‘I have been a very useless little angel,’ she answered, ‘and I am sorry for it. But I mean to do better now, and you will help me, won’t you?’
‘That is all I ask! But to tell the truth, I was discouraged to-day, and I have been to ask the advice of a very good man. There! I have told you, and I am glad of it, because I hate secrets! He has promised to come and see you, and talk to you, but now that you are yourself again — —’ She stopped, as if embarrassed.
‘Who is he?’ asked Angela with a shade of distrust. ‘A priest?’
‘Please do not be angry!’ Madame Bernard began to repent of what she had done. ‘I was so much distressed — I felt that you were slipping out of the world day by day, just dying of a broken heart, so I went to see him this afternoon.’
‘I am not going to die,’ Angela said confidently. ‘Who is he? I think I know at last what I must do, without the advice of a priest. But tell me who he is.’
‘He is such a good man, my dear — Monsignor Saracinesca.’
‘That is different,’ Angela said, changing her tone at once. ‘I shall be very glad to see Monsignor Saracinesca. He is a real saint, if there is one living.’
CHAPTER VII
THERE IS A religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of Santa Giovanna d’Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the last ten years, but few will ever return.
The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the portress’s wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself. If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid, mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the patients must pass her when they enter or leave the house, as well as the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps, the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another, and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon, Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many of his patients brought there to be operated on and nursed.
The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific principles, without the least fuss, or any ‘board of trustees’ or ‘committee of management,’ or any of that cumbrous administration which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately unpractical.
There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other. On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.
Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the patients are taken. The Mother Superior’s rooms are those above the cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so that each window has two little arches.
In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor, with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we older men can remember only too well.
There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to be hot. But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say something about her surroundings.
An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the history of Angela’s soul from the day on which she learned the bad news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final vows of her order in the little convent church. But one great objection to psychological analysis in novels seems to be that the writer never gets beyond analysing what he believes that he himself would have felt if placed in the ‘situation’ he has invented for his hero or heroine. Thus analysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her. I shall not try to ‘factorise’ the result represented by her state of mind from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to prove that the ratio of dx to dy is twice x, the change in Angela at any moment of her moral growth.
What has happened must be logical, just because it has happened; if we do not understand the logic, that may or may not be the worse for us, but the facts remain.
It is easy, too, to talk of a ‘vocation’ and to lay down the law regarding it, in order to say that such and such a woman acted wisely in entering a religious order, or that such another made a mistake. The fact that there is no such law is itself the reason why neither a man nor a woman is permitted nowadays to take permanent vows until after a considerable period of probation, first as a ‘postulant’ and then as a novice.
For my own part, when Angela Chiaromonte left Madame Bernard’s pleasant rooms in Trastevere and went into the convent hospital of Santa Giovanna d’Aza through the green door, I do not believe that she had the very smallest intention of becoming a nun, nor that she felt anything like what devout persons call a ‘vocation.’ It was not to disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn to an existence of asceticism a
nd mystic meditation.
The prospect of work was what attracted her. She was a perfectly healthy-minded girl, and though she might never cease to mourn the man she had loved, it was to be foreseen that in all other respects she might recover entirely from the terrible shock and live out a normal life. Under ordinary circumstances that is what would have happened; she would have gone back to the world after a time, outwardly the same, though inwardly changed in so far as all possibilities of love and marriage were concerned; she would have lived in society, year after year, growing old gracefully and tenderly, as some unmarried women do whose stories we never knew or have forgotten, but whose hearts are far away, watching for the great To-morrow, beside a dead man’s grave, or praying before an altar whence the god has departed. They are women whom we never call ‘old maids,’ perhaps because we feel that in memory they are sharing their lives with a well-loved companion whom we cannot see. That might have been Angela’s future.
But a brutal fact put such a possibility out of the question. She was a destitute orphan, living on the charity of her former governess, whereas her nature was independent, brave, and self-reliant. When she rose above the wave that had overwhelmed her, and opened her eyes and found her senses again, her instinct was to strike out for herself, and though she talked with Monsignor Saracinesca again and again, she had really made up her mind after her first conversation with him. She saw that she must work for her living, but at the same time she longed to devote her life to some good work for Giovanni’s sake. The churchman told her that if she could learn to nurse the sick, she might accomplish both ends.
