The Marquise of O and Other Stories (23 page)

The nuns, proceeding to the organ gallery, were about to do so – distributing the parts of a piece of music which they had already frequently performed, and testing and tuning the violins, oboes and bass viols – when suddenly Sister Antonia, fresh and well though a trifle pale, appeared at the top of the steps carrying under her arm the score of the ancient Italian Mass on the performance of which the Abbess had so urgently insisted. When the nuns asked her in amazement where she had come from and how she had recovered so suddenly, she replied: ‘Never mind that, sisters, it is of no consequence!' Whereupon she distributed the parts which she had brought with her, and herself sat down at the organ,
glowing with enthusiasm, to begin conducting the wonderful piece of music. And so it came about that something like a miraculous, heavenly consolation entered the hearts of the pious women; they immediately sat down at their music-stands with their instruments; indeed, the very anxiety they were in helped to raise their souls as if on wings through all the heavens of harmony; the music was played with supreme and splendid brilliance; during the whole performance not a breath stirred from where the congregation stood and sat; especially at the
Salve regina
and even more at the
Gloria in excelsis
it was as if the entire assembly in the church had been struck dead. In short, despite the four accursed brothers and their followers, not even a particle of dust on the floor was blown out of place, and the convent continued to flourish right until the end of the Thirty Years War, when by virtue of an article in the Treaty of Westphalia it was nevertheless secularized.

Six years later, long after this incident had been forgotten, the mother of the four young men arrived from the Hague and, tearfully declaring to the civic authorities at Aachen that they had vanished without trace, put legal inquiries in hand in the hope of discovering where they had gone. She stated that the last news heard of them in the Netherlands, where in fact their home was, had been a letter written at the time in question, on the eve of the Feast of Corpus Christi, by the preacher to a friend of his, a school-teacher in Antwerp; in four closely-written pages he gave a high-spirited and indeed boisterous advance report of a proposed enterprise against the convent of St Cecilia, about which, however, his mother declined to enter into further details. After a number of vain attempts to trace the persons for whom the unhappy woman was searching, someone finally remembered that quite a few years earlier, approximately at the time she stated, four young men of unknown nationality and origin had been admitted to the city lunatic asylum, for the foundation of which the Emperor
had recently provided, and were still confined there. As, however, their illness consisted in a kind of religious obsession, and their behaviour, to the best of the court's knowledge, was said to be extremely gloomy and melancholy, the mother could not set much store by this report, since it bore little relation to the temperament of her sons which she knew only too well, and more especially because it rather seemed to indicate that the persons in question were Catholics. Nevertheless, curiously struck by a number of details in the description she was given of them, she went one day to the asylum in the company of a court official and asked the warders if they would be kind enough to give her permission to see the four unfortunate deluded men who were in their charge. But how shall we describe the horror of the poor woman when, on entering the room, she immediately, at first glance, recognized her sons! Wearing long black robes, they were sitting round a table on which a crucifix stood, and this they seemed to be worshipping, with their folded hands silently resting on the table-top. The woman, sinking down half fainting on to a chair, asked what they were doing, to which the warders replied that they were merely adoring the Saviour, ‘for' (they added) ‘they claim to understand better than anyone else that He is the true Son of the One God. These young men,' they said, ‘have been leading this ghostly existence for six years now; they hardly sleep and hardly eat and never utter a word; only once, at midnight, they rise from their chairs, and they then chant the
Gloria in excelsis
in voices fit to shatter the windows of the house.' The warders ended by assuring her that nevertheless the young men were physically in perfectly good health; that they even undeniably possessed a certain tranquillity of mind, although of a very grave and solemn sort; that when told they were mad they would pityingly shrug their shoulders, and that they had already several times declared that if the good city of Aachen only knew what they knew, it too would lay aside
all its activities and gather, as they had done, round the crucified Lord to sing the
Gloria
.

