Black Narcissus

by Rumer Godden

  ‘I’m sorry, Sister. I’m so tired that I sleep too soundly and that’s a fact. Mr Dean says the spring here is very trying and I think we’re all feeling it. And that reminds me, angry as I can’t help feeling with Sister Ruth, I don’t think she’s well. Perhaps that isn’t altogether her fault. She’s not sleeping. I hear her at night and at times I’ve seen her in a kind of shivering fit. I’d really like her to see a doctor. I wish we had sent her down with Sister Philippa.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t and we can’t help that now. After Easter I’ll see what I can arrange; she might go back with Father Roberts. Did you give her a tonic?’

  ‘Yes. She’s so rude if I ask her about herself, but don’t you think that she might be excused from early chapel until she’s better?’

  Sister Clodagh hesitated. ‘No,’ she said. ‘On the whole I think it’s wiser not to single her out in any way. She needs discipline.’

  ‘She certainly does,’ sighed Sister Briony. ‘Dear me, how odd it feels without Sister Philippa. But no one’s indispensable, are they? And we should all feel glad that we’re able to welcome Sister Adela. Poor soul, she must be worn out with all she’s suffered.’

  The first impression of Sister Adela was one of height; not a graceful height like a tree, but of a prop or a lamp-post or a figure on stilts from Hallowe’en with a carved-out turnip for a head. Sister Clodagh frowned at herself for thinking so, as she rose to meet her. ‘Poor thing, she must have suffered!’ she thought, and felt ashamed.

  Sister Adela had been at St Agnes’s in Canton. The Convent had not closed down during the bombing and she and another Sister had been wounded. When she turned her head, a scar showed, running down from her chin under her wimple towards her ear; it was raspberry coloured and still angry, and she carried her arm stiffly from a wound in her shoulder. She had been evacuated to India and the doctor had recommended that she should be sent to the hills for a long period; the escort that had taken Sister Philippa to Darjeeling had brought her back.

  ‘You see, she’s found her way safely to us,’ said Sister Honey, ushering her into the office.

  ‘I hope it didn’t jolt you too badly coming down the hill,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘Our ponies are sure-footed but they’re rough. You must be very tired.’

  ‘I’m accustomed to bad journeys,’ answered Sister Adela. ‘In China we often had to go very far between our schools and if we’d wasted time thinking whether we were tired or not, we should never have got anything done.’

  ‘Really,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘In that case you’ll be able to join us for supper. I was going to suggest that you went straight to bed.’

  ‘Oh, I think she should go straight to bed,’ Sister Honey interrupted, ‘she’s really very tired and she’s eaten almost nothing all day.’

  ‘But didn’t Sister Briony send provisions?’

  ‘She sent meat pies,’ said Sister Adela. ‘This is Lent and today is Friday.’

  Sister Clodagh coloured and said nothing. These last few days she had been examining every least thought and feeling, examining them all in an effort to get back to the atmosphere that she felt that they had lost. In chapel she had tried to stand outside herself and listen. Was it her imagination that the prayers sounded almost strange, as if she had not heard them for months? That it was an unfamiliar feeling to go down on her knees and pray, instead of the most natural thing of her life? She had tried to throw her earnestness and appeal into her voice, but she noticed how the Sisters’ eyes strayed and how very often they seemed to be following her with their lips, but with their minds far away.

  She had spoken to Sister Briony about sending the Sisters to St Ursula’s after Easter in turn for their annual Retreat that had been postponed from Christmas. ‘Yes, Sister,’ said Sister Briony, ‘but wouldn’t it be better to let them go in the rains or in the winter when we haven’t so much to do? I’d thought of having a spring cleaning, all these fires have made the house so dirty.’

  ‘How is Kanchi getting on with her Catechism?’ she asked Sister Honey. ‘Does she understand anything of it? Do you think she will be at all ready to see Father Roberts after Easter?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Sister Honey. ‘I haven’t heard her through it for a little while, I’ve been so busy. Sister, have you seen how Om’s little brother is improving? He hasn’t a single sore left. Do come and look at him!’ She held up the sleepy baby for Sister Clodagh to see.

