Sister Teresa Part 24

"'How lovely it is!' I said, feeling that if Mother Hilda and I could have spent the recreation hour together my first convent evening would have been happy. But the chattering novices soon caught us up, and when we were sitting all a-row on a bench, or grouped on a variety of little wooden stools, they asked me questions as to my sensations in the refectory, and I could not help feeling a little jarred by their familiarity.

"'Were you not frightened when you felt yourself at the head of the procession? I was,' said Winifred.

"'But you didn't get through nearly so well as Sister Evelyn; you turned the wrong way at the end of the pa.s.sage and Mother had to go after you,' said Sister Angela. 'We all thought you were going to run away.' And they went into the details as to how they had felt on their arrival, and various little incidents were recalled, ill.u.s.trating the experience of previous postulants, and these were productive of much hilarity.

"'What did you all think of the cake?' said Sister Barbara suddenly.

"'Was it Angela's cake?' asked Mother Hilda. 'Angela, I really must congratulate you; you will be quite a distinguished _chef_ in time.'

"Sister Angela blushed with delight, saying, 'Yes, I made it yesterday, Mother; but, of course, Sister Rufina stood over me to see that I didn't forget anything.'

"'Ah, well, I don't think I cared very much for the flavouring,' said Sister Barbara in pondering tones.

"'You seemed to me to be enjoying it very much at the time,' I said, joining the conversation for the first time; and when I added that Sister Barbara had eaten four slices of bread and b.u.t.ter the laugh turned against Barbara, and every one was hilarious. It is evident that Sister Barbara's appet.i.te is considered an excellent joke in the novitiate.

"Of course I marvelled that grown-up women should be so easily amused, and then remembered a party at the Savoy Hotel (on leaving it I went to the presbytery to confess to you, Monsignor). I had to admit to myself that the talk at Louise Helbrun's party did not move on a higher level; our conversation did not show us to be wiser than the novices, and our behaviour was certainly less exemplary.

Everything is att.i.tude of mind, and the convent att.i.tude towards life is curiously sympathetic to me... at present. My doubts lest it should not always be so is caused by the fury of my dislike to my former att.i.tude of mind; something tells me that such fury as mine cannot be maintained, and will be followed by a certain reaction. I don't mean that I shall ever again return to a life of sin, that life is done with for ever. Even if I should fall again--the thought is most painful to me--but even if that should happen it would be a pa.s.sing accident, I never could again continue in sin, for the memory of the suffering sin has caused me would be sure to bring me back again and force me to take shelter and to repent.

"I know too much belief in one's own power of resistance is not a good thing, but I can hardly bear to think of the suffering I endured during those weeks with Ulick Dean, walking in Hyde Park, round that Long Water, talking of sin and its pleasures, feeling every day that I was being drawn a little nearer to the precipice, that I was losing every day some power of resistance. It is terrifying to lose sense of the reality of things, to lose one's own will, to feel that one is merely a stone that has been set rolling.

To feel like this is to experience the obtuse and intense sensations of nightmare, and this I know well. Have I not told you, Monsignor, of the dreams from which I suffered, which brought me to you, and which forced me to confession, those terrific dreams which used to drive me dazed from my bed, flying through the door of my room into the pa.s.sage to wake up before the window, saying to myself:

"'Oh, my G.o.d! it is a dream, it is a dream, thank G.o.d, it is only a dream!'

"But I must not allow myself to dwell on that time, to do so throws me back again, and I have almost escaped those fits of brooding in which I see my soul lost for ever. Sooner than go back to that time I would become a nun, and remain here until the end of my life, eating the poorest food, feeling hungry all day; anything were better than to go back to that time!"

In another letter she said:

"I am afraid I shall always continue to be looked upon as an actress by the Prioress, and St. Teresa's ecstasies and ravishments, with added miracles and prophecies, would not avail to blot out the motley which continues in her eyes, though it dropped from me three years ago.

