"The Path" tells the story of an unnamed man crossing an unnamed frontier. It begins: "I forget now why I went down the track alone: but I did, and Mary and my sister, the Franciscan nun, were to follow me in half an hour." (p.66) It's revealed later (p.67) that Mary is the man's wife. The three go over the "narrow track, winding and easy to lose at first on the bare mountainside" (p.66).

They separate, planning to meet in the town on the other side of the frontier, and the man reaches a customshouse. The man goes inside and sees "a kiosk, not unlike a paybox" where a "big, pink-faced" priest is sitting. The man was "in such a hurry of spirits that it hardly seemed extraordinary to see him there, nor was it very strange that at the sight of my passport he should speak to me in English." (p.67)

The man tells the priest that he has taken his wife and sister's passport along with his own. The priest looks at the passports and "he said, looking at my sister's face, that he had often seen her; not in the flesh, he added, but in the papers" (p.68). The man is relieved, but then "the friendliness left his [the priest's] tone. He assured me he would look after them when they came through, and towards them his voice was cordial: but for me he was no more than polite." Then the man's pack is "exactly rifled, turned inside out by expert searchers", yielding some undisclosed "bad revelations" (p.68).

After some unclear events, the man finds himself "free on the mountain again." He is on a path and the story ends beautifully but mysteriously as follows:

"She started before me along this path, and I hurry to catch her up. It is easy walking, neither hot nor cold, and I go with long strides, fast and pursuing. I shall never catch her: I know that. I shall never catch her, however much I hurry -- and I do hurry, press on hard without a moment's slackening of the strongest continual effort; and I go fast for all the weight of my pack.

"I shall never catch her: but I have this, that I am on the ground that she has travelled. The 'never catching', that is less important now: we are divided by the distance, but the path is our connection; and I shall never let the distance grow." (pp 68-69)

So what happened? It's not at all clear, but I can think of several possibilities:

1) The literal explanation: the man is searched and let go. He is looking for "her" (his wife? sister? both?). So why can't he he catch up with her? Maybe it's all just a feeling in his head. Maybe he thinks he can never catch up with her because she's nowhere to be seen, but perhaps he'll see her around the next bend. Or perhaps she's taken a different path, or gotten lost, or there's some other similar natural reason for their apparently permanent separation.

2) As P. Richman pointed out earlier, perhaps it's all a dream, or vision, or something similar, so that one part (e.g., being together at the story's beginning) does not necessarily follow logically into another (being able to re-unite at the end).

3) Something has happened or will happen to the wife and sister. The priest recognizes the two of them (or at least the sister) as the victims of some sorry fate (being shot or killed in an accident perhaps) and so is "cordial" towards them, but takes refuge in politeness to avoid telling the man what he knows.

I have two sinister variations on this idea:

a) The man has killed his wife and sister. There's some evidence in his pack (the "bad revelations") which confirms this. This is why the friendliness leaves the tone of the priest's voice.

b) It is the priest who is evil. He has a particular animus towards the sister, whose face he recognized. The priest "assured [the man] that he'd look after them [the wife and sister] when they came through". Oh, he'll look after them, all right; he'll look after them Forever!

Why would he be opposed to the sister? She is a Franciscan, so perhaps sympathetic to pacificism or left-wing causes in general. Whatever she's done, she's famous enough to appear in the pages of at least the religious press.

Or perhaps the"priest" is no priest at all. The man is happy to be in "so clerical a country" (p.68). Yes, well, countries with strong clerical traditions also tend to have strong anti-clerical traditions. If we assume that the "priest" is really an imposter, then perhaps the fake priest is hostile to the sister on religious (or anti-religious) grounds. Just as in the traditional Irish song "The Croppy Boy" a fake priest (really a yeoman soldier) listens to the croppy boy(a rebel in the 1798 rising)'s confession and uses the boy's confession to condemn him to death, so perhaps this fake priest listens to the man's confession about the passports and his sister and uses that information against the sister.

4) The man is not released at all. He is taken into custody because of the "bad revelations" in his pack (what could it be? a gun? subversive literature? the severed heads of his wife and sister? If he had anything incriminating in his pack, why didn't he get rid of it before he got to the customshouse?). The part at the end about going along the path is all imaginary, imagined from his cell. Or if he does get out, it is years after the fact, which is why he has no hope of catching up with the women.

5) It is all religious metaphor. Mary perhaps represents the Blessed Virgin. The man is trying to follow the path of religion (his sister, the nun) but cannot go all the way ("I shall never catch her: I know that"). The priest sees this as well (which is why he is merely polite to the man, though he is cordial towards the women). Compare this to the previous story: the man in "The Path" is pursuing a religious fulfillment, though he shall never find it, whereas the man in "The Tunnel at the Frontier" sees a religious fulfillment in front of him, but turns his back on it and goes back the other way. "The Path" may perhaps be influenced by "The Path to Rome", Hillaire Belloc's memoir of his religious pilgrimage on foot over mountains and roads from Spain to Rome.

On the subject of religion, it's interesting to note the increasing humanization in symbols of the Catholic Church found in the last three stories. In "The Passeur", there is an image of Golgotha, and perhaps also the light imagery, suggestive of God Himself. In "The Tunnel", there is an image of Job, the prophet, as well as the fisherman, which I take to represent the pope, the vicar of Christ. The images have thus gone from God directly to men who have close mystical connection with God. In "The Path", the religious figures are an ordinary nun and an ordinary priest, still connected to the Church, of course, but at a further remove.

I'll end with some thoughts on Mary, the narrator's wife. Susan suggested she may be the Mary Adams mentioned in "The Return". Mary Adams was the long-ago love, probably the first love, of JSB, the protagonist in "The Return". The narrator in "The Path" is married to his Mary (and, of course, Patrick O'Brian's own wife was named Mary, which may not be entirely irrelevant). I don't think the two Marys are literally the same character because of their different relationships with the the male protagonists, but there may very well be a conceptual connection: Mary, shown in the full range of possible relationships to the man: a first love, then lost, then wife, then lost again irretrievably, but connected by a path and a distance that would never grow.

John Finneran