There was nothing anywhere.
And with that final certainty of negation came a rigidity of despair that no terms of time or space could measure.
Alex fell into exhaustion, then into a state of coma that became heavy, dreamless sleep enduring far into the next day. She woke to instant, stabbing recollection. It was a grey, leaden day, with rain lashing the window-panes, and at first Alex thought that it might be still early morning, but there was all the far-away, indescribable stir that tells of a household when the day’s work is in full swing, and presently she realized that it must be the middle of the morning.
“They have gone,” she thought, but the words conveyed no meaning to her. The Infirmarian came in to her and spoke, and asked whether she felt fit to get up, and although on the day before Alex had so craved for rest, she heard her own voice replying indifferently that she thought she was quite well, and that she was ready to rise at once.
“You are sure you have taken no chill? You must have been there in Mother Gertrude’s room for a long time after you were taken faint.... Can you remember?” The nun looked at her, puzzled and anxious.
“Did I faint?”
“I think so, surely. You were almost unconscious when I came in, quite by chance, and found you there, almost frozen, poor little Sister! Now tell me — ?” The old Infirmarian put a few stereotyped questions such as she addressed to all those of her patients whose ailments could not be immediately diagnosed at sight.
Alex’ matter-of-fact replies, for the most part denials of the suggested ills, left her no wiser. Finally she decided on a refroidissement. “Put a piece of flannel over your chest,” she said gravely, “and you had, perhaps, better spend recreation indoors until the spell of cold is over.”
“Thank you,” said Sister Alexandra lifelessly. “What time is it?”
“Nearly eleven. Have you any duties for which you should be replaced this morning?”
“There are a lot of things, I think,” said Alex vaguely, “but I can get up.”
“Very well,” the Infirmarian acquiesced unemotionally. “There is much work to be done, as you say, and we nuns cannot afford to be ill for long.”
Alex did not think that she was ill — she was quite able to get up and to dress herself, although her head was aching and her hands shook oddly.
She reflected with dull surprise that all the poignant misery of the days that had gone before seemed to have left her. Evidently this was what people meant by “getting over things.” One suffered until one could bear no more, and then it was all numbness and inertia.
She felt a sort of surprised gratitude to God at the cessation of pain, as one who had undergone torture might feel towards the torturers for some brief respite.
Her thankfulness made tears come into her eyes, and she forced them back with a sort of wonder at herself, but that odd disposition to weep still remained with her.
As she went downstairs, rather slowly and cautiously, because her knees were shaking so strangely, she met a very little girl, the pet and baby of the whole establishment, climbing upwards. She was holding up the corners of her diminutive black apron with both hands, and after looking at the nun silently for a moment, she showed her that it contained two tiny, struggling kittens. “Les petits enfants de Minet,” she announced gravely, and went on climbing, clasping her burden tenderly.
Alex could never have told what it was that struck her with so unbearable a sense of pathos in the sight of the little childish figure.
Quite suddenly the tears began to pour down her face, and she could neither have checked them nor have assigned any reason for them.
She went on downstairs, wiping the blinding tears from her sight, and amazed at the violence of the uncontrollable sobs that were noiselessly shaking her.
Something had suddenly given way within her and passed far beyond her own control.
It was as though she could never stop crying again.
XXI
Father Farrell
For what seemed a long while afterwards — a period which, indeed, covered three or four weeks — Alex learnt to be intensely and humbly grateful for the convent law that would not allow any form of personalities in intercourse.
She was utterly unable to cease from crying, and in spite of her shame and almost her terror, the tears continued to stream down her face in the chapel, in the refectory, even at the hour of recreation.
Nobody asked her any questions. One or two of the nuns looked at her compassionately, or made some kindly, little, friendly remark; a lay-sister now and then offered her an unexpected piece of help in her work, and the Infirmarian occasionally sent her a cup of bouillon for dinner, but it was nobody’s business to offer inquiries, and had any one done so, the rule would have compelled Sister Alexandra to reply by a generality and to change the conversation without delay.
Only the Superior was entitled to probe deeper, and at first the Frenchwoman who was temporarily succeeding Mother Gertrude was too much occupied by her new cares to see much of her community individually.
Alex was relieved when the Christmas holidays began, and she had no longer to fear the notice of the sharp-eyed children, but in the reduction of work surrounding the festive season, it became impossible that her breakdown should continue to pass unnoticed. She did not herself know what was the matter, and could scarcely have given a cause for those incessant tears, except that she was unutterably weary and miserable, and that they had passed far beyond her own control.
The idea that that continuous weeping could have any connection with a physical nervous breakdown never occurred to her.
It was with surprise, and very little thought of cause and effect, that she one night noticed her own extraordinary loss of flesh. She had never been anything but thin and slightly built, but now she quite suddenly perceived that her arms and legs in the last two months had taken on an astounding and literal resemblance to long sticks of white wood. All the way up from wrist to armpit, her left hand, with thumb and middle finger joined, could span the circumference of her right arm.
