Vocations, p.20
Vocations, page 20
‘We could run the lime avenue down to the river,’ Reverend Mother said.
‘Even that, perhaps,’ Mother Michael doubtfully agreed.
But already Reverend Mother had extended the lime avenue, and was busy making a path along the river; and growing a hedge—a juniper hedge well back with openings—to shade the nuns from prying eyes while giving access to a terrace on the bank.
‘I was keeping the river meadow back as a surprise for dear Reverend Mother … it’s sure to come the day Winnie is professed. She and all the novices have been praying for it ever since she entered,’ Mother Calixta said.
Mother Michael shot at Reverend Mother her well-known look: ‘Don’t you admit now she’s a fool ?’ Reverend Mother’s whimsical smile encouraged her to add in words, ‘You could come round him if anyone could, Reverend Mother.’
‘I might try,’ the old nun said reluctantly. ‘He’s giving us a good deal as it is. And people cling to land. I wouldn’t part with a foot of our grounds for its weight in gold. And he’s never forgiven us for taking Kitty. There’s a real nun for you! But I wish I could see my way more clearly about Winnie. We could have a little summer-house behind the hedge, by one of the openings. I’ll get Johanna to influence him. It’s not grasping of us, as it must all come to the children one day,’ she added, as if pleading with a conscience that hung on a branch of wistaria. ‘But I wish we had given Winnie a few months more trial,’ with a sigh.
‘There’s no hedge in the river meadow,’ said Mother Michael severely.
‘There will be, dear. There will be,’ Reverend Mother mused.
There was silence for a few seconds. Reverend Mother was thatching the summer-house. Mother Michael was frowningly calculating the probable losses on her proposed source of profit. Mother Calixta was feeling snubbed. The office of novice-mistress was senior to that of bursar and infinitely more important. Michael, of course, was always horrid. But dear Reverend Mother? She wouldn’t mind if they had been alone, but to ignore her before that cat Michael! She felt irritated with Reverend Mother.
‘I don’t care what anyone says, Winnie has ten times the vocation that Kitty has,’ she broke out.
‘Ah,’ Reverend Mother said sadly, brought back with painful suddenness from a pleasant dream. Most of poor Calixta’s swans were geese. Calixta was good, but was that enough? Was she consulting her own ease too much in having her as novice mistress. She sighed.
‘Kitty doesn’t put ink in the holy water stoup,’ Mother Michael said quietly.
‘Father Acquaviva did the same when he was a novice, and he became General of the Jesuits,’ Mother Calixta retorted. ‘It was all dear Winnie’s playfulness. She read about it at Spiritual Reading and thought it such simple saintly fun. I like my novices to show signs of Holy Innocence.’
‘That’s why she runs after Father Burke, I suppose?’ Mother Michael gave a keen glance at Reverend Mother as she spoke.
‘He’s her confessor,’ Mother Calixta said, looking apprehensively in her turn at Reverend Mother, who was telling her beads with a troubled face.
Mother Michael made a dive at a wasp with the end of her black veil, and smiled sceptically at the corpse. ‘I’ve wondered till now where our young nuns got their wisdom,’ she said pleasantly, whisking the wasp off her lap.
‘Indeed, I’m most careful. You know I am, Reverend Mother?’ Mother Calixta said, blushing deeply. ‘I can’t speak frankly of such delicate subjects, of course, but I’ve hinted, and I’ve found Winnie as open as the day. The poor child is as easily seen through as a glass of spring water. A real nun to her finger-tips. I’ve known her to have as many as five novenas running at the same time. And I watch like a sleuth-hound.’
She laughed merrily. ‘I once said that to the novices and the dear things call me ‘the sleuth-hound’ as a pet name ever since.’
‘It’s so very apt!’ Mother Michael said.
‘I can’t put my finger on anything positive.’ Reverend Mother was half-asserting, half-posing a worried question to the gravel at her feet.
‘Perhaps if Calixta were to wear spectacles,’ Mother Michael suggested, with malice in her shining teeth.
‘It’s all because Kitty is your favourite,’ Mother Calixta tartly retorted.
