‘I shouldn’t worry,’ I said, annoyed. ‘There’s not much danger of that. And, incidentally, nuns don’t “sneak off”. If they hide themselves, it’s in order to live harder lives and shoulder heavier responsibilities than people in the world. You don’t enter a convent to escape hard things, but to do a job of work so exacting that it takes not only all the strength and courage you can muster but large extra supplies of the grace of God which can only be obtained by prayer. Without that, you could hardly hope to persevere to the end.’
‘Do explain yourself,’ said Maurice.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what a nun really offers herself for, when she makes her Vows at her Profession, is to “fill up”—as St. Paul calls it—“what is wanting to the Passion of Christ”. Though I don’t suppose,’ I added, feeling faintly worried as I realized how deep were the waters upon which I was embarking, ‘that that conveys very much to any of you.’
They admitted that it didn’t. So I said:
‘Well, short of preaching you a sermon on the Mystical Body of Christ, which I don’t propose to do’ (their relief was obvious), ‘I fail to see how I can make you understand. Unless, perhaps, what Huysmans said, in St. Lidwine of Schiedam….’
I had copied the passage from that rather repulsive masterpiece when, as quite a young nun, it had first come into my hands. And I’d read and re-read it so often that I knew it by heart. I quoted it now.
‘Le Sauveur ne peut plus souffrir par lui-même depuis qu’il est remonté près de son Père: sa tâche redemptrice s’est epuisée avec son sang. Ses tortures ont fini avec sa mort. S’il veut encore pâtir ici-bas, ce ne peut être que dans son Eglise, dans les membres de son Corps Mystique …’
No one said anything. And as there didn’t seem to be much that I could usefully add to M. Huysmans’ remarks on the subject, we left it at that.
I am thankful to say that nobody asked me any more questions about nuns and convents during the rest of the afternoon.
Instead, Wim, whose mysterious job had apparently taken him up north for a month or two during the summer, entertained us with enraptured descriptions of Skye.
There must, I think, have been some special magic in his words, for what he said about the Cuillin, Lochs Coruisk and Scavaig, and the fey, strange atmosphere that haunts the island, so enchanted me that I was all for throwing up everything and starting away for Dunvegan that very evening.
I mention this because such was the spell he managed to cast over me that the place haunted my thoughts like an idée fixe for more than a year afterwards. In fact, when the time came for such decision, I very nearly settled there.
I suppose the fact of having been enclosed for so long made me especially susceptible to descriptions of fascinating places.
Even as I write this, I can’t help wondering whether one day Skye may not draw me northwards after all.
(8)
I left Flower Gardens about half-way through November.
Gay and Maurice had been long advising me to do so. (They said the place was ‘too much like a convent’—a statement which left me so staggered that I made no attempt to contradict it.) So that when one day Mrs. Todd told me that in order to reduce expenses, large cuts were being made in the staff by the Ministry responsible for the place, I was, on the whole, relieved.
Before I left, Mrs. Todd, as Head Warden, presented me with a testimonial. As I had never seen or heard of such a thing before, I was perhaps unduly thrilled.
From it I learned that I was—among other agreeable things—‘devotedly patriotic’; that I had ‘extremely high ideals’ and that I ‘threw myself whole-heartedly into anything that I undertook’.
All highly gratifying, even if a little inaccurate. But I couldn’t help wondering, as I packed my few possessions once more into the two faithful suitcases, just how much this catalogue of virtues was going to help me when it came to hunting for another job.
CHAPTER EIGHT
(1)
A FORTNIGHT later I travelled down to London.
Rail journeys had by now lost their terrors for me. This one would have been almost tediously uneventful had it not been for a minute incident which—as it turned out—propelled me along the path which was to lead me to my destiny.
Gay, who had risen at some unearthly hour to see me off at Scoreswick, cast a book in at the carriage window as the train moved out.
It was Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory.
