Perpetual Light : a memorial Part 1

Perpetual Light.

by William Rose Benet.

DEDICATION

TO KATHLEEN AND MARGARET

Think of no verse when you read this, But think of her alone And her enduring benefice, Sunlight on stone.

For day is stone and night is stone Save she has made them bright, Now she knows all that may be known Of day and night.

Courage like hers we have from her, Strength to be straight and brave, And n.o.ble memories that recur And heal and save.

By her clear eyes, by her pure brows, We take the Sign, And kneel within her Father's house-- And yours and mine.

FOREWORD

TERESA FRANCES THOMPSON, who also bore my name by marriage, died on January 26, 1919. This verse is published to her memory, because I wish to keep together the poetry she occasioned and enable those who loved her--and they were a great many-to know definitely what she was to me.

I think that is the truth. This is the only means I have at present of acknowledging publicly the vast debt I owe to her.

As I turn these poems over--if they are even to be called poems--I realize that they can never begin to express what her personality was.

The earliest ones were written by a boy who was in love, and the latest by a man who has suddenly stepped into the dark. Those between are fragments from the days when we were struggling along together at the everyday tasks and outside interests and dreams that possessed us.

The war entered our lives to change them in September, 1917. The poem, "Man Possessed," was written within sound of her actual voice, the others all in absence from her at various times and in moods made strange by absence.

And yet this is all I have at present to give in her memory. But I hold by these because--though they are poor, freakish fragments as far as any real expression of her is concerned--they were made for her.

It is even harder to express in bald prose a personality that had so many sides, so many varying strengths, such inner sight and yet such a forthright splendid intelligence. I have tried once to round it into periods--and have destroyed the attempt. It is my hope that the sister to whom she was devoted with an attachment altogether unusual to most of us will write of her.

If I merely recount the outlines of her life, it loses her. To say that her girlhood was given up to an intense and whole-souled devotion to the life of Christ as taught by the Roman Catholic Church will not even trace the outlines of that great spiritual adventure. But there, in the word "adventure," is a dim ideograph of what she found in life.

Every day was an adventure to her with the hope of accomplishing something over and above mere routine and the pursuit of pleasure. And she used to say to me that her life had simply been a series of experiments into which she had put her whole heart, and in which she had always failed. But, of course, she never failed.

She wrote me while I was stationed at Washington:

"I am so very glad of your Sunday experience. I wish that I might have shared it with you, but I almost did, since we were at Ma.s.s there and walked across that green together.... No one else might be impressed by it, but you _know_. When I first thought of a convent I was about sixteen, and I did not go until I was twenty-one. During that time I had the habit of pretending when I went to sleep that I was lying full-length in a convent chapel before a dark altar, with its tiny light. When I went to the Little Sisters, with all its strangeness and homesickness and wrench away from everything, I was sustained by the knowledge that our bedroom on the third floor was across a wide hall from a rose window that looked right down into the Chapel. The dormitory had windows out into the hall, French fashion, so that when I opened the one at the head of my bed I was doing just what I had so often planned. You cannot imagine how personal it seemed to me.

"Then years after when I was in the Carmelite convent in London, it began to snow. I stood at a window looking out at the snow upon the roofs, and began to think (as you would have in my place), "Deep on the convent roofs the snows are sparkling to the moon,"--and suddenly I realized that it was St. Agnes Eve, and that long ago, when I was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, I had prayed that I might be a Carmelite nun in England. It was a thrill. No one else knew it. No one else could possibly have brought either of those two things about but Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever."

And she wrote me later:

"We will make a go of it together--I have been just where you are several times in my life. There is no denying that it hurts like the mischief, but there is something carried away out of it that the people who don't go through with it do not have. When I came back from the Little Sisters, after affirming and reaffirming (to strengthen my own resolution) that I was never coming back, I had to face just the same old world, and the same streets and people. Then, after the earthquake, I left Paul Elder's to go out to the settlement in the Mission. I was full of faith in it, to work among the poor, without the fetters of a convent, to plan a new way in which Catholic girls could dedicate themselves to the service of G.o.d, using the best of the Protestant and Catholic ideas both--and in three months I... had handed in a report which criticized the whole place severely--and my resignation. I do not know now how much was personal spite on my part and how far I was right. And back to the same old circle at Paul Elder's, with another bright bubble broken. Then came the Carmelites, which cost, I think, more than any, and I remember I so dreaded coming back to New York and facing everyone that I tried hard to get a position in London where women get $5.00 a week as trained librarians.

So back again. Well, education as the world hands it out to us is a mighty expensive thing. You give so much of your heart's blood and get so little back in any tangible form, but 'youth shows but half' and we have not yet come to the harvesting years. We might as well sow hopes and plans and ambitions generously 'and stretch through time a hand to reap the far-off interest of tears'."

And she said of the number 19 in her life, in the late fall of 1918:

"I was thinking a lot about life this morning, coming home from church. You know the 27th of November is Mother's anniversary....

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, always a great Catholic Feast ... Father's birthday was the 23rd of December, he was buried on Christmas day--their wedding anniversary was December 3lst-- my birthday is January first, J--'s the seventh, Mother's the fifth.