The woman could not bear the terrible sight of her unfortunate sons and almost immediately asked to be taken home, hardly able to walk; and on the following morning she went to visit Herr Veit Gotthelf, a well-known cloth-merchant in the city, hoping to get some information from him about the cause of this appalling event, for he was a man mentioned in the preacher's letter, from which it appeared that he had himself been a zealous participant in the plan to destroy St Cecilia's convent on the day of Corpus Christi. Veit Gotthelf the cloth-merchant, who in the meantime had married, had several children, and had taken over his father's prosperous business, welcomed the stranger very kindly; and on hearing the request that brought her to him he bolted the door, made her sit down on a chair, and spoke as follows: ‘My good lady! I was indeed closely associated with your sons six years ago, and if you will promise not to involve me in any legal inquiry in this connection, I will frankly and unreservedly confess to you that we did, indeed, have the purpose which this letter mentions. And since the execution of the deed was planned to the very last detail with truly godless ingenuity, it remains incomprehensible to me why it came to nothing; Heaven itself seems to have granted its holy protection to the convent of those pious women. For you must know that your sons had already permitted themselves to disturb the celebration of Mass with a certain amount of boisterous levity, intended as a prelude to more decisive action; more than three hundred ruffians from this city, misguided as it was then, were standing ready with axes and torches of pitch, simply waiting for the preacher to give the prearranged signal at which they would have razed the cathedral to the ground. But instead, as soon as the music began, your sons surprised us by suddenly, with a simultaneous movement, taking off their hats; slowly, as if with inexpressibly deep
and ever greater emotion, they pressed their hands to their bowed faces, and no sooner had a few moments of moving silence passed than the preacher suddenly turned round and called to us all in a loud and terrible voice to bare our heads as he had done! Some of our companions vainly whispered to him and frivolously nudged him, urging him to give the agreed signal for the riot: instead of answering, the preacher crossed his hands on his breast and sank down on his knees, whereupon he and his brothers, with their foreheads fervently pressed into the dust, recited in a murmur the entire series of the prayers he had mocked only a few moments earlier. Thrown into utter confusion of mind by this sight, the pack of miserable fanatics, bereft of their ringleaders, stood irresolute and inactive until the end of the Mass, the wonderful music of which went on pouring down from the organ gallery; and then, since at that moment several arrests were made on the commandant's orders and some of the offenders who had behaved in a disorderly fashion were seized by a guard and led away, there was nothing left for the wretched rabble to do but to leave the sacred building as quickly as possible, mingling for protection with the crowd as it thronged out of the doorway. In the evening, after vainly inquiring several times for your sons at the inn, I went out again to the convent with some friends, full of the direst foreboding, to seek information about them from the men at the door who had given valuable assistance to the Imperial guard. But how, worthy madam, shall I describe to you my consternation when I beheld those four men still lying, with folded hands, kissing the ground with their breasts and brows, prostrated in ardent adoration before the altar, as if they had been turned to stone! The administrator of the convent, arriving at this moment, vainly plucked them by their cloaks and shook them by their arms, bidding them leave the cathedral, telling them that it was already growing quite dark and there was no one left in it: raising themselves half erect as
if in a trance, they paid no attention to him until he made his followers grasp them under the arms and lead them out of the main entrance, whereupon they finally followed us to the city, though often sighing and looking back in heartrending fashion towards the cathedral, which was gleaming and glowing behind us in the last rays of the sun. On the way back, my friends and I repeatedly and with much tender concern asked them what in all the world had happened to them that was so terrible and had been able to cause such a revolution in their very souls; they looked kindly at us, pressed our hands, gazed pensively at the ground and, from time to time, alas! wiped tears from their eyes with an expression which it still breaks my heart to remember. Then, on reaching their lodgings, they cleverly and neatly tied birch twigs together to make themselves a cross, and this they set up on the large table in the middle of the room, pressing it into a little mound of wax, between two candles which the maid brought; and while their friends, arriving in increasing numbers as the time passed, stood aside wringing their hands or gathered in small groups, speechless with distress, to watch their silent spectral doings, they sat down round the table, apparently impervious to everything else that was going on about them, and quietly began to worship with folded hands. When a servant brought the meal which had been ordered that morning for the entertainment of their friends they would have none of it, nor did they later, as night fell, want the bed which, since they seemed so weary, she had made up in the next room; in order not to annoy the landlord, who was much put out by this behaviour, their friends had to sit down on one side at a lavishly laid dinner table and consume the food that had been prepared for a large party, seasoning it with the salt of their bitter tears. Then, suddenly, it struck midnight; your four sons, after listening intently for a moment to the bell's dull tolling, suddenly rose with a simultaneous movement from their seats; and as we stared across at them, laying
