by George Moore
The Reverend Mother again addressed her, and Evelyn considered what age she might be. Between sixty and seventy in point of years, but she seemed so full of intelligence, wisdom and sweetness that she did not suggest age; one did not think of her as an old woman. Her slight figure still retained its grace, and though a small woman, she suggested a tall one; and the moment she spoke there was the voice which drew you like silk and entangled you as in a soft winding web. Evelyn smiled a little as she listened, for she was thinking how the Reverend Mother as a young woman must have swayed men. Presumably at one time it had pleased her to sway men’s passion, or at least it pleased Evelyn’s imagination to think it had. Not that she thought the Reverend Mother had ever been anything but a good woman, but she had been a woman of the world, and Evelyn attributed no sin to that. Even the world is not wholly bad; the Reverend Mother and Monsignor owed their personal magnetism to the world. Without the world they would have been like Father Daly and Mother Philippa — holy simplicities. She looked at the quiet nun, and her simple good nature touched her. Evelyn went toward her. Sister Mary John broke into the conversation so often that the Reverend Mother had once to check her.
“Sister Mary John, we hope that Miss Innes will sing to-morrow and every day while she is with us. But she must do as she likes, and these musical questions are not what we are talking about now.”
But Sister Mary John was hardly at all abashed at this reproof. She was clearly the only one who stood in no awe of the Reverend Mother.
They were sitting on the terrace, and a mauve sunset faded in the grey sky. There was a strange wistfulness in the autumn air and in the dim garden where the gentle nuns were taking their recreation. There was a subtle harmony in the grey habits and floating veils; they blended and mingled with the blue mist that was rising among the trees. And a pale light fell across the faded lawns, and Evelyn looked into the light, and felt the pang that the passing of things brings into the heart. This spectacle of life seemed to her strangely pathetic, and it seemed to mean something which eluded her, and which she would have given a great deal to have been able to express. Music alone could express the yearning that haunted her heart, the plaint of the Rhine Maidens was the nearest to what she felt, and she began to sing their song. Sister Mary John asked her eagerly what she was singing. She would have told her, but the Reverend Mother grew impatient with Sister Mary John.
“You must be introduced to Mother Mary Hilda, our novice mistress, then you will know all the mothers except our dear Mother Christina, who is quite an invalid now, and rarely leaves her cell.”
On St. Peter’s path a little group of nuns were walking up and down, pressing round a central figure. They were faint grey shadows, and their meaning would not be distinguished in the violet dusk. It was like a half-effaced picture in which the figures are nearly lost in the background; their voices, however, sounded clear, and their laughter was mysterious and far distant, yet distinct in the heart. Evelyn again began to hum the plaint of the Rhine Maidens. But the voices of the novices were more joyous, for they, Evelyn thought, have renounced both love and gold. The Reverend Mother clapped her hands to attract attention, and one of the novices, it was Sister Veronica, ran to them.
“Ask Mother Mary Hilda to come and speak to me, Veronica.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother;” and Veronica ran with the message without once looking at Evelyn. Mother Mary Hilda crossed the lawn toward them, and Evelyn noticed her gliding, youthful walk. She was younger than the prioress or even the sub-prioress. And she had that attractive youthfulness of manner which often survives in the cloister after middle age.
“Here is Miss Innes,” said the prioress; “I know you wished to make her acquaintance.”
“Yes, indeed.”
Evelyn noticed the bright eyes and the small, clearly cut nose and the pointed chin, but her liveliest sensation was of Mother Hilda’s hand; so small was it and soft that it seemed like a little crushed bird in Evelyn’s hand, and Evelyn did not think that hers was a large hand.
“I am sure, Miss Innes, you feel that you have been thanked sufficiently for all you have done for us, but you’ll forgive us if we feel that we cannot thank you often enough. Your singing at Benediction to-day was a great pleasure to us all. Whose ‘Ave Maria’ was it, Miss Innes?”
Evelyn told them, and thinking it would interest the nuns, she admitted that her father would not allow it to be sacred music. This led the conversation on to the question of Palestrina, and how the old music had rescued the Jesuits from their pecuniary embarrassments. A casual mention of Wagner showed her that the Reverend Mother was interested, and she said that she might sing them Elizabeth’s prayer. Evelyn spoke of the Chorale in the first act of the “Meistersinger,” and this led her into quite a little account of the music she sang on the stage. It pleased her to notice the different effect of her account of her art on the four nuns. The conversation, she could see, carried the prioress back into the past, but she put aside these memories of long ago and affected a polite interest in the stage. Mother Philippa listened as she might to a story, too far removed from her for her to be more than vaguely interested; Sister Mary John listened in the hopes that Evelyn would illustrate her experience with some few bars of the music — with her it was the music and nothing else; Mother Mary Hilda listened very prettily, and Evelyn noticed that it was she who asked the most questions. Mother Mary Hilda was the most fearless, and showed the least dread in the conversation. Yet for no single moment did Evelyn think that she was the worldliest of the four nuns. Evelyn thought that probably she was the least. Her trivial utterances were the necessity of the unimportant moment, and she seemed to bring to them the enlightenment of her own vivid faith. The holiness that shone out of her eyes inspired the calm, tender smile, and was in her whole manner. “She speaks,” Evelyn thought, “of worldly things without affectation, but how clear it is that they lie outside, far outside, of her real life.”