  ‘Look, his eyes are so small that they disappear into fat when he smiles. Look, he’s smiling now. He knows me. What darlings these babies are! How different from the skinny little dried-up things in the plains, aren’t they, Sister? Look, he’s trying to catch my finger. Oh, I couldn’t love him more if he were mine.’

  ‘Don’t you let me hear you talk like this again,’ said Sister Clodagh in a sudden rush of feeling that was almost panic. ‘You’re getting entirely too sentimental over these children. You must control yourself, Sister, or I shall have to stop them coming here.’

  There was Sister Ruth going out to the terrace, her jacket huddled round her thin shoulders; she would stand by the railings looking down to the factory, searching the path that wound up between the tea, looking to where the hill hid the way to the Agent’s bungalow. When she saw Sister Clodagh, she drew herself up and walked quickly away to the class-rooms.

  Sister Clodagh was beginning to look haggard. She had driven herself and the others hard these last few days; she had tightened and narrowed her very thoughts, and worked and kept vigil at night, but still she found time to think. She had stopped her walks on the terrace and the hour she spent at her embroidery frame; if she woke in the night she got up at once and went to the chapel, and still she found time to think. In the middle of her work, in the middle of giving her orders, at her desk or at meals, even in chapel, her thoughts would catch her unawares. She would find she had been sitting for half an hour with her pen in her hand, or that Sister Briony was waiting for her to speak, or the young General was looking at her, patiently waiting for her to finish her sentence.

  In the second week of the month when the moon was full, the mountain glittered into the air by night as well as by day. She had a window in her cubicle; she had deliberately given that cubicle to herself, and now she lay and stared at the mountain, until she dressed again and went into the chapel.

  How often she had seen the first light creep on the green ceiling of the House of Novices at Canstead, defining the tops of the cubicles where the others lay happily sleeping. How often she had heard the first blackbird in the garden and known another night had gone, and she had not shut her eyes. She ached with sleep and still she could not shut her eyes. That was not in her first year; then she had been too sore and proud and angry; but it was impossible to stay in the Order like that, bit by bit they had drawn it all from her; but her pride was always left; she had never lost that, and they did not know that night after night she lay awake, listening to the chimes of St Joan’s clock from the great hall below.

  She still did not know how this had come on her again. It had seemed to radiate from the feeling of the wine-cup in her hand that day in the forest; she had looked up from it and seen the young groom with the leaves behind his ear; she had looked at him and thought of Con and then of her doubts and worries in the night.

  In the old days at Canstead, peace had gradually come to her; she had been drawn into the life of the Order and had found in it more than she had ever thought that life could mean; it had come to be her life and so it would continue to her death. That must be; nothing else could ever be, and desperately she had been fighting these last few days to find that peace again.

  Now she looked at Sister Adela and said nothing; but face to face with a Sister fresh from the older branch of the Order, the first house in India, she realized how far they had gone from it this winter. Even these small things, meat pies in Lent, Sister Honey interrupting her, were signs of it, and Sister Adela missed none of them. She was suddenly glad that Sister Adela had
come, that already she had criticized in that unbending voice, that she was looking coldly at Sister Honey. They were eyes with a fanatical light in them, they were eyes that would see more than there was to be seen.

  ‘I’m glad that you’ve come, Sister Adela,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘I think we need you here.’

  25

  Sister Adela met Mr Dean for the first time in the passage leading to the nuns’ private rooms. She stopped, dramatically barring the way, and said: ‘What are you doing here? You can’t come in here.’

  With the hand that held two spanners and a piece of rag, he took off old Feltie. ‘You’re the new Sister,’ he said. ‘How do you do? You’ll get used to me in time. I’m not prying. I’ve come to mend a loose joint in your pipe.’

  ‘My pipe? What pipe?’

  ‘The lavatory pipe,’ said Mr Dean blandly. ‘Now, may I go in and see to it?’

  ‘You must send a workman. I’ve told you, you can’t go in there.’

