by George Moore
“Yet she was quite cheerful; I never should have guessed.”
“Mother Philippa and Mother Mary Hilda tried to dissuade her. But she would see you.”
“Then it is with her heart disease that the Reverend Mother rules the convent,” Evelyn thought, as she followed Sister Mary John up the spiral staircase to the organ loft. She looked over the curtained railing into the church. The watcher knelt there, her head bowed, her habit still as sculpture, and Evelyn heard Sister Mary John pulling out her music. She could not find what she wanted, and she sat with her legs apart, throwing from side to side piles of old torn music.
“Never can one find a piece of music when one wants it: I don’t know if you have noticed that nothing is so difficult to find as a piece of music. Day after day it is under your hands, it would seem as if there was not another piece in the organ loft, but the moment you want it, it has disappeared. I don’t know how it is.”
“What are you looking for? Perhaps I can help you.”
“Well, I was thinking that you might like” — Sister Mary John looked up at Evelyn— “I suppose you can sing B flat, or even C?”
“Yes, I can sing C;” and Evelyn thought of the last page of the “Dusk of the Gods.” “But what are you looking for?”
Sister Mary John did not answer. She threw the music from side to side, every minute growing more impatient. “It is most strange,” she said at last, looking up at Evelyn. Evelyn smiled. With all her brusque, self-willed ways, Sister Mary John was clearly a lady born and an intelligent woman.
“I’m afraid I shall not be able to find you anything that you’d care to sing.”
“Oh, yes, I shall,” Evelyn replied encouragingly.
“It is all such poor stuff. We’ve no singers here. Do you know, I’ve never heard a great singer, and I’ve often wished to. The only thing I regret is not having heard a little music before I came here. But I’ve heard of Wagner; you sing Wagner, don’t you, Miss Innes?”
“Yes, I sing little else. ‘Fidelio’—”
“Ah, I know some of the music. Do you sing—”
Sister Mary John hummed a few bars.
“Yes, I sing that.”
“Well, I shall hear you sing to-day. I’ve been wishing to go to St. Joseph’s to hear Palestrina. You were brought up on music. You can sing at sight — in the key that it is written in?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“But all prima-donnas can do that?”
“No; on the contrary, I think I’m the only one. Singers on the operatic stage learn their parts at the piano.”
She could see that to Sister Mary John music was the temptation of her life, and she imagined that her confession must be a little musical record. She had lost her temper with Sister So-and-So because she could not, etc. But time was getting on. If she was to sing that afternoon, she must find something, and seeing that Sister Mary John lingered over some sheets of music, as if she thought that it presented some possibility, Evelyn asked her what it was. It was a Mass by Mozart for four voices, which Sister Mary John had arranged for a single voice.
“The choir and I sing the melody in unison, and I play the entire Mass on the organ.”
Evelyn smiled, and seeing that the smile distressed the nun, she was sorry.
“To you, of course, it would sound absurd, it does to me too, but it was a little change, it was the only thing I could think of. We have some pieces written for two voices, but I can hardly get them sung. I have to teach the sisters the parts separately. Till they know them by heart, I can’t trust them. It is impossible sometimes not to lose one’s temper. If we had a few good voices, people would come to hear them, the convent would be spoken about, and some charitable people would come forward and pay off our mortgages. I’ve lain awake at night thinking of it; the Reverend Mother agrees with me. But in the way of voices we’ve been as unlucky as we could well be. I’ve been here eight years — there was one, but she died six years ago of consumption. It is heartbreaking. I play the organ, I beat the time, and, as I said to them the other day, ‘There are five of you, and I’m the only one that sings.’”
Sister Mary John asked Evelyn if she composed. Evelyn told her that she did not compose, and remembering Owen’s compositions, she hoped that Sister Mary John had not an “O Salutaris” in manuscript.
“Let me look through the music; we are talking of other things instead of looking.”
“So we are.... Let us look.” At the bottom of a heap, Sister Mary John found Cherubini’s “Ave Maria.”
