“I cannot,” he answered, and clasped his hands.
“Why?” I demanded sternly, pointing an accusing finger at him. “Why do you refuse? If a man is a monk—a Dominican, a Franciscan, a Norbertine—ay, of any Order you like, even of one of the great silent, enclosed orders like the Trappists or the Cistercians—he does not hesitate to admit his kind and to explain under what rule he lives. Why should you people, here in the very heart of a busy modern city like London, not practise the same candour? Why should you cloak yourselves in mystery, in doubt, in veiled hints, in suspicion? Your reticence is not meaningless. You have some cause for it. What is the reason of it? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because we are all alike bound by an oath,” he muttered, and he moved away from me as though the mere acknowledgment of that secret bond had set up a new barrier, an unseen gulf, between us. “We cannot tell anyone what we have in mind.”
“Still there is one way out of the difficulty,” put in the MP, speaking now with marked care and deliberation, “which, fortunately, rests with you whether it is acted upon. It is this: While it is quite true we cannot reveal the secrets of our existence to outsiders, no such bar rests against any communications or confidences between members themselves. Why, therefore, Glynn, don’t you apply yourself for admission to the Order of St. Bruno?”
“Impossible,” I cried. “I have no wish to join the Order.”
“Well,” said Cooper-Nassington, “I can’t pledge the Order, of course—I have no power to—but I am almost certain that they would take you in.”
“But for what purpose?” I demanded. “Don’t you see we are arguing in a circle and that we have arrived again at the point why the Order exists?”
“I do. But that can’t be helped. Will you join?”
“I don’t know,” I said lamely after a moment’s reflection. “Answer me one question before I decide, and answer it to me with the most solemn truth: Do all the candidates join you in as deep ignorance as I?”
“All,” cried José and the Prior in one breath. “That is the essence of our union—this appalling ignorance of what we commit ourselves to.”