The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg/Chapter 7
HE was born of mixed blood. On his father's side he was French and on his mother's Italian, and the two bloods had been at war within him since the day he was born. Until the day he died they would battle there in his body and in his mind. In youth the struggle had been incomplete and confused, but with age the two demons came to divide, each withdrawing a little into his own corner, and with the clearness of division there had come a certain peace, for Father d'Astier understood that he was two persons and not one and that there was no merging the one into the other. The one man was a mystic, and gullible and sentimental, of that blood which painted smiling Madonnas and miraculous children seated in fields starred with impossible flowers beneath throngs of pretty angels. The other was of the blood of the philosophers, of Voltaire and the eighteenth century, a creature inquiring and restless, skeptical and touched with the despair of those who stand in awe of that which they are too proud to believe. All that was French in him found satisfaction in facing the truth and knowing it however unpleasant it might be.
There was in him, too, a monster, born perhaps of the long struggle in his soul. This, too, at sixty he knew well. He had known it for a long time now. It was a monster not easy to tame, perverse and cruel, which sometimes claimed possession of his very soul and destroyed what he loved best.
He was thinking of these things when the Princess dropped him before the door of his own house, a great house which he owned, for he was a rich man, and in which he kept for himself only two small rooms under the eaves looking down upon the square beneath the lovely tower of San Stefano. Of those who occupied his house he knew nothing. They lived their lives beneath him, lives that were tangled and complex, tragic or comic, pathetic and nondescript. He preferred not knowing his tenants. And he owned, too, the old rookery called the Palazzo Gonfarini where this strange woman Miss Annie Spragg had died. But as he climbed the stairs, a little wearily, he was not thinking of Miss Annie Spragg but of his own life and the life of Anna d'Orobelli.
He was tired. That long motor ride had worn his nerves. And then the discovery of that obscene but beautiful statue had been disturbing. A thing like that was better hidden forever in the dark earth of that ancient garden. It stirred up the demons.
"I am growing old," he thought. "Yet she seems as young as ever. She is a remarkable woman."
She had not tricked him. He knew well enough why she had been in such haste. Had he not known her for nearly thirty years, better perhaps than any man, better even than any of her lovers, for there was a side of her known to him which they would never know? She was a woman, he thought, born out of her time, a woman who might have been a grande amoureuse, or a great courtesan. She was always in haste, always unsatisfied, like a flame, always seeking, seeking, seeking something. What could it have been? Love, perhaps, or something more than that, if indeed there were anything greater than that. Perhaps she had been seeking always a man whom she could find worthy of her, to receive all that she had to give. Such a man might have saved her, but it was too late now. She would never find him. She was growing old and to seek love when one was old was to be ridiculous. The thought hurt him, as it had hurt him many times during the past year or two, when he had heard her name mentioned in jest, when people had told stories against her. Women did not like her and that was natural, but men had come of late to talk of her. It was like an audience of dolts witnessing a great play which they had not the capacity to understand. A whole life wasted. They did not know her as he knew her. They could not understand why it hurt him when they laughed.
He turned the key and let himself into the two small rooms. They were like twin cells, sparsely furnished, with plain oak tables and chairs, a cupboard. . . . It was here that he came when he wanted peace and rest from the world, when he had need to retire and fight the demon that sometimes claimed his soul. This time he had come all the way from a country house in Shropshire so that he might be alone. And now he was to have no solitude because he had found Anna d'Orobelli in Brinoë and because Fulco chose to torment him with all the nonsense about the Spragg woman being a saint. He was to have no peace because he had found there the two people in all the world whose presence tormented him most.
He did not bother to send for a hot supper. He ate the cheese and wine and bread which he always kept in the cupboard, eating in a room that was dark save for the splashes of moonlight on the floor. Fulco would be coming in a little while. It would be time enough then to have a light.
He thought again, "People do not know how it hurts me when they laugh at her. They do not know that I shall die wondering if I was not the one chosen by God to save her." Perhaps saving her would have been in the sight of God more worthy than all the souls he had brought to the Church, cowardly, worldly, sniveling souls, most of them. But who could decide a thing like that? Certainly not the Church, filled with men no nearer to God than himself and most of them far more stupid. It required charity to understand such things and only God had charity. And who could know that there was a God? He had been honest with the Church, he told himself. He had never let men know that he doubted these things.
