Complete Works of George Moore

by George Moore

  “But, Mother, do you regret that you came here?”

  The old nun did not answer for some time.

  “It is hard to say, Teresa. There are deceptions everywhere, in the convent as in the world; and the mediocrity of the Sisters here is tiresome; one longs for a little more intelligence. And, as I was saying just now, everything declines; an idea ravels like a sleeve. Are you happy here?… You are not; I see it in your eyes.”

  “The only ones who are happy here,” Evelyn answered, “I am sure, are those like Veronica, who pass from the schoolroom to the novitiate.”

  “You think that? But the convent is a great escapement. You came here, having escaped death only by an accident, and when you went to Rome to see your father you came back distraught, your mind unhinged, and it was months before you could believe that your sins could be forgiven. If you leave here, what will become of you? You will return to the stage.”

  Evelyn smiled sadly.

  “You will meet your lovers again. Temptation will be by you; you are still a young woman. How old are you, Teresa?”

  “Thirty-eight. But I no longer feel young.”

  “Then, do you not think it better to spend the last term with us? I am an old woman, Teresa, and you are the only friend I have in the convent, the only one who knows me; it would be a great charity if you were to remain with me…. But you fear I shall live too long? No, Teresa, the time will not be very long.”

  “Mother, don’t talk like that, it only grieves me. As long as you wish me to stay I’ll stay.”

  “But if I weren’t here you would leave?” Evelyn did not answer. “You would be very lonely?”

  “Yes, I should be lonely.” And then, speaking at the end of a long silence, she said, “Why did you send away Sister Mary John? She was my friend, and one must have a friend — even in a convent.”

  “Teresa, I begged of her to remain. And you are lonely now without her?”

  “I should be lonelier, Mother, if you weren’t here.”

  “We will share our loneliness together.”

  Evelyn seemed to acquiesce.

  “My dear child, you are very good; you have a kind heart. One sees it in your eyes.”

  She left the Prioress’s room frightened, saying. “Till the Prioress’s death.”

  XXXI

  FATHER DALY PACED the garden alley, reading his Breviary, and, catching sight of him, Sister Winifred, a tall, thin woman, with a narrow forehead and prominent teeth, said to herself, “Now’s my chance.”

  “I hope you won’t mind my interrupting you, Father, but I have come to speak to you on a matter of some importance. It will take some minutes for me to explain it all to you, and in confession, you see, our time is limited. You know how strict the Prioress is that we shouldn’t exceed our regulation three minutes.”

  “I know that quite well,” the little man answered abruptly; “a most improper rule. But we’ll not discuss the Prioress, Sister Winifred. What have you come to tell me?”

  “Well, in a way, it is about the Prioress. You know all about our financial difficulties, and you know they are not settled yet.”

  “I thought that Sister Teresa’s singing—”

  “Of course, Sister Teresa’s singing has done us a great deal of good, but the collections have fallen off considerably; and, as for the rich Catholics who were to pay off our debts, they are like the ships coming from the East, but whose masts have not yet appeared above the horizon.”

  “But does the Prioress still believe that these rich Catholics will come to her aid?”

  “Oh, yes, she believes; she tells us that we must pray, and that if we pray they will come. Well, Father, prayer is very well, but we must try to help ourselves, and we have been thinking it over; and, in thinking it over, some of us have come to very practical conclusions.”

  “You have come to the conclusion that perhaps a good deal of time is wasted in this garden, which might be devoted to good works?”

  “Yes, that has struck us, and we think the best way out of our difficulties would be a school.”

  “A school!”

  “Something must be done,” she said, “and we are thinking of starting a school. We’ve received a great deal of encouragement. I believe I could get twenty pupils to-morrow, but Mother Prioress won’t hear of it. She tells us that we are to pray, and that all will come right. But even she does not depend entirely upon prayer; she depends upon Sister Teresa’s singing.”

  “A most uncertain source of income, I should say.”

  “So we all think.”

  They walked in silence until within a few yards of the end of the walk; and, just as they were about to turn, the priest said:

  “I was talking at the Bishop’s to a priest who has been put in charge of a parish in one of the poorest parts of South London. There is no school, and the people are disheartened; and he has gone to live among them, in a wretched house, in one of the worst slums of the district. He lives in one of the upper rooms, and has turned the ground floor, which used to be a greengrocer’s shop, into a temporary chapel and school, and now he is looking for some nuns to help him in the work. He asked me if I could recommend any, and I thought of you all here, Sister Winifred, with your beautiful church and garden, doing, what I call, elegant piety. It has come to seem to me unbearably sad that you and I and these few here, who could do such good work, should be kept back from doing it.”

  “I am afraid our habit, Father, makes that sort of work out of the question for us.” And Sister Winifred dropped her habit for a moment and let it trail gracefully.

  “Long, grey habits, that a speck of dirt will stain, are very suitable to trail over green swards, but not fit to bring into the houses of the poor, for fear they should be spoiled. “Oh,” he cried, “I have no patience with such rules, such petty observances. I have often asked myself why the Bishop chose to put me here, where I am entirely out of sympathy, where I am useless, where there is nothing for me to do really, except to try to keep my temper. I have spoken of this matter to no one before, but, since you have come to speak to me, Sister Winifred, I, too, must speak. Ever since I’ve been here I’ve been longing for some congenial work — work which I could feel I was intended to do. It seems hard at times to feel one’s life slipping away and the work one could do always withheld from one’s reach. You understand?”

