CHAPTER FIVE

TILL now, though Goldmund had always known something of his mother, it had only been through other folks' stories. Her image had faded from his mind and, of the little which he believed himself to know of her, he had always kept something hidden from Narziss. 'Mother' had become a thought of which it was forbidden him to speak. Once she had been a dancing woman, had been beautiful and wild, noble, but of bad and heathenish kindred. Goldmund's father, or so he told his son, had raised her up from poverty and shame. Since he could not be sure she was a Christian he had had her baptized and instructed in her faith; had married her, and made her a great lady. But she, after a few years of submission to him, and ordered life, had returned to her old arts and practices, arousing dissensions, and tempting men; strayed from her home for days and weeks together, gained the ill-repute of a witch, and, at last, gone her ways for evermore, though her husband had many times pardoned her, and taken her back into his favour.

For some while longer her fame had lived, like an evil fire, flickering in the trail of a comet, till that too had died, leaving no trace. Slowly her goodman had recovered from years of terror and mistrust, shame, and ever-fresh surprises. And, in place of his evil wife, he had loved this son, very life his mother in face and bearing. The knight had grown grizzled and penitent, instilling into Goldmund the belief that now he must offer himself up, in expiation for his mother.

Thus Goldmund's father would talk of his lost woman, although he was not easily brought to speak of her; and when he delivered Goldmund at the cloister he had given the abbot certain hints of it. His son had known it all, but only as a mean and evil tale, which he must put forever from his mind; strive with all his might to forget.

But what indeed was lost and forgotten was his own true memory of his mother; that other, different mother, in his soul, not built of the sayings of the knight, or the dark, wild rumours of serving-men. This reality, seen by his heart, had soon been forgotten; yet now her image, the star of his babyhood, arose in him.

'I cannot tell how ever I managed to forget her,' he cried one day to his friend. 'Never in all my life have I loved as I loved her, with a love so glowing, and unwithheld. And never have I honoured another like her, or thought any other so beautiful. To me she is the sun and moon. God knows how it ever should have been possible to dim this shining love of her in my mind, and so make of her at last the evil, pale, formless witch she became for me, and was to my father for many years.'

A short while since, Narziss had ended the novitiate, and would soon be a clothed and consecrated priest. His bearing towards his friend had changed, though Goldmund, who, before his swoon, would chafe at Narziss' questions and admonishments, as irksome pedantry and arrogance, now, since his pain had brought back memory, was full of ever-wondering gratitude for the skill and wisdom of his teacher. How deeply had this uncanny scholar read in him: how exactly proved his hidden sore! And then, how cunningly healed it! Not only had his swoon left no trace, but something seemed to have melted out of his nature; some vain, owlish longing to be a saint, a certain solemn, over-devout frivolity; Goldmund seemed both older and younger since the day on which he discovered his true self. And for all this he had to thank Narziss.

But now Narziss, for some short time, had been very prudent with his friend. He watched him humbly, no longer as his teacher and superior, though he had gained a very willing disciple. But he saw Goldmund endowed from a hidden source with gifts for ever denied him. It had been granted him to foster their growth, yet he himself would have no share in them. He rejoiced to see his friend made whole and free, and yet in his joy there was some sadness. He felt himself a husk, to be sloughed aside: a surmounted rung on the ladder of perfection; could see the near conclusion of their bond, which had brought such gladness to his heart. And he still knew Goldmund better than the boy himself, who now, though he had found his soul again, and was ready to follow where it would lead him, could not tell as yet which way it might beckon. But Narziss had perceived that his friend's path led through lands he himself could never travel in.

Goldmund was less eager for learning; his itch for disputation had left him utterly. Now, in all their talks, he would speak with shame of many of his former arguments.

In the meantime, since he had ceased to be a novice, or else because of what he had done to Goldmund, these last few days had aroused in Narziss a need for retirement and self-questioning, askesis, and devotional exercise; the urge to fast much, and say long prayers, often confess, and lay voluntary penance on himself. Goldmund tried hard to share these inclinations. Since his cure all his instincts had been sharpened. Though as yet he had not any inkling of what the future might have in store, he could feel every day more clearly, and sometimes with terror in his heat, that now his real destiny was upon him, a time of respite and innocence at an end, and the life in him rose to meet its fate. The omens at times seemed full of happiness, keeping him awake half the night, like a sweet, bewildering caress, but often they were dark and terrible.