The struggle was beginning again. He saw it now. He was too old to fight against it any longer, but there was a part of him that would not leave him in peace—that part which would not lie down shamelessly in the calm which appeared to envelop those who never asked questions.
He did not see Anna now as he had seen her a little while before in the loggia of that preposterous woman at the Villa Leonardo. He kept seeing her as he had seen her years before when they were both young, when—(why did he keep on tormenting himself?) when it could have happened. And now it was too late. There was no living life over again. There was only that single straight narrow groove, the record of each life, which was soon worn away and forgotten when you were dead. Who would remember you when you were dead? Who would care what you had done, what pleasures you had known and what sorrows? What difference could it have made? It would not have been an easy thing, what with his having been Father d'Astier and she the Princess d'Orobelli. Could they have dared such a thing, and faced life confident in each other, finding in each enough to throw away all else? She would have gone in recklessly, greedily. Perhaps her way was better, after all, taking life as it came, squeezing it for the last drop of color and fire and beauty.
His agony was that it was too late now. He would die without ever knowing. If he had taken the wrong turning, it could not be undone now. And she had gone on and on all these years, wasting herself and all she had to give prodigally and without restraint. Perhaps in the eyes of God he had committed the greatest of sins. If God and Nature were one, he was the greatest of sinners. The Church taught otherwise, but the Church, the Church. . . . The Church had far less in common with God than Nature had. As it grew older, the Church seemed to have less and less. For forty years he had been serving the Church like an honest servant, no more, no less. For forty years he had been atoning for the first sin, and surely by now he had atoned. Had he not brought souls to God? Souls to God? The phrase echoed bitterly inside his head like a phrase spoken aloud in an empty room. Souls to God. Souls who had wanted to come to God because they were worldly or because they were afraid of life and needed to believe in a pretty story that was considered holy and could not be denied. And at the end there was always Heaven, not a fine, noble, splendid Heaven, but a Paradise like the Primitives', filled with pink and blue angels and God in a blue robe. He had brought souls to God, but not his own soul. It was still the same as it had been at seventeen before he had known anything of life, a little more placid, perhaps, and more resigned, but not much different. Sixty years of life had not proven anything. He was no nearer the mystery now than he had ever been. Sometimes he fancied that God was perhaps on his side smiling at the antics of all the others.
And suddenly he thought with shame of what he had written on the first empty white page of the Thomas-à-Kempis he had given Anna so long ago.
Dans la damnation le feu est la moindre chose; le supplice propre au damné est le progrès infini dans le vice et dans le crime, l'âme s'endurcissant, se dépravant toujours, s'enfoncant nécessairement dans le mal de minute en progression géométrique pendant l'éternité.
He had written that. He who could have saved her.
What did it all mean, what did it all matter? There was Anna a little way off with Oreste Fuenterrabía searching, searching for what Oreste Fuenterrabía could never give her, and what she could never find now. Soon they would both be dead. Ten more years. Twenty more years. The sooner, the better now for Anna. She was not made to be old. For himself it did not matter. Nothing could happen to him now. He was tired tonight and he had yet to deal with Fulco and all his stupidity, to keep Fulco from making a fool of himself. Fulco, who would not see that the world was what it was and that Christ had come too soon. There were those who believed that Jesus would come again. Perhaps when he came again the world would not reject him—this world of priests and preachers, of statesmen and barterers and politicians and cheats and idle women, a world ridden with greed and ambition. He knew the world. He had lived in it for a long time. He knew those who ruled the world. The poor were humble, but the poor in power would be no different. No, he had seen too much of the world, years and years too much.
There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs and he put down the glass of wine to listen. He knew the steps. They were Fulco's, shuffling, timid, uncertain. He knew the creaking boots. For some reason Fulco's boots always creaked. He rose and lighted a candle, wearily, for he would rather have received Fulco in the dark. There was a knock on the door, a timid, apologetic knock. It was his past knocking. It was his fiery, unhappy youth. There were people, he thought bitterly, who said that youth was the time of happiness.
The door opened and his son stood there, fat and squat and awkward in his priest's clothes, and ill at ease like a peasant, with red swollen peasant's hands and a round face covered with pimples. Only the eyes were her eyes, great, brown, gentle, sensitive eyes, like a doe's, in which the shadow of pain was mirrored so easily. He had wanted it dark so that he could not see those eyes.