‘My dear child, I’ve no favourites,’ Mother Michael said, with a shrug. ‘Winnie has survived her noviceship without making too great a fool of herself, so I’m willing to take your word for the rest. As far as I’m concerned, we haven’t had two more promising nuns than the Curtins since I became bursar. Vocations are your business and dowries are mine. In cash they’re both equal; and both eminently satisfactory. Instead of worrying about Winnie, Reverend Mother should be blessing her stars. They say Tom Curtin has pots of money, and our purse is a bottomless sieve.’
‘We could put the profession off for another three months,’ Reverend Mother suggested.
‘In twenty years Winnie will be the very same as she is to-day,’ Mother Michael decisively said. ‘They were both due for profession three months ago, and you’ve kept them back with no result but to complicate my accounts. It’s not fair to Kitty with nothing whatever against her. And Calixta will know just as much about Winnie in three months as she knows now. The profession day has been fixed by the bishop; and we’ve practically arranged to begin building next week. It means an overdraft unless we have Tom Curtin’s cheque at once.’
‘She draws a net round me so that I can hardly breathe when she speaks like this,’ Reverend Mother said to Mother Calixta, with a sigh. ‘You’re sure it’s all right?’
‘Dear Michael takes such material views of things,’ Mother Calixta said primly. ‘I know my novices. Winnie is a saint if ever there was one,’ she continued, with enthusiasm. ‘Such acts of mortification, such offerings up, such—’
‘I hope to God we aren’t making a mistake,’ Reverend Mother interrupted. ‘If she were only like Kitty I’d feel quite happy. There, if you like, is complete detachment from the world. Well, well, let us hope for the best.’
After a few seconds’ silent fingering of her beads she said thoughtfully:
‘You must put up an iron paling along two sides of the river meadow, Michael—the sisters would be so frightened of the cows. Perhaps, indeed, it would be better not to keep cows there at all.’
‘I wanted to speak to you about the kitchen range,’ Mother Michael said hastily.
Chapter 11
Kitty watched the shadows grow darker and darker. The stained-glass window behind the high altar was a black smudge. The little red lamp in front of the tabernacle twinkled more luminously. In the fading light the silence grew deeper. The sacristy clock hammered out the seconds with a force and clearness that added to the stillness. There was something soothing and protecting in the regular, detached, slow beats. Only unexpected sounds, the banging of a door somewhere far away in the convent, a distant burst of laughter, desecrated the quiet and peace.
A sigh from Winnie’s stall opposite seemed like a groan of pain. Kitty started and glanced across nervously, but was reassured by the immobility of the dim white figure. She settled herself back on her heels, half kneeling, half sitting, and leant her shoulder against the side of her stall with a sigh. The menacing sound had made her nervous. She smiled wryly as she pulled herself together. The retreat was telling on her, but it was practically over now. The nuns would soon be in for night prayer; then bed, a long sleep in the morning, and her last farewell to the world at eleven.
Could she sleep at all this night of nights? But that was only a scrap of someone else’s talk. She just felt tired and languid—not at all exalted, as Mother Calixta said novices felt on the night before their profession. Perhaps the exaltation would come at the supreme moment when she made her vows—those wonderful vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. She murmured the words under her breath in a tone of awe; but sighed at the lack of response in her feelings. Was she always to suffer from this aridity of soul? There was no glow of feeling such as Father Bernardine promised her. Nothing but bleak mountains which she had to climb arduously, cold at heart. And that was only sometimes. Mostly it was merely drifting with the current without any feeling at all. Perhaps the many rehearsals, the effort to remember the proper bow, the right response, had deadened her capacity for feeling. God would one day—perhaps to-morrow—unlock her feelings and allow her mind and her heart to act in unison. It was so hard to go on spurring her mind without any response from her heart. Yet she knew she was right. Father Bernardine over and over again had made it quite clear. God had marked out the path for her. The convent was her only way of salvation and atonement. If only her feelings would for once come to her aid. Even in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament there was only this hard, mechanical belief. She knew God was there now, loving her, helping her. Her mind accepted it, believed in it firmly. She wanted to feel gratitude, but her heart was like a dry well. So with her vocation. It was an eternal truth, decreed, Father Bernardine said, from before time was. But it gave her no emotion.