He never suggested that she should become a nun, or take upon herself any permanent obligation. He had seen much of human nature; the girl was very young, and perhaps he underrated the strength of her love for the dead man, and thought that she might yet marry happily and live a normal woman’s life. But there was no reason why she should not become a trained nurse in the meantime, and there was room for her in the nuns’ hospital of Saint Joan of Aza, an institution which owes its first beginnings and much of its present success to the protection of the Saracinesca family, and more particularly to the Princess herself, the beautiful Donna Corona of other days, and to her second son, Monsignor Ippolito. The hospital was always in need of young nurses, especially since a good many of the older ones were going to the Far East, and when there was a choice the Mother Superior gave the preference to applicants from the better classes.
The matter was therefore settled without difficulty, and Angela was soon installed in the tiny room which remained her cell for years afterwards. It contained a narrow iron bedstead, and during the day a small brass cross always lay on the white coverlet; there was a chest of drawers, a minute table on which stood an American nickeled alarum clock; there was one rush-bottomed chair, and the only window looked westwards over the low city wall towards Monteverde, where the powder magazine used to stand before it was blown up. The window was latticed half-way up, which did not hinder Angela from seeing the view when she had time to look at it.
She wore a plain grey frock at first, but when she was in the wards it was quite covered by the wide white cotton garment which all the nurses wore when on duty. Occasionally Madame Bernard came and took her for a walk, and sometimes she went out on an errand with one of the nuns; but she did not care very much for that, possibly because she was not under any restraint. The beautiful enclosed garden was wide and sunny, and she could generally be alone there; when the weather was fine she could wander about between the beds of roses and carnations or sit on a bench, and if it rained she could walk up and down under the cloisters. The three old nuns who came out to sun themselves paid no attention to her, beyond nodding rather shakily when she bent her head to them in respectful salutation. They had seen more than a hundred girls enter the convent, to work and grow old like themselves, and one more neither made any difference to them nor possessed for them the least interest. That strange petrifaction had begun in them which overtakes all very old monks and nuns who have never had very active minds. From doing the same things, with no appreciable variation, at the same hours for fifty, sixty, and even seventy years, they become so perfectly mechanical that their bodies are always in one of a limited number of attitudes, less and less pronounced as great age advances, till they at last cease to move at all and die, as the hands of a clock stop when it has run down.
But the three old nuns belonged to a past generation, and it was not probable that the younger Sisters would ever be like them. The Mother Superior was a small and active woman, with quick black eyes, a determined mouth, and a strangely pale face. She seemed to be incapable of being tired. Among themselves the novices called her the little white volcano. When the one who had invented the epithet repeated it to Monsignor Saracinesca in confession, and he gently told her that it was wrong to speak disrespectfully of her superior, she rather pertly asked him whether any one who lived under a volcano could fail to ‘respect’ it; whereat he shook his head gravely inside the confessional, but his spiritual mouth twitched with amusement, in spite of himself. The four novices were inclined to distrust Angela at first, however, as she was not even a postulant, and it was not till she became one of themselves that she was initiated into their language.
It was not long before this took place, however. From the first, she showed a most unusual aptitude in learning the mechanical part of her profession, and her extraordinary memory made it easy for her to remember the lectures which were given for the nurses three times a week, generally by the house surgeon, but occasionally by the great Doctor Pieri, who had been a pupil of Basini of Padua and was a professor in the University of Rome. He showed especial interest in Angela, and the pert little novice wickedly suggested that he was falling in love with her; but the truth was that he at once distinguished in her the natural gifts which were soon to make her the most valuable nurse at his disposal.
The Mother Superior expected that she would become vain and gave her some energetic lectures on the evils of conceit. There was a sort of fury of good about the pale woman that carried everything before it. She was just, but her righteous anger was a ready firebrand, and when it burst into flame, as often happened, her eloquence was extraordinary. Her face might have been carved out of white ice, but her eyes glowed like coals and her words came low, quick, and clear, and wonderfully to the point. As a girl, her temper had been terrific, and had estranged her from her own family; but her unconquerable will had forged it into a weapon that never failed her in a just cause and was never drawn in an unjust one. Monsignor Saracinesca sometimes thought that Saint Paul must have had the same kind of fiery and fearless temperament.