He tried to speak kindly. "Sit down, Fulco. Where have you been?"
The man sat down. (He must be nearly forty-one, thought Father d'Astier.) His hands clasped his hat. It was not the proper manner for a priest, but rather the manner of a timid commercial traveler trying to sell an article which no one wanted. (He will never rise in the Church, thought Father d'Astier, because he does not understand the world. He is too simple.)
Fulco spoke in a weak voice, rather too high-pitched and a little grating. "I have been to the Palazzo Gonfarini praying there. There was a great crowd of devout. Surely the Holy Virgin has vouchsafed a miracle in your own house."
How round-eyed he was and how credulous, how exactly like her! Father d'Astier tried to be firm and kind.
"It is true, Fulco, that the woman died in my house, but that means nothing. You must not hope for vain things, Fulco. Nothing is known of her. People always come like that to seek relics the minute anything strange occurs. People want to believe in miracles, and among the poor, relics are valuable. The poor can turn them into money."
It was odd that he found himself speaking to this man of forty as if he were a child. It was odd and revolting.
"She was a good woman, Father d'Astier. A religieuse. She came daily for years to worship the pictures of Saint John the Shepherd. I have seen her there day after day with my own eyes. The very doves in the Piazza loved her, and the little birds sat by her when she was dying. Sister Annunziata swears to that. And the janitress. I saw them too, but you need not take my word; there is the word of the others."
Father d'Astier interrupted him. "The janitress is infidel and anti-clerical and Socialist. She is malicious and intelligent. We cannot take her word. Besides, saints are not made like that. We do not even know that the woman had espoused the Church."
"She was a good woman," persisted Fulco. "The light of God was in her eyes."
"And how do you know the light of God?"
"I know, Father d'Astier, I know. I have seen it once before in the eyes of Sister Annunziata who they are beginning to say is crazy. I know the light of God."
Fulco went a little breathlessly, for the climb up the four flights of stairs to the top of the palace had taken his breath. He kept telling Father d'Astier all those things about Miss Annie Spragg which the older man had already found out for himself and knew better than Fulco. The old priest did not listen. He sat with bowed head as if he were listening, but he was thinking of other things. He was thinking of Brinoë forty years before when he had come to stay with his mother's people, not much different from the Brinoë that lay all about him tonight in the moonlight. The city was too old to alter much. And he was thinking of the villa on the hill beyond the Church of Monte Salvatore, a small white villa surrounded by an orchard of olive trees. And he was thinking of the fat widow of Professor Baldessare and their daughter. The Professor had been a remarkable man, raising himself from the level of the peasantry with a peasant wife, greedy and coarse and vulgar. But the daughter was a miracle. He saw her again with a sickening clarity, like one of the women of Botticelli. There was a room in the Uffizi that he had not entered in years because he could not bear to look at a picture that hung there. (Fulco was talking, talking. He became drunk with words without ever knowing their value.) Laura was her name, like Petrarch's Laura. It was odd how long an old wound could give pain.
He had been young then and strong, not this old man tired of the world who sat listening to Fulco's complaints against his fellow priests—young and twenty-two, a boy who thought the world his for the taking, a boy who sinned and then tormented himself with his sense of sin and then mocked at God and the Church, only to begin again on the same round in the order. He had been full of animal delight at being alive, and the delight of delights was Laura Baldessare. It was not the memory of his sin with her that troubled him now, but of the other sin he had committed, so much the worse, of destroying her soul by tearing from it cruelly the simple faith that had dwelt there. He had done it with wild gusts of adolescent talk, and because she loved him she had believed what he told her. She believed anything he told her—he who stood in awe of God at one moment and in the next felt superior to God, a silly fellow strong enough to doubt but too feeble to stand before the awesome spectacle of a universe. He knew better now. He was no longer defiant. He only waited for the end, to see.
Fulco was questioning him. He raised his head and murmured, "Yes, Fulco, but continue. Tell me all your reasons first." Fulco was so certain that the old maid was a saint.
He could not hear what Fulco said for the memories that crowded in upon him, memories which went back years before there was ever a potential saint in the Palazzo Gonfarini. In Fulco's eyes there was that same fire of belief that had once burned in her eyes. It redeemed Fulco, he thought, from being an utter lout. "There is a demon born in me," he thought, "that has always tormented those I have loved best." Anna, too, he had tormented, long afterward.
