And the silence was not hard to bear.  The Trappists have a book of gestures, and are often allowed to converse by signs.  We novices were generally in little bands, and often, as we walked in the garden of the monastery, we talked together gaily with our hands.  Then the silence is not perpetual.  In the fields we often had to give directions to the labourers.  In the school, where we studied Theology, Latin, Greek, there was heard the voice of the teacher.  It is true that I have seen men in the monastery day by day for twenty years with whom I have never exchanged a word, but I have had permission to speak with monks.  The head of the monastery, the Reverend Pere, has the power to loose the bonds of silence when he chooses, and to allow monks to walk and speak with each other beyond the white walls that hem in the garden of the monastery.  Now and then we spoke, but I think most of us were not unhappy in our silence.  It became a habit.  And then we were always occupied.  We had no time allowed us for sitting and being sad.  Domini, I don’t want to tell you about the Trappists, their life—­only about myself, why I was as I was, how I came to change.  For years I was not unhappy at El-Largani.  When my time of novitiate was over I took the eternal vows without hesitation.  Many novices go out again into the world.  It never occurred to me to do so.  I scarcely ever felt a stirring of worldly desire.  I scarcely ever had one of those agonising struggles which many people probably attribute to monks.  I was contented nearly always.  Now and then the flesh spoke, but not strongly.  Remember, our life was a life of hard and exhausting labour in the fields.  The labour kept the flesh in subjection, as the prayer lifted up the spirit.  And then, during all my earlier years at the monastery, we had an Abbe who was quick to understand the characters and dispositions of men—­Dom Andre Herceline.  He knew me far better than I knew myself.  He knew, what I did not suspect, that I was full of sleeping violence, that in my purity and devotion—­or beneath it rather—­there was a strong strain of barbarism.  The Russian was sleeping in the monk, but sleeping soundly.  That can be.  Half a man’s nature, if all that would call to it is carefully kept from it, may sleep, I believe, through all his life.  He might die and never have known, or been, what all the time he was.  For years it was so with me.  I knew only part of myself, a real vivid part—­but only a part.  I thought it was the whole.  And while I thought it was the whole I was happy.  If Dom Andre Herceline had not died, today I should be a monk at El-Largani, ignorant of what I know, contented.