"'My dear Evelyn, you have hardly any perception of what our life is,' she said to me yesterday. 'You know it only from the outside, you are still an actress, you are acting on a different stage, that is all.' And it seemed to me that the Prioress thought she was speaking very wisely, that she flattered herself on her wisdom, and rejoiced not a little in my discomfiture, visible on my face, for one cannot control the change of expression, 'which gives one away,'

as the phrase goes. She laughed, and we walked on together, I genuinely perplexed and pathetically anxious to discover if she had spoken the truth, fearing lest I might be adapting myself to a new part, not quite sure, hoping, however, that something new had come into my life. On such occasions one peers into one's heart, but however closely I peer it is impossible for me to say that the Prioress is right or that she was wrong. Everybody will say she is right, of course, for it is so obvious that a prima donna who retires to a convent must think of the parts she has played, of her music, and the applause at the end of every evening, applause without which she could not live. To say that no thought of my stage life ever crosses my mind would be to tell a lie that no one would believe; all thoughts cross one's mind, especially in a convent of a contemplative Order where the centre of one's life is, as Mother Mary Hilda would say, the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament exposed upon the altar; where, as she teaches, next to receiving Holy Communion, this hour of prayer and meditation in the presence of our Lord is the central feature of our spiritual life, the axis on which our spiritual progress revolves.

"This was the subject of yesterday's lesson; nevertheless, during the meditation thoughts came and went, and I found much difficulty in trying to fix my mind. Perhaps I shall never learn how to meditate on--shall I say the Cross?--I shall never be able to fix my attention. Thoughts of the heroes and heroines of legends come and go in my mind, mixing with thoughts of Christ and His apostles; yet there is little of me in these flitting remembrances. My stage life does not interest me any longer, but the Prioress does not see it as I do, far away, a tiny speck. My art was once very real to me, and I am surprised, and a little disappointed sometimes, that it should seem so little now. But what I would not have, if I could change it, is the persistency with which I remember my lovers; not that I desire them, oh, no; but in the midst of a meditation on the Cross a remembrance catches one about the heart, and, closing the eyes, one tries to forget; and, Monsignor, what is worse than memory is our powerlessness to regret our sins. We may not wish to sin again, but we cannot regret that we have sinned. How is one to regret that one is oneself? For one's past is as much oneself as one's present. Has any saint attained to such a degree of perfection as to wish his past had never existed?

"Another part of my life which I remember very well--much better than my stage life--is the time I spent working among the poor under your direction. My poor people are very vivid in my memory; I remember their kindness to each other, their simplicities, and their patience. The patience of the poor is divine! But the poor people who looked to me for help had to be put aside, and that was the hardest part of my regeneration. Of course I know that I should have perished utterly if I had not put them aside, but even the thought of my great escape does not altogether satisfy me, and I would that I might have escaped without leaving them, the four poor women whom I took under my special protection, and who came to see me the day before I came to the convent to ask me not to leave them. Four poor women, poor beyond poverty, came to ask me not to go into the convent. 'The convent will be always able to get on without you, miss.' Such poverty as theirs is silent, they only asked me not to leave them, not to go to the convent. Among them was poor Lena, a hunchback seamstress, who has never been able to do more than keep herself from starving. It is hard that cripples should have to support themselves. She has, I think, always lived in fear lest she should not be able to pay for her room at the end of the week, and her food was never certain. How little it was, yet to get it caused her hours and hours of weary labour. Three and sixpence a week was all she could earn. Poor Lena, what has become of her? So little of the money which my singing brings to the convent would secure her against starvation, yet I cannot send her a penny. Doesn't it seem hard, Monsignor? And if she were to die in my absence would not the memory of my desertion haunt me for ever? Should I be able to forgive myself? You will answer that to save one's soul is everybody's first concern, but to sacrifice one's own soul for the poor may not be theological, but it would be sublime. You who are so kind, Monsignor, will not reprove me for writing in this strain, writing heresy to you from a convent devoted to the Perpetual Adoration of the Sacrament, but you will understand, and will write something that will hearten me, for I am a little disheartened to-day. You will write, perhaps, to the Reverend Mother, asking her if I may send Lena some money; that would be a great boon if she would allow it. In my anxiety to escape from the consequences of my own sins I had almost forgotten this poor girl, but yesterday she came into my mind. It was the lay sisters who reminded me of the poor people I left; the lay sisters are what is most beautiful in the convent.

"Yesterday, when the gra.s.s was soaked with dew and the crisp leaves hung in a death-like silence, one of them, Sister Bridget, came down the path carrying a pail of water, 'going,' she said, answering me, 'to scrub the tiles which covered the late Reverend Mother's grave.

