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Was he, or was he not, an ordinary flesh-and-blood person?"
The question was frightening. That the question was dignified by coming from
the lips of so exalted a person as his sovereign abbot made it even more
frightening, though he could plainly see that his ruler stated it merely
because he wanted a particular answer. He wanted it rather badly.
If he wanted it that badly, the question must be important. If the question
was important enough for an abbot, then it was far too important for Brother
Francis who dared not be wrong.
"I--I think he was flesh and blood, Reverend Father, but not exactly
'ordinary.' In some ways, he was rather extraordinary."
"What ways?" Abbot Arkos asked sharply.
"Like--how straight he could spit. And he could read, I think." The abbot
closed his eyes and rubbed his temples in apparent exasperation.
How easy it would have been flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was
only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him not to think
otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possi-
ble, he had rendered such a command ineffective before he uttered it. In-
sofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to
follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not
obey. Like any wise ruler, Abbot Arkos did not issue orders vainly, when to
disobey was possible and to enforce was not possible. It was bet-
ter to look the other way than to command ineffectually. He had asked a
old wanderer surprised him. Francis had spoken of the old man, simply because
of the part he had played, either by accident or by design of
Providence, in the monk's stumbling upon the crypt and its relics. The pil-
grim was only a minor ingredient, as far as Francis was concerned, in a
mandala design at whose center rested a relic of a saint. But his fellow
novices had seemed more interested in the pilgrim than in the relic, and even
the abbot had summoned him, not to ask about the box, but to ask about the old
man. They had asked him a hundred questions about the pilgrim to which he
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could reply only: "I didn't notice," or "I wasn't looking right then," or "If
he said, I don't remember," and some of the questions were a little weird. And
so he questioned himself: Should I have noticed?
Was I stupid not to watch what he did? Wasn't I paying enough attention to
what he said? Did I miss something important because I was dazed?
He brooded on it in the darkness while the wolves prowled about his new
encampment and filled the nights with their howling. He caught himself
brooding on it during times of the day that were assigned as proper for the
prayers and spiritual exercises of the vocational vigil, and he con-
fessed as much to Prior Cheroki the next time the priest rode his Sunday
circuit. "You shouldn't let the romantic imaginations of the others bother
you; you have enough trouble with your own," the priest told him, after
chiding him for neglecting the exercises and prayers. "They don't think up
questions like that on the basis of what might be true; they concoct the
questions on the basis of what might be sensational if it just happened to be
true. It's ridiculous! I can tell you that the Reverend Father Abbot has
ordered the entire novitiate to drop the subject." After a moment, he unfor-
tunately added: "There really wasn't anything about the old man to suggest the
supernatural-- was there?" with only the faintest trace of hopeful won-
der in his tone.
Brother Francis wondered too. If there had been a suggestion of the
supernatural, he had not noticed it. But then too, judging by the number of
questions he had been unable to answer, he had not noticed very much.
The profusion of the questions had made him feel that his failure to observe
had been, somehow, culpable. He had become grateful to the pilgrim upon
the motive of the cat who became an ornithologist?--so that he might glorify
his own ornithophagy, esoterically devouring Penthestes atricapillus but never
eating chickadees. For, as the cat was called by Nature to be an ornithophage,
so was Francis called by his own nature hungrily to devour such knowledge as
could be taught in those days, and, because there were no schools but the
monastic schools, he had donned the habit first of a postulant, later of a
novice. But to suspect that God as well as Nature had beckoned him to become a
professed monk of the Order?
What else could he do? There was no returning to his homeland, the Utah. As a
small child, he had been sold to a shaman, who would have trained him as his
servant and acolyte. Having run away, he could not re-
turn, except to meet grisly tribal "justice." He had stolen a shaman's prop- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]