Evelyn was saying that it was a long while since she had sung any sacred music, and, referring to the difference of the rule in France and in England, she mentioned that in Paris the opera singers frequently sang in the churches.
“It must be hard on Catholics with beautiful voices like yours that they may not be allowed to sing in church choirs, for there can be nothing so delightful as to bring a great gift to God’s service.”
It was the prioress who broke off the conversation, to Evelyn’s regret.
“Mother Hilda, I am afraid we are forgetting your young charges.”
“Yes, indeed, I must run back to my children. Good-bye, Miss Innes, I am so glad that you have come to us;” and the warm, soft clasp of the little hand was to Evelyn a further assurance of friendly welcome.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SHE WAS ASHAMED not to be able to follow the Office in chapel, so at the Reverend Mother’s suggestion she consented to employ part of her long convent leisure in taking lessons in Latin. Mother Mary Hilda was to be her instructress.
The library was a long, rather narrow room, once the drawing-room of the Georgian mansion. Only a carved Adams’ chimney-piece, now painted over in imitation of oak remained of its former adornment; the tall windows were eighteenth century, and with that air they looked upon the terrace. The walls had been lined by the nuns with plain wooden shelves, and upon them were what seemed to be a thousand books, every one in a grey linen wrapper, with the title neatly written on a white label pasted on the back. Evelyn’s first thought was of the time it must have taken to cover them, but she remembered that in a convent time is of no consequence. If a thing can be done better in three hours than in one, there is no reason why three hours should not be spent upon it. She had noticed, too, that the sisters regarded the library with a little air of demure pride. Mother Mary Hilda had told her that the large tin boxes were filled with the convent archives. There were piles of unbound magazines — the Month and the Dublin Review. There was a ponderous writing-table, with many pigeon-holes; Evelyn concluded
it to be the gift of a wealthy convert, and she turned the immense globe which showed the stars and planets, and wondered how the nuns had become possessed of such a thing, and how they could have imagined that it could ever be of any use to them. She grew fond of this room, and divided her time between it and the garden. It had none of the primness of the convent parlour, which gave her a little shiver every time she entered it. In the further window there stood a deep-seated, venerable arm-chair, covered in worn green leather, the one comfortable chair, Evelyn often thought, in the convent. And in this chair she spent many hours, either learning to construe the Office with Mother Mary Hilda, or reading by herself. The investigation of the shelves was an occupation, and the time went quickly, taking down book after book, and she seemed to penetrate further into the spirit of the convent through the medium of the convent books.
The light literature of the convent were improving little tales of conversion, and edifying stories of Catholic girls who decline to enter into mixed marriages, and she thought of the novices reading this artless literature on Sunday afternoons. There were endless volumes of meditations, mostly translations from the French, full of Gallicisms and parenthetical phrases, and Evelyn often began a paragraph a second time; but in spite of her efforts to control her thoughts they wandered, and her eyes, lost in reverie, were fixed on the sunny garden.
She returned the volumes to the shelves, and remembering Mother Mary Hilda’s recommendation, she took down a volume of Faber’s works. She found his effusive, sentimental style unendurable; and had turned to go to her room for one of the books she had brought with her when her eyes lighted upon Father Dalgairn’s Frequent Communion. The father’s account of the various customs of the Church regarding the administration of the Sacrament — the early rigorism of the African fathers, and the later rigorism of the Jansenists at once interested her, and, lifting her eyes from the book, she remembered that the Sacrament had always been the central light around which the spiritual belief of the church had revolved. Her instinctive religion had always been the Sacrament. When Huxley and Darwin and Spencer had undermined the foundations of her faith, and the entire fabric of revelation was showering about her, her belief in the Divine Presence had remained, burning like a lamp, inviolate among the débris of a temple. She had never been able to resist the Sacrament. She had put her belief in the mystery of transubstantiation to the test, and when the sanctus bell rang, her head had solemnly bowed; softer than rose leaves or snowflakes, belief had rained down upon her choked heart. She had never been able to reason about the Divine Presence — she felt it. She had believed whether she willed it or not. Owen’s arguments had made no difference. Her desire of the Sacrament had more than once altered the course of her life, and that she should have unconsciously wandered back to the Passionist Convent, a convent vowed to Perpetual Adoration, seemed to her to be full of significance.
Father Dalgairn’s book had made clear to her that wherever she went and whatever she did she would always believe in the Divine Presence. His book had discovered to her the instinctive nature of her belief in the Sacrament, but it had not widened her spiritual perceptions, still less her artistic: the delicious terror and irresistible curiosity which she experienced on opening St. Teresa’s Book of Her Life she had never experienced before. It was like re-birth, being born to a new experience, to a purer sensation of life. It was like throwing open the door of a small, confined garden, and looking upon the wide land of the world. It was like breathing the wide air of eternity after that of a close-scented room. She knew that she was not capable of such pure ecstasy, yet it seemed to her very human to think and feel like this; and the saint’s holy rapture seemed as natural — she thought for a moment — even more natural, even more truly human than the rapture which she had found in sinful love.
