It was long after sunset, but the crescent moon above Notre Dame was still no more than a glimmering sickle in the harvest glow of the sky. The inner radiance that is the mystery of the light of the Île de France slept on its towers. Abelard, rounding the last bend above the Clos des Vignerons, halted in the stride that had carried him through twenty miles of the Seine valley. Often as he had seen it, this beauty never failed to catch him by the throat. Before him rode the island with its towers, glimmering like some great white-sailed ship that he had seen, bearing into Nantes from the vast spaces of the open Loire, or a wild swan, resting a moment in mid flood. It had the air of a winged victory, stayed of its own volition in its imperious way. “Queen among cities, moon among stars,” his brain was beating out the lovely rhythms, “island of royal palaces: and in that island hath Philosophy her royal and ancient seat, who alone, with Study her sole comrade, holding the eternal citadel of light and immortality, hath set her victorious foot on the withering flower of the fast-aging world.”
The withering flower. The light on the banks had dimmed, the river darkened, but still the island glowed with that unearthly light, as though its fountains were within. Abelard swung down the river road, his blood pulsing in a strange exaltation that was the climax of his mood. Never had he so felt the richness of living as in these last days, never been so joyously aware of the urge of creation. The name of his new book had flashed on him, Sic et Non, and he had stood astonished and charmed at its simplicity and its absoluteness. His scholars were out of Paris, but he had hardly been aware of the emptiness of his days, for he had plunged headlong into a re-reading of the Fathers, and the surge of St. Augustine’s prose rose and fell in his brain. He was drinking little and eating less, but something was wine in his blood, and all the day and half the night reading could not daunt the restlessness that fevered him. To-day it had driven him out, but the miles of the Seine valley had only set his pulse beating to a headier rhythm. Paris rode there to greet him, unearthly and proud: but the man who swung down the river-path to enter it came as both conqueror and lover.
The river ran dark below the Petit Pont: Abelard’s countryman’s nostrils twitched as he came through the narrow street between the crowding houses. Thank Heaven the chapter had insisted that Raoul Testart should at least close in his latrines: the river that had been a sheet of silver here ran like a sewer. What sort of creature was man, that he could not live without a heap of ordure? The air grew sweeter as he passed into the wide Parvis, but the light was dim beneath the tall houses, and as he entered his own doorway, he stumbled in the black well of the stairs. It was at once close and chill. Guibert had fried some abomination for his supper: the smell of burnt fat still hung in the air. His own room was heavy with it; his manuscripts lay in a disordered heap on the table, pushed to one side to make room for the platter with its revolting gobbets of flesh congealed upon it. Guibert had long since disappeared. Abelard’s stomach, never a strong one, rose. He took a hasty pull at the flagon, cut himself a hunch of bread and cheese and went over to the window to eat it, the demi-god who had swung through the radiant dusk become an irritable and queasy-stomached scholar.
The loneliness of the room gathered about him: in the dreary reaction after exaltation, Abelard could have groaned aloud. The books looked on him with indifferent faces: his manuscript was a meaningless huddle of words. He would go to Gilles: the thought of the man warmed you like a wine. In a moment he was on the stairs, almost as though something chased him, across the Parvis, through the great arch of the cloister gate, and climbing the familiar stair. His hand on the door, a sudden reluctance seized him, a memory of sensation so violent that for a moment it sickened him: but he thrust it down and, opening the door, drew an involuntary breath of relief. Gilles was alone. The great chair at the hearth was empty, and white ash lay on the stone. Gilles himself stood at the window, craning to catch the last of the light on a page of parchment held close to his eyes. Abelard crossed to him lightly, and stood at his side.
“Humph,” said Gilles, without looking up. He finished his paragraph, laid down the parchment, and turned his eyes on Abelard, a gaze of slow kindliness that wrapped his shivering loneliness like a cloak. He forgot his darkness and discouragement: he could have kissed Gilles’ hands in gratitude.
“I was a fool to stay away,” he blundered out.
“So that was it,” said Gilles.
“I did not know I was doing it. Gilles, do you remember what Marbod of Angers said about a man losing the truth of himself?”
“Juvenal first, I think. But that is a trifle. Well?”
“I find it again, the truth of myself, with you.”
Gilles considered him.
“The pit of your stomach more likely.” He turned from him and went over to the dresser. “By the look of you, you last broke your fast this time yesterday. They stuff this,” he was busy carving a great ham, “in Brittany better than anywhere. And the wine, like your quotation, is from Angers. But I should commend you to eat before you drink.”