  “Indeed, I do. It is the fate of many of us here, Father Daly.”

  “Now, if you could make a new foundation — if some three or four of you — if the Bishop would send me there.”

  “Of course, we might go and do good work in the district you speak of, but I doubt whether the Bishop would recognise us as a new foundation.”

  “I daresay he wouldn’t.” And they walked a little way in silence. “You were telling me of your project for a school, Sister Winifred.”

  Sister Winifred entered into the details. But she had unduly excited Father Daly, and he could not listen.

  “My position here,” he said, interrupting her, “is an impossible one. The only ones here who consider my advice are the lay sisters, the admirable lay sisters who work from morning till evening, and forego their prayers lest you should want for anything. You know I’m treated very nearly with contempt by almost all the choir sisters. You think I don’t know that I am spoken of as a mere secular priest? Every suggestion of mine meets with a rude answer. You have witnessed a good deal of this, Sister Winifred. I daresay you’ve forgotten, but I remember it all… you have come to speak to me here because the Prioress will not allow you to spend more than three minutes in the confessional, arrogating to herself the position of your spiritual adviser, only allowing to me what is to her no more than the mechanical act of absolution. In her eyes I am a mere secular priest, incapable of advising those who live in an Order! Do you think I haven’t noticed her deference to the very slightest word that Father Ambrose deigns to speak to her? Her rule doesn’t apply to his confessional, only to mine — a rule which I have always reg
arded as extremely unorthodox; I don’t feel at all sure that the amateur confessional which she carries on upstairs wouldn’t be suppressed were it brought under the notice of Rome; I have long been determined to resist it, and I beg of you, Sister Winifred, when you come to me to confession to stay as long as you think proper. On this matter I now see that the Prioress and I must come to an understanding.”

  “But not a word. Father Daly, must we breathe to her of what I have come to tell you about. The relaxation of our Order must be referred to the Bishop, and with your support.”

  They walked for some yards in silence, Father Daly reflecting on the admirable qualities of Sister Winifred, her truthfulness and her strength of character which had brought her to him; Sister Winifred congratulating herself on how successfully she had deceived Father Daly and thinking how she might introduce another subject into the conversation (a delicate one it was to introduce); so she began to talk as far away as possible from the subject which she wished to arrive at. The founders of the Orders seemed to her the point to start from; the conversation could be led round to the question of how much time was wasted on meditation; it would be easy to drop a sly hint that the meditations of the nuns were not always upon the Cross; she managed to do this so adroitly that Father Daly fell into the trap at once.

  “Love of God, of course, is eternal; but each age must love God in its own fashion, and our religious sentiments are not those of the Middle Ages.” The exercises of St. Ignatius did not appeal in the least to Father Daly, who disapproved of letting one’s thoughts brood upon hell; far better think of heaven. Too much brooding on hell engenders a feeling of despair, which was the cause of Sister Teresa’s melancholia. Too intense a fear of hell has caused men, so it is said, to kill themselves. It seems strange, but men kill themselves through fear of death. “I suppose it is possible that fear of hell might distract the mind so completely — Well, let us not talk on these subjects. We were talking of—” The nun reminded the priest they were talking of the exercises of St. Ignatius. “Let us not speak of them. St. Ignatius’s descriptions of the licking of the flames round the limbs of the damned may have been suitable in his time, but for us there are better things in the exercises.”

  “But do you not think that the time spent in meditation might be spent more profitably, Father? I have often thought so.”

  “If the meditation were really one.”

  “Exactly, Father, but who can further thoughts; thought wanders, and before one is aware one finds oneself far from the subject of the meditation.”

  “No doubt; no doubt.”

  “It was through active work that Sister Teresa was cured.” “If any fact has come to your knowledge, Sister, it is your duty to tell it to me, the spiritual adviser of the nuns, notwithstanding all the attempts of the Prioress to usurp my position.”

  “Well, Father, if you ask me—”

  “Yes, certainly I ask you.” And Sister Winifred told how, through a dream, Sister Cecilia had been unable to go down from her cell to watch before the Sacrament.

  “We are not answerable for our dreams,” the priest answered.

  “No; but if we pray for dreams?”

  “But Cecilia could not desire such a dream?”

  “Not exactly that dream.” And so the story was gradually unfolded to the priest.

  “What you tell me is very serious. The holy hours which should be devoted to meditation of the Cross wasted in dreams of counterparts! A strange name they have given these visitations, some might have given them a harsher name.” Father Daly’s thoughts went to certain literature of the Middle Ages. “The matter is, of course, one that is not entirely unknown to me; it is one of the traditional sins of the convent, one of the plagues of the Middle Ages. The early Fathers suffered from the visits of Succubi. What you tell me is very alarming. Would it not be well for me to speak to the Prioress on the subject?”

  “No, on no account.”