It sometimes outran facts, if it always obeyed her intention, as happened one day when she privately gave Angela a sermon on vanity which would have made the other novices tremble at the time and feel very uncomfortable for several days afterwards. When she had wound up her peroration and finished, she drew two or three fierce little breaths and scrutinised the young girl’s face; but to her surprise it had not changed in the least. The clear young eyes were as steady and quiet as ever; if they expressed anything, it was a quiet admiration which the older woman had not hitherto roused in the younger members of her community.
‘Pray for me, Mother,’ Angela said, ‘and I will try to be less vain.’
The other looked at her again very keenly, and then, instead of answering, asked a question.
‘Why do you wish to be a nun?’
Angela had lately asked herself the same thing, but she replied with some diffidence:
‘If I can do a little good, by working very hard all my life, I hope that it may be allowed to help the soul of a person who died suddenly.’
The Mother Superior’s white face softened a little.
‘That is a good intention,’ she said. ‘If it is sincere and lasting, you will be a good nun. You may begin your noviciate on Sunday if you have made up your mind.’
‘I am ready.’
&nbs
p; ‘Very well. I have only one piece of advice to give you, and perhaps I shall remind you of it often, for it was given to me very late, and I should have been the better for it. Try to remember what I tell you.’
‘I will remember, Mother.’
‘It is this. Count your failures but not your successes. You cannot surprise God by the amount of good you do. There are girls who enter upon the noviciate just as hard-working students go up for an examination, hoping to astonish their examiners by the amount they know. That is well enough at the university, but it is all wrong in religion. Work how you will, you cannot be perfect, and, if you were, you could only be what God made man before sin came. Each student is trying to beat all the others, and one succeeds. We are not trying to outdo each other; there are no marks in our examination and there is no competition. We are working together to save life in a world where millions die for want of care. To do less than the best we can is failure, for each of us, and the best we can all do together is very little compared with all there is to be done. Faith, Hope, and Charity are all we have to help us, all we can ask of Heaven. Believe, hope, and help others while you live, and all will go well hereafter, never fear! Not to help, not to believe, not to hope, even during one moment, is to fail in that moment. Where the sum is light, it is easy to count the dark places, but not the light itself. That is what I mean, my daughter, when I say, keep account of your failures but not of your successes. Try to remember it.’
‘Indeed I will,’ Angela answered.
She went back to her work, and the Mother Superior’s words thereafter became the rule of her life; but she was not sent for again to listen to a lecture on vanity, and the small White Volcano was inclined to think that it had made a mistake in breaking out, and inwardly offered a conditional apology.
Angela worked hard, and made such progress that before the two years of her noviciate were over Doctor Pieri said openly that she was the best surgical nurse in the hospital, and one of the best for ordinary illnesses, considering how limited her experience had been. The nursing of wounds is more mechanical than the nursing of a fever, for instance, and can be sooner learned by a beginner, where the surgeon himself is always at hand. On the other hand, the value of surgical nursing depends on relative perfection of detail and rigorous adherence to the set rules of prophylaxis, whereas other nursing often requires that judgment which only experience can give. Surgery is a fine art that has reached a high degree of development in the treatment of facts, about which good surgeons are generally right. A great deal of noise is made over surgeons’ occasional mistakes, which are advertised by their detractors, but we hear little of their steady and almost constant success. Medicine, on the other hand, must very often proceed by guesswork; but for that very reason it covers up its defects more anxiously, and is more inclined to talk loudly of its victories. Every great physician admits that a good deal of his science is psychological; and psychology deals with the unknown, or with what is only partially knowable. A mathematician may smile and answer that ‘infinity’ is much more than partially ‘unknowable,’ but that, by using it, the differential calculus gives results of most amazing accuracy, and is such a simple affair that, if its mere name did not inspire terror, any fourth-form schoolboy could easily be made to understand it, and even taught to use it. What we call the soul may be infinite or infinitesimal, or finite, or it may be the Hegelian Nothing, which is Pure Being under another name; whatever it is, our acquaintance with it is not knowledge of it, since whatever we can find out about it is based on the Criticism exercised by Pure Reason and not on experience; and the information which Pure Reason gives us about the soul is not categorical but antinomial; and by the time medicine gets into these transcendental regions, consciously or unconsciously, it ceases to be of much practical use in curing ‘pernicious anaemia’ or any similarly obscure disease.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1268
