THE NECROPHILE

The most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life came from the mouth of a priest. It came quite unsought, for I was making a silent retreat in a Carthusian monastery. It was likewise unexpected, for I had gone to rest, not to rack, my mind. The rule of Saint Bruno enforces a cessation of sound. And the Great Silence from vespers to midday had rolled over the wearied souls in the guest house twice: silence unbroken save by the solemn and rugged chant of the monks; real chant and real monks. The surreptitious aid of organ pipes was unknown in the Carthusian service. The roaring and wheezing of compressed air through leaden guts and wooden tripery, however harmonious and tuneful, had never been thought necessary in the Carthusian scheme for bringing Multiplicity back to Unity, Created to their Creator and contemplatives into that glowing orb of essential Contemplation which is God. Supremely and serenely God contemplates, and the holy contemplatives on earth enter His thoughts and His contemplation. And they contemplate Him in return. If it were not so, how else could they endure that appalling life of solitude, mewed in little prisons, toiling in lonely workshops and solitary gardens, or, after rising to chant the sublime office at midnight, returning to snatch a few hours of slumber, before dawn recalls them to the choir and the Carthusian Mass. For, steeped in the thirteenth century, they keep the ceremonies and liturgy of their religion before it was demediævalised and emasculated by the Renaissance. So delightfully do the Carthusians remain in their own century that they still prostrate themselves flat at the Confiteor, and wear stockings cut out of two pieces of linen and spliced together! Knitting-needles would be heresy, and a sewing-machine modernism! It is so throughout their rules and customs, which leave them with the proud boast shared by no other Order. Never reformed because never deformed. Numquam reformata quia numquam deformata!

We were a little wearied, for we had been listening to the great Office of Matins chanted from midnight until two in the morning. Ensconced in the hanging gallery, buried behind the huge printed prayer books of the Carthusian rite, we had sat, letting the rival delights of slumber and plain-chant dispute for our senses. At times it was like being carried out to sea upon successive waves that choked one’s ear-drums. At another time one felt sinking, sinking into the dull, matted vibrations that eternally reach the ocean depths from above. Then the sound had died down, and each holy father, wearing the ghostly white shroud in which he will one day be buried, picked up his lantern and made his way back through unending cloister to the cell in which he circumvents death with pious irony. Death and the devil are put to considerable mock in a Carthusian house. Death causes no alarm, no terror. All his tricks, all his stage-effects have been put into daily practice by the Religious. The utter loneliness that cuts off the soul from the whole human family, the secretion behind narrow stone walls, the white funeral clothes, the silence that forbids all the hum and humours and humdrum of noisy, gossipy human life, reduce Death himself to parody. And then? And then they see intellectually, that is to say they contemplate while yet alive what the dead see to their exquisite joy or lingering loss.

The guests were the usual habitants of monastery guest-houses. A poet, who had failed of attaining perfect sonnet-form first on cocoa at Oxford, and on cocaine subsequently in Paris. He was thinking, in some despair, of joining the Holy Church. An architect successful enough in his line, and with a rare knowledge of Gothic, but superficially and glitteringly, for he was an atheist, and none can have real knowledge of the Gothic grandeur without acknowledging the true religion and the true God. God, shall we say? built the vault of Heaven, and strewed the gargoyles of the constellations across its symmetry. Mediæval man built the Gothic Cathedral in reply, and God saw that it was good. God poised the planets in space to show what could be done without actually breaking eggs, and man riposted with the flying buttress, that marvellous hanging miracle of thrust and strain riveted into immobility, and man showed God that he, too, could suspend stone in the void. And again God perceived, almost to His delighted embarrassment, that it was good.

None of us could understand how a Gothic architect could remain an atheist. Once the Divine in man, that is to say his art, is realised, it is only a step to the Divinity. There was also a Monsignor, an Austrian and a mild-faced mystery. It was not until the end of the retreat that we learnt a little of his identity. We were committed on our honour to silence except during the hour of recreation, when we moved round a high-walled garden, wondering desperately what things were happening on the highway the other side—that is to say in the world.

There were monks in the Monastery who had not seen a newspaper for thirty years, and even happy ones to whom woman was an extinct animal. A silent laybrother served our meals with shaven head and untrimmed beard, looking like the shrouded figure of Time himself. After each meal I expected him to leave a running hour glass on the table instead of the cheese, and point toward it with bony fingers as though to suggest that the course of our life was also finished. The strain of silence was having its effect, and on the last day of the retreat we became more and more communicative during the hour of recreation.