His mother, the long-forgotten, had come again. She had brought great joy, but wither did her siren-call entice him? Out into the unknown world, into enthralment, need, perhaps to death. She would never lead him back to safety; to the peace of cloister schools and dormitories, and a life-long fellowship with monks: her call had nothing in it of the commands laid on him by his father, which for so long he had imagined his own wishes. Yet this new emotion, at times as strong, poignant, and full of life as any sensation in his body, awakened all the piety in Goldmund. In repetitions of many prayers to God's Holy Mother in the sky he poured forth the too-great emotion in himself, which drew him back to his own mother. But many of these prayers would end in strange, haunting dreams of delight and triumph, daydreams of the half-awakened senses, visions of her in whom all his senses had their share, and then, with its scents and longings, the mother-world would lie about him: its life calling enigmatically; his mother's eyes were deeper than the sea, eternal as the gardens of paradise, she lulled him with gentle, senseless words, or indeed with all the gentleness of the senses: life would taste sweet and salt upon her lips; his mother's silky hair would fall around him, tenderly brushing his mouth and longing eyes, and not only was this mother all purity, not only the skyey gentleness of love, , the clear, serene promise of smiling happiness; in her, somewhere hidden beneath enticements, lay all the storm and darkness of the world, all greed, fear, sin, and clamouring grief, all birth, all human mortality.

Her son would lose himself in these dreams, in the many-threaded woof of his living senses. More than the past which he had loved came alive, as by magic, in his mind, than boyhood and his mother's tenderness, the twinkling dayspring of his life: these thoughts held promises and threats, enticements and dangers to come. He would wake at times from such a vision of his mother as both madonna and ravisher, as filled him with a sense of horrible sin, sacrilege, and vilification of God, death from which he could never rise again. At others all was harmony and release. Life full of her secrets lay about him: a magic garden grown with enchanted trees, flowers bigger than any in the world; deep, misty hollows. In the grass there were glittering eyes of unknown beasts, smooth powerful snakes glided along the branches: from every bough hung clusters of glittering berries which, when he plucked them, swelled within his hand, spurted soft, warm sap, like blood, or had eyes on them, and slithered cunningly. He would lean against a tree and feel its trunk, clutch down a branch and stare at it, touch, between bough and stem, a cluster of thick, wild hairs, like the hairs in an armpit. Once he dreamed himself his patron-saint, the holy Chrysostom, the golden-tongued, whose mouth was gold, from which he uttered golden words, and the words were a swarm of little birds, rising and flying off in glittering bands.

And once he dreamed he was grown to manhood, yet could only sit on the ground, like a child, had clay before him, and kneaded it like a child, till the clay began to shape itself in images: a little horse; a bull; a little woman. This kneading of clay delighted him, and he gave his little men and women the biggest genitals he could fashion, since, in his dream, that seemed to him very witty. He grew tired of his game, stood up and left it, and suddenly felt something behind him, something huge and noiseless, and, looking back, saw in great amazement and terror, yet not without some pleasure in his work, that his little clay men and women were huge and alive. Powerful, dumb giants, they came marching past him, growing, and growing as they went; out into the world, high as towers.

He lived more truly in this dream-world than in the real. The school, the courtyard, the dormitory, the library, the cloister chapel, had become only the surface of reality, a trembling outer film, encasing the image-world of dreams, the deep intensity of life. And trifle served to rend this outer veil; some sound of a Greek word, in the midst of the dullest lesson, a whiff of scent from the herb-stuffed wallet of Pater Anselm, the simple-gatherer; a glance at the clustered leaves which twined over the arches of a window; such nothings as these could dispel the illusion called reality, opening up, beneath its sober peace, the whirling depths, torrents, and starry heights of the world imagined in his soul. A Latin initial would frame the radiant eyes of his mother, a long-drawn note in the Ave open some inner gate in Paradise, a Greek letter become a galloping horse, a rearing snake, sliding in and out among flowers, till it vanished and left him staring down at the dull pages of a grammar book.