Abelard came over meekly for his platter and carried it to the window-seat. In a moment Gilles followed him, with two tankards, and set himself down on the settle.
“It is perhaps no wonder,” he said meditatively, “that Fulbert is concerned for your health.”
Abelard looked up startled. “Fulbert?”
“My good Peter, you have been the god of their idolatry to many young men: but it is a triumph to have captured anything so dry. He talks of nothing else. Hercules for strength, because you carried him out of chapter; but there is nothing pagan that is Christian enough for your handling of him afterwards——”
Abelard moved uncomfortably. “I knew nothing of it,” he said sulkily, “till he slid down beside me in the stalls. And when I lifted him, it was like handling a little dead bird. He came to, pretty quickly; but I did not like to let him walk home alone.”
“And so you carried him?”
“I did not. I only gave him an arm.”
“By this time, you carried him like St. Christopher, and put him in his bed, and even thought to come here and fetch Heloise, and went and sat with him every day till he was about again, meantime, discoursing like St. Augustine and St. Jerome, with the wisdom of the Blessed Gregory thrown in.”
“For heaven’s sake, Gilles—— But you know yourself there is something about him.”
“There is,” said Gilles, “and I shall tease you no longer. I told you you were neglecting him.”
“It is not his conversation,” said Abelard, “for he has none. Is it his innocence?”
“I think myself,” said Gilles, “that he has more of the faculty of admiration than any man I have ever known. He has never ceased to wonder at finding himself a canon of Notre Dame; like Ausonius, when they made him consul. A canon’s stall is a sacred thing to him; he thinks better of himself ever since. And I have never known a man with so small a tincture of letters and so profound a reverence for them. He was always by way of regarding you as a demigod; and now that you have condescended, he goes scarlet and stammers when he speaks of you.”
“You have seen him?”
“He was here yesterday, lonely, for Heloise had gone for a while to Argenteuil. He sent her, for he thought her too much confined in the nursing of him. And he spoke of nothing else, unless indeed it was your scoundrel of a Guibert.”
“You see,” said Abelard, “it is not easy to know what to talk about. And when he asked me what Guibert paid for his fish——”
“It is a careful soul,” said Gilles. “The tears stood in his eyes when he told me what your house-keeping cost you. He could feed you, he says, on a quarter of the sum, and you would be as sleek as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.”
Abelard sighed. “I never seem to have any money,” he said ruefully, “and I never have anything fit to eat. There’s the wine, of course. And books. But old William never had more than a quarter of my scholars, and he lived like a bishop, before he was one.”
“It is that locust you have. And you are like enough to have less, now that Guibert has fallen in with Bele Alys.”
“Bele Alys? I thought she was out of a song.”
“You would,” said Gilles patiently. “And so she is. That song was made for her when she first came to Paris.”
“It’s a good tune,” said Abelard. “Main se leva Bele Alys”—he stopped his humming abruptly. “I wonder—but it could hardly have been.”
“What?”
“About two weeks ago I was looking out one night, late. And I saw two in the shadow at the steps. I did not know they were living creatures till they moved, and the moon shone on her face. And then they came together again, and——” He hesitated, but the silence into which he spoke accepted him. “It seemed to me, watching them, as if they made all the things that we contend for, nothing. And then it struck for midnight, and the woman darted away like a swallow, and who was it but that lank cat of a Guibert sidling across the square.”
“And so you mocked him?”
“And myself too.”
“You need not have done that,” said Gilles, “if the woman was Bele Alys.”
“A scullion and a harlot,” said Abelard bitterly. “And for a while——”
“Well?”
“It seemed to me as though . . . as though they had immortality.”
“And so they had. Do you remember Boethius’ definition of eternity, ‘to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come’? That is what Bele Alys gives to a man when he takes her in his arms. Until she wearies.”
Abelard listened, bemused. “Gilles,” he said suddenly, “I do not believe a word of it. It is you who are the sorcerer. There is no woman living could give a man that.”
“Bele Alys has, to many men,” said Gilles soberly. “Though not all of them, perhaps, have recalled it in the language of Boethius. But—man, you saw it for yourself.”
“Not with that hound,” said Abelard obstinately.