Now, I’m quite aware that Le Morte d’Arthur isn’t everybody’s fancy. It is, however, very definitely mine. And I met it again after nearly half a lifetime with a quickening of the heart.
I first read it when I was about fifteen, using the Idylls of the King and Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse to set the stage. From then onwards it always held for me a quite extraordinary charm. And when I say ‘charm’, I mean it. Literally. The book was a door that opened into an enchanted world. Its humour might be archaic but it was irresistible. Its pathos wrung one’s heart. Best of all, its closely printed pages positively effused romance.
I took all three books back with me to school. Tristram of Lyonesse and the Idylls were promptly confiscated by the nuns, though for some reason they saw fit to leave me my Malory. I used to escape into it when the classes were more than usually dull.
Was it Maeterlinck who said: ‘Ne faites pas le rêve … faites les choses qui font rêver’? Because, to me, that has always seemed Malory’s supreme gift. His pages are so charged with life that they set the imagination tingling. A background of beauty springs up and weaves itself into the tale as it moves along.
The parts of the story I liked best were set in Cornwall.
Camelot, of course, with its magic gates carved by the wizardry of Merlin, its soaring towers and shadowy palaces, came straight from the Idylls. So did the sad, sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse. The forests, too—Cornish counterparts of Sherwood and Bedegraine—dark with gnarled oaks and green-gloomed groves where deep fern grew like smouldering fire of emerald. But there were pictures which certainly hadn’t come out of the Idylls—or indeed out of anything else that I’ve ever been able to trace. Stretches of lonely moor, stained with deep, quaggy marshes and sedgy streams; trackless uplands, where, gaunt against the skyline, huge granite blocks were piled in strange, fantastic shapes. Or, at the land’s edge, strong cliff castles, sternly battlemented, towering above dark rocks where, far below, the surf boomed and sea-birds wheeled and cried. Or again, storm scenes, with Swinburne’s terrible Atlantic breakers boiling and eddying, ‘ravening aloud for ruin of lives’, hurling themselves, wind-lashed in ‘rent white shreds and shattering storm’ against the ‘high-towered hold’ of ‘dark Tintagel by the Cornish sea’….
The odd thing was, of course, that I’d never set foot in Cornwall. And yet I could picture it all as though I’d lived there all my life.
And now, suddenly, here I was, after all these years, with the book in my hands again.
I paused: rather as one is apt to do before opening an important door.
I’d had so many disappointments over things and people remembered too ecstatically out of an impressionable youth. Somehow, when I’d met them again after the lapse of all those years, their glory had departed. How frightful, if, on re-reading this book which had been to me an archway into fairyland, I were to find that its magic, too, had fled. Shouldn’t I, perhaps, be wiser to leave it unopened?
Of course, in the end, I risked it.
At the bottom of the first page I knew I need have no further fears.
‘It befell in the days of King Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England … that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the duke of Tintagil. And so by means King Uther sent for this duke, charging him to bring his wife with him, for she was a passing fair lady, and a passing wise. And her name was called Igraine….’
With a shiver of delight I settled myself, book in hand, into my corner.
T
he old familiar witchery was at work.
It was like meeting old friends from whom I had been separated for too many years. Merlin the Enchanter, addicted to spasmodic fits of second sight (how perfectly he fitted in to Mr. Dunn’s theories of the inseparability of time!); Sir Garlon, the black-faced gangster knight who ‘rode invisible’; the craven Mark of Cornwall; Sir Dinadan, most inveterate of japers; Breuse Saunce Pitié ‘that was the most mischievous knight living’; Palomides the Saracen, who, like Mr. Salteena, could never quite succeed in being a gentleman: the Beast Glatisant, last of this island’s dinosaurs, and the long procession of lovely ladies from Elaine of Astolat to the selfish, mean-spirited, glamorous Queen Guinevere.
I spent the journey in a kind of ecstasy. Indeed, it was only when the train slowed down before steaming into Euston that I returned to earth.