down our napkins and wondering anxiously what so strange and disconcerting an action might portend, they began, in voices that filled us with horror and dread, to intone the
Gloria in excelsis
. It was a sound something like that of leopards and wolves howling at the sky in icy winter; I assure you, the pillars of the house trembled, and the windows, smitten by the visible breath of their lungs, rattled and seemed about to disintegrate, as if handfuls of heavy sand were being hurled against the panes. At this appalling spectacle we scattered in panic, our hair standing on end; leaving our cloaks and hats behind, we dispersed in all directions through the surrounding streets, which in no time were filled by more than a hundred people startled out of their sleep; the crowd forced its way through the door of the inn and upstairs to the dining-room, seeking the source of this ghastly and hideous ululation which rose, as if from the lips of sinners damned eternally in the uttermost depths of burning hell, to God's ears and implored his mercy. Finally, as the clock struck one, having heeded neither the incensed landlord nor the shocked exclamations of the numerous bystanders, they fell silent; with a cloth they wiped from their brows the sweat that trickled down in great beads to their chins and breasts; and spreading out their cloaks they lay down on the floor to rest for an hour from the torment of their task. The landlord, letting them have their way, made the sign of the cross over them as soon as he saw they were asleep; and glad of a momentary respite from the trouble, he persuaded the crowd of onlookers, who were furtively whispering to each other, to leave the room, assuring them that in the morning things would change for the better. But alas! at very first cockcrow the unhappy brothers rose to their feet again, and turning to the cross on the table they resumed the dismal, spectral, monkish routine which only exhaustion had forced them briefly to interrupt. They heeded neither admonition nor assistance from the landlord, who was overcome by
distress at this pitiable sight; they requested that the numerous friends who normally came to visit them every morning should be courteously denied admittance; they asked him for nothing more than bread and water, and if possible some straw to lie on at night, so that in the end the innkeeper, who was accustomed to doing a fine trade from their high-spirited carousals, was obliged to report the whole incident to the authorities and ask them to have these four men removed from his house since it was evident that they were possessed by the devil. Accordingly they were medically examined by order of the magistrates, and being found insane they were, as you know, lodged in a room in the madhouse which the late Emperor in his generosity had founded within the walls of our city for the benefit of such unfortunates.' All this Veit Gotthelf, the cloth-merchant, told the woman, together with various other things which, however, we prefer not to mention, for we think we have said enough to make the essentials of the matter clear; and he once again urged her not to implicate him in any way if there should be a judicial investigation concerning these events.

Three days later the woman, profoundly shaken by his narrative and with a friend supporting her, made her way out to the convent, since it happened to be a fine day for a walk and she had formed the sad intention of taking a look at the terrible place in which God had struck down her sons, blasting them as if with invisible lightning; but as building was in progress at the cathedral the entrance was boarded up, and when they stood on tiptoe to peer with difficulty through the chinks between the boards the two women could see nothing of the interior except the splendid rose window at the far end of the church. On an intricate structure of slender scaffolding many hundreds of workmen, singing merrily, were busy raising the height of the spires by a third at least, and decorating their hitherto only slate-covered roofs and pinnacles with strong bright copper that