“It is grace, not merit,” said Gilles gravely. “Yet another point in which she has something of the divine nature. She will sell herself, when she chooses, for a king’s ransom—if she wants the money: and she will give herself, when she chooses, for charity. Like enough, your mongrel looked up at her with the eyes haunting out of that scraped face of his——”
“Don’t I know it!” said Abelard. “The drunken, lecherous hound. But he can sit in the corner mouthing that flute of his with those eyes gazing at you over it and the tune plucking at you like a hand in your breast, till I have hurled things at him. It’s either that, or throw back your head and howl like a dog yourself.”
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” said Gilles drily. “Well, she will soon weary of him. But meantime, look to your purse.”
Abelard shrugged. “Most of the year’s fees are gone already,” he said bitterly. “Now that I think of it, I have half a mind to go for the summer back to Brittany.”
Gilles sat silent, his mouth pursed, frowning to himself. Still frowning, he rose, and went to sit down in his familiar chair beside the hearth. When he spoke, it was as a man who has come to a decision and does not know whether or not he mislikes it.
“Fulbert,” he said harshly, “is wishful that you should give up your separate lodging and live with him. He bade me say that he has room for Guibert also, for he knows that you must have a man about you, and his old Grizzel, though bearded, is a woman, and enough to do in the kitchen. So that you will still have Guibert to fetch and carry for you, but no outgoings of money nor false marketing.” He talked on, as if not to observe the rigour that had crept on the younger man’s face. “There is a great room that looks to the Seine near the top of the house; it is draughty with windows, but there would be room for yourself and your books. He does not any more climb so high, with the stiffness of his knees.”
He ceased speaking and the air was rigid with silence. At last Abelard spoke.
“Why has he done this?”
“He would take you for the half of what your separate housekeeping costs you now. But he asks you, with diffidence, if in part consideration of your board and lodging, you would, in such leisure as your weightier studies afford you, instruct his niece. He is ambitious for her, as you have yourself perceived. He bade me say that she will be at your disposal at any hour you choose.” Gilles’ voice rasped like a saw.
Abelard sat grimly silent. Suddenly he rose, and coming down the room, stood square in front of Gilles. “Is the man right in his wits?”
“I thought it my duty,” said Gilles deliberately, “to point out to him that his niece was seventeen and you as yet only in your thirty-seventh year. But he spoke much of your reputation for chastity, and of St. Jerome and his pupil Eustochium, and also of Origen. He seemed to me imperfectly acquainted with the circumstances of that Father.”
Abelard laughed shortly. He had begun tramping up and down the room. Gilles had turned his back on him and was looking into the empty hearth, but a muscle in his cheek twitched with irritation each time Abelard passed.
The tramping ceased. Abelard drew out a stool from the chimney-corner, and sat down, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees.
“Gilles,” he said, and the old man stirred wretchedly, for the voice was suddenly a boy’s voice, uncertain of himself. “Tell me. Is it to be Yes or No?”
Gilles lifted his hand and dropped it wearily. “I am no man to ask that question of, Peter,” he said slowly. “For never in my life have I said No to a thing I greatly desired.”
The tension had lessened. Abelard sat back, hugging his knees.
“Odd,” said he, “but do you know, Gilles, I do not think I have, either. Only,” he went on slowly, like a boy analysing himself for the first time, “I have wanted so few things.”
Gilles stirred in relief. He turned to Abelard, the old speculative light in his eye. “I have sometimes wondered, Peter, what were the things you did want.”
Abelard sat, his brows knit. “I believe,” he said slowly, “I believe the thing I have most wanted all my life was to be free. I think perhaps that was one reason why I told my father I did not want to go and be squire at Clisson, and be knighted, and that Guillaume might go instead.”
“It was a strange thing that your father gave consent,” said Gilles. “But he was not like other men, ever.”
Abelard’s eyes had softened. “He was more of a saint than any man I ever knew,” he said eagerly. “And he would have been a rare scholar, if there had been any schooling in his youth. I have seen him listen when Guillaume and I were at our lessons. I have thought that was why he was willing I should go to the schools, for his own heart lay there, and it was as though he satisfied himself in me. Only, he would have gone to the cloister, in my place, I think. You know, he has gone there, now.”
Gilles nodded. “I rode with him once, years ago. He was a young man then, and I not so much older. And even then I noted that at every crucifix he did not pass with a reverence, as the rest of us might, but got off his horse and knelt, and I could see his lips move. I asked him what the words were that he said, but it was a long time before he would tell me.”
“What was it?”
