by Rumer Godden
‘Do you like it?’ he asked Sister Ruth, offering her his handkerchief. ‘It’s called Black Narcissus and I got it at the Army and Navy Stores.’
‘Black Narcissus!’ said Sister Ruth scornfully.
Afterwards in the Refectory, she told the others and said: ‘That’s what I’m going to call him. It’s a beautiful name for him. He’s so vain,’ she mocked, ‘like a peacock, a fine black peacock. I’m going to call him Black Narcissus.’
‘But he isn’t black,’ said Sister Honey, who had laughed and felt mean for laughing. ‘He’s only a dusky olive colour.’
‘They all look alike to me,’ said Sister Ruth loftily, and she answered Dilip ungraciously and said: ‘I don’t like scent at all.’
‘But don’t you think it’s rather common to smell of ourselves?’ he pleaded. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said shyly, ‘I’m trying very much to improve myself. Have you noticed any difference in me the last few days?’
‘I’ve noticed that you’re not getting on very fast with your French,’ answered Sister Ruth. ‘Now, General, will you write out from memory the present indicative of the verb “aller”, to go.’
It seemed suddenly and utterly fantastic to her, that she should be requiring French verbs from this dark young prince, in his shimmering coat; working in the smell of his narcissus scent made her head reel, and she went to the window, looking out across the terrace. She could just see the factory roof far down below and the streamer of smoke from its chimney; as she looked down, her eyes hardened and she squared her shoulders; then she leant against the sill, her chin on her hand, one finger tracing the line of the wood; she smiled, a curious little absent smile, and now her eyes were wide and softly green.
The young General seemed very beautiful to all the nuns. When he came galloping down the drive, flashing under the deodar trees, he might have been a forerunner of the spring and summer days that were so long in coming. They had seen so little colour in the winter that he seemed almost startling, and he came so fast, his pony’s mane rising in the wind like a crest, its tail streaming over the sky and clouds between the trees.
Sister Clodagh had let more than she knew into the Convent with the young General Dilip Rai.
He was outside everything they had considered real; he was the impossible made possible. He was fantastic. His white pony was a stallion of the famous Tangastiya breed; it galloped up and down the hills, and when he galloped it on the narrow paths of the high ground, his head looked to be above the clouds, and the trees below the path brushed his knees. His coats and jewels were fabulous, and he was as naïve and charming as the youngest son in a fairy story. His people were fantastic too, heady and strong with their crude bright clothes and goblin faces, and they also rode these white and dappled stallions.
‘Have you noticed,’ Sister Philippa asked once, ‘how important these people are? How they’ve impressed themselves on us, compared with the natives in other places we’ve been in?’
They and the General were not too fantastic for the country; nothing was too strange for the mysterious and impenetrable State and the ice mountains and the dark forests and the valley with its easy luscious fields.
Sister Honey stopped in her work to listen eagerly to the children saying their lesson in the next room, as if they belonged to her; Sister Philippa straightened her back from her frozen beds and stared across the garden, seeing it in summer, and Sister Ruth watched and waited for Mr Dean. Sister Clodagh’s face was so softened and changed that Mother Dorothea would not have known her.
‘Sometimes she looks half asleep,’ said Sister Briony. ‘Really, I’d think she had liver if she didn’t look so well. She’s as flushed and clear-skinned as a young girl!’
If Sister Briony noticed anything unusual about the Sisters, she thought spring must be coming and they needed dosing; all she thought about the General was that he should not be allowed to wear his best clothes in the morning. She was far too busy to look out of the window or to stop and think about people, except as legs and arms and heads that needed bandaging and eyes and stomachs and chests that came to be treated.
Sister Clodagh was very angry when she heard that Sister Ruth had nicknamed the young General ‘Black Narcissus’. She was angry and astonished at its neatness; what had made Sister Ruth echo her own dream with a name? In her dream, Dilip and Con had held mirrors in the palms of their hands, and she had tried to attract them but could only echo what they said. And now Sister Ruth had put her dream into words.