Again he began to think what his life would have been if at its beginning he had taken another turning. If he had married Laura. He could have married her even at the end before she died when Fulco was born, but chance had brought him too late, an hour after she had died, going out into the darkness shaken and terrified because he had destroyed her faith. That, he thought, was a real sin, a sin that could torment one even into the grave. Her poor faith did no one any harm and it had made her unafraid.
And now for forty years he had been atoning for that sin since the day when in the midst of youth he had turned to the Church to atone. He had kept his vow. He had atoned. From that day on he had never known love, and for him that was not an easy thing. But others had been made to atone as well, for life was a silly tangled thing. There was Anna driving through the darkness like a mad woman to meet her lover because she had never found love and still believed that one day she might find it. That was her faith, a good faith, quite as good perhaps as the other though more easily proven false. She would not believe that already it was too late. And what good had this atonement brought to himself or to God or to the world? What had it brought him in the end but old age and doubt? It had not made Laura alive again. It had not restored her faith before she died, so that she might die in peace.
And here was Fulco raving about faith and saints and a peasant's Heaven filled with pink and blue plaster images and magenta paper wreaths. That was the cruel joke Nature had played on him—making Fulco not in the image of Laura or himself, so that he might have had a son to be proud of, but in the image of that vulgar and scheming old woman, Laura's mother, who connived at her daughter's sin because she saw her one day as the Marquise d'Astier. That was Nature's bitter jest, that and this stupid adoration which Fulco had for the man he did not even know was his father. If Fulco had not been stupid he might have guessed long ago that there was some reason for this stranger's interest in him. And Fulco had become a priest because he, Father d'Astier, was a priest. This fat, stupid, pimply little man was his son, his heir, who should have been the Marquis d'Astier. Suddenly he felt a sickening wave of distaste and hatred for his own son. He was stupid, stupid, and he could never be rid of him.
Then all at once he knew a fierce desire to beat his head against the floor. "I am proud and worldly like all the others. I have learned nothing at all. I am no different. O God, teach me humility."
Fulco's thin monotonous voice trickled through the haze of memories. "Sister Annunziata is a woman inspired of God. . . ."
He could bear it no longer. He raised his head this time and looked straight into those trusting doe-like eyes. A kind of madness seized him. There was something in those eyes which he must destroy. He knew he must quench it forever. He could have no peace until he had done it.
"You are stupid, Fulco. You are stupid. You have lived in the world for forty years and have learned nothing. . . . Nothing. You complain because they do not give you a parish. Parishes are not gotten by faith alone. Men are not made princes of the Church simply because they have faith. You learn nothing. The Church has no need of a saint now, least of all in Brinoë. There is nothing to show that this woman has ever embraced the faith. Miracles cannot happen to heretics. There is no place for your simplicity in the Church. For centuries there has been no place for it."
In the eyes of the fat little man the shadow of pain and terror was mirrored. He sat on the edge of the chair, his fat red hands crushing the black hat. The sight of him sitting thus, so stupid and humble, only enraged Father d'Astier. He thought wildly, "He has neither courage nor intelligence."
Aloud he said, "You have lived too long among priests, Fulco, and superstitious peasants. Can you not see that the Church is no longer a power? It is only a shelter for the weak and fearful, all those who must have miracles and wondrous things, like children in the presence of a cheap magician."
He arose suddenly, as if possessed, and began to pace the narrow room. The demon had risen now, alive and fearful. He told Fulco things which had long been hidden in his heart which he had told to no one since the day he entered the Church. The heretic churches were no better, he cried, because they tried to mingle faith with reason and that could not be done. All that the Church taught was a legend and a superstition. To believe, one had to be as simple as the most ignorant man. To believe, one must be stupid and afraid. Had he not brought souls to the Church? Had he not brought money to the Church? It was for that he worked and that alone. Did he not know these things? Had he not lived with the Church for nearly half a century? Not because he believed, but because it was a profession, a career.
And this whole affair of the Spragg woman was nonsense—the concoction of a half-insane nun and a malicious peasant woman who hated priests. And if even such things could be, if they were true, the Church would not make a saint of her, because it had no need of saints at the moment. The same miracle had happened to more than a hundred others. It was on record. They were always hysterical women. No great organization could saint every woman who saw fit to produce miraculous scars on her body. The Church made saints when it needed them and where it needed them. It was not an affair left to the Divine Will of God. It was geography and politics.