I told some very dull and uninspiring tale. I suffer from normality, and my life is inclined to convention. The architect, while redoubling his artistic appreciation of the Carthusian life, repeated his atheistic ultimates toward life. He gave the rather absurd reason for his attitude that he had been always disappointed by women. Who hasn’t, including the Saints? I could not help retailing him a newspaper poster I had once read in America which ran: “MAN TWICE DIVORCED REFUSES TO BELIEVE IN GOD!” We all laughed, and the Monsignor began disclosing his past. As we had expected, he had incurred some kind of disgrace in his own country. He was not a fallen priest, but a Prelate on the shelf. It was not owing to any scandal, he explained, and we believed him, but owing to his intellectual backsliding that he had missed his ecclesiastical career. Modernism had fired him with its bright Will-o’-the-wisp, and he had not remained unsinged. However, he had been permitted to retain priestly rank and dress, and to travel on his own means. He was visiting the English cathedrals (an American rather than a Christian form of pilgrimage) and had been so shocked by their ghastly and sepulchral interiors that he had fled to the Carthusians as he said to seek a little oil for his creaking soul. The actual services he had seen had filled him with depression. As he expressed it himself they reminded him of the facetiousness of undertakers! Better he thought that the cathedrals had been destroyed than made ridiculous. His was the true Catholic spirit.

He never forgot the holy office which was his, and made a serious attempt to supplement the silent efforts of the Carthusians in converting the architect. On our last evening of recreation we agreed to make a concerted assault on our companion. We found that his atheism was not based on any pose of disbelief, but on a total inability to understand how a human body could rise formally and substantially from the dead. “I don’t see why spirits shouldn’t survive like sheets of luminous paint, but as for atoms rearranging their constituency in a human body it is impossible,” he argued. “Annihilation seems far more logical and probable, and proper after death.”

“Nevertheless,” said the Monsignor, “we believe in the resurrection of the body from the dead.” And he proceeded to the theories of scholastics. “You must understand that the body like the soul is created not generated by the Creator. Creation is a more perfect and sublimer act than generation. Soul and body are both called out of the misty void, out of space, out of nothing, and therefore both are capable of passing into complete abeyance again. The Creator can uncreate and then recreate. The resurrection of the body is a form of recreation. But He Himself will not annihilate an atom of His own work.”

The architect returned to the charge: “The atoms of a dead human body pass into other bodies. Whose body shall they be on the Day of Resurrection?” The reply was that Unity could bring about Multiplicity, and just as the multiplication of the loaves was a scriptural miracle, and the multiplication of the Host a constant occurrence in missionary history, it was possible that atoms could be multiplied to serve their different turns so to speak.

“Can God unmake? Can He annihilate the dust He has created?” asked the architect. “No!” said the Monsignor, for they had settled down to a duel, “but God is the cause of energy as the sun is of colour, and as the sun can equally cause colour to rise or fade, so God can cause energy and existence to come or collapse out of the atoms. That is death! But the sun can one day recolour those identical atoms in other leaves. The atoms can be the same, so that you really get a resurrection of the body of the leaf. The human body can be similarly restored.” Somehow it did not convince.

“What age will our bodies be when they rise again?” asked the architect. “We shall be outside of Time and therefore quite ageless. God is not a source or a sequence, but the primal power. He is the Motor causing all motion. Our bodies are emanations from Him, and He can cause or uncause them voluntarily.”

The conversation was only prevented from becoming quarrelsome by the difficulty both combatants felt in wielding metaphysical terms. They disagreed as to what atoms were, as to whether the divine power showed itself in a materialistic manipulation of things or in a kind of cosmic mania. The architect was at one time willing to admit the personality of God, but only on the corollary that God was mad. It explained so much, the crinks in the universe, the genius of man, the brilliance of the stars, the comets tearing out of place. The madness of God was of course a divine madness. “Yes,” said the Monsignor very solemnly. “Bethlehem was madness, Nazareth was paranoia, and Calvary delirium.”

From the metaphysical the discussion became biological. The architect admitted that fresh bouts of the life-spirit could reanimate dead matter, but not the same set of atoms. Once dead, nothing could revive a dead anatomy. Could the Monsignor record a single instance except the legendary tale of Lazarus, who was probably in a state of coma, and whose personal experiences by some extraordinary oversight on the part of the Evangelists had been withheld from the human race?

The Monsignor became angry and took his challenge. “I believe it is quite possible,” he said, “for the life-spirit to be restored to a dead body long after physical death has occurred. I will tell you a story for which I have the evidence. I shall make a series of positive statements and leave it as such. The circumstances are morbid in the extreme, but you will excuse my narration of them. I have never breathed this story before, but I consider that I am justified if I can at least refute your statement that the dead rise up never. I say they do. I can give an instance which was not coma. Life can go, and life can be reinfused.