He never told all this; only now and then would he hint of it to Narziss. 'I believe,' he said to him once, 'that the cup of a flower, or a little, slithering worm on a garden-path, says more, and has more things to hide, than all the thousand books in a library. Often, as I write some Greek letter, a theta or omega, I have only to give my pen a twist, and the letter spreads out, and becomes a fish, and I, in an instant, am set thinking of all the streams and rivers in the world, of all that is wet and cold; of Homer's sea, and the waters on which Peter walked to Christ. Or else the letter becomes a bird, grows a tail, ruffles out his feathers, and flies off. Well, Narziss, I suppose you think nothing of such letters, and every dream can be conjured up with them. But, alas, they cannot be used for learning sciences. Thought loves definitions, and clear forms, and needs to be able to trust its signs for things: it likes what is, and not what is to be, and so it cannot bear to call an omega snake or a theta bird. Now, Goldmund, do you believe what I told you, that we should never turn you into a scholar?'

Oh, yes, Goldmund had long since agreed with him, and long since known himself resigned to it.

'I no longer care to strive after your learning,' he said, almost with a laugh, 'and I feel now for all learning and intellect what I used to feel for my father. I used to think I loved him very dearly, hoped that I had made myself very like him, and swore by everything he said. But my mother came back, to show me what true love is, and, beside her image, my father's memory shrunk to nothing. It displeased me; I came near hating it. And now I almost think that all learning is like my father; that it hates me father, and has no love in it, and so I begin to despise it a little.'

Though he jested in saying all this he could not bring any smile to is friend's sad face. Narziss studied him in silence, his glance almost a caress. Then he said:

'I understand you well. Now we have no need to dispute: you are awake, and so you have seen the difference between us, the difference between men akin to their father and those who take their destiny from a woman; the difference between spirit and intellect. And now, too, you will also soon have perceived that your life in the cloister, and longing to be a monk, were a misprision; a device of your father, who sought to purge your mother's memory, or perhaps only to be revenged on her. Or do you still imagine it your destiny to stay here all the days of your life?'

Goldmund considered a while, studying the hands of his friend, then, delicate, white hands; soft and yet resolute. Everyone could perceive in them a monk's hands.

'I do not know,' he replied, in the slow, singing voice in which he had spoken for some time, a voice which seemed to pause on every syllable. 'How can I tell you? You may be judging my father a little harshly. He knew much grief. But perhaps in this, too, you may be right. I have been many years in the cloister, and yet he has never come to visit me. He hopes I shall stay here always. Perhaps it would be best if I did, since I, too, used always to wish it. But today I no longer know myself, nor my real wishes and hopes. Once everything seemed so easy, as easy as the letters in a grammar-book: and now nothing is easy, not even those letters. I cannot tell what is to become of me, and, for now, I don't want to think about it.'

'Nor need you,' answered Narziss. 'Your way will soon lie clear before you. It has begun by leading you back to your mother, and will bring you even nearer her than you are. As for your father, I do not judge him too harshly. Do you feel you would like to go back to him?'

'No, Narziss, that I should not! If I felt I could, I would do it, as soon as I was clear of school. Or even now, perhaps, since I never intend to be a scholar. I have learned enough Greek and Latin and mathematics. No, I do not want to go back to my father.'

He gazed out abstractedly; then, with a sudden cry:

'But what trick do you use to question me again and again, in words that illumine my mind, and make me see into myself? Now again it is only your question if I want to go back to my father which makes me perceive that I do not. How do you do it? You seem to know everything. You have taught me so many things about our friendship which I did not understand at the time I heard them, and later they seemed full of meaning and consequence. It was you who told me I take my life from my mother; you discovered first that I lay under a spell, and had lost the memory of my childhood. How is it you can know me so well? Could I learn that from you also?'

Narziss smiled and shook his head.

'No, amice, that you could never learn. There are men who can learn many things, but you are not one of them. You will never be a learner. Why should you be? You have no need of it. You have other gifts, and far more than I: you are richer, yet not so strong as I am, and your life will be fairer than mine, and harder. Often you did not want to understand me; you jibbed away like a young colt. It was not always easy, and I must have made you smart. But you were asleep, I had to wake you. It hurt you even to be put in mind of your mother, and your pain was so great that they found you stretched half-dead in the inner cloister. It had to be – no, leave stroking my hair! No, stop I tell you! I can't bear it.'