  ‘The mistri can’t deal with it,’ he said patiently. ‘He has tried. I count plumbing of sorts among my other gifts, and I swear to you, Sister,’ he said with his eyes twinkling, ‘it’s only the pipe that I’m interested in.’

  Sister Adela clapped the door to behind her. ‘I must see Sister Clodagh about this,’ she said. ‘Until then, I forbid you to go in there.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, putting on his hat, ‘but in fairness I must tell you that the plug won’t pull till I do, and I’m going away in half an hour and I shan’t be back for three days.’

  “This is something that I’ve never heard of,’ cried Sister Adela indignantly before Sister Clodagh’s desk. ‘I never expected to be asked to tolerate this.’

  ‘Why should you object to him more than to any other workman?’

  ‘He’s not a workman, that’s why. You should have heard the way he spoke to me!’

  ‘How did you speak to him?’ asked Sister Clodagh. ‘He’s usually respectful unless he’s provoked, and then he only does it to tease.’

  ‘Why should I tolerate it?’

  ‘We have to,’ answered Sister Clodagh wearily. ‘We can’t manage without him. I don’t think you realize the conditions here, Sister, our complete isolation and the difficulties of finding adequate help. These hill-people are peasants, agriculturists; they haven’t learned to be skilled workmen and they’re not good carpenters or smiths or plumbers. We’re dependent on Mr Dean and he has been very good to us. Perhaps it will help you to understand, when I say that I call him in very much as I should call in a doctor. You didn’t refuse to see a doctor when you were ill, did you? In the same way it’s necessary that Mir Dean should go into our private part of the house and repair that pipe. He does so when the rooms are empty; you only met him this morning because you haven’t taken up your work yet.’

  ‘You mean he comes here often?’

  ‘There’s-still a great deal to be done. He’s building the chapel for us and the class-rooms are not finished yet, and he’s helping me with some translations because he speaks this dialect as well as he speaks English. He comes when it’s necessary. He seems odd and rude, but he’s really very kind.’

  Sister Honey found it hard to swallow Sister Adela’s comments. When she came into the Lace School, her eyebrows went up above those gaunt all-seeing eyes.

  The Lace School was nearly finished; the workmen were busy on the interior which smelled of whitewash and wood shavings. The girls moved their mats round the room out of their way and Sister Honey’s chair and table followed them.

  There were two separate conversations; the shy whispering of the girls broken with giggles, and the burring noise made by the men when they tried to speak softly to one another in their deep voices. Often while they were planing a piece of wood in the vice or tarring the plinth of a door, they stopped to watch the fingers at work on the bobbins and the curious result of knitted threads that the Lemini prized enough to pay for it. Then one of the girls would notice that she was watched, and would droop her head under her shawl and make secret glances at the others; the folds about her face made a deeper shadow, the warmth of her cheek came up under the brown and the ring in her nose glinted as she trembled with inward laughter; Kanchi would toss her head and say a few words to the others that the men would catch and a slow smile would spread from face to face round the room, and then the man would be transfixed with his mouth a little open until Sister Honey looked up, when he would drop his head and, too hastily, begin to work again.

  Sister Adela said nothing, she stood by the table fingering the patterns.

  ‘You find all this a little unusual, Sister?’ said Sister Honey at last, with a deprecatory wave of her hand.

  ‘Very unusual.’

  ‘It’s only until we’re settled. It was expedient,’ said Sister Honey impressively. ‘I wanted space for my clinic and the girls would have caught cold on the verandah.’

  ‘Would it have done them any harm to have caught cold?’ answered Sister Adela.

  Sister Honey flushed and answered as Sister Clodagh had done. ‘We’re living under primitive conditions –’

  ‘You forget I was at the opening of St Teresa’s in the hills. There we had to start from the bare ground; we organized the labour and the workmen, and as they built room after room, we took them over and finished them ourselves. There were no Europeans there either, except a French doctor, and,’ finished Sister Adela, ‘I never remember seeing him.’