Before she had read a dozen pages, she seemed to know her like her own soul, though yet unaware whether the saint lived in this century or a dozen centuries ago. For all she said about the material facts of her life St. Teresa might be alive to-day and in England. She lived in aspiration, out of time and place; and like one who, standing upon a hill top, sees a bird soaring, a wild bird with the light of the heavens upon its wings, Evelyn seemed to see this soul waving its wings in its flight towards God. The soul sang love, love, love, and heaven was overflowed with cries for its Divine Master, for its adorable Master, for its Bridegroom-elect.
The extraordinary vehemence and passion, the daring realism of St. Teresa reminded Evelyn of Vittoria. She found the same unrestrained passionate realism in both; she thought of Belasquez’s early pictures, and then of Ribera. Then of Ulick, who had told her that the great artist dared everything. St. Teresa had dared everything. She had dared even to discriminate between the love of God the Father and God the Son. It was God the Father that inspired in her the highest ecstasy, the most complete abandonment of self. In these supreme moments the human form of Jesus Christ was a hindrance, as in a lower level of spiritual exaltation it was a help.
“The moment my prayer began to pass from the natural to the supernatural, I strove to obliterate from my soul every physical obstacle. To lift my soul up, to contemplate, I dared not; aware of my imperfection it seemed over bold. Nevertheless I knew the presence of God to be about me, and I tried to gather myself in him. And nothing could then induce me to return to the sacred humanity of the Saviour.”
But how touching is the saint’s repentance for this infidelity to the Divine Bridegroom.
“O Lord of my soul, of all my goods, Jesus crucified, I shall never remember without pain that I once thought this thing. I shall think of it as a great treason, and I stand convicted before the Good Master; and though it proceeded from my ignorance, I shall never expiate it with tears.”
Just as every variation of habit, of fashion is noticeable to those who live outside themselves, so the changes and complexities in the life of the soul are perceived by them who live within themselves. The saint relates how for many months she refrained from prayer, and as we know that prayer was the source of all her joy, a joy touching ecstasy, often above the earth and resplendent with vision, we can imagine the anguish that these abstinences must have caused her.
“To destroy confidence in God the Demon spread a snare, his most insidious snare. He persuaded me that owing to my imperfections I could not, without being wanting in humility, present myself in prayer to God. This caused me such anguish that for a year and a half I refrained. For at least a year, for the six months following I am not sure of my memory. Unfortunate one, what did I do! By my own act I plunged myself in hell without demons being about to drag me there.”
This scruple is followed by others. The saint suspects the entire holiness of her joy in prayer, and she asks if these transports, these ravishments, these moments in which she lies exhausted in the arms of the Beloved Bridegroom, were contrived by the Demon or if they were granted to her by God. Her anxiety is great, and men learned in holy doctrine are consulted. They incline to the belief that her visions proceed from God, and encourage her to persevere. Then she cries to her Divine Master, to the Lord of her soul, to her adorable Master, to the adorable Bridegroom.
“Cannot we say of a soul to whom God extends this solicitude and these delicacies of love that the soul has made for our Lord a bed of roses and lilies, and that it is impossible that this adorable Master will not come, though he may delay, and take his delight with her.”
This saint, in whom religion was genius, was one of Ulick’s most unqualified admirations. He never spoke of her that his voice did not acquire an accent of conviction, or without alluding to the line of an old English poet, who had addressed her:
‘Oh, thou undaunted daughter of desires.’
She recalled with a smile his contempt of the Austins and the Eliots, those most materialistic writers, he would say, whose interest in humanity and whose knowledge of it is limited to social habits and customs. But St. Teresa he placed among the highest writers, among the great visionaries. “
Her desire sings,” he said, “like the sea and the winds, and it breaks like fire about God’s feet.” He had said that the soul that flashed from her pages was more intense than any soul in Shakespeare or Balzac. “They had created many, she but one incomparable soul — her own, and in surging drift of vehement aspiration, and in recession of temporal things we hear the singing of the stars, the beating of the eternal pulse.”
On Friday she had finished the autobiography, and before going into the garden she took down another of the saint’s works, The Way of Perfection, intending to look through it in some sunny corner.
She had slipped easily into the early hours of the convent. After breakfast she had the morning to herself, and she divided it between the library and the garden. The leaves were beginning to fall, and in the thinning branches there seemed to be an appearance of spring. From St. Peter’s walk she strolled into the orchard, and then into the piece of uncultivated ground at the end of it. Some of the original furze bushes remained, and among these a streamlet trickled through the long grasses, and following it she found that it led her to the fish pond in the shrubbery, at the back of St. Peter’s walk. There was there a pleasant, shady place, where she could sit and read. She stood for a moment watching the fish. They were so tame that they would take the bread from the novices’ hands. She had brought some bread, but she had to throw it to them. She divided it amongst them, not forgetting to favour the little ones, and she thought it strange that they could distinguish her from the novices. That much they knew of the upper air. The fish watched her out of their beady eyes, stirring in their dim atmosphere with a strange, finny motion.