Ah, well, Mother's room must have its weekly turn out.' How beautiful is the use of the word 'room' in the phrase, and when I pointed out to her that the tiles were still clean her answer was that she regarded the task of attending the grave not as a duty but as a privilege. Dear Sister Bridget, withered and ruddy like an apple, has worked in the community for nearly thirty years. She has been through all the early years of struggle: a struggle which has begun again--a struggle the details of which were not even told her, and which she has no curiosity to hear. She is content to work on to the end, believing that it was G.o.d's will for her to do so. The lay sisters can aspire to none of the convent offices; they have none of the smaller distractions of receiving guests, and instructing converts and so forth, and not to have as much time for prayer as they desire is their penance. They are humble folk, who strive in a humble way to separate themselves from the animal, and they see heaven from the wash-tub plainly. In the eyes of the world they are ignorant and simple hearts. They are ignorant, but of what are they ignorant? Only of the pa.s.sing show, which every moment crumbles and perishes. I see them as I write--their ready smiles and their touching humility. They are humble workers in a humble vineyard, and they are content that it should be so."

XVIII

"You see, Evelyn," the Prioress said, "it is contrary to the whole spirit of the religious life to treat the lay sisters as servants, and though I am sure you don't intend any unkindness, they have complained to me once or twice that you order them about."

"But, my dear Mother, it seems to me that we are all inferior to the lay sisters. To slight them--" "I am sure you did not do so intentionally."

"I said, 'Do hurry up,' but I only meant I was in a hurry. I don't think anything you could have said could have pained me more than that you should think I lacked respect for the lay sisters."

Seeing that Evelyn was hurt the Prioress said:

"The sisters have no doubt forgotten all about it by now."

But Evelyn wanted to know which of the sisters had complained, so that she might beg her pardon.

"She doesn't want you to beg her pardon."

"I beg you to allow me, it will be better that I should. The benefit will be mine."

The Prioress shook her head, and listened willingly to Evelyn, who told her of her letter to Monsignor. "Now, wasn't it extraordinary, Mother, that I should have written like that about Sister Bridget, and to-day you should tell me that the lay sisters complained about me? If the complaint had been that I was inclined to put the active above the contemplative orders and was dissatisfied with our life here--"

"Dissatisfied!" the Prioress said.

"Only this, Mother: I have been reading the story of the Order of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and it seems to me so wonderful that everything else, for the moment, seems insignificant."

The Reverend Mother smiled.

"Your enthusiasms, my dear Evelyn, are delightful. The last book you read, the last person you meet--"

"Do you think I am so frivolous, so changeable as that, dear Mother?"

"Not changeable, Evelyn, but spontaneous."

"It would seem to me that everything in me is of slow growth--but why talk of me when there is Jeanne to talk about; marvellous, extraordinary, unique--" Evelyn was nearly saying "divine Jeanne,"

but she stopped herself in time and subst.i.tuted the word "saintly."

"No one seems to me more real than this woman, no one in literature; not Hamlet, nor Don Quixote, not Dante himself starts out into clearer outline than this poor servant-girl--a goatherd in her childhood." And to the Prioress, who did not know the story of this poor woman, Evelyn told it, laying stress--as she naturally would-- on Jeanne's refusal to marry a young sailor, whom she had been willing to marry at first, but whom she refused to marry on his returning after a long voyage. When he asked her for whom she had refused him, she answered for n.o.body, only she did not wish to marry, though she knew of no reason why she should not. It was not caprice but an instinct which caused Jeanne to leave her sweetheart, and to go on working in humble service attending on a priest until he died, then going to live with his sister, remaining with her until she died, and saving during all these long twenty years only four-and-twenty pounds--all the money she had when she returned to the little seaport town whence she had come: a little seaport town where the aged poor starved in the streets, or in garrets in filth and vermin, without hope of relief from any one.

It was to this cruel little village, of which there are many along the French coast, and along every coast in the world, that Jeanne returned to rent a garret with an old and bedridden woman, unable to help herself. Without the poor to help the poor the poor would not be able to live, and this old woman lived by the work of Jeanne's hands for many a year, Jeanne going every morning to the market-place to find some humble employment, finding it sometimes, returning at other times desperate, but concealing her despair from her bedridden companion, telling her as gaily as might be that they would have to do without any dinner that day. So did they live until two little seamstresses--women inspired by the same pity for the poor as Jeanne herself--heard of her, and asked the _cure_, in whom this cruel little village had inspired an equal pity, to send for Jeanne. She was asked to give her help to those in greater need than she--the blind beggars and such like who prowled about the walls of the churches.