It seemed incredible.
Her mind went back ten years, and she thought of Lady Isabel, and how much she had lamented her daughter’s youthful angularity.
“If she could have seen this!” thought Alex. “But, of course, it only mattered for evening dress — she wouldn’t have thought it mattered for a nun.”
Instantly she began to cry again, although her head throbbed and her eyes burned and smarted. There was no need now to wonder if she looked tired. Accidentally one day, her hand to her face, she had felt the sort of deeply-hollowed pit that now lay underneath each eye, worn into a groove.
She had ceased to wonder whether life would ever offer anything but this mechanical round of blurred pain and misery, these incessant tears, when the Superior sent for her.
“What is the matter with you, Sister? They tell me you are always in tears. Are you ill?”
Alex shook her head dumbly.
“Sister, control yourself. You will be ill if you cry like that. Don’t kneel, sit down.”
The Superior’s tone was very kind, and the note of sympathy shook Alex afresh.
“Tell me what it is. Don’t be afraid.”
“I want to leave the convent — I want to be released from my vows.”
She had never meant to say it — she had never known that such a thought was in her mind, but the moment that the words were uttered, the first sense of relief that she had felt surged within her.
It was the remembrance of that rush of relief that enabled her, sobbing, to repeat the shameful recantation, in the face of the Superior’s grave, pitiful urgings and assurance that she did not know what she was saying.
After that — an appalling crisis that left her utterly exhausted and with no vestige of belief left in her own ultimate salvation — everything was changed.
She was treated as an invalid, and sent to lie down instead of joining the community at the hour of recreation, the Supe
rior herself devoted almost an hour to her every day, and nearly all her work was taken away, so that she could walk alone round the big verger and the enclosed garden, and read the carefully-selected Lives and Treatises that the Superior chose for her.
Gradually some sort of poise returned to her. She could control her tears, and drink the soups and tisanes that were specially prepared and put before her, and as the year advanced, she could feel the first hint of Spring stirring in her exhaustion. She was devoid alike of apprehension and of hope.
No solution appeared to her conceivable, save possibly that of her own death, and she knew that none would be attempted until the return of the Superior-General from South America.
As this delayed, she became more and more convinced, in despite of all reason, of the immutable eternity of the present state of affairs.
It shocked her when one day the Superior said to her:
“You are to go to the Superior of the Jesuits’ College in the parlour this afternoon. Do you remember, he preached the sermon for your Profession, and I think he has been here once or twice in the last year or two? He is a very wise and clever and holy man, and ought to help you. Besides, he is of your own nationality.”
Alex remembered the tall, good-looking Irishman very well. He had once or twice visited the convent, and had always told amusing stories at recreation, and preached vigorous, inspiring sermons in the chapel, with more than a spice of originality to colour them.
The children adored him.
Alex wondered.
Perhaps Father Farrell, the clever and educated priest, would really see in some new aspect the problem that left her baffled and sick of soul and body.
She went into the parlour that afternoon trembling with mingled dread, and the first faint stirrings of hope that understanding and release from herself and her wickedness might yet be in store for her.
Father Farrell, big and broad-shouldered, with iron-grey, wavy hair and a strong, handsome face, turned from the window as she entered the room.
“Come in, Sister, come in. Sit down, won’t you? They tell me ye’ve not been well — ye don’t look it, ye don’t look it!”
His voice, too, was big and bluff and hearty, full of decision, the voice of a man accustomed to the command of men.
He pushed a chair forward and motioned her, with a quick, imperious gesture that yet held kindness, to sit down.
He himself stood, towering over her, by the window.
“Well, now, what’s all the trouble, Sister?”
There was the suspicion of a brogue in his cultivated tones.
Alex made a tremendous effort. She told herself that he could not help her unless she told him the truth.
She said, as she had said to the French Superior:
“I am very unhappy — I want to be released from my vows as a nun.”
The priest gave her one very quick, penetrating look, and his thick eyebrows went up into his hair for an instant, but he did not speak.
“I don’t think I have ever had any — any real vocation,” said Alex, whitening from the effort of an admission that she knew he must regard as degrading.
“And how long have ye thought ye had no real vocation?”
There was the slightest possible discernible tinge of kindly derision in the inquiry.
It gave the final touch to her disconcertment.
“I don’t know.”
She felt the folly of her reply even before the priest’s laugh, tinged with a sort of vexed contempt, rang through the room.
“Now, me dear child, this is perfect nonsense, let me tell ye. Did ye ever hear the like of such folly? No real vocation, and here ye’ve been a professed religious for — how long is it?”
“Nearly four years since I was finally professed, but—”
“There’s no but about it, Sister. A vow made to Our Blessed Lord, I’d have ye know, is not like an old glove, to be thrown away when ye think ye’re tired of it. No, no, Sister, that’ll not be the way of it. Ye’ll get over this, me dear child, with a little faith and perseverance. It’s just a temptation, that ye’ve perhaps been giving way to, owing to fatigue and ill health. Ye feel it’s all too hard for ye, is that it?”