“When I was a young priest in Vienna, before my rise to favour at Court, I was, in addition to my parish duties, detailed for work at the Morgue. I waited there three nights every week to receive the unknown dead, and to give them the benefit of a religious reception. Some of the dead were recognised, and a few were claimed. Relatives were grateful for such Catholic rites as I could give to those, who had generally died without Absolution or Sacrament. I loved saying Mass for the Unknown dead lying in the Morgue, not knowing their names or their lives. The Church is the Mother not only of the living, but also of the dead, and her arms are strong to stretch down even into the pit. How surprised some of these stray souls must have been to find the Church, which they had forgotten on earth, following them with charitable hands into the other world. I was stationed for two years at the Morgue.

“One day the police brought an unclaimed body and left it upon a marble slab. It was that of a woman still in her beauty, and not more than thirty years of age. I could see that she had been a woman of pleasure, though, as is often the case, the extreme sadness of her face counteracted the dis-sanctification of her body. Poor child! The Morgue was seldom without one of her unclassed class. I could say Mass for her which I could not for the suicides. The suicides the Church leaves to God. He alone can say the Office of the Dead for those who have destroyed the life which He gave to them, and which He alone has the right to take.

“It happened that evening that the Commissioner of Police brought an anonymous party apparently of relations to view the tragic human relics in the Morgue. One of them appeared to be of rank, for the Commissioner saluted him at every opportunity. They remained some time in front of the woman’s body admiring the great beauty of her features and inquiring her name. Though the records were examined, nothing definite could be learned except that she was a courtesan, who had had the misfortune to die during an evening party in the house of a gentleman, who preferred to remain unnamed. His doctor had brought the body and filled the necessary certificates, and the great gentleman, at whose expenses she had perished, had sent a hundred kronen to provide her funeral. It was understood that she had no family. In his anxiety to learn her history the distinguished stranger asked for me to be presented to him, and I found myself shaking the hand of a Duke, connected with one of the German Royal Houses. When I was unable to add to his information, he turned from me with wandering eyes and an expression which to me seemed bordering on dementia. Curiously enough he congratulated me on my good fortune in being chaplain at the Morgue, but this I took for an excess of politeness on his part. It was not considered a very high ecclesiastical position. He was closeted for some time with the Commissioner and drove away.

“Later that night I was summoned to attend a dying man, who died before I could do more than hear his confession. He was friendless, and his body was taken to the Morgue. I followed. It was a late hour, and I decided to finish reading my Breviary in the Secretary’s room. While seated there, I was astonished to hear footsteps in the inner hall, where the unclaimed dead were thrown on marble slabs. A shadow was cast against the frosted-glass partition, and it was followed by another. I stood involuntarily in the doorway. To my amazement it was the Commissioner, who was again taking the Duke round the grim contents of the room. I could not help overhearing them, and what I did not overhear my horrified senses supplied. There are things that one has read in books about sick souls or demented bodies, that I had never dreamed of meeting. How can I explain?

“To forestall my story, the Duke I could realise was deeply afflicted mentally, I do not say morally, for he was not responsible. It was not hereditary but accidental. I learnt all this some time after. I must explain that he had had a terrible experience at marriage. After a passionate and romantic courtship his young wife had died of heart failure in his arms a few hours after the ceremony. The marriage night had become a watch night of the dead, during which he had passed a ghastly vigil instead of enjoying an efflorescence of happiness. In answer to his entreaties he had been left alone with the body of his wife that night. His groans and prayers were heard until a late hour....