'So you think I shall never learn! All my life I shall be stupid, like a child.'

'There will be others there from whom you can learn. You, child, I have taught you all I could, and now the lesson is over.'

'Oh, no,' cried Goldmund, 'it was not for that we became such friends. What kind of friendship would that be, that ended at our first milestone. Have you known me so long that I weary you? Have you had enough of me?'

Narziss paced quickly up and down, his eyes to the ground, and came to a halt before his friend.

'Let be,' he whispered, 'you know very well you do not weary me.' He eyed him as though in doubt, then started his pacing to and fro again; stopped again, and stared at Goldmund, with firm eyes from his stern face. In a low, clear, resolute voice he spoke: 'Listen, Goldmund. Our friendship has been a good one:it has had its particular goal, and reached it, since now you are roused from your half-sleep. But now we have no more to achieve. Your purposes are still uncertain, and I can neither lead you nor accompany you. Ask your mother; ask her image, and listen. My aims are not misty and far-off; they lie here around me in the cloister, demanding fresh efforts with every hour. I can be your friend, I can never love you. I am a monk, and I have taken my oath to God. Before I make my final vows I shall ask to be relieved of my office as teacher, and go into retreat to fast and do penance. Throughout that time not a word of earth must pass my lips; not even to you.'

Goldmund understood. He answered sadly:

'So now you will do what I should have done had I entered the order as a monk. But when your retreat is over and you have fasted, watched, and prayed long enough – what will your goal be then?'

'You know that,' Narziss answered him.

'Yes, in a few years you will be the teaching superior, then, perhaps, comptroller of the school. You will better the teaching, add many new scrolls to the library: perhaps you will write books yourself. Will you not? You shake your head. What will you do then?'

Narziss smiled rather sadly: 'What shall I do in the end? Who knows? I may die as head of the school, or as abbot or bishop. That is all one. But my aim is this: always to be where I can serve best, where by disposition, talents, and industry may find their best soil and be most fruitful. That is the only aim in my life.'

Goldmund: 'The only aim for a monk. Is that what you mean?' Narziss: 'Oh yes; and object enough. A monk's whole life may be spent in learning Hebrew; or he may live to annotate Aristotle, to decorate his cloister church, or shut himself up and meditate on God, or a hundred and one other things. But none of all these are final aims. I neither wish to multiply the riches of the cloister, nor reform the order, nor the Church. What I wish is to serve the spirit within me, as I understand its commands, and nothing more. Is that an aim?'

Goldmund considered this:

'You are right,' he said. 'Have I hindered you much in its achievement?

'Hindered? Oh, Goldmund, no other has helped me more than you. You sometimes set difficulties in my way, but I am not one to shrink from difficulties. I learnt from all of them, and, in a sense, I overcame them.'

Goldmund interrupted him almost mockingly:

'You have conquered them all. But tell me this. By helping me and giving me back my memory, and freeing my soul, and so restoring me to health – were you truly serving the spirit? Have you not robbed the cloister of a zealous and obedient novice, and perhaps raised up an enemy of the spirit, one who will do and feel the opposite of all that you consider holy?'

'Why not?' said Narziss very gravely. 'Amice, you still know so very little of me! True that in you I have spoilt a future monk, and in place of him have opened out a path in you which may lead you to no common destiny. But even if tomorrow you were to burn down this whole fair cloister, or propagate some wild heresy in the world, I should not feel an instant's remorse for having helped you to it.'

He laid friendly hands on Goldmund's shoulders.

'Listen, little Goldmund, this too is part of my ambition! Whether I become a teacher or abbot, confessor, or whatever else it may be, I never wish to be of such a sort that when a strong man crosses my path – and man of high worth and real capacity – I find myself unable to understand him, find myself his enemy in my heart, unable, if I will, to further his purposes. And this I say to you: You and I may turn into this or that; we may meet either good or bad fortune; but you never shall lack my help if you truly ask for it, and feel in your heart that you need me, since my hand will never be against you. Never.'

