Instructions and religious exercises filled the morning, and the midday recreation succeeded dinner.
“The test of a good novice is her attitude towards the community recreation,” was a favourite axiom of the novice-mistress.
Frances had been told that this recreation might prove to be a great trial, and sometimes wondered whether there was anything abnormal in her extreme and childlike enjoyment of this part of her religious life.
The ten or twelve novices, most of whom were Irish or English, one American, two Spanish and the rest French, spent the allotted forty-five minutes in company of the novice-mistress, and of one another. The conversation was general, usually gay, and always impersonal.
Up and down the small garden the little group paced slowly on fine days, carefully avoiding the larger gathering of “la grande communautee,” also assembled in recreation round the Superior. Little or no intercourse was permitted between the novices and the professed religious.
On wet days, and not infrequently on days which Frances regretfully thought delightfully fresh and moist, but at which the novice-mistress raised protesting hands and exclamations of “Ce climat anglais!” the perambulations of the novitiate took place in a long corridor some six or seven feet broad, the length of which it was possible to traverse slowly, in little groups of three or four, always with the novice-mistress as central point. Many of the novices walked backwards, so as to face her continually. Most of them held knitting, or wool which could be wound on to cards whilst still walking, but as soon as she made a move into the small community room, mending and darning baskets were produced and set upon the floor beside each low wooden stool ranged against the wall. The novice mistress sat also upon a stool, placed on a low, wooden dais at the end of the room. She thus dominated the room as naturally as she did the conversation. In her early days at the convent it was a continual cause of wonder to Frances that this conversation, general as it was, could remain so animated and yet so singularly impersonal.
The welfare of the Order in general was often discussed, the old days when its headquarters had been in Paris tenderly recalled by the novice-mistress, and her varied reminiscences of those times and of the expulsion which ensued, eagerly listened to by the little assembly. Sometimes there was talk of such small technicalities as the origin of some point of Rubric, or a broader question of Church ruling, but for the most part the conversation ran cheerfully upon trivial lines. It was always conducted in French, and the famous Gallicanism— “Moi, je” — was apt to provoke a general burst of merry laughter and a humorous glance or word of rebuke from the novice-mistress. But pronouns relating to the first person singular were seldom much in evidence.
The knowledge that she must not seek to place herself beside any one companion, that she must not move from her low stool during recreation without asking and obtaining leave to do so, and that any form of personality beyond the most trivial allusion must be excluded from her conversation, failed to disturb Frances’ calm enjoyment of the three quarters of an hour which always seemed to her so quickly over.
Rising from her little stool on the first stroke of the bell which proclaimed renewed silence, she was generally conscious of distinct exhilaration, resulting from the interval of talk and laughter. In virtue of her English nationality, Frances was often allowed to make her half-hour’s spiritual reading out of doors. This she did after the midday recreation, gravely kilting her serge habit above the stiff woollen underskirt, and pacing the round of the garden with steady, measured footsteps, her head bent over some devotional volume bound in stout brown paper with a little gummed blue label on the back.
The afternoon’s routine of instructions, choir-practices, and the like was unbroken till supper at seven o’clock. The institution of afternoon tea held no place in the convent curriculum, and Frances, who had been told that this might at first present itself to her in the light of a deprivation, found herself, on the contrary, thankful that no additional meal should intervene between the substantial dinner and supper.
The amount of coarse but nourishing food which she found herself expected to assimilate was a continual source of wonder and at first of distress, to the novice. Where were the ascetic fasts and austerities of the religious life, if one was required to make two such meals every day? Even on the regular days of fasting and abstinence decreed by the Church, Frances found that she was only allowed to indulge in a modified form of abstention.
Even after six months’ novitiate, she still looked doubtfully at the brown platter heaped with butter beans, the hunk of bread, and the huge slab of cold meat that so often constituted her midday portion. She knew that she might not leave anything unfinished, and the half-hour allotted to dinner was apt to hurry past her and bring her to her feet at the recital of Grace with half of her allowance still untouched.
“Ma mere, puis-je aller finir au refectoire?” was the formula which was oftenest on her lips in those early days.
And on the permission being given, Frances would valiantly return to the attack.
Supper presented fewer difficulties. A religious or biographical work was read aloud, and whilst giving her full attention to that, Frances found it easier to dispose of the pudding-basin full of soup and the mighty wedge of pudding or the vegetable stew which might form the repast.
But the ethics of the case still troubled her.
Finally she brought her difficulty to Mere Therese.
“You must eat in order to work, my child. Remember that you have entered an order where there is much manual labour to be done, and also the instruction of our poor people, our dames pensionnaires to attend to. Had you entered an order where physical austerity is the first object, then indeed you would not complain of having too much.
But tell me, my little Sister, is it not a greater hardship to you to follow the holy rule of obedience and eat all that is set before you, than it would be to deprive yourself of all but the bare necessities?”
