by George Moore
Her hands were leaned against the edge of the table, her white fingers, white with age, played with the hem of her veil, her blue, anxious eyes were fixed on Evelyn at once tenderly, expectantly, and compassionately. Her voice was the clear, refined voice which signifies society, and Evelyn would not have been surprised to learn that she belonged to an old aristocratic family, Evelyn imagined her to be a woman in whom the genius of government dominated, and who, not having found an outlet into the world, had turned to the cloister. Was that her story? Evelyn wondered, and suddenly seemed to forsee a day when she would hear the story which shone behind those clear blue eyes, and obliterated age from the white face.
They went up the circular staircase, at the top of which was a large landing; there were two rooms at the head of the stairs, and the Reverend Mother said —
“These are our guest chambers.” Standing on a second landing, one step higher than the first, a solid wooden partition had been erected, and pointing to a door the nun said with a laugh, “That door leads to the sisters’ cells. You must not make a mistake.”
Evelyn was pleased to see that her room had two windows overlooking the garden. There was a table covered by a cloth at which she could write, and she bent over the bowl of roses and wondered which kind nun had gathered them. The Reverend Mother left her, saying that she would be told when supper was ready, and on looking round the room she perceived her portmanteau, which the lay sister had not unstrapped. She would have to unstrap it herself. She remembered that she had brought very few things with her, and yet she was surprised at the smallness of her luggage. For she usually took half-a-dozen dresses with her, now she had only brought one change, a grey alpaca. She thought she might have left her dressing-case behind, a plain brush and comb would have been all she needed. But at the last moment, she had felt that she could not do without these bottles of scent and brushes and nicknacks; they had seemed indispensable. The dressing-case was Owen’s influence still pursuing her. She had not known why she was compelled to bring the dressing-case, now she knew — Owen! Never would she be able to wholly separate herself from him. He had become part of her.
As she stood in the convent room noticing the beeswaxed floor and the two rugs, one by the small iron bed, she remembered a hunting morning three years ago at Riversdale. She had gone to Owen’s room to see if he were ready. A multitude of orders were being given there, the valet was searching anxiously in the large wardrobe, piled high with many various coats and trousers; Owen stood before the looking-glass tying a white scarf, and two footmen watched each movement, dreading a mistake. She remembered that she had been amused at the time, and she never recalled the scene without smiling. But she had liked Owen better for the innumerable superfluities, all of which were necessary to his happiness, the breakdown of any one of which made him the most miserable man alive. She remembered how she had secretly imitated him, and how she had gathered about her a mass of superfluous necessities. But they had never become necessities to her, they had always galled her. It was in a spirit of perversity she had imitated him. She had always felt it to be wrong to eat peaches at five francs a piece, and had always been aware of an inward resentment against the extravagance of a reserved carriage on the railway and private saloon on board the boat. She had always desired a simple life; the life of these nuns was a simple life, simpler perhaps than she cared for. There was no hot water in her room, she wondered how she would wash her hands, and smiling at her philosophical reflections, she thought how Owen would laugh if he could see her in her present situation — in a convent, crying out for a constant supply of hot water and her maid. A religious life with home comforts, that was what she wanted.
She was always a subject of amusement to herself, and she was still smiling when a knock awoke her from her whimsical reveries. She answered “Come in,” and an elderly nun told her that supper was ready in the parlour. In this room, furnished with a table and six chairs and four pious prints, Evelyn ate her convent meal, a sort of mixed meal, which included soup, cold meat, coffee, jam and some unripe pears. The porteress took the plates away, and somehow Evelyn could not help feeling that she was giving a good deal of trouble. She could see that the nuns did everything for themselves, and she abandoned hope of ever finding a can of hot water in her room. She remembered that when she made her retreat some years ago, she had not noticed these things. She owed all her wants to Owen. Mother Philippa came in, delighted to see her, and anxious to know if she had everything she wanted.
“I thought you would be sure to be going abroad, and that next Easter, the time you were here before, would be the time to ask you.”
“But the Reverend Mother thought that now would be a better time.”
“Yes, she said that Easter was a long way off, and that a rest would do you good after singing all the season in London.”
Evelyn wondered what idea the phrase “the season in London” awoke in the mind of the nun. A little puzzled look did pass in her eyes, and then she resumed her friendly chatter. Evelyn listened, more interested in Mother Philippa’s kind, amicable nature than in what she said. She imagined in different circumstances what a good wife she would have been, and what a good mother! “But she is happier as she is.” Evelyn could not imagine any soul-rending uncertainties in Mother Philippa. At a certain age, at seventeen or eighteen, she had felt that she would like to be a nun; very probably she was not any more pious than her sisters; she had merely felt that the life would suit her. That was her story. Evelyn smiled, and looked into Mother Philippa’s mild eyes, in which there was nothing but simple kindness, and with a yes and a no she kept the conversation going till the bell rang for Office.
“I do not know if you would care to come to church. Perhaps you are tired after your journey?”
“Journey! I have only driven a few miles.”
Evelyn ran upstairs for her hat, and she followed the nun down the cloister which led to the church.