And—believe it or not—it was at that precise moment, just as I was regretfully leaving Sir Tristram and La Beale Isoud to ride away to the tournament at Lonazep, that the Thing happened for which all this apparently pointless preamble had prepared the way.
Cornwall, like a lovely sleeping sorceress, bestirred herself, sat up, stretched forth a long, slim, beckoning hand and, in a voice like the sound of fairy harps across deep water, commanded me to come.
(2)
To leap straight out of the Court of King Arthur into the Ministry of Supply in Adam Street is, believe me, no laughing matter. Especially when a summons such as that which I had just received is ringing in your ears.
Following the uniformed underling up the ugly staircase to the music of clacking typewriters and scurrying feet, I tried hard to shake myself into the correct attitude of mind for an elderly spinster who is about to be interviewed for the post of Assistant in a scientific library. But without success. I just could not get back to the world where I belonged. Every bit of me that counted had been left behind on the rock-bound shores of Lyonesse.
Perhaps that is why my recollections of that particular interview are so hazy. Two details alone remain in my memory. One was the appalling stuffiness of the dark little hutch in which I was deposited to await my summons: the other, the curiously fifteenth-century face of a tall, pale young man whose profile was sharply outlined against the window-pane in front of which he sat. Exactly the kind of face, I reflected, that one would expect to see in the streets of Camelot or glancing from under a lifted vizor in the Forest of Bedegraine. A reincarnation, perhaps, of Sir Alesaunder le Orphelin or Griflet le Fise Dieu. (Good Heavens, I thought. Here I am again, still drooling about in a world of whimsy … I must get back to reality. And I gave myself another ferocious mental shake.)
About my interview, which followed directly on the heels of that for which the pale young man had been whisked away ten minutes previously, there is nothing to say except that the Ministry of Supply did not engage me. The committee before which I was summoned informed me that a wider knowledge of technical terms in French and German than I possessed was needed.
So that was the end of that.
I had warned A.B. that if I failed to get the job, I should descend upon her in Sussex for a while. I therefore took a taxi to Victoria.
All the way down I could think of nothing but Cornwall. The ideal setting for my Cottage in the Clouds had at last been revealed. With the eyes of my heart I watched it slowly begin to emerge from the mists of dream.
I decided I’d wait till the war was ended. But—come the Peace—I would set out immediately.
Cornwall had spoken. The spell of Merlin was beginning to weave itself about me. To all intents and purposes, I was already on my way.
(3)
For reasons which needn’t be given here, since they could be of no interest to anybody, that particular visit to A.B. was not a success.
I was sorry, because my sister was staying there and I had been looking forward to our meeting. However, I had not been twenty-four hours in the house before it became obvious that the sooner I removed myself, the better.
The tiresome thing was that I had nowhere else to go.
I’d had quite a lot of friends when I first went into the convent. But I’d been told to warn everyone when I said good-bye that, once inside, it would have to be the end. They were part of the ‘All’ that one was renouncing. So that when I came out again, I had lost contact with almost everyone I had known.
On the Sunday after my arrival in Sussex, therefore, I set out for Mass in some perplexity as to what my next step had better be.
To my annoyance, no sooner did I attempt to marshal my thoughts into order than I discovered that I simply could not concentrate.
My nerves were jangled. Try as I would, I could think of nothing but certain rather annoying happenings which had darkened the last few days. Could it be that I had fallen into that distressing condition known in religious communities as having Lost One’s Peace of Soul?
Anyone who enters a contemplative convent presumably does so in the hopes of achieving union with God by means of prayer. For this, it is essential that one’s peace of soul should be preserved.