  She went down the new corridor that joined the schools to the main building and turned to the right by the statue of St Elizabeth; she stood there for a little while to get her breath, for she was still weak and the altitude made her breathe too quickly. St Elizabeth had a robe with a glaze like blue linen, and the porcelain roses in her lap gleamed beside her hands that were like a doll’s.

  ‘Don’t you think she’s awfully pretty?’ asked a voice beside her.

  Behind a partition screen which had been pushed back, a young man sat at a desk writing busily in an exercise book; in front of him stood a pink text book that read French Without Tears, and he was copying from it, with his tongue at the corner of his mouth. He was dressed in pink too, but as pale as a shell, and he had amethyst earrings as large as sixpences stuck in his ears. Her eyes travelled from his shoes, over his pantaloons and achkan to his head, measuring his size, and hardened into hostility.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked him as she had asked Mr Dean.

  ‘At present I’m doing the verb “s’asseoir”, to seat oneself.’ He put down his pen and smiled at her. ‘But to-morrow I’m going to read a child’s easy book called Les Malheurs de Sophie. Do you know it? Have you read it? Can you read French? Are you a Sister or a Mother? I do so want to meet a Mother.’

  ‘Who are you?’ demanded Sister Adela.

  ‘I am General Dilip Rai. How do you do?’ he stood up and bowed.

  ‘General?’ Her voice was suspicious though her ears had rung with the names of generals and warlords for the last months. ‘What have you done to be made a General?’

  ‘I didn’t make myself one. It was my brother.’

  ‘Well, what did he do?’

  ‘He died,’ said Dilip simply.

  ‘You mean you inherited the title. I’ve never heard of anyone inheriting a military title. What did he do to be made a General in the first place?’

  ‘He was born,’ said Dilip. ‘He wasn’t made a General, he was born one. I would have been born one too, but my Uncle wasn’t certain if I were legitimate; now it has been proved that I am and I am now allowed to be General as my brother was. He is dead and I am to inherit from my Uncle and that’s why I am so busy with my education. Sister Clodagh is helping me.’

  ‘I suppose you are a Christian,’ she said, ‘or you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I’m not a Christian out loud,’ said Dilip. ‘My Uncle wouldn’t let me change my religion.’

  ‘The religion of this country is a form of Hinduism or else a low form of Bu
ddhism that is, in reality, Animism,’ pronounced Sister Adela.

  ‘Is it?’ asked Dilip interested. ‘How do you spell that? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a form of Pantheism,’ said Sister Adela contemptuously.

  ‘Pantheism?’ he cried, writing it down delightedly. ‘And that? How do you spell it and what is it?’

  ‘Saying that God is in everything, animate and inanimate; in the trees and stones and streams.’

  ‘That sounds very beautiful,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but it certainly isn’t true.’

  Sister Adela was surprised. ‘Why are you so sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Because,’ he said, ‘we can conquer trees and streams and stones; we can cut down the forest and dam the stream and break up the stones, but we can’t conquer God. Now, He,’ he said, pointing with his pen, ‘might very well be in the mountain. We call it Kanchenjunga and we believe that God is there. No one can conquer that mountain and they never will. Men can’t conquer God, they only go mad for the love of Him. We have a legend in this country that among those mountains are strange men, who have gone mad for love of the mountain, and because of being mad, they go naked in the snow with white hair on their necks and chests and arms, and their eyes are like ice. And whoever sees them,’ said Dilip, his eyes growing big, ‘they kill and devour and we call them the Abominable Men. They have gone too close to the mountain, and they are mad.’

  ‘You have a very vivid imagination, haven’t you?’ said Sister Adela.

  ‘Well, I got some of that out of a book,’ he said modestly, ‘but it’s all perfectly true. You have to be very strong to live close to God or a mountain, or you’ll turn a little mad. The strongest of all,’ he said, ‘is my Great-Uncle, the Sunnyasi. He makes himself strong inside himself and he can look at the mountain all day.’

  She turned sharply. Behind her she had seen a flash of colour by the door, a red sleeve, the end of a veil, and heard a tinkling that might have come from a pair of anklets.