Not that she had no feelings. Unhappily she had. Feelings that she had failed to bring under the sway of her mind. It was her punishment that the devil had so much power to tempt her through her emotions. Those emotions that she could not subdue to the service of God were easily moved by temptations of the devil. When she thought she had completely mastered them they grew again in strength; and it was only by almost superhuman prayer that she prevented them from conquering her. It was as if she were the guardian of a fragile dyke against which great waves beat: her puny mind and will against the turbid waves of her lower nature. In the crises of furious storms it was only one last, almost despairing, cry to God that had saved her. Even then she could feel no gratitude. She could only thank God with her mind and her moving lips … It was so odd that God should give the devil such power in His own world—but she must not think. That, too, was a wile of the devil. God gave sufficient grace to resist all temptations. And recently, thank God, they had been less active. Perhaps it was the approach of her profession … Her vows would be new weapons against the devil.
One, two. Half-past eight. How long time took in passing. Half an hour yet before the nuns came to night prayer. What was Winnie thinking of? She might be asleep, she was so still and silent. How little she knew about Winnie! The convent, instead of bringing them closer to one another, had divided them. How little one knew about any of the nuns!
She watched the little lighters attached to the gas-lamps. Soon a nun would come and tug at the chains and the chapel would glow with a brilliant light. One saw little of the convent from the noviceship. It would be different in the professed community room. What matter if it all seemed so trivial? There was the greater glory of God to be worked for, and the salvation of one’s own soul.
Nearly three years! It seemed like an eternity. And she might live to be old. Reverend Mother was seventy, and Sister Euphemia was nearly ninety. She shuddered and huddled herself into the corner of her stall.
She remembered so well the blank desolation of the night of her entrance. It might have been yesterday in its vividness; though the chasm that yawned across to it made it seem a hundred years: her anguish when the door was shut behind her. The feeling of despair at the grating of the key in the lock. Her revulsion from those endless kisses that congratulated her on her doom. It was as if grinning devils mocked at her. And in the chapel there was only an angry God who frowned on her and spurned her. And her relief when she fainted. How suddenly the lights danced up and down. The nuns’ voices reached her from a distance like subdued music. The water Reverend Mother put to her parched lips was a heavenly draught, and there was consolation in her kind, ‘I know, dear. You’ll be all right tomorrow.’ Peace came only when she was alone in her little whitewashed cell. How well she remembered sitting on the blue-and-white coverlet of her bed, noting with the peace of exhaustion the scant white-enamelled furniture, the bare waxed floor, the blue-and-white curtains; and the curious sensation she had had as of an emptiness of all sensation, a dead restful feeling from which she had never since quite awakened.
But that was nonsense. She was always quite wide awake. She smiled faintly. She saw all the absurdities of the noviceship!
Her mind moved over the past, to and fro, like a shuttlecock: the peace of the long nights and the times of silence and the agony of the recreations. It was as if she had grown suddenly old and Winnie and many of the novices had gone back to the nursery. They couldn’t be as foolish as they seemed. She knew nothing of them, just as they knew nothing of her. Nothing, thank God, of the storms of temptation that left her pale and exhausted. She knew too much of real sin to toy with danger. Winnie was one of the silliest. She spoke of Father Burke as if he were a lover—but that must be the recklessness of innocence. She spoke of half a dozen saints in the same words, and of several nuns. Even Father Brady had his devoted admirers; while almost the whole noviceship was in adoration before Father Bernardine. There was nothing wrong, of course—just mere silliness. But how often their talk, the perpetual comparison of their stages of ‘gone-ness’ was the occasion of temptation to her. They called her a prig because she wouldn’t join in their game of placing the objects of her affections in their order of precedence. But it was only because she was afraid. Her emotions, frigid in her intercourse with God, played her curious tricks when the novices spoke of love. When they boasted lightly of their ‘number one,’ ‘number two’ or ‘number three,’ her set face indicated, not condemnation as they thought, but her effort to guard herself from sin. Nothing in the convent had been difficult except the recreations. Not the obedience, not the work, not the ordered monotony of the daily round, nothing except the constant direct and indirect references to sex. Not even the saints and angels were exempt. St Stanislaus was a greater darling than St Aloysius. One novice was ‘gone’ on St Vincent, another on St Benedict Joseph Labre. There was open jealousy over the priests. Sister Camilla was accused of making eyes at Father Burke, and Sister Chrysostom of waylaying Father Bernardine in the corridor. A handkerchief of his was put up to auction by a prayer-collecting novice and scraps fetched as much as ten rosaries. She particularly disliked talk of Father Bernardine. God had used him for her salvation; but He was also using him for her punishment—or, rather, He was allowing the devil to use him as a temptation. No, she mustn’t dwell on him. It would all be different when she was professed. Her vow would help her.
