The Garden of Allah eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 736 pages of information about The Garden of Allah.

The Garden of Allah eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 736 pages of information about The Garden of Allah.
woman, subject to physical caprices.  There are things that I pass over, Domini, which would explain still more her hesitation.  He knew what caused it, and again he was tortured.  But he persisted.  And at last he overcame.  She consented to marry him.  They were engaged.  Domini, I need not tell you much more, only this fact—­which had driven him from France, destroyed his happiness, brought him to the monastery.  Shortly before the marriage was to take place he discovered that, while they were engaged, she had yielded to the desires of an old admirer who had come to bid her farewell and to wish her joy in her new life.  He was tempted, he said, to kill her.  But he governed himself and left her.  He travelled.  He came to Tunis.  He came to La Trappe.  He saw the peace there.  He thought, ‘Can I seize it?  Can it do something for me?’ He saw me.  He thought, ’I shall not be quite alone.  This monk—­he has lived always in peace, he has never known the torture of women.  Might not intercourse with him help me?’

“Such was his history, such was the history poured, with infinite detail that I have not told you, day by day, into my ears.  It was the history, you see, of a passion that was mainly physical.  I will not say entirely.  I do not know whether any great passion can be entirely physical.  But it was the history of the passion of one body for another body, and he did not attempt to present it to me as anything else.  This man made me understand the meaning of the body.  I had never understood it before.  I had never suspected the immensity of the meaning there is in physical things.  I had never comprehended the flesh.  Now I comprehended it.  Loneliness rushed upon me, devoured me—­loneliness of the body.  ’God is a spirit and those that worship him must worship him in spirit.’  Now I felt that to worship in spirit was not enough.  I even felt that it was scarcely anything.  Again I thought of my life as the life of a skeleton in a world of skeletons.  Again the chapel was as a valley of dry bones.  It was a ghastly sensation.  I was plunged in the void.  I—­I—­I can’t tell you my exact sensation, but it was as if I was the loneliest creature in the whole of the universe, and as if I need not have been lonely, as if I, in my ignorance and fatuity, had selected loneliness thinking it was the happiest fate.

“And yet you will say I was face to face with this man’s almost frantic misery.  I was, and it made no difference.  I envied him, even in his present state.  He wanted to gain consolation from me if that were possible.  Oh, the irony of my consoling him!  In secret I laughed at it bitterly.  When I strove to console him I knew that I was an incarnate lie.  He had told me the meaning of the body and, by so doing, had snatched from me the meaning of the spirit.  And then he said to me, ’Make me feel the meaning of the spirit.  If I can grasp that I may find comfort.’  He called upon me to give him what I no longer had—­the

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The Garden of Allah from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.