The coarsest blades live in enormous sheaths—the civilian equivalent of a policeman’s truncheon—and are simply jammed into them. But the best sticks are as supple as withies. There is absolutely nothing to show that they conceal a triangular blade, as light as a feather. The lock can be sprung either by pressing a button with the thumb or by twisting the knob halfway around. The handle may be of carved ebony, chased silver, horn or ivory, a bronze figure of a naked woman, or the head of a bird, a dog, or a horse. The best of them have two little steel bars that spring out at right angles to the blade when it is drawn to make a rudimentary guard.
My sword sticks are my daughters, my personal virgin army, for so far none of them has ever killed, or not in my service. I should not keep them by me were I not convinced that the time will come when it will be necessary to perform that act of love and death which involves two men and a sword. And so I never fail, before I set out for the nightly chase, to make my slow, ritual selection of a companion. My favorite is called Fleurette— like myself in my time at Thabor—and her blade of blued Toledo steel, triple-grooved, is as slim as a dart. I take her on my arm, like a bride-to-be, only on those evenings that are darkened by some foreboding. When the fatal night comes, she will be my only ally, my only friend, and I shall not fall until she has strewn the ground with the bodies of my murderers.
CHAPTER III
The Hill of the Innocents
In the twenty years that she had been in charge of St Brigitte’s, Sister Beatrice had ceased to make a distinction between her religious vocation and her dedication to the children. She was always secretly astonished—even shocked—that anyone could approach them in anything but an evangelical spirit How could you respect and love them properly unless you realized that God has revealed to the simpleminded truths he has concealed from the clever and even from the wise? Besides, was there any remarkable difference between our poor intellect and the consciousness of a mongol when compared to the mind of God? She thought, moreover, that any progress made by the mentally defective must stem directly or indirectly from a religious inspiration. Their greatest handicap was their loneliness, their incapacity to form mutually satisfying relationships with another person—even someone as handicapped as themselves. She had invented games, round games and playlets in which each child had to become one of a group and model his behavior on that of his fellows—a laborious undertaking, demanding infinite patience, because the only human relationship they would accept was that linking them to her, Sister Beatrice, so that her own presence was constantly helping to break down the interdependence she was striving to create among the children.
Nevertheless, success was possible and even assured with the help of divine intervention. God, who knew each of the children and had a special fondness for them just because they were simple-minded, embraced them all in the same love and sent the light of the Holy Spirit to shine in them. So Sister Beatrice dreamed of a Pentecost of the Innocents which would descend in tongues of fire upon their heads, driving the shadows from their minds and loosening the paralysis of their tongues. She said nothing about it, knowing that her ideas had already caused some uneasiness in high places and that she had very nearly been found guilty in particular for the simplified version of the Lord’s Prayer which she had put together for the use of her protégés:
Our Father greatest of all
May everybody know you
May everybody sing your name
May everybody do what you like
Always and everywhere
Amen
The affair had gone all the way to the archbishop. In the end he had approved the words, which, in his estimation, contained the heart of the matter.
But this was not all. Sister Beatrice had convinced herself that her innocents were closer to God and the angels than other people—and herself especially—not only because they were strangers to the duplicity and false values of society, but also because sin had, so to speak, no hold on their souls. She experienced a kind of fascination in the presence of beings who—besides having a very cruel curse inflicted on them—had also been gifted with what was in its way a kind of original goodness, altogether loftier and purer than the virtue which she had been able to attain from years of prayer and self-denial. Her faith was strengthened by the glow of their presence and could not have forgone their intercession without suffering a perilous setback. Thus she, too, was the children’s prisoner (but more irremediably than her colleagues), because they had become the foundation and the living spring of her spiritual universe.
The institution of St Brigitte’s, which was made up of some sixty children with a staff of twenty, was divided theoretically into four sections like four concentric circles, each smaller than the last The first three fell roughly into the classic categories of mild, moderate and severe retardation, as measured by the Binet-Simon intelligence tests.
But Sister Beatrice had enough experience of backward children to place only a relative value on such scientific distinctions. The test measured only certain limited aspects of intelligence, ignoring all other forms of mental activity, and disregarded the subject’s degree of affectivity and cooperativeness, presupposing a passive child of unlimited willingness. For this reason the groups at St Brigitte’s fitted better into fairly flexible empirical categories defined by the degree of understanding that existed among the children themselves.
In the first group were those children who appeared normal— except when they exhibited personality problems or congenital feebleness—and who were educable, requiring only an unusual amount of supervision. The epileptic, the deaf and dumb, the overactive, and the psychotic could be seen getting on happily together. The second circle, however, had already ceased to have any outlet to the outside world. The children here could speak if they had to, but they could not read and would never write. Not so many years earlier, there would have been a place for them in some rural community where the village idiot was a traditional character, accepted, even respected, and able to do little jobs about the fields and gardens. Now the rise in economic and cultural standards of living was turning them into rejects, instantly recognizable compared to the general level of education and consequently rejected by the community, their wretchedness only increased by the gulf created around them. All that was left to them was to express by mumbling, stamping, head waving, hooting, squinting, dribbling and incantinencies of the bowels, their antagonism to a bureaucratic, rationalized, mechanized and aggressive society which they denied quite as strongly as it rejected them.
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