Often now, it was Con and not the young General who sat at her desk, while she was in her chair stitching at the wool picture of St Francis and the animals; there was not the gulf and the snowline beyond the windows, but the lawn and the veronica hedges, the foreshore and the lake and the low green mountains.
‘Con, won’t you ever finish? Pat’s had the boat waiting for the last hour.’
‘Lord, girl, can’t a man write a letter in peace?’ They smiled at one another across the room; there was such happiness in that, that she had to turn away and look at the lake and the boat with patient Patsy in the stern.
In summer they were often out with him on the lake after brown trout, or fishing the Upper River when it was not let, or else at the small stream that ran out on the lake. Every year the cousins came over for the shooting, and there were the long days on the mountain with the guns and Roderick and Morna and Gamble matching themselves against Con’s springers. ‘Call in your mad dog, Clo. Is it the Waterloo Cup you’ve entered it for? Take it home and cut off its tail just behind its ears. It’s corrupting my beautiful Joey.’
‘Joey! That rabbit catcher!’
Cousin Michael’s wife, Mary, eyed the men and said: ‘Well, Clo, I suppose very soon you and Con –?’
‘You and Con.’ Everyone was thinking that. Everyone was waiting. The Byrnes at Clough House, and the O’Driscolls at Fosse, and the Misses Barradine at Castle Maine, and Lady Truebridge, who was her godmother. ‘These emeralds are for you, child, when you marry Con.’ There were the Malley girls, Moira had been making eyes at Con since she was in socks; and the Riordans and the Shephards and the Monks, and young Jerry Caldecott who was the next Lord Toome, as mother was always pointing out. They were all waiting and wondering.
It was in the winter she saw most of them; that last winter every face had been an open question. Hounds met three mornings a week and Con had let her ride Thunderer as well as having her own Peewit. ‘Be careful of that horse, he’s the family fortune.’ Con kept by her side and showed her the way when she let him. ‘Be careful, Clo. Mind him at the break. Keep behind me if you can.’ The dances and the hunt balls were in the winter, and the Misses Barradine’s games party, and the tenants’ dance which was the only kind of entertainment Con’s people ever gave; that last one had made her stiff with self-consciousness, scenting congratulations in the air. ‘Miss Clodagh and Mr Con, isn’t it?’
But in the blessed summer months they were shut away by themselves; Con’s father was not the only one who withdrew into obscurity and let the house and the fishing and the shooting. ‘Our house is a byword now,’ grumbled Con, that last summer. ‘Even the agents can’t recommend it. No one will take it now.’ She was glad of it; it kept him there, and every evening his whistle came over the hedge.
Father looked over his paper. ‘That’s Con.’ Mother put down the fleecy knitting. ‘Now not too late, dear.’ As she closed the door she heard mother say: ‘Oh dear, I’d like them to settle something before next winter.’
They walked down the hill and leaned on the bridge to watch the stream run into the lake. She always remembered how, in the fields, the rabbits showed white scuts and undercoats as they played and the geese shone like pearls in the mud, and a gull over the lake showed white wings as it turned to the shore. She always remembered those small shining pieces of white.
‘It isn’t even a life for a man,’ said Con. ‘There isn’t anything in it for me. What do I get out of it, waiting for the old man to
die? Seeing him toil and slave for a house that’s falling to pieces over his head. The rot’s in and the land’s gone to weed and he won’t see it. He’ll kill himself for it and I’m expected to do the same. Why? Because we’ve always been here; because of a lot of old dead and buried men. What do I care what kind of blood I’ve got, when I haven’t a penny to bless myself with? What do I care if the land’s been ours for a thousand years when it isn’t worth a halfpenny now?’
‘But Con, you know quite well you’re proud of it and love it.’
‘Love it! When he dies, and it’s the sober truth I’m telling you, Clo, I shall let the whole thing go and clear out to Uncle Nat. I’ve written and told him so and he agrees with me. Fond as I am of the old man, there are things I won’t do. As soon as he goes, I go. I never want to see the place again.’