“Could you sing this? It is a beautiful piece of music.”
Evelyn read it over.
“Yes,” she said, “I can sing it, but it wants careful playing; the end is a sort of little duet between the voice and the organ. If you don’t follow me exactly, the effect will be like this,” and she showed what it would be on the mute keyboard.
“You haven’t confidence in my playing.”
“Every confidence, Sister Mary John, but remember I don’t know the piece, and it is not easy. I think we had better try it over together.”
“I should like to very much, but you will not sing with all your voice?”
“No, we’ll just run through it....”
The nun followed in a sort of ecstasy, and when they came to what Evelyn had called the duet, she played the beautiful antiphonal music looking up at the singer. The second time Evelyn was surer of herself, and she let her voice flow out a little in suave vocalisation, so that she might judge of the effect.
“I told you that I had never heard anyone sing before. If you were one of us!”
Evelyn laughed, and then, catching sight of the nun’s eyes fixed very intently upon her, she spoke of the beauty of the “Ave Maria,” and was surprised that she did not know anything of Cherubini’s.
“Gracious, how the time has gone! That is the first bell for vespers.”
She hurried away, forgetting all about Evelyn, leaving her to find her way back to her room as best she could. But Evelyn found Sister Mary John waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs. She had come back for her, she had just remembered her, and Sister Mary John apologised for her absence of mind, and seemed distressed at her apparent rudeness. They walked a little way together, and the nun explained that it was not her fault; her absence of mind was an inheritance from her father. Everything she had she had inherited from him— “my love of music and my absence of mind.”
She was intensely herself, quaint, eccentric, but she was, Evelyn reflected, perhaps more distinctly from the English upper classes than any of the nuns she had seen yet. She had not the sweetness of manner of the Reverend Mother, her manners were the oddest; but withal she had that refinement which Evelyn had first noticed in Owen, and afterwards in his friends, that style which is inheritance, which tradition alone can give. She had spoken of her father, and Evelyn could easily imagine Sister Mary John’s father — a lord of old lineage dwelling in an eighteenth century house in the middle of a flat park in the Midlands. She could see a piece of artificial lake obtained by the damming of a small stream; one end full of thick reeds, in which the chatter of wild ducks was unceasing. But her family, her past, her name — all was lost in the convent, in the veil. The question was, had she renounced the world, or had she refused the world? Evelyn could not even conjecture. Sister Mary John was outside not only of her experience, but also of her present perception of things. Evelyn wondered why one of such marked individuality, of such intense personal will, had chosen a life the very raison d’être of which was the merging of the individual will in the will of the community? Why should one, the essential delight of whose life was music, choose a life in which music hardly appeared? Was her piety so great that it absorbed every other inclination? Sister Mary John did not strike her as being especially religious. What instinct behind those brown eyes had led her to this sacrifice? Apparently at pains to conceal nothing, Sister Mary John concealed the essential. Evelyn could even imagine her as being attractive to m
en — that radiant smile, the beautiful teeth, and the tall, supple figure, united to that distinct personality, would not have failed to attract. God did not get her because men did not want her, of that Evelyn was quite sure.
There were on that afternoon assembled in the little white chapel of the Passionist Sisters about a dozen elderly ladies, about nine or ten stout ladies dressed in black, who might be widows, and perhaps three or four spare women who wore a little more colour in their hats; these might be spinsters, of ages varying between forty and fifty-five. Amid these Evelyn was surprised and glad to perceive three or four young men; they did not look, she thought, particularly pious, and perceiving that they wore knickerbockers, she judged them to be cyclists who had ridden up from Richmond Park. They had come in probably to rest, having left their machines at the inn. Even though she was converted, she did not wish to sing only to women, and it amused her to perceive that something of the original Eve still existed in her. But if any one of these young men should happen to have any knowledge of music, he could hardly fail to notice that it was not a nun who was singing. He would ride away astonished, mystified; he would seek the explanation of the mystery, and would bring his friend to hear the wonderful voice at the Passionist Convent. By the time he came again she would be gone, and his friend would say that he had had too much to drink that afternoon at the inn. They would not be long in finding an explanation; but should there happen to be a journalist there, he would put a paragraph in the papers, and all sorts of people would come to the convent and go away disappointed.