A quarter to nine. How ghostly the chapel looked in the gloom of the gas lighters. To-morrow her hair would be cut off. If only her ghosts went with it. What was Daisy Thornton’s baby like? Had he blue eyes like him—no, no, she mustn’t think of that. And Joe Duggan had never married. He was a great man now. She was glad her father had helped him. He dressed more quietly and spoke better. If he weren’t so repulsive looking? No, no, she mustn’t think of things like that. And Father Burke had changed. She really believed she had done him good. The one good thing to her credit was that she had resisted him and the result on him was wonderful. He seemed to have repented. Perhaps he had never been really wicked. It was not for her to cast stones. He should not have allowed himself to fall in love with her, of course. He cared for her still—she could see that. But she was sure that it was now in a holy way. He did his best to avoid her, and when they met, he was so gentle. He never even tried to hold her hand, and if he held it sometimes unconsciously, she knew from the way he dropped it suddenly that he was fighting a noble battle. He had really good taste in music, and there was something very sympathetic in his singing voice. It was absurd of Winnie to be jealous of her. She had got over her dislike of Father Burke, but he could never be anything more than a friend. Winnie was frivolous and couldn’t see that he had grown serious …
She shook herself and knelt straight. She mustn’t allow these distractions to-night of all nights! She should be thinking of her vows. Poverty was nothing. Notwithstanding all Mother Calixta said it seemed to be a joke. They weren’t poor. And obedience saved one the trouble of thinking. Mother Calixta told one to do some silly things, but that was because she was so silly. Reverend Mother was different. Chastity? Oh, that God would make that vow her strong armour. She wished she knew more about it. But Mother Calixta was always vague. Even Father Bernardine was disappointing in his direction and in his convent sermons. He never spoke to nuns, he said, on gross subjects; never even mentioned hell and toned down Purgatory till it seemed a desirable place to live in … Would her vow remove those horrid temptations of the flesh altogether? restore her to the original innocence of Eve? Father Bernardine said, yes. But then he had said that the convent would, and the convent hadn’t. She didn’t know. Or would her vow, as Mother Calixta said, be a sort of supernatural help that stilled the passions ? Anyhow, Father Brady couldn’t be right when he said she’d be only exchanging a whip for a scorpion. He was getting more crabby as he grew older, and practically all the nuns except Reverend Mother and a few old black veils had given him up as a confessor. Besides, he had never forgiven her for coming into the convent; and when she went to him with a difficulty he told her cruelly to go out home and get married. It was so odd he hadn’t more spiritual discrimination, for he was kind in many ways, and Reverend Mother said he was a saint. Everything was so difficult to understand. Anyhow, he couldn’t say that to her any more. Thank God, to-morrow she’d be bound to God irrevocably and the devil would knock in vain at her heart.
She turned her eyes towards the tabernacle and prayed. Her lips were dry. When she thought of God He seemed suddenly to desert her. She had nothing to offer. She was an empty husk without an idea, without words. Oh, for one moment of Winnie’s fervour! It was no use, she couldn’t pray …
And there were those other images coming again. Why had God given her a body and feeling, and emotions that seemed meant for no other purpose but to offend Him … oh, thank God, there were the lights at last.