The water seemed to flow away from her, the geese, and the clouds seemed to run together into a blur. ‘Think of all there is to do in the world,’ cried Con. ‘God! Sometimes I can’t wait for it all. Clo, doesn’t it make you itch to get away?’
‘I don’t want to go away,’ she said. ‘I want to stay here, like this, for the rest of my life.’
‘Please, Sister,’ the young General was saying, urgently from her desk. ‘In this passage
“Laudate et benedicite mio signore et regratiate;
Et seruite a lui cum grande humilitate”
how do I translate “Et seruite”?’
She was sitting at her embroidery frame, the blue thread of St Francis’s eye in her hand, and the unstitched eye still staring at her from the canvas.
‘Sister, I’ve asked you twice,’ said Dilip plaintively. ‘What is the right translation for “Et seruite”?’
Kanchi looked for him every day, she watched him ride up and give his old coat to the groom so that it should not be seen, and pull down his cuffs and straighten his hair, and touch his earrings to be sure they were in place. Then he took up his books and went in to his lesson, leaving a waft of fragrance on the air, that made Sister Briony say: ‘Tsst! Tsst!’ and fetch the pine disinfectant.
If he saw Kanchi he smiled at her because she was young and pretty like himself, and because he knew that she desired him. He thought that was perfectly natural, but at present, with all his schemes and ambitions, he had no time for anyone but himself, and he smiled at her and went in to his lesson.
Kanchi dropped her lids at once, but after he had gone, she raised her eyes to his back and they were bright with tenderness and greed.
21
Father Roberts had put off coming until now, and after tea on the day of his visit he walked on the terrace with Sister Clodagh. He kept his hands behind his back, the wind blew the short hairs on his head into bristles and sent his cassock streaming out behind him like a skirt.
‘I hope you’re pleased,’ said Sister Clodagh.
‘Ye-es,’ said Father Roberts doubtfully. ‘It all seems excellent; very excellent. Yes, it certainly seems that. But –’ he stopped and looked directly at her. ‘Is anything worrying you Sister?’
‘Why do you ask that?’ she said steadily.
‘I don’t know, but you seem changed. Yes, you all of you seem changed, except my good friend Sister Briony and she’s always the same.’
‘In what way are we changed?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘I can’t quite say. I’ve noticed it with each one of you. It’s difficult to explain. I feel as if you were all hiding something from me. Nothing’s happened, has it?’
‘Nothing.’ She hesitated. ‘I told you that I had been worried over Sister Ruth, but she has been writing to Reverend Mother, and I think she’s better; and Sister Philippa has been overworking herself, but I think that’s all.’
‘I hope it is.’ He still spoke doubtfully. ‘You don’t think it was a mistake to allow the young General to come – I mean the novelty of it – but no, no it couldn’t be that, and I don’t see how you could have done anything else. I feel something’s upsetting you. Do you know in chapel this morning, I suddenly had the feeling that I was alone. That not one of you was listening to me.’
‘Father!’ said Sister Clodagh.
‘I did. Sister, if the place is too much for you, you will say so.’
‘But, Father, I don’t understand. I thought we’d made such progress here. That you’d be so pleased.’ She was touched to the quick.
‘It’s difficult to explain,’ was all he said. ‘To-day, I somehow felt I’d lost you. You’re none of you as single-hearted as you were.’
22
After Christmas night Sister Clodagh felt she could never see Mr Dean again; that this time she would not and could not tolerate him. He had come up as usual to see the buildings, but she had hardly seen him. She did not think he was avoiding her, he gave her the same twinkling smile when they did meet, but she always arranged to be busy when she saw him coming down the drive. Now, in answer to her enthusiastic letters to Mother Dorothea, a packet enclosing the chapel plans had come. Reverend Mother had written: ‘From your report we think the time has come when you may safely embark on the building of the chapel. You seem to have been very successful in the organizing of St Faith’s.’