She looked round the church, calculating its resonance, and thought with how much of her voice she should sing so as to produce an effect without, however, startling the little congregation. The sermon seemed to her very long; she was unable to fix her attention, and though all Father Daly said was very edifying, her thoughts wandered, and wonderful legends and tales about a voice heard for one week at the Wimbledon Convent thronged her brain, and she invented quite a comic little episode, in which some dozen or so of London managers met at Benediction. She thought that their excuses one to the other would be very comic.
She was wearing the black lace scarf instead of a hat; it went well with the grey alpaca, and under it was her fair hair; and when she got up to go to the organ loft after the sermon, she felt that the old ladies and the bicyclists were already wondering who she was. Her involuntary levity annoyed her, and she forced a certain seriousness upon herself as she climbed the steep spiral staircase.
“So you have found your way ... this is our choir,” and she introduced Evelyn to the five sisters, hurrying through their names in a low whisper. “We don’t sing the ‘O Salutaris,’ as there has been exposition. We’ll sing this hymn instead, and immediately after you’ll sing the ‘Ave Maria’; it will take the place of the Litany.”
Then the six pale voices began to wail out the hymn, wobbling and fluctuating, the only steady voice being Sister Mary John’s. Though mortally afraid of the Latin syllables, Evelyn seconded Sister Mary John’s efforts, and the others, taking courage, sang better than usual. Sister Mary John turned delighted from the organ, and, her eyes bright with anticipation, said, “Now.”
She played the introduction, Evelyn opened her music. The moment was one of intense excitement among the five nuns. They had gathered together in a group. The great singer who had saved their convent (had it not been for her they would have been thrown back upon the world) was going to sing. Evelyn knew what was passing in their minds, and was a little nervous. She wished they would not look at her so, and she turned away from them. Sister Mary John played the chord, and the voice began.
Owen often said that if Evelyn had two more notes in her voice she would have ranked with the finest. She sang from the low A, and she could take the high C. From B to B every note was clear and full, one as the other; he delighted especially in the middle of her voice; for one whole octave, and more than an octave, her voice was pure and sonorous and as romantic as the finest ‘cello. And the romance of her voice transpired in the beautiful Beethoven-like phrase of Cherubini’s “Ave Maria.” It was as if he had had her voice singing in his ear while he was writing, when he placed the little grace notes on the last syllable of Maria. The phrase rose, still remaining well within the medium of her voice, and the same interval happened again as the voice swelled up on the word “plena.” In the beautiful classical melody her voice was like a ‘cello heard in the twilight. In the music itself there is neither belief nor prayer, but a severe dignity of line, the romance of columns and peristyle in the exaltation of a calm evening. Very gradually she poured her voice into the song, and her lips seemed to achieve sculpture. The lines of a Greek vase seemed to rise before the eye, and the voice swelled on from note to note with the noble movement of the bas-relief decoration of the vase. The harmonious interludes which Sister Mary John played aided the excitement, and the nuns, who knelt in two grey lines, were afraid to look up. In a remote consciousness they feared it was not right to feel so keenly; the harmonious depth of the voice entered their very blood, summoning visions of angel faces. But it was an old man with a white beard that Veronica saw, a hermit in the wilderness; she was bringing him vestments, and when the vision vanished Evelyn was singing the opening phrase, now a little altered on the words Santa Maria.