  “But she must be exceedingly anxious to put a stop to such a pollution of the meditation?”

  “Yes, indeed, I will say that nobody is more opposed to it; but she is one of these women who, though she sees that something is wrong, will not go to the root of the wrong at once. The tendency of her mind is towards the contemplative, and not towards the active orders, and she will not give way to the relaxation of the rule. You had better just take the matter into your hands, feeling sure she will approve of the action in the end. A word or two on the subject in your sermon on Sunday would be very timely.”

  Father Daly promised to think the matter over, and Sister Winifred said:

  “But you must know we shall have much opposition?”

  “But who will oppose us?”

  “Those who have succeeded in getting counterparts will not surrender them easily.” And Sister Winifred was persuaded to mention the names of the nuns incriminated in this traffic with the spirits of the children who had been drowned in Noah’s flood.

  “Beings from the other world!” Father Daly cried, alarmed that not one of the nuns had spoken on this subject to him in the convent. “This is the first time a nun has spoken to me—”

  “All will speak to you on this matter when you explain to them the danger they are incurring — when you tell them in your sermon. There is the bell; now I must fly. I will tell you more when I come to confession this afternoon.” As she went up the path she resolved to remain ten minutes in the confessional at least, for such a breach of the rule would challenge the Prioress’s spiritual authority, and in return for this Father Daly would use his influence with the Bishop to induce the Prioress to relax the rule of the community. To make her disobedience more remarkable, she loitered before slipping into the confessional, and the Prioress, who had just come into the chapel, noticed her. But without giving it another thought the Prioress began her prayers. At the end of five minutes, however, she began to grow impatient, and at the end of ten minutes to feel that her authority had been set aside.

  “You’ve been at least ten minutes in the confessional, Sister Winifred.”

  “It is hard, indeed, dear Mother, if one isn’t allowed to confess in peace,” Sister Winifred answered. And she tossed her head somewhat defiantly.

  “All the hopes of my life are at an end,” the Prioress said to Mother Hilda.” Every one is in rebellion against me; and this branch of our Order is about to disappear. I feel sure the Bishop will decide against us, and what can we do with the school? Sister Winifred will have to manage it herself. I will resign. It is hard indeed that this should happen after so many years of struggle; and, after redeeming the convent from its debts, to be divided in the end.”

  XXXII

  NEXT SUNDAY FATHER Daly took for his text, “And all nations shall turn and fear the Lord truly, and shall bury their idols” (Toby xiv. 6).

  “Yes, indeed, we should bury our idols.” And then Father Daly asked if our idols were always external things, made of brass and gold, or if they were not very often cherished in our hearts — the desires of the flesh to which we give gracious forms, and which we supply with specious words; “we think,” he said, “to deceive ourselves with those fair images born of our desires; and we give them names, and attribute to them the perfections of angels, believing that our visitations are angels, but are we sure they are not devils?”

  The Prioress raised her eyes, and looked at him long and steadily, asking herself what he was going to say next.

  He went on to tell how one of the chief difficulties of monastic life was to distinguish between the good and the evil visitant, between the angel and the demon; for permission was often given to the demon to disguise himself as an angel, in order that the nun and the monk might be approved. Returning then to the text, he told the story of Tobit and Tobias’s son, and how Tobias had to have resort to burning perfumes in order to save himself from death from the evil spirit, who, when he smelt the perfume, fled into Egypt and was bound by an angel. “We, too, must strive to bind the evil spirit, and we can do so w
ith prayer. We must have recourse to prayer in order to put the evil spirit to flight. Prayer is a perfume, and it ascends sweeter than the scent of roses and lilies, greeting God’s nostrils, which are in heaven.”

  The Prioress thought this expression somewhat crude, and she again looked at the preacher long and steadfastly, asking herself if the text and Father Daly’s interpretation of it were merely coincidences, or if he were speaking from knowledge of the condition of convents… Cecilia, had she told him everything? The Prioress frowned. Sister Winifred was careful not to raise her eyes to the preacher, for she was regretting his words, foreseeing the difficulties they would lead her into, knowing well that the Prioress would resent this interference with her authority, and she would have given much to stop Father Daly; but that, of course, was impossible now, and she heard him say that the angel who bound the evil spirit in Egypt four thousand years ago is to-day the symbol of the priest in the confessional, and it was only by availing themselves of that Sacrament, not in any invidious sense, but in the fullest possible sense, confiding their entire souls to the care of their spiritual adviser, that they could escape from the evil spirits which penetrated into monasteries to-day no less than before, as they had always done, from the earliest times; for the more pious men and women are, the more they retire from the world, the more delicate are the temptations which the devil invents. Convents dedicate to the Adoration of the Sacrament, to meditation on the Cross, convents in which active work is eschewed are especially sought by the evil spirits, “the larvæ of monasticism,” he called them. An abundance of leisure is favourable to the hatching of these; and he drew a picture of how the grub first appears, and then the winged moth, sometimes brown and repellant, sometimes dressed in attractive colours like the butterfly. The soul follows as a child follows the butterfly, from flower to flower through the sunshine, led on out of the sunshine into dark alleys, at the end of which are dangerous places, from whence the soul may never return again.