She laughed shrewdly at Frances’ conscious expression, and indeed no argument could have prevailed more strongly with the little novice. She learnt to look upon the completion of her meals as a task to be performed conscientiously, and felt a glow of triumph when she was able to wash the wooden fork and spoon and the blunt knife in her little pewter bowl of water, and place them in due order upon the table before the signal for rising was given.
The evening recreation which succeeded supper was a repetition of the morning one, and did not terminate until the clanging bell at eight o’clock proclaimed that the convent world had entered into “le grand silence,” which would remain unbroken save for the most urgent necessity, until after Mass the following morning.
Collecting the manuals containing the office for the day from her tiny pigeon-hole, Frances would join the noiseless, softly hurrying throng of novices and descend to the chapel. On her knees at the high prie-dieu, which she would presently leave for a carved stall when the general recital of the office began, she embarked nightly upon the hardest struggle of her present existence — that against an overpowering need of sleep. Again and again Frances fell asleep while kneeling, only to wake instantly with a violent start, and force her eyelids, heavy as lead, to remain open over her filmed, unseeing eyes.
The novice in the stall next her, a Spanish child not yet nineteen, slumbered uneasily as unwillingly every night through the recital of Matins and Lauds, and one of Frances’ most effective devices for keeping herself awake was that of gently pushing her neighbour into position when the nuns rose for the Gloria Patri that concluded every psalm.
She half envied little Sister Encarnacion that uncomfortable three-quarters of an hour’s sleep. For her own part, Frances never quite lost consciousness, although the curious intermittent buzzing in her head often prevented her from hearing her own voice joining in the psalms and hymns. But it was always with intense, though most involuntary, thankfulness, that she sank on to her knees for the last time, for the two or three moments silent devotion that preced
ed the final signal at which the novices rose and filed slowly, two by two, from the chapel. It was then generally some few minutes before half-past nine, but if the big clock on the stairs, which she passed every night, its ticking loud and portentous in the absolute silence, showed the hour to be even a very little later than usual, Frances was conscious of a purely physical sensation of sick dismay and resentment at the abridgement of her night.
In her cubicle she undressed as rapidly and silently as possible, and fell asleep almost as she lay down on her paillasse. To its iron hardness and the absence of any support but the smallest and stiffest of bolsters, she had never given a thought, since the first week when her arms and sides for a little while had shown the faint discoloration of bruises. The days, regular and incessantly occupied, flew by with a rapidity that she had never known before, and it was always with a sort of shock of surprise that Frances greeted the arrival of each Saturday morning, the day which was marked for her by the unfailing arrival of Rosamund’s weekly letter.
She had long ago, with tears, asked her sister to conform to the convent regulation, which did not extend its approval to more than one weekly letter from home for its novices, although no definite commands were issued except in the matter of the letters sent out. These might not exceed one every Sunday to a parent or guardian, and one a fortnight to a sister or brother. Frances, however, was permitted to reverse the custom, and it was to Rosamund that her Sunday letter was always addressed.
One of the strangest and hardest pangs that her torn and divided loyalty was to suffer, lay in the knowledge that no restriction was placed upon the correspondence of a nun or novice and any other member of the Order, domiciled in “one of our houses abroad.”
That this tie, strong and sacred although she believed it to be, should be held closer than that of blood, remained to Frances an incomprehensible and rather heartrending convention of which she shunned the thought as a temptation to disloyalty.
Her sense of proportion, like that of all those who lead the cloistered life altered strangely and rapidly.
Her letters to Rosamund, the aching dread lest the new life should separate her irrevocably from Rosamund, the little tender recollections of their life together, of Lady Argent’s kindness, of Hazel and her two babies, that had thronged her mind at first, had given place imperceptibly but with the strangest rapidity, to other preoccupations and other aspirations.
Nowadays, the things which mattered most were naturally those which filled the atmosphere into which she found herself transplanted.
The field of her external interests was naturally an extremely narrow one. The novice-mistress, the small society of her fellow-novices, and an occasional one or two of the older nuns, were the only human beings with whom she ever came into contact, and this intercourse, extremely limited as it was, took place either in one of the few rooms where speech was permitted, or in the narrow confines of the convent garden. It was as brief as possible, and was always, except when receiving direct spiritual guidance from Mere Therese, as impersonal as the sense of discipline on either part could make it.
Her small duties, for the faithful accomplishment of which she would receive no commendation, loomed enormous to Frances. She took a joyful pride in the thorough sweeping of the only long corridor which the house contained, and which had been given into her charge, and she looked forward anxiously to her bi-weekly mornings in the kitchen, where the lay sisters laughed furtively and goodnaturedly at her utter ignorance of those primary laws of letonnage which never seemed to present any difficulties to her French and Spanish contemporaries. On two evenings a week she taught in an elementary class of the poor school attached to the convent, and was gradually learning not to tremble at the apprehension that the six or seven-year-old urchins would decline to be instructed in the multiplication table by anyone so young and so frightened.