“That is your door, it will take you into the outer church.”
The nuns’ choir was still empty, but the two candles on the high altar were already lit, ready for Matins and Lauds. Evelyn had only just taken her place, when at that moment a door opened on the other side of the grille, and the grey figures, their heads a little bent, came in couples and took their place in the stalls. They were wonderfully beautiful and impressive, and the idea they represented seemed to Evelyn extraordinary, simple and true. For, once we are convinced that there is a God, and that we are here to save our souls, it were surely folly to think of anything else. Our loves and our ambitions, what are they when we consider him? and Evelyn remembered how he waits for us in an eternity of bliss and love, only asking for our love. These were the wise ones, they thought of the essential and let the ephemeral and circumstantial go by them. Even from a worldly point of view, their life was the wiser, since it produced the greater happiness. Owen was a proof of this. She remembered how he used to say he had the finest place, the most beautiful pictures, and the most desirable mistress in Europe. Yet he was always the unhappiest man she knew. His life had been an unceasing effort to capture happiness, and he had failed because he had sought happiness from without instead of seeking it from within. He lived in externals, he was dependent on a multitude of things, the breakdown of any one of which was sufficient to cause him the acutest misery. The howl of a dog, the smell of a cigar, any trifle was sufficient to wreck his happiness. He had taught her to live in external things, to place her faith in the world instead of in her own conscience. How unhappy she had been; she had been driven to the brink of suicide. Ah, if it had not been for Monsignor. She bent her face on her hands, and did not dare to think further.
When her prayer was finished, she listened to the high monotonous chant of the nuns reciting Matins. It sank into her soul, soothing it, and at the same time inspiring an ardent melancholy. The long, unbroken rhythm flowed on and on, each side of the choir chanting an alternate verse. In the dimness of her sensation, Evelyn lost count of time,
nor did she know of what she was thinking. She was suddenly awakened by a sound of shuffling. The nuns had risen to their feet, and in the middle of the floor a sister began the lessons in a shrill voice, keeping always on the same note, never letting her voice fall at the close of the sentences. Evelyn grew more interested; the rite was full of a penetrating mystery. She viewed the lines of grey nuns and heard the Latin syllables. These poor nuns whom she was just now pitying for their ignorance of life could at all events read the Office in Latin.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes and saw the convent room, she remembered how she had come there. Her still dreaming face lighted up with a smile, and she began to wonder what was going to happen next. Soon after, someone knocked. It was the little porteress telling her that it was seven o’clock. Evelyn expected her to come in, pull up the blinds and pour out her bath. But she did not even open the door, and Evelyn lay looking through the strange room, unable to face the discomfort of a small basin of cold water. She would have to do her hair herself, and there was no toilette table. The convent seemed suddenly a place to flee from; she hadn’t realised that it would be like this.... But it would never do for her to miss Mass, and she sat on the edge of the bed, unable to think of any solution of her difficulties. The only glass in the room was about a foot square; it had been placed on the chest of drawers, and nothing seemed to Evelyn more inefficient than this wretched glass. Its very position on the top of the chest of drawers was vexatious. She could not even get it into the proper angle, and when she removed the piece of paper that held it in position, it swung round and its back confronted her. That morning it seemed as if she could not dress herself. Her hair had curled itself into many a knot; she nearly broke the comb, and her hand dropped by her side, and then she laughed outright, having caught sight of some part of her dejection. As she hooked on her skirt she reflected on the necessity of not leaving bottles of scent nor too many sponges for the observation of the nuns; and the nightgown she had brought was certainly not a conventual garment.
She hurried downstairs, and was just in time to see the nuns coming into church. They came in by a side door, walking two by two, and Evelyn was again struck by the beauty and mystery of this grey procession. She had seen on the stage the outward show of men who had renounced the world — the pilgrims in “Tannhäuser,” the knights in “Parsifal,” but this was no outward show. The women she was now witnessing had renounced the world; the life she was witnessing was the life they lived from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year. She had included lovers amid their renunciations; such inclusion was ridiculous, for of such sins as hers they had not even dreamed. To pass through life without knowing life! To have renounced, to have refused love, friends, art, everything, dinner-parties, conversations, all the distractions which we believe make life endurable, to have refused these things from the beginning — not even to have been tempted to taste, not even to have desired to put life to the test of a fugitive personal experience, but to have divined from the first, by instinct, by the grace of God, the worthlessness of life — that was what was so wonderful. Mother Philippa, that simple nun, had done this, instinct had led her — there was no other explanation. She had arrived at the same conclusion as the wisest of the philosophers and without any soul-searching, by instinct — each of the humble lay sisters, the little porteress had done this. And Evelyn was filled with shame when she thought of the effort it had cost her to free herself from a life of sin.
In extraordinary beauty of grey habit and veil and solemn procession, the nuns passed to their seats. Now they were kneeling altarwise, and Evelyn was still occupied by the thought that this was not outward show as she had often seen it on the stage, but the thing itself. This was not acting, this was truth, the truth of all their lifetimes.