There came the little duet between the voice and the organ, in which any want of precision on the part of Sister Mary John would spoil the effect of the song; but the nun’s right hand answered Evelyn in perfect concord. And then began the runs introduced in the Amen in order to exhibit the skill of the singer. The voice was no longer a ‘cello, deep and resonant, but a lonely flute or silver bugle announcing some joyous reverie in a landscape at the close of day. The song closed on the keynote, and Sister Mary John turned from the instrument and looked at the singer. She could not speak, she seemed overpowered by the music, and like one more dreaming than waking, and sitting half turned round on her seat, she looked at Evelyn.
“You sing beautifully,” she said. “I never heard singing before.”
And she sat like one stupefied, still hearing Evelyn’s singing in her brain, until one of the sisters advanced close and said, “Sister, we must sing the ‘Tantum ergo.’”
“Of course we must. I believe if you hadn’t reminded me I should have forgotten it. Gracious! I don’t know what it will sound like after singing like that. But you’ll lead them?”
Evelyn hummed the plain chant under her breath, afraid lest she should extinguish the pale voices, and surprised how expressive the antique chant was when sung by these etiolated, sexless voices. She had never known how much of her life of passion and desire had entered into her voice, and she was shocked at its impurity. Her singing sounded like silken raiment among sackcloth, and she lowered her voice, feeling it to be indecorous and out of place in the antique hymn. Her voice, she felt, must have revealed her past life to the nuns, her voice must have shocked them a little; her voice must have brought the world before them too vividly. For all her life was in her voice, she would never be able to sing this hymn with the same sexless grace as they did. Her voice would be always Evelyn Innes — Owen Asher’s mistress.
The priest turned the Host toward them, and she saw the two long rows of grey-habited nuns leaning their veiled heads, and knew that this was the moment they lived for, the essential moment when the body which the Redeemer gave in expiation of the sins of the world is revealed. Evelyn’s soul hushed in awe, and all that she had renounced seemed very little in this moment of mystery and exaltation.
“What am I to say, Miss Innes? I shall think of this day when I am an old woman. But you’ll sing again before you leave?”
“Yes, sister, whenever you like.”
“When I like? That would be all day. But I did follow you in the duet, I was so anxious. I hope I did not spoil it?”
“I was never better accompanied. You made no mistake.”
As they passed by her the other nuns thanked her under their b
reath. She could see that they looked upon her as a providence sent by God to save them from being cast back upon the world they dreaded, the world from which they had fled. But all this extraordinary drama, this intensity of feeling, remained inarticulate. They could only say, “Thank you, Miss Innes; it was very good of you to come to sing for us.” It was their very dumbness that made them seem so wonderful. It was the dumbness of these women — they could only speak in prayer — it was that that overcame her. But the Reverend Mother was different. Evelyn listened to her, thinking of nothing but her, and when the Reverend Mother left her, Evelyn moved away, still under the spell of the authoritative sweetness which her presence and manner exhaled. But the Reverend Mother was only a part of a scheme of life founded on principles the very opposite to those on which she had attempted to construct her life. Even in singing the “Ave Maria,” she had not been able to subdue her vanity. Her pleasure in singing it had in a measure sprung out of the somewhat mean desire to proclaim her superiority over those who had attained the highest plane by renouncing all personal pride. They had proclaimed their superiority in their obeisance. It was in giving, not in receiving, praise that we rise above ourselves. This was the lesson that every moment of her convent life impressed upon her. Her thoughts went back to the Reverend Mother, and Evelyn thought of her as of some woman who had come to some terrible crisis in her worldly life — some crisis violent as the crisis that had come in her own life. The Reverend Mother must have perceived, just as she had done, as all must do sooner or later, that life out of the shelter of religion becomes a sort of nightmare, an intolerable torture. Then she wondered if the Reverend Mother were a widow — that appeared to her likely. One who had suffered some great disaster — that too seemed to her likely. She had been an ambitious woman. Was she not so still? Is a passion ever obliterated? Is it not rather transformed? If she had been personally ambitious, she was now ambitious only for her convent: her passion had taken another direction. And applying the same reasoning to herself, she seemed to see a future for herself in which her love passions would become transformed and find their complete expressions in the love of God.