So the whole season is full of memories, churches, ma.s.ses, prayers, a.s.sociations. And it struck me as strange that this New Year's finishes another half of my life. I was nineteen that winter. This year I shall be just twice that. Nineteen years were all childhood, dreaming, planning, hoping, aspiring, but with no practical care, no responsibilities of any sort, the most sheltered existence a girl could have. And now nineteen of as varied an experience as most people know, teaching, housekeeping, bringing up the younger children, seven years of Paul Elder's, the settlement house, travel, London, Rome, Paris, New York, the two convents in Chicago and London, extreme poverty, self-support, comfortable, moderate means, as you and I had, luxury such as this and the months with E--, six years a wife, five years a mother when J--'s birthday rounds it out,--the earthquake, which we thought transcended in size and importance anything that would ever happen to us, and then our little share of the tragedy of the war. Nineteen full years, n'est-ce pas? And now we start a new life, thank G.o.d, together."

She wrote me earlier, in 1917, while I was waiting to be called to a Southern training camp:

"I plan a home some day of the most Spartan simplicity, all our needs cut down to the lowest and plainest of possessions, and yet a spirit of hospitality, of contentment, of gaiety, of self-reliance and mutual helpfulness. Books and bookshelves..."

And of the Army:

"It so often makes me think of the religious orders. The combination of the most heroic impulses with the most commonplace drudgery. The extraordinary fluctuations of feeling, thinking at one time that it is the only thing in the world to do ... and then the feeling, what am I doing this for, anyway, other people do not find it necessary... As one nun said to me, 'You do not have to accept a Carmelite vocation-- but, you have to either accept or refuse it.' The choice is laid before everyone, but once it is, all the coward has to do is to stand aside."

This last ill.u.s.trates how she always saw the necessities of those she loved in terms of the spirit. Napoleon is reported to have said of Jesus Christ: "He speaks from the soul as never man spoke; the soul is sufficient for him, as he is sufficient for the soul."

So she thought. And her letters contain many quotations she formed her life by:

"G.o.d himself is Truth, Charity, and Purity, and the three things he hates most are deceit, cruelty, and impurity."

"G.o.d make us all saints!"

And the characteristic ending of a letter, with her full name always signed, such as:

"Lord, grant us in this world knowledge of thy truth, and in the world to come life everlasting.

TERESA."

But it is impossible to convey what her ways were with the children and in the several homes that she made so full of dreaming light. She had a keen appreciation of the humorousness and quaintness of children. She was always quoting to me their adventures, their sayings. She had countless plans and schemes for work in the world, and carried out many of them in relation to woman suffrage, baby clinics, camp-fire organization for the girls of our village, and, during the war, work with all the local organizations among women that it called into being where she was living at the time. She wanted to start a home in America for French widows and orphans, though this plan was not possible,--she was deeply interested in the work for the protection of young girls under Miss Katharine Bement Davis, and only circ.u.mstances prevented her taking this up during the fall of 1918.

She had several interviews with Miss Davis and showed herself to be the very person who could have helped greatly. Self-denial, sacrifice, poverty, effort were the watchwords ever recurring to her. Her instant concentration upon any book or paper that came under her eyes became a family joke. She would be lost immediately, oblivious of all surroundings. She read and thought with a lively appreciation of the many futilities in life and a desire to make her life count. She wasted no time on what did not at once attract her spirit, except of necessity. And yet she genuinely delighted in the small events of a day such as please and awe children. And the reason they loved her so was because they knew she brought the same guileless point of view to solve their bewilderment from larger experience. And yet she would write:

"I _wish_ I knew where I stood. I was much happier when I was a rigid Catholic. I wish I could fit back into that measure. Can I ever-- any more than I can fit into the mental measure of a nun?"

And again her typewriting would exclaim to me:

"I don't like to write letters to you. I like to talk to you. I like still better to be silent with you!"

When she thought me in need of it she could be very self-forgetful:

"But I want to see the future big with Romance for you and I would rather feel you came home from voyages two weeks or two months long, with a trunkful of ma.n.u.scripts; and that, three years from today, you had secured us special rates on a tramp steamer to Plymouth, than that you were going to dodge into subways the rest of your life."

"I would infinitely rather you shipped before the mast--to Bermuda, Borneo, or Buenos Aires. Don't think from this I don't want your face across the table from mine every night the rest of my life!"

Reading to the children, she would retail to me such incidents as:

"Then I read them the Gospel stories, ... and they were too funny--R-- trying to show me how Herod looked, and J-- suggesting charitably that perhaps his wife was good. 'No,' said R--,'the whole family was bad!'"

"In the spring I am going to take an old farmhouse, give the children one brown garment apiece, and plan a scheme of living that will leave something over for other children."

And this appealed to her:

"Well, if it is not in the Fall of 1918, it will be in 'one of those houses Our Lord is building' as J-- remarks casually. Did I tell you of the little village in the North Carolina hills where H-- and S. L-- spent the summer, where the women raised enough sheep to cut the wool, card, and spin and weave the clothes the family wore?"