Suddenly began the plaint of the organ, and some half-dozen voices sang a hymn; and these pale, etiolated voices interested her. It was not the clear, sexless voice of boys, these were women’s voices, out of which sex had faded like colour out of flowers; and these pale, deciduous voices wailing a poor, pathetic music, so weak and feeble that it was almost interesting through its very feebleness, interested Evelyn. Tears trembled in her eyes, and she listened to the poor voices rising and falling, breaking forth spasmodically in the lamentable hymn. “Desolate” and “forgotten” were the words that came up in her mind.
They were still kneeling altarwise; their profiles turned from her. Outside of the choir stalls, on either side of the church, were two special stalls, and the Reverend Mother and the sub-prioress knelt apart. Their backs were turned to Evelyn, and she noticed the fine delicate shoulders of the Reverend Mother, and the heavy figure of Mother Philippa. “Even in their backs they are like themselves,” she thought. She smiled at her descriptive style, “like themselves,” and then, seeing that Mass had begun, she resolutely repressed all levity, and began her prayers. She had not felt especially pious till that moment, and to rouse herself she remembered Monsignor’s words, “That at the height of her artistic career she should have been awakened to a sense of her own exceeding sinfulness was a miracle of his grace,” and she felt that the devotion of her whole life to his service would not be a sufficient return for what he had done for her. But in spite of her efforts she followed the sacrifice of the Mass in her normal consciousness until the bell rang for the Elevation. When the priest raised the Host she was conscious of the Real Presence. She raised her eyes a little, and the bent figures of the nuns, their veils hanging loose about them, contributed to her exaltation, and with a last effort, holding as it were her life in her hands, she asked pardon of God for her sins.
Then the pale, etiolated voices of the nuns, the wailing of these weak voices — there were three altos, three sopranos — began again. They were singing an Agnus Dei, a simple little music nowise ugly, merely feeble, touchingly commonplace; they were singing in unison thirds and fifths, and the indifferent wailing of the voices contrasted with the firmness of the organist’s touch; and Evelyn knew that they had one musician among them. She listened, touched by the plaintive voices, so feeble in the ears of man, but beautiful in God’s ears. God heard beyond the mere notes; the music of the intention was what reached God’s ears. The music of these poor voices was more favourable in his ears than her voice. Months she had spent seeking the exact rhythm of a phrase intended to depict and to rouse a sinful desire. Though the hymns were ugly — and they were very ugly — she would have done better to sing them; and she sought to press herself into the admission that art which does not tend to the glory of God is vain and harmful. Far better these hideous hymns, if singing them conducts to everlasting life. But every time she pressed her mind towards an inevitable conclusion, it turned off into an obscure bypath. She brought it back like an intractable ass, but the stubborn beast again dodged her, and she had to abandon the attempt to convince herself that art which did not tend to the honour and glory of God should be suppressed — should be at least avoided. Once we were convinced that there was a God and a resurrection, this world must become as nothing in our eyes, only it didn’t become as nothing in our eyes; every sacrifice should become easy, but every sacrifice didn’t become easy. That was the point; to these nuns, perhaps, not to her. At least not yet.
She had fussed a great deal this morning because she had no hot water to wash with. Seven o’clock had seemed to her somewhat early to get up. But they had been up long before. She had heard of nuns who got up at four in the morning to say the Office. She did not know what time these nuns got up, but she felt that she was not capable of much greater sacrifice than six or seven o’clock. These nuns lived on a little coarse food, and spent the day in prayer. She thought of their aching knees in the long vigils of their adorations. She understood that the inward happiness their life gives them compensates them for all their privations. She understood that they are the only ones who are happy, yet the knowledge did not help her; she felt that she would never be happy in their happiness, and a gre
at sorrow came over her. Mass was over, and again the beautiful procession, with bowed heads and meekly folded veils, glided out of the church. Only the watchers remained.
Last night she had sat watching the stars shining on the convent garden. There were, as Owen said, twenty millions of suns in the Milky Way; beyond the Milky Way there were other constellations of which we know nothing, nebulæ which time has not yet resolved into stars, or stars so distant that time has not yet brought their light hither. But why seek mystery beyond this poor planet? It furnishes enough, surely. That we should see the stars, that we should know the stars, that we should place God above the stars — are not these common facts as wonderful as the stars themselves? That those twenty or five-and-twenty women should give up all the seduction of life for the sake of an idea, accepting Owen’s theory that it is but an idea, even so the wonder of it is not less; even from Owen’s point of view is not this convent as wonderful as the stars?
On coming out of church, she was told that in half-an-hour her breakfast would be ready in the parlour, and to loosen the mental tension — she had thought and felt a great deal in the last hour — she asked the lay sister who were the nuns who sang in the choir. The lay sister answered her perfunctorily. Evelyn could see that she was not open at that moment to conversation. She guessed that the sister had work to attend to, and was not surprised that she did not come back to take the things away. Although only just begun, the day had already begun to seem long. She proposed to herself some pious reading; and wondered how she was going to get through the day. She would have liked to go into the garden; but she did not know the rules of the convent, and feared to transgress them. However, she was free to go to her room. The books she had brought with her would help her to get through the morning.