glittered in the sun. And behind the building a thunder-storm lowered, a deep black cloud with gilded edges; it had spent itself already over Aachen and the surrounding district, and after hurling a few more powerless flashes of lightning in the direction of the cathedral, it dissolved and subsided in the east with surly mutterings. It so happened that as the women, lost in thought, watched this double spectacle from the steps of the great convent building, a passing nun happened to learn who the woman standing by the entrance was, whereupon the Abbess, who had heard that she carried with her a letter concerning the Corpus Christi incident, immediately sent the sister down with a message requesting the woman from the Netherlands to come up and see her. The latter, although alarmed for a moment by this summons, nevertheless respectfully set about obeying it, and while her friend, at the nun's invitation, went to wait in a side room just by the entry, the stranger was led upstairs and the double doors of a beautiful upper chamber were opened to admit her to the presence of the Abbess herself. The latter was a noble lady of serene and regal appearance, seated on an armchair with a footstool resting on dragon's claws; on a desk at her side lay the score of a piece of music. The Abbess, after having a chair brought for her visitor, told her that she had already been informed by the burgomaster of her arrival in the city; she inquired in a kindly manner how her unhappy sons were, and pointed out that since this was something for which there was no remedy she should accept it with as much composure as possible. Having said this, she expressed her wish to see the letter which the preacher had written to his friend, the schoolmaster in Antwerp. The woman was for a moment greatly embarrassed by this request, for she had enough knowledge of the world to realize what might be the consequences of her acceding to it; but the Abbess's venerable countenance inspired absolute trust, and it seemed quite unthinkable that she should intend to make
any public use of the letter's contents. After a few moments of hesitation she therefore took it from her bosom and handed it over to the princely lady, pressing a fervent kiss on her hand as she did so. While the Abbess was reading through the letter, her visitor now cast a glance at the score which lay, casually opened, on the music-desk; and as it had occurred to her, on hearing the cloth-merchant's report, that it might well have been the power of the music that had so shattered and confounded the minds of her poor sons on that dreadful day, she turned to the nun who was standing behind her chair and shyly asked her whether this had been the piece of music performed in the cathedral on that strange Corpus Christi morning six years ago. The young sister said that she remembered, indeed, having heard this was so, and that ever since then it had been the custom for the work, when not actually being used, to be kept in the Reverend Mother's room; whereupon the woman, in deep emotion and with many thoughts rushing through her mind, rose and stood in front of the music-desk. She gazed at the unknown magical signs, with which some terrible spirit seemed to be marking out its mysterious sphere; and the earth seemed to give way beneath her when she noticed that the score happened to be standing open at the
Gloria in excelsis
. She felt as if the whole dreadful power of the art of sound, which had destroyed her sons, were raging over her head; she thought the mere sight of the notes would make her fall senseless, and after quickly pressing the sheet to her lips in an impulse of infinite humility and submission to Divine Omnipotence, she sat down again on her chair. Meanwhile the Abbess had finished reading the letter, and said as she folded it up, ‘God Himself, on that wonderful day, protected the convent against the presumption of your grievously erring sons. The means He used in doing so will no doubt, since you are a Protestant, be a matter of indifference to you; moreover, you would scarcely understand what I might say to you on this subject. For let me tell you that absolutely nobody knows who it really was
who, in the stress of that terrible hour, when the forces of iconoclasm were about to burst in upon us, sat calmly at the organ and conducted the work which there lies open before you. It has been proved by evidence given on the following morning in the presence of the administrator and of several other men, and recorded in the archives, that Sister Antonia, the only one of us who was able to conduct that work, was for the whole of the time during which it was being performed lying in a corner of her cell, sick, unconscious, and totally paralysed; one of the sisters, who because she was her kinswoman had been directed to look after her during her illness, did not leave her bedside during the whole of that morning on which the Feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated in the cathedral. Indeed, Sister Antonia herself would undoubtedly have testified and confirmed the fact that it had not been her who had appeared so strangely and surprisingly in the organ gallery, if her utterly senseless condition had permitted us to question her about it and if she had not, on the evening of that very same day, died of the nervous fever from which she was suffering and from which we had previously thought her life to be in no danger. Moreover, the Archbishop of Trier, to whom this incident was reported, has already made the only comment that can explain it: namely that Saint Cecilia herself performed this miracle which was both so terrible and so glorious; and I have only just received a Papal brief confirming this.' So saying she handed the letter, which she had asked to see only to learn further details of what she already knew, back to the woman, promising her as she did so that she would make no use of it; she inquired further whether there was any hope of her sons recovering their wits and whether she could perhaps in this respect, by money or any means, be of assistance to her. But the woman, weeping and kissing the hem of the Abbess's robe, answered no to both questions, whereupon the Abbess dismissed her with a kindly gesture.