of voluptuous and languorous appeasement as if they were just coming from the act of love. But probably all they felt was the sensuous mystery, beauty and fragrance of the night, the smell of the trees and the earth and the flowers, which seemed to impregnate the whole continent of dark with the thrilling promises of desire almost made palpable, of unknown joys about to be realized.
It was a wonderfully seductive scene that opened from the entrance of the café, and all the more exciting because of its homely familiarity, its small framed limits into which life passed briefly with a ring of jaunting hooves, a sudden casual nearness and loudness of passing voices, and then—the fading and lonely recession of these homely sounds, a woman’s burst of low and sensual laughter in the dark, the far-off dying-out of jaunting hooves—and silence.
The two priests missed nothing of the quiet scene: they drank it in with the air of men who have eaten nobly and who, fumed to contentment with the drugs of good tobacco and an old liqueur, are enormously pleased with life.
They were a strangely sorted pair and, once seen, would never be forgotten. The larger of the two was a huge tub and belly of a man, a kind of mammoth creature out of Rabelais, whose great moon of face flared fiercely, from the excess of his eating and his drinking. His fat neck and triple chin exuded over the neck-band of his robe, so that the garment he wore seemed to be stained and larded with the man’s own grease. Everything about the great priest cried out with swingeing openness: his whole nature seemed to be permeated by a good humour so mountainously all-engulfing that nothing in the world could stop it: the huge red face would swell, suffuse, and purple with its choking laughter, the whole huge torso—the shoulders, arms and breast, and the great heaving belly—would shake and tremble like a hogshead full of jelly. And so far was he from being troubled by a thought of judgment, by fear of censure or the world’s reproving eye, that the sight of a shocked or unconceding face was enough to send him off in a renewed paroxysm of volcanic mirth. There was no concealment in the man, there was even a kind of mountainously good-natured contempt for what the world might say or think of him, and for this reason his association with his fellow-priest was all the more grotesquely humorous—a humour which was certainly not lost on this great modern Friar John of the Funnels, but which he relished to the full. For, by contrast to this