Sister Clodagh had been worrying all night over Father Roberts’s odd words, but now she went humming to the window and opened it; she felt alight with happiness and hope. ‘You seem to have been very successful in the organizing of St Faith’s.’ As she leant out of the window she could hear the men busy on the class-rooms, a saw working, tapping and hammering, and the noise of someone pounding mortar; she could hear the workmen’s voices, and the chanting of the coolies as they dragged a roller on the drive, and the children in recitation in the school. Sister Briony came round the corner, her keys swinging and her veil wrapped round her shoulders; she gave some order to Sister Philippa who came up from the stables to meet her, and then their busy figures parted and they went back to their work. A pony trotted past with a load of wood, and a man came down from the General’s house with a basket of vegetables on his way to the kitchen. Sister Clodagh gave a satisfied smile and closed the window.
She felt that she must go and tell them all that the chapel was to be begun, that she had had a letter of commendation from Reverend Mother, who so rarely praised, that here was a reward for their work; but before she moved, with her hand still on the window catch, an unpleasant thought struck her. ‘You may safely embark on the building of the chapel.’ She could not possibly embark without Mr Dean.
All their conferences must begin again; she would be drawn into talking to him, and she had said firmly that this time he had gone too far and she had no more charity to give him. She stood there, her eyes on the carpet; she thought of Sister Ruth and the finished, careful work he had done for them before; she thought of his crude, peculiar opinions and his sudden rudeness, and then of the way in which he had dealt with all their troubles, of his gentleness with Sister Honey and the help he had given to Sister Briony and Sister Philippa. And then she thought of the new chapel, that was to be the centre of their lives, and the crisp new plans on her desk; it was the final establishment of the foundation, and she sat down at her desk and wrote a note, and then went to find Sister Briony.
‘Sister, I have a letter from Reverend Mother that has made me very happy. We are to start on the chapel, and I’ve sent for Mr Dean. Will you come and discuss the plans with him?’
It was to be as far as possible a replica of the chapel at Canstead, as were the chapels of nearly every house in the Order; the stalls and the carpet and the tiles for the dado had been sent out to each from England, and for each a reproduction of one of the windows in the great chapel at the Mother House.
‘These will be leaving very shortly, and we want to have the building as nearly ready as possible by the time that they arrive,’ Sister Clodagh told Mr Dean, spreading the plan out for him to see. ‘It’s our idea that it should face on to an enclosed garden, which Sister Philippa is very anxious to make. It
will give us quiet and seclusion.’
‘I see,’ he said, ‘just as you’ve got over that difficulty in the present room by fitting the thick serge curtains.’
They both looked up at him in surprise, but he was studying the plan. The chapel was rectangular, with a pointed roof that had a cross and a bell; inside, the walls had a dado of tiles and a dais for the altar. The window above it was a reproduction of the children’s window at Canstead, of the Flight into Egypt; a ruby-coloured Joseph, a blue Virgin and a khaki-coloured donkey.
‘Where will you get the glass for that?’
‘It comes out with the other things.’
‘Is it made in Birmingham, or did they pick it up at Woolworth’s at sixpence a pane?’
There was a silence, and then Sister Clodagh said: ‘Mr Dean, will you either help us or not help us? This means a very great deal to us and we can’t hear you talk like that about it, whatever you may think.’ Instead of apologizing he picked up the plan again, looking at it, and a look of stubborn disapproval filled his face; but he said nothing and she went on: ‘The tiles of the dado will gradually, as we can afford it, be replaced by panels of the same wood as the door.’
‘Will it have iron nails in it too?’ he asked; and then, suddenly, earnestly he said: ‘Sister Clodagh, is that a door for a chapel or an armoury?’
They stared at him, not understanding.
‘A chapel shouldn’t have a door,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t need one.’ He threw the plan back on the desk. ‘Sister, do you like this chapel?’