“No,” said Alex frantically, “that’s not it. It’s nothing like that. It’s that I can’t bear this way of living any longer. I want a home, and to be allowed to care for people, and to have friends again — I can’t live by myself.”
She knew that she had voiced the truth as she knew it, and covered her face with her hands in dread lest it might fail to reach his perceptions.
She heard a change in Father Farrell’s voice when next he spoke.
“Ye’d better tell me the whole tale, Sister. Who is it ye want to go back to in the world?”
She looked up, bewildered.
“Any one — home. Where I can just be myself again—”
“And how much home have ye got left, after being a nun ten years? Is your mother alive?”
“No.”
“Your father?”
“No,” faltered Alex.
“They died after ye left home, I daresay?”
“Yes.”
“Then, in the name of goodness, who do ye expect is going to make a home for ye? Have ye sisters and brothers?”
“Yes.” Alex hesitated, seeing at last whither his inquiries were tending.
“Yes, and I’m thinking they’re married and with homes of their own by this time,” said the priest shrewdly. “Let me tell ye, ten years sees a good many changes in the world, and it isn’t much of a welcome ye’d get by breaking your holy vows and making a great scandal in the Church, and then planting yourself on relations who’ve lost touch with ye, more or less, and have homes of their own, and a husband or wife, as the case may be, and perhaps little children to care for. A maiden aunt isn’t so very much thought of, in the best of circumstances, let me tell ye.
“Now isn’t there reason in what I’m saying, Sister?”
Sick conviction shot through her.
“Yes, Father.”
“Well, then, ye’ll just give up that foolish notion, now.”
He looked at her white, desperate face, and began to take long strides up and down the room.
“Have ye confidence in your Superior? Do ye get on with her?” he asked suddenly.
“Our present Superior has only been here a little while — the one before that—”
“I know, I know,” he interrupted impatiently. “It’s the Superior-General I mean, of course — everything must come to her in the long run, naturally. Have you full confidence in her, now?”
Alex felt as incapable of a negative reply as of an affirmative one. She knew that she did not understand the term “full confidence” as he did, and she temporized weakly.
“But our Mother-General is away in South America — she keeps delaying, and that’s one reason why nothing has been settled about me. She hasn’t even left America yet.”
“I’m well aware of that. Don’t waste time playing with me that way, Sister, ye’ll get no further. Ye know very well what I mean. Now, tell me now, will it do for ye if I arrange for your transfer to another house — maybe to the one in London, or somewhere in your own country?”
The instinct of the imprisoned creature that sees another form of the same trap offered it under the guise of freedom, made her revolt.
“No,” she cried. “No! I want to get right away — I want to stop being a nun.”
The priest suddenly hit the table with his clenched fist, making it rock, and making his auditor start painfully.
“That’s what you’ll never do, not if ye got release from the holy vows ten times over. Once a nun always a nun, Sister, although ye may be false and faithless and go back into the very midst of the world ye’ve renounced. But ye’ll find no comfort there, no blessing, and God’ll remember it against ye, Sister. A soul that spurns His choicest graces need expect no mercy, either here or hereafter. I tell ye straight, Sister, that ye’l
l be deliberately jeopardizing your immortal soul, if ye give in to this wicked folly. Ye’ve to choose between God and the Devil — between a little while of suffering here, maybe, and then Eternity in which to enjoy the reward of the faithful, or a hideous mockery of freedom here, followed by Hell and its torments for ever and ever. Which is it to be?”
Alex was terrified, but it was the priest’s anger that terrified her, not the threats that he uttered. At the back of her mind, lay the dim conviction that no Hell could surpass in intensity of bitterness that which her spirit was traversing on earth.
Father Farrell looked at her frightened, distorted face, and his voice sank into persuasiveness.
“This’ll pass, me dear child. Many a poor soul before ye has known what it is to falter by the wayside. But courage, Sister, ye can conquer this weakness with God’s help. You’re in no trouble about your faith, now are ye?”
Had Alex been able to formulate her thoughts clearly, she might have told him that it had long since become a matter of supreme unimportance to her whether or no she still possessed that which he termed her faith. As a fact, the beliefs which could alone have made the convent life endurable to her, had never struck more than the most shallow of roots into her consciousness. Perhaps the only belief which had any real hold upon her was the one that she had gradually formed upon her experience of the living — that God was a Superior Being who must be propitiated by the sacrifice of all that one held dear, lest He strike it from one.
She looked dimly at Father Farrell, and shook her head, because she was afraid of his anger if she owned to the utter insecurity of her hold upon any religious convictions.
“That’s right, that’s right,” he said hastily. “I felt sure ye were a good child at bottom. Now would ye like to make a good general Confession, and I’ll give ye absolution, and ye can start again?”
Some hint of inflexibility in the last words roused Alex to a final, frantic bid for liberty.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 114