“The effect on the unhappy Duke was serious. His character, hitherto, had been irreproachable, and his experiences in love matters exceeding slight, considering the opportunities possible to his rank and fortune. It was a stroke of incredibly bitter irony, which I should hesitate to lay at the door of a benevolent Providence, that his marriage night should have been of such horror. His bride was buried, but the effect on the white tablets of his mind was lasting. To a large extent he became a recluse, avoiding society, and more especially all the gay world of women and wives and half-women and half-wives, who present such an alarming phase of modern civilisation. Unfortunately his loneliness was obsessed by one very gruesome but innocent form of sentiment. He only fell in love with the dead, in whom he ocularly memorised the last vision of his wife. There was no carnal wickedness on his part, for he showed signs of a diabolical possession, that is of not being his own possessor, and of indulging in uncanny and fantastic wishes, which in his saner moments he would never have tolerated. His friends proposed that he should be solemnly exorcised by the Church, but his Confessor was nervous, and the modern Cardinal Archbishop would never give his consent to anything so mediæval. In the Middle Ages of course the most solemn and terrifying of rites would have been performed, and I have no doubt that the poor Duke was actually possessed by an unhappy demon—explain his malady how you will. He was unable to resist this terrible instinct, this love of watching women who were newly dead. I suppose it could be explained. The supreme anguish and the supreme joy of his life had come to him on the same day, and he had mingled them in the one night until agony and ecstasy, delight and grief, life and death must have become indistinguishable. But the result had been distressing in the extreme, and from time to time the mad Duke emerged from gloomy solitude to satisfy his widowed eyes. The police had orders, certainly not to facilitate his sepulchral amours, but not to prevent him, for the doctors when consulted agreed that if he were thwarted he would become dangerous. As it was, he was studiously observant of the natural rights and feelings of the living, and though when his secret agents heard of the death of a beautiful woman they instantly visited the next of kin, he never pressed his suit except with the most pathetic delicacy. In the cases when through poverty or even through a curious form of snobbery (for with some folk snobbery is stronger than reverence or death) he was permitted to see the corpse, he always insisted on defraying the eventual expenses of the funeral and, when the relatives allowed, of appearing at the grave side of the object of his momentary affection. There is no human law which forbids a man to love a corpse, provided the dead body is not desecrated, and receives proper burial within the number of ordained days. And the Duke was careful almost to the verge of scruple on this point. However morbid this habit might be considered, it was overlooked under two heads. There was the fact that the Duke’s aberration caused no unhappiness to anyone except himself, and secondly that he suffered the most agonising remorse and shame between each outbreak of his singular passion for still life. The leading pathologists declared that it was a very exceptional case.

“In any case the Duke was not interrupted in his Platonic love affairs with Hades, though, poor man, I remember his pathetic grief, which could be charitably construed into a madman’s ideas of being faithful to a dead woman.

“However, I learnt all this long after that evening which was to have such a curious effect on my subsequent life, the evening of the Duke’s visit to the Morgue, a visit as I then imagined out of ordinary curiosity. As I previously mentioned, I had returned late that night to dispose of the friendless man, whose soul I had previously guided as well as I could into the shadows of the other world. I was reading the last words of my Breviary by the flickering gaslight, when suddenly shadows passed the frosted glass, and to my horror I heard the Duke making arrangements for the temporary watching of the beautiful woman I had already seen him cover with piteous eyes. I gathered that it was not considered discreet, and would entail a licence from the police, to remove the body from the Morgue to his private house. So saying, they both entered where I was standing. It was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. The Duke turned as pale as one of the marble mortuary slabs, and the Commissioner actually seized me as though to prevent my escape. When they realised that I was a priest, they seemed relieved, for a priest becomes so used to the seal imposed upon the confessional that even secrets which come to him in other ways join that silence of the grave. They both read what came in my face, and without a word nodded to each other, and passed on their way. I finished writing the formularies descriptive of my unknown client, and left him lying with the others. I noticed that he was on the next slab to the mysterious woman. It was beyond human nature for me to refrain from glancing a second time at her features. They were beautiful with the pallid unreality of the sculptor’s art. I have observed that if the sculptor attains the slightest line of beauty or personality in his art, it is far more wonderful than the painter’s. It is more difficult to raise life out of the marble depths than upon the surface of canvas or paint. But to leave by brush or chisel any idea of the life that has recently left the countenance is the most difficult. And this lovely model from the Divine sculptor conveyed that haunting expression which sometimes the mediæval tombs possessed, as though life lingered in death. How can I describe it? If you have ever seen a fort or town which has been surrendered to the enemy, there is a moment of tremendous pathos after the flag has been lowered and the garrison withdrawn, before the enemy have taken possession. The prize lies like the body of Patroclus between contending rivals. So, I may say, lay the body of this beautiful woman, over whom life and death had contended, and now that the colours of life had been lowered she lay awaiting the legions of death and corruption. I turned away, making the Sign of the Cross, and said the De Profundis for the absent soul. It was well that it had passed from its hostel’s desecration. The next morning the body was gone. And then the weeks and the months passed.... I was agreeably surprised that winter to be summoned by my Bishop, and told that the moment of my promotion had arrived. I was to be sent to a fashionable parish, where I would find more leisure to continue my taste for historical studies, which the Bishop was gracious enough to say had met his attention when inspecting the Seminary. He wished me to leave my curacy, and with it those unhealthy but rather fascinating duties at the Morgue, while another priest took my place. I bowed to the Bishop’s decision, and kissed his ring. As I rose to leave his anticamera he mentioned without a trace of inner meaning, as though he were saying the most natural thing in the world, ‘You owe your promotion to the kind offices of the Duke.’ To my amazement he mentioned the name of the Duke I had reason to remember under ineffaceable circumstances. The Bishop looked at me with the gentle wondering look as though to say: ‘Go in peace, my son, your career is made. You know how to keep secrets. To those who can keep the secrets of humanity or of the Church all things will come.’ At least this came into a mind, alert to guess the reasons of the Duke’s action in my favour.

