Chapter I

Friar Gregory ceased reading, and looked round the little room. A low truckle-bed occupied one side, two other walls were lined with oaken book-cases quaintly carved, and on the fourth hung a few articles of simple clothing. The bookshelves were full of large books, bound, some in vellum, some in leather. The Friar sat on a wooden chair at a low table whereon flared a bronze lamp. _Intrate per angustam portam, quia lata porta est quae ducit ad perditionem._ As he looked up from the minuscule of the parchment, the guttering flame of the lamp hurt his tired eyes and a yellow mist surged before them. Little beads of moisture hung upon the stone wall and the air was close. _Quam angusta porta, et arcta via est quae ducit ad vitam._ His vision cleared and his eyes wandered among the books which he knew so well and the pages of which he had turned so often, and as scholars said, to such good account: _Homilia Sancti Augustini_, _Origen de Virginitate_, _Divi Lanfranci Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini Nostri_, _Joannis Scoit de_ _Eucharista_, and the rest of the abstruse works in Theology, Logic, and Music upon which he had spent the vigour of his manhood.

His eyes were wont to glow with affectionate reverence when they lighted on the books, the Noble Masters whom he had followed these thirty years with more zeal and enthusiasm than a lover his mistress. But to-night the Friar’s spirit was heavy; his eyes ached, his brain comprehended only with difficulty the sense of the written words; hope and self-belief seem to have been suddenly extinguished in his breast. The faith in his labours, which had made them labours of desire to him, seemed suddenly departed, and his life looking forward, looking backward, appeared a blank, a desert, a precious period in the endless and remorseless procession of time, irrevocably wasted in misdirected effort. This state of mind had come upon him in a moment as it were, or rather, he had only apprehended it the instant he had raised his eyes from his book.

He sat motionless a few minutes. Outside, the bell of St. Mary the Virgin tolled eight o’clock. The Friar sighed and raised his hand to his head. That day his lecture in the Schools had been exceptionally well received. Never before had Bradwardine and St. Augustine been so acutely elucidated in the University, and as he finished his exposition the scholars had risen to their feet and had clapped and cheered him. Many learned Doctors and Professors had crowded round to applaud and congratulate him. Yet the _doctissimus frater_, the _erudissimus lector_ had lost heart. Learning is a bitter-sweet fruit.

The Friar rose to his feet, and threw open the little lattice window. The cool night struck on his brow. The moon glowed large and fair over the city of spires and towers; in the distance the river lay a band of silver. A light wind stirred the branches of a neighbouring poplar. A girl passed humming a popular tune, and the distant shout of some hilarious scholar came through the air like the cry of a lonely ghost. The Friar breathed deeply of the pure air and loathed the confines of his narrow room. His eye regarded the great silent moon and glanced from spire to spire and tower to tower, silvered in the floods of light that poured from the heavens; his mind suddenly reverted to a similar scene of his boyhood. He remembered the night when his father had brought him, after travelling all day, to the monastery where he was to live henceforth and receive instruction, and how descending the hill-path they had first sighted the monastery on the other side of the valley, clothed in a vivid moonlight which revealed every detail of its exquisite architecture. As it broke upon his vision, it had seemed to the boy a mystic shrine of God, an exquisite casket wherein the Holy of Holies had His dwelling in the midst of chaste splendours and mildly luminous glories. Hence the Friar’s mind wandered back to earlier memories, to the house built of wattles and mud beneath the little hill, to the couple of oxen kept in the stall which he used to feed, to his sisters Peronelle and Alice, and his brothers Robert and Adam, with whom he used to play in the long water-meadows, and to his mother feeding, as was her accustomed task, the poultry on the headland. His eyes grew misty as he thought of them. He remembered the foresters bringing the dead deer up to the Manor, the shouting villeins driving the great plough through the furrows, and the festivals at Easter and Harvest. He called to mind his young days, before Sir John the parish priest had picked him out and had him instructed in good learning, when he ran like a greyhound through the wild wood, climbed the trees like a squirrel, swam like an otter in the swift river, and could shoot with his bow and play his quarterstaff with any boy in town. Then life was a real thing, a vivid enjoyment; physical activities and elemental emotions made up the sum of his careless, happy being.

But now he had drunk deep of learning; he had wandered widely in the mazes of theology and philosophy. The heedless certainty of those untrammelled days had gone by for ever; he was now endlessly immersed in doubt and argument; a subtle logic was his, powerful to destroy but very weak to build. His learning had brought him to a land of shadows. Truth and reality, that had environed his youth, now the more escaped him the more he pursued them.

This was the fruit of many books and of many teachers. He turned from the window to survey his room. He saw his books piled up in the gloom of their shelves, his nostrils caught the smell of warm leather and parchment, and a great loathing of them and the life to which they belonged rose up in his heart.

Oh for Life, Life, real Life--away from books, away from disputations, away from endless reflectings and researchings.

Oh for Life, the Life of the free spirit, moving of itself, uncontrolled, self-expressive.

He glanced once more out of the open window; the moon poured down her silvery floods. The lamp was dying on the table; the room grew darker and closer. He took his wallet and staff and went out.