Now, as anyone who has attempted it will tell you, success in prayer depends very largely upon how you behave in between the times of prayer. If, for instance, you allow yourself to be disturbed or agitated, you will find, when you return to prayer, that a barrier has arisen between your soul and God. So that one of the first things that has to be learnt in the Noviceship is, how to keep your thoughts and feelings well under control. Once allow your soul to be disturbed by any violent emotion and, like the waters of a tempest-tossed lake, it can no longer reflect the divine Image. St. John of the Cross says that such a soul becomes ipso facto incapable—for the time being—of ‘living spiritually’. Interior tranquillity, he insists, can always be maintained by never allowing the memory or imagination to become ‘cumbered’ or ‘dissipated’.
Which sounds, of course, perfectly simple.
Actually, as those who have attempted it for any length of time are only too well aware, it is anything but that. For it means neither more nor less than a sustained and ruthless effort to repress one’s ‘natural impulses’ by a series of cold, calculated acts of the naked will. A gruelling process.
Suppose, for instance, that something happens which makes you feel very violently. It may be fear, anger, sorrow, indignation … even in convents such things do happen now and then, especially when one is young and sensitive and what is called ‘attached’ to people and things.
Well—if the blow be really shattering—if one feels lacerated, shattered, explosive, the ‘natural’ reaction will probably be to fly to one’s cell, fling oneself down beside one’s bed or on one’s prie-dieu and let the tempest rage. Even a storm of tears may follow, leaving one exhausted though possibly physically relieved.
This may go on until one is recalled to oneself by hearing a bell ring somewhere in the monastery. One remembers that, no matter how bitter one’s own personal suffering, the life of the community must go on. One is therefore obliged to pull oneself together and go back—quite possibly still half-dazed with misery—to one’s place in the great machine.
In the world, people can escape—at least for a time—from their troubles. Things can be crowded out, forgotten, at a theatre or cinema. One may even get away for a change of scene.
But in an enclosed convent, none of these things are possible. There you are, and there you have to remain. You have got to face the fact that for a certain period of time—until, in fact, you have grown accustomed to what has happened to you—an intruder called Pain is going to be with you in every detail of your life. You will find it awaiting at the end of your bed to join itself to you every morning when you awaken; it will worm itself into your thoughts when you go to prayer: curl like a cold snake round your heart as you sit through your silent meals in the refectory: make you weary at work, morose at recreation, and even haunt the hours that should be spent in sleep.
Now, experts in the spiritual life will tell you that to meet suffe
ring along these lines is fatal.
To begin with, it is purely ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘supernatural’ behaviour. Moreover, it is a lamentable waste of spiritual power.
I remember a very wise old nun explaining to me that suffering was one of the most valuable things in the spiritual life. Nothing, she declared, except, perhaps, humiliation, was even comparable to it.
‘Rien’, she quoted, ‘ne porte aussi loin en avant que la souffranee: rien ne laisse après elle tant de bénédiction, tant de grâce!’
It was, therefore, important to know exactly how to cope with it. Otherwise it would rush in, oust you from your rightful place as ruler of your soul and proceed to tyrannize over every department of your spiritual life.
The right way to deal with it, she said, was to rouse up your will and hold the thing at bay. Refuse it entrance, no matter in what guise it might present itself, to the citadel of your soul. Do that and it would immediately become your servant. You would then be able to harness it, like a kind of spiritual steam, to be used as a tremendous power at the very roots of your prayer. Properly managed, it would drive your prayer upwards, endowing it with a power, a quality, a value, which it could never otherwise have possessed.
‘Suffering,’ she once told me, ‘if you accept it lovingly, can give an intensity to one’s prayer which nothing else can give.’
Another nun told me how she had once struggled for nearly a week to prevent a storm of suffering from entering her soul. She said that the effort of holding the door barred against it had been a kind of agony and that she had only managed to endure to the end by praying constantly and refusing to let her mind dwell for even an instant on what was distressing her. She surprised me by declaring that there was such a thing as luxuriating in suffering, and that what she called ‘real austerity of will’ was needed to deny oneself the comfort of thinking about what was causing one pain.
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