“Thy cross I adore. I call to mind Thy passion. Thou who didst die for the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.”
Reluctantly as Gilles spoke, the words made a curious silence about them, alien in that place. Abelard sat biting his under-lip. Gilles was the first to speak. “It was men like your father,” he said, “who made the liturgies.”
Abelard looked up, again eager for speech. “I never had a hard word from him, all my life,” he said. “It was my mother who gave us whatever chiding we got. And that was little enough.”
“She was a Quelhac,” said Gilles. “I saw her when she was a little girl: with great eyes, as wild as a hare.”
“She has them still,” said Abelard. “But I sometimes think she is happier now than in all the years. You know, she took the veil at Poitiers two months after my father entered at Saint Savin. It was as though they both had a vocation, a kind of spring in their hearts. And now their peace flows like a river. It is not the worst end, Gilles, to have served in the wars and taken a wife and begotten children and looked to one’s lands, and then at the last take down one’s sail and ride at anchor in God.”
“Would it have contented you?”
Abelard got restlessly to his feet. “I hate to be tied.”
“You know what they called you at Laon?” said Gilles, “The masterless man. Why do you make such enemies, Peter? You might as well have sat out your time at old Anselm’s feet, and been received by him as magister. Now they all say that you teach, never having been taught yourself. Use authority, and rebel when you are Authority yourself. It wastes time else.”
“I could not endure it,” said Abelard, frowning. “Anselm didn’t know anything. None of them do. At least, they know, but they don’t understand anything. They swallow, but they don’t chew.”
“The sincere milk of the Word,” said Gilles solemnly.
Abelard groaned. “Do you remember,” he said suddenly, “what Augustine said, that a man should serve the understanding of things? I shall be content if when I am dead someone says that about me. And that is why they like me, Gilles, these youngsters. There is a natural reasonable soul in most things, when they’re young.”
“I doubt it,” said Gilles. “Yet it may be even a hen when it is young thinks it may some day fly like a hawk. Then it grows up, and squawks when it sees one. They are beginning to squawk, Peter.”
“Let them,” said Abelard. He straightened his shoulders. “I can do what I please with the young men anyhow.”
“Freedom for yourself,” said Gilles reflectively. “And power of life and death over everybody else. Well, it is the nature of eagles—and hawks. But tell me, Abelard, have you never in all your life wanted anything else?”
Abelard stopped in his restless stride. “There was one time,” he said, “but it was only when I was tired. It was after that terrific fight with William of Champeaux, the time I had my schools at Corbeil. And suddenly my head stopped thinking. There was nothing I cared about. And I went back to Le Palais, to Denise.”
“Denise?”
“My little sister. She was the youngest. There was myself, and Guillaume, and Raoul, and Dagobert, and Denise. I think maybe Denise came off worst, with having a saint for a father. He did betroth her when she was nine to a Montreuil-Bellay, but the boy died of measles when he was sixteen, and things drifted. And I was away, and they two, Berengar and my mother, did not think how time went. And when they did, she had set her heart, and more than that, on Hugh the Stranger—a landless squire my father had—and they let her have him. He was steward for my father. And they live there, Hugh and Denise, still. You see, Guillaume married a Clisson, and Le Palais is a little fief beside hers. So Hugh farms the land for Guillaume, and there’s a bunch of children with soft heads and round eyes bustling about the orchard, like chickens. Denise is like an apple-tree when the sun has been on it; you put your hand on her and you can feel the kindness of the earth. And I was as weak as a cat. I used to lie on the grass that summer, no feeling in me at all. I could not read two lines without going dizzy. And I felt that I would have given all I had to be like Hugh and sweat all the mischief out of me at the hay, and come back and lie with something soft and kind like Denise all night. And I could have cursed my wits that had spoiled me for living, and then left me drained like a piece of tripe. And my head—God, how it ached! And then Denise used to come—there weren’t any children then, but she was carrying her first, and she would sit beside me on the grass for hours and hold my head in her two hands——”
Gilles raised his head. “Ah, those two hands,” he cried, and Abelard wondered at the sudden harshness of passion in his voice. “If only they knew it, it is not their beauty, it is that divine kindness they have. That moment when they take two hands and carry it to their breasts.”
Abelard stood till. “No woman,” he said, very low, “has ever done that to me.” He stood for a moment looking at the old man, sunk in his chair, and then walked over to the door.
“You may tell Fulbert it is Yes,” he said quietly, and went out.