On leaving the priest it is related that she said: "I don't understand, but I never heard any one speak so beautifully." But next day when she went to see the priest she understood everything, sufficient at all events for the day which was to take to her garret a blind woman whom the seamstresses had discovered in the last stages of neglect and age. There was the bedridden woman whom Jeanne supported, and who feared to share Jeanne's charity with another, and resented the intrusion; she had to be pacified and cajoled with some little present of food, for the aged and hungry are like animals-- food appeases them, silences many a growl; and the blind woman was given a corner in the garret. "But how is she to be fed?" was the question put to Jeanne next morning, and from that question the whole Order of the Little Sisters of the Poor started. Jeanne, inspired suddenly, said, "I will beg for them," and seizing a basket she went out to beg for broken victuals.

"There is a genius for many things besides the singing of operas, painting pictures, and writing books," Evelyn said, "and Jeanne's genius was for begging for her poor people. And there is nothing more touching in the world's history than her journey in the milk-cart to the regatta. You see, dear Mother, she was accustomed to beg from door to door among squalid streets, stopping a pa.s.ser-by, stooping under low doorways, intruding everywhere, daring everything among her own people, but frightened by the fashionable folk _en grande toilette_ bent on amus.e.m.e.nt. It seems that her courage almost failed her, but grasping the cross which hung round her neck, she entered a crowd of pleasure-seekers, saying, 'Won't you give me something for my poor people?' Now, Mother, isn't the story a wonderful one? for there was genius in this woman, though it was only for begging: a tall, thin, curious, fantastic figure, considered simple by some, but gifted for her task which had been revealed to her in middle age."

"But why, Evelyn, does that seem to you so strange that her task should have been revealed to her in middle age?"

Evelyn looked at the Reverend Mother for a while unable to answer, then went on suddenly with her tale, telling how that day, at that very regatta, a man had slapped Jeanne in the face, and she had answered, "You are perfectly right, a box on the ears is just what is suited to me; but now tell me what you are going to give me for my poor people." At another part of the ground somebody had begun to tease her--some young man, no doubt, in a long fashionable grey frock-coat with race-gla.s.ses hung round his neck, had ventured to tease this n.o.ble woman, to twit her, to jeer and jibe at her uncouthness, for she was uncouth, and she stood bearing with these jeers until they apologised to her. "Never mind the apology," she had answered; "you have had your fun out of me, now give me something for my poor people." They gave her five francs, and she said, "At that price you may tease me as much as you please."

Evelyn asked if it were not extraordinary how an ignorant and uncouth woman, a goatherd during her childhood, a priest's servant till she was well on in middle age, should have been able to invent a system of charity which had penetrated all over Europe. Every moment Evelyn expected the Prioress to check her, for she was conscious that she was placing the active orders above the contemplative, Jeanne above St. Teresa, and, determined to see how far she could go in this direction without being reproved, she began to speak of how Jeanne, after having made the beds and cleaned the garret in the morning, took down a big basket and stood receiving patiently the remonstrances addressed to her, the blind woman saying, "I am certain and sure you will forget to ask for the halfpenny a week which I used to get from the grocery store, you very nearly forgot it last week, and had to go back for it." "But I'll not make a mistake this time," Jeanne would answer. Her bed-ridden friend would reprove her, "But you did forget to ask for my soup." To bear patiently with all such unjust remonstrances was part of Jeanne's genius, and Evelyn asked the Reverend Mother if it were not strange that a woman like Jeanne had never inspired some great literary work.

"I spoke just now of Hamlet, Don Quixote, but Falstaff himself is not more real than Jeanne, and her words are always so wonderful, wonderful as Joan of Arc's. When the old woman used to hide their food under the bed-clothes and sell it for food for the pigs, leaving the Little Sisters almost starving, Jeanne used to say, 'So-and-so has not been as nice as usual this afternoon.' How is it, Mother, that no great writer has ever given us a portrait of Jeanne?"

"Well, Jeanne, my dear Evelyn, has given us her own portrait. What can a writer add to what Nature has given? No one has ever yet given a portrait of a great saint, of St. Teresa--what can any one tell us that we do not already know?"

"St. Teresa's life pa.s.sed in thought, whereas Jeanne's pa.s.sed in action."

"Don't be afraid, Evelyn," the Prioress said, "to say what you mean, that perhaps the way of the Little Sisters of the Poor is a better way than ours."

"It seems so, Mother, doesn't it?"