The Church was not rich and powerful because it was the instrument of God, but because the men in the Church had made it so. They were politicians. Because men chose to enter the Church it did not make them different from other men. They were, after all, pitiful and human and insignificant like all the others. They made people believe in things which no man could prove. The Church had muddled and compromised and corrupted the teachings of Jesus. It had buried his teachings beneath a mountain of cant and theology and superstition. When it was powerful it had committed murder by fire and torture always in the name of God but always to increase its own power and wealth and stamp out its enemies. It was among the great criminals of the world.
"Go to your history, Fulco," he cried out. "Cease being a dolt. Read the records of its worldliness. It lives by gold more than by faith, taking the money of those who are afraid or who bargain with it. I know. I have brought it much money. It is my work to bring the rich and the powerful into the Church."
He halted suddenly, facing the frightened Fulco. "And your faith. What is it? It has been said that faith can move mountains, but no one has seen it done, save by the faith that man has in himself, in the steam shovels and the dynamite he has invented in the face of a hostile Nature. Man can save himself by faith, but not by a cowardly faith that pins itself upon conjurer's tricks, but by faith in himself and in Nature and in the teachings of Christ. The world and the Church have forgotten Christ, who was a simple man. What had Christ to do with the cheap tricks of an old maid, an insane nun and a malicious scrubwoman? All that should be beneath the dignity of God's church."
He moved to the table and took up the thin book which held for him all the peace he knew. He opened easily to a page to which he had turned a thousand times in the struggle to subdue the monster in his soul. By the yellow light of the candle he began to read.
"For a man's worthiness is not to be estimated by the number of visions and comforts which he may have, or by his skill in the Scriptures or by his being placed in a higher station:
"But by his being grounded in humility, and full of divine charity; if he be always purely and sincerely seeking God's honor; if he think nothing of and unfeignedly despise himself, and even rejoice more to be despised and little esteemed by others than to be honored by them."
He put down the book and turned his white face toward Fulco. "Where is humility in the world today? Where is divine charity? Who is it that purely and sincerely seeks God's honor?"
Then, quite suddenly, he felt weak and leaned against the window, his head in his hands, trembling. He was an old, tired man once more.
There was a long silence and then the timid voice of Fulco murmuring, "The world, the Church can be purified. If what you say is true. It can be purified."
"And who is to do it? The Church would have none of Savonarola. The Jesuits turned into politicians who said the end justified the means. It hanged Savonarola by the neck and burnt his body when he sought to purify the Church." He turned and looked at the cowering Fulco. "Go now. I can't talk any longer."
Fulco answered him. He was weeping like a little child. "I can't argue these things. I know too little. But the world can be saved," he repeated. "The Church can be purified."
To Father d'Astier it seemed impossible to remain any longer in the same room with this man who was his son. Turning, he went quickly into the bedroom and, closing the door, bolted it. . . . The room was tiny with only a narrow iron bed covered with coarse blankets. Upon this he flung himself down, feeling that he was ready to die. Fulco knew now. Fulco, his own son, was the only one who knew the truth. He had killed Fulco's faith as he had slaughtered the faith of Fulco's mother. The demon had won a second time. And faith was all that poor Fulco had in the world.
Presently he sat up on the narrow bed. "Tomorrow," he thought bitterly, "I shall go out into the world again and go to dinners and make flattering speeches to rogues and criminals and fools. It is too late now to change. I am too old. And tomorrow no one will know." Again he had betrayed the thing he served.
Tomorrow he would go again to the Villa Leonardo to continue the conversion of that silly woman Mrs. Weatherby, and from her he would get money for the Church. Oh, he had brought money to the Church—thousands, millions of lira and francs and marks and dollars and pounds. He had, he thought, bought himself a place in Heaven by now. He had the right to ask a seat of God. He would tell God he had bought a seat in Heaven and paid for it. He would go again to dinners and to house parties and great receptions. . . .
In the midst of these thoughts he seemed to hear the voice of someone talking quite near at hand. He listened and presently he recognized the voice. It was Fulco's. He had not gone away after all. He had been in the next room all the while, and now he was down on his fat knees, praying to God for the soul of Father d'Astier.