The novices, as a rule, were never sent amongst the lady boarders, but when she had been at the convent some four months, Frances was told that she was to work regularly under the Mere Econome. She thus found herself deputed occasionally to take an interview on behalf of the much occupied Mere Caroline, so that she was not without fugitive intercourse with those whom she had soon learned to designate, in all due charity and perfectly unconscious arrogance, as “les personnes du dehors.”
During these brief interviews the little novice was always highly conscious of the gulf which should lie between the manners of ordinary social intercourse and the demeanour of a young religious obliged through obedience to hold a needful conversation with an inhabitant of the outer world.
She was careful to say the prescribed Ave Maria to herself on the threshold of the small parlour where these conversations took place, and would enter holding herself unconsciously more upright than usual, her eyes downcast, and her hands tucked away under her wide sleeves. It had frequently been impressed upon her that a religious “tie s’affaise pas sur sa chaise comme si elle az’ait I’habitude des fauteuils,” and consequently she sat on the extreme edge of her chair, very much erect, and with her feet carefully concealed beneath the ample folds of her habit.
The business in hand she disposed of as rapidly as the extreme eloquence with which most of the lady boarders were afflicted, permitted.
It was no temptation to Frances to prolong the conversations in the parlour. She was naturally shy, and had, all her life, more or less unconsciously, preferred silence to speech.
She also became aware, as must all those who pursue a way of spiritual endeavour, that silence is the preliminary to concentration.
The atmosphere of the convent, which Frances had heard spoken of outside its walls as “peaceful” and “gentle” was, to her awakened perceptions, mainly one of intense concentration. The whole place, silent and monotonous, and even trivial in detail, was instinct with a force that seemed to vibrate through the stillness. Frances could discern this force in the chapel, in the refectory, most of all perhaps in the cold, narrow dormitory. The words which came oftenest to her mind were the “Ego dormio: et cor menm vigilat,” painted in red letters a foot high on the whitewashed wall just above the narrow window.
She could not have spoken of this impression of tense unceasing life which for her lay behind all the convent routine, but she felt a new sensation as of being mentally at rest, as though she were at last able to share and recognize the scale of relative values prevailing in her surroundings.
Of the progress of her spiritual life she was scarcely aware. Frances was not introspective, and possessed that curious detachment from herself sometimes observable in extremely and fundamentally innocent personalities.
She listened to the instructions given, both general and particular, with the careful attention of a conscientious child, noted her failures to observe good resolutions in a tiny paper notebook kept in her pocket, and made it a matter of habit to observe scrupulously the more minute details of her daily duties.
She was naturally careful, and had been taught order by Mrs. Tregaskis, but her tendency to sit and dream was a source of much heart-searching to Frances.
“Vous etes dans la lune, ma petite sceur,” was a brisk reminder often uttered by Mere Therese, and Frances would return to earth with a guilty start and a few words of fervent contrition and resolution in her heart.
When the winter was drawing to a close, and Frances had been at the Convent nearly six months, Mere Therese spoke to her of her prise d’habit. The ceremony, goal of every novice’s thoughts, was the first stage of the religious life proper. The novice exchanged her own name for a religious one bestowed upon her by the Superior, her hair was cut off, and the white Cross of her Order fastened upon the front of her habit. It was the preliminary step to the vows which she would take later on.
“Oh, ma Mere I” stammered Frances, her face one flush of joy.
“I think so, little one. I have spoken to Notre Mere Superieure, and the ceremony will probably be for Easter Monday... you must be very, very fervent....”
XXII
“MA MERE, may one ask if any of Sister Frances’ family are coming for the ceremony to-morrow?” inquired the American novice at the evening recreation on Easter Sunday.
“Her sister is coming for the day, and perhaps a friend.
The poor child has no parents.”
“Perhaps that is as well,” said a little French novice calmly. “It is such a sacrifice for the parents, however pious, and the thought of their grief must be a distraction.”
Her neighbour, a placid Spanish girl, looked surprised.
In Andalusia the parents of the Lola or Pepita who had “la vocacion” would let her go with pride and joy, although they could not, like these rich Americans, hope to see her for the yearly visit permitted by the regulations, when, as would probably happen at the end of her novitiate, she should be sent away to some house of the Order overseas. She herself had only left home some few months ago, but even her little sister Conchita, who was only ten, had been too glad of the great honour and joy of seeing Maria a nun, to cry at losing her. But she kept her thoughts to herself and remained silent.
The American novice, with a sudden recollection that hurt like a physical pang, of a lonely, bewildered old couple in New England, as unrelenting, as uncomprehending in their condemnation of their only daughter’s lapse into an alien and idolatrous creed, quickly changed the conversation by asking another question of Mere Therese.
“What name is she to receive, ma Mere?”
“Supposing you try to guess?”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 81