These words had the ring of a farewell, and indeed they were the foretaste of their leave-taking. As Goldmund stood gazing at his friend, with his resolute face and eyes that seemed to see far beyond him, he could feel, past all deceiving, that now they were no longer brothers and comrades, no longer one another's kind: that their lives had sundered them already. This man who faced him was no dreamer, waiting – as he must wait – on some hidden admonition of destiny: he was a monk who had inscribed himself on the roll, accepting his strict duties and rule; a soldier in the service of his order, of God and the Church. But now Goldmund knew for a certainty that here was no place for such as he: he was homeless, and the unknown world awaited him. So also had it been with his mother. She had left house and court, man and child, company and all fair pastime, good order, reverence, and duty, to go forth into the huge, uncertain world, and in it had certainly perished. She had had no aim, as he, too, had none. Aims were set to others, not to him. Oh, how well Narziss had seen all this, long ago: how right he had been!

And already, soon after this, Narziss seemed to have vanished from his life. It was as though he were suddenly wrapt away. Another teacher gave his lessons: his lectern in the library stood empty. Still hovering, not altogether invisible, he would sometimes pass quickly through the cloisters; at others his murmuring voice could be heard at a side-altar, as he knelt praying on the stones. He had entered his retreat for his final vows; it was known he kept strict fasts and rose three times in the night for office. He was still there, yet half in another world, could be seen, though seldom, but never reached. They could not speak, and now there could be nothing more between them, and though Goldmund knew that Narziss would return, would sit again at his desk, his place in the refectory, and his voice be heard again in the schools, yet nothing of what he had been would ever return with him. Narziss would not belong to him any more.

So that, with this thought, it grew clear to him that Narziss alone had made him love the cloister and the monks, with their grammar and logic, study, and intellect. It was Narziss who had given all this its meaning:Narziss' example had enticed him; to become as Narziss had been his aim. It is true that the abbot was still there, and he, also, Goldmund had honoured; he had loved him, too, and seen in him his example. But the others, the teachers, his fellow-scholars, the dormitories, the cloisters, the refectory, the lessons and exercises in syntax, the service of God – the whole of Mariabronn – without Narziss it all meant nothing. Why did he still remain here? He waited under this cloister roof like an undecided shelterer from the rain, taking cover under any tree or penthouse; a guest who still delays because of the unfriendliness of the world.

Now Goldmund's days were nothing but a lingering farewell. He would seek out all the things that had meaning for him, all he had grown to love in the cloister, beginning, in amazement, to perceive how few of the faces that surrounded him would cost him any pain after he left them. There was Narziss and old Abbot Daniel, and the good, gentle leech, Pater Anselm; and then, perhaps, his friend, the brother-porter, and perhaps the miller, their jolly neighbour. Yet even these seemed half-unreal to him. Far harder to say farewell to the great stone virgin in her chapel, the apostles over the arch of the gateway. He would stand for an hour together examining them, or the beautiful, intricate carving of the choir-stalls, gaze at the cloister fountains, the pillar with its three beasts' heads, and, in the court, would lean against the lime-trees and the chestnut. Soon all these would be a memory, a little picture-book in his heart. Even now, though still they surrounded him, they were beginning slowly to fade out. With Pater Anselm, who liked his company, he would go forth, gathering simples, or gossip with the men at the mill who sometimes asked him into their mill-loft, to a platter of baked fish, and wine. But already it was strange, and half a memory. As over there, in the twilight of the church and of his cell, Narziss, withdrawn to fast and pray, had taken on the dimensions of a ghost, so too was the reality fading round him: it all breathed autumn and the past.

Now there was only one thing left that mattered: the wild beating of his heart, an anxious pricking of desire in him, the joy and terror of his dreams. To these he now belonged, and let them master him. As, one of many classmates, he seemed to study, he could sink down into himself and forget his fellows, plunge through the murmuring torrent in his heart, and let its current swirl him away with it; into deep pools echoing with dark music, clouded depths of fairy sounds and happenings, all calling him with the voices of his mother, their thousand eyes his mother's eyes.