“I found my new position delightful—new interests, new ecclesiastical visions, new friends. My confessional was thronged, which is always pleasing to a young priest. When one becomes older, one’s professional vanity can be adequately satisfied by shriving one old washerwoman per diem. One day the confessional bell rang out of my usual hours. I descended into the Church and a woman heavily veiled began telling me the history of her life. As a good confessor, I forget all she said. It is a blank, but I can say that the sweat poured down my face before I left my seat. She joined me in the sacristy as she wished to speak to me of other matters, and once outside the sacred seal my memory of course returns. I recall that she was anxious for me to arrange her private wedding. She wished to be married at the dead of night, and my name had been mentioned as the only one fit and willing to perform the ceremony. I replied that I could do nothing without my Bishop’s consent, but that I would take him the particulars immediately, if she would leave me her name and address. She replied that that she could not, but a carriage would come to fetch me that night to perform the ceremony, which would take place in a private house. So saying she laid the marriage fees on the table, and without letting me look through her veil handed me a letter from her bosom, which she requested me to give the Bishop. Then she withdrew.

“That afternoon I called on the Bishop without giving notice, and to my surprise was admitted immediately. He listened quietly to my request, which I never dreamed for a moment he would permit, but I gave him the lady’s letter. He glanced at the contents as though he knew it all in advance. Without a trace of surprise or reflection in his eyes he nodded and told me to perform the ceremony that night if I was sent for. I gasped something about papers and ecclesiastical authorisation. He forestalled me with a packet of papers, bidding me fill all the particulars except the names of those about to be married. He ordered me under severe penalties to bring back the papers without attempting to read the signatures. He himself would fill in the names in the body of the document. I respectfully withdrew, and waited in my rooms that evening with some of the trepidation that I can imagine a girl feeling while waiting for her first romance.

“After a solitary dinner I waited and waited. I finished reading my Office for the day, and still sat waiting. I was too excited to pray, too curious to meditate, too tired to read any book of piety. I waited from nine to eleven, and from eleven to half-past eleven. A bell rang and to my amazement my friend the Duke was introduced. He explained that he had come because he was not sure if I would come on such a wild goose chase, and also because it was necessary for me to come blindfolded. Under his guarantee I naturally lent myself to the adventure, and left the clergy house in a two-horsed carriage with a tight bandage round my eyes. The Duke never spoke to me, but he helped me very graciously out of the carriage, and through a courtyard, and up what seemed a very fine flight of stairs, for I quickly felt that I was treading marble, not wood.

“Then my eyes were released and I found myself standing in a long and richly curtained apartment. There were two witnesses blindfolded like myself, standing in front of an altar brought apparently out of a private chapel. Others there were none except the Duke and the lady whose confession I had heard that afternoon. The Duke then asked me to perform the marriage ceremony between them. I bowed and took up my place before the altar beside which were laid the necessary vestments. As in a dream I proceeded to recite the prayers and perform the gestures which should symbolise and solderise the mystical union of two human beings. I had reached the moment for the Duke to place the ring on the finger of the bride, when she let slip her veil, and for a minute I could neither speak nor move. I should have been prepared, but it had never crossed my mind, not even as the wildest and maddest possibility. My friends, the bride whom I was uniting in marriage with the Duke was the woman whose body I had seen laid on a marble slab at the Morgue a year previously!

“She stood there with the same transcendent beauty, but with the slight flush of life and love recurdling in her cheeks. This was the woman whom I had seen among the dead and for whose soul I had said Mass! The dead shall rise up and praise Thee, O Lord!

“Truly I may say that love is stronger than death and that God had most strangely permitted this woman to be raised from the dead, by the whim of a madman’s sentiment. Though she had been a sinner she was found not unworthy of what I account as a miracle. Like the Prince and the sleeping Beauty in the Fairy tale the Duke had restored her to life. Their marriage was naturally morganatic, but as the incident restored the Duke to his normal senses, it was a marriage that neither Church nor State cared to forbid.”