Black Narcissus

by Rumer Godden

  Obediently he took the pupil’s note-book with its cover stamped with ‘Semper Fidelis’ in gold, and followed her into the corridor. He felt uneasy. The Palace had become strange; only when they came upon Ayah bawling at the water carriers in the backyard, did he recover himself and know that for all this frosted Convent air, nothing was changed and nothing could be changed.

  ‘Almost you frightened me,’ he murmured. ‘But it’s only because the paint is new. What’s underneath will soon come through.’

  ‘How is it going?’ he shouted to Ayah in dialect.

  ‘What do you expect?’ she shouted back. ‘It’s just like it was with the others, they’re all ill and they’re all tired. They need medicine, poor things.’

  ‘You should take better care of them then. What have you been thinking of? I believe they’ve frightened you out of your wits.’

  Ayah laughed. ‘Hai! Hai! Hai!’ and slapped him on the elbow as he passed. Sister Clodagh was shocked. A native to slap a European in that friendly familiar way! But she had noticed that they treated him as one of themselves. Now he found he could talk to her more easily and his hand strayed to the tightness around his waist and forgetting, he pulled his shirt tails out.

  ‘There is one other thing,’ she said. ‘I – some of the Sisters – are ill. Sister Briony doesn’t know how to treat it and thinks it must be some local infection, as we all have it. Ayah says it’s from the water.’

  ‘Darjeeling tummy,’ said Mr Dean. ‘Yes, we must see to that,’ as he had said to the question of the clerk and the wire netting and the kitchen floor.

  ‘And the plumbing is out of order.’

  ‘I thought something would go wrong with that,’ he said with interest. ‘I hope you haven’t been letting any of these people mess about with it or we shall never have it right. It’s too bad when you’re ill.’

  Her face relaxed its tenseness and she smiled. ‘Thank you for being so sympathetic over everything,’ she said.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said politely and added: ‘I’m glad to find you’re human enough to have – everything.’

  Ayah helped Sister Briony deal out his prescription. ‘You’re ill because you’re not used to drinking good water,’ she said.

  ‘Indeed we are,’ said Sister Briony indignantly. ‘We’re all exceedingly careful about our water.’

  ‘Calcutta water is bad,’ went on Ayah. ‘Benares water is worse and it’s worse still in Bombay. You had better water in England and Paris, but I still don’t call it good.’

  ‘What do you know about England and Paris?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been there,’ said Ayah complacently. ‘I’ll show you my passport and the certificate the General Bahadur gave me, saying he would pay me two hundred rupees to go across the black water with Srimati Devi and that she was to bring me back to my husband in good condition.’

  ‘And did she?’ asked Sister Philippa.

  ‘Tcha no! I got so thin he didn’t want me back; he said he’d no use for bones. That was because I found nothing fit to eat; except in France and Italy, the bread. Ah, I can’t forget that bread! The horses were good too, but the cows were too big and so of course the milk was coarse and that upset my stomach.’

  ‘Why did the Princess Srimati go to Europe, Ayah?’

  ‘Because she was ill, Lemini, and they were looking for someone to cure her. No wonder she was ill,’ cried Ayah. ‘I could tell you – hmm. They looked in Paris and London,’ she went on hastily, ‘and in a place called Baden, and then they sent us to Alassio to rest and then they listened to me and brought her home to make her really better.’

  ‘And what did she do then?’

  ‘Oh, she died. At Darjeeling. That was a great nuisance for us because we had to carry her all the way into the interior. The General Bahadur would have her buried in the State. He thought a great deal of her though – hmm. Not even elephants nor horses can go over some of the passes, but we did. Yes, she died. She was young, it wasn’t her time to die.’ Ayah sighed and then said cheerfully: ‘Let her go. She was always wilful and silly and not much good.’

  ‘Tell us more of what you did in Europe, Ayah.’

  ‘You’re as bad as the young masters always pestering me for stories.’

  ‘What young masters?’

  ‘Kundra and Dilip, the eldest sons of Srimati. They are the General’s true nephews, the others are not and they are not quite sure about Dilip. Still, let us say there are two. Soon there’ll be only one; the elder brother is ill. Did you hear the drums in the night? They were for him. They beat all night while he is ill, if you hear them stop, he’s dead.’

  All of them listened that night, but the drums beat, hour after hour, until morning.

  7

  Soon it was quite natural to see Mr Dean in the Convent; soon he began to whistle and walk about in the house with his old hat on his head instead of in his hand, and it seemed no more strange than seeing the other workmen. There was one of them astride the sill in Sister Clodagh’s office as she worked; it had warped and he was planing it so that the window would shut; and there had been another moving a ladder from room to room for days, mending the ceiling, they were apt to forget about him perched up over their heads. Mr Dean was always there, showing them how to fit a bolt or measure a door or conferring with Pin Fong. He would flatten himself in a doorway to let a Sister pass, still holding the rule against it, shutting one eye to see if it were straight, never glancing at her; or kneel on the floor, testing the floor boards as their skirts swished by, without turning his head.

  He came everywhere; into the office to get Sister Clodagh’s signature for a receipt, into the dispensary to mend a tap that Pin Fong did not understand; to the Lace School to explain to the carpenter about the rat that had died under the corner boards, into the school-room to ask if the blackboard were standing more steadily now. The sound of his whistle came from all quarters of the house and, quite often, the sound of his curses; and he would pull his shirt outside his shorts as he worked and leave it hanging there under his disreputable checked coat.

  Now they all talked to him naturally, except Sister Ruth, whom he avoided, and Sister Honey who fluttered; she was no more capable of speaking naturally to a man than she was capable of beating Joseph. He knew it and teased her gently, making her blush and flutter more than ever.

  It was miraculous how things improved. Pin Fong, the carpenter, was a tall sad Chinese; in his blue coat he looked like a drooping cornflower with a seeded yellow centre; he never seemed to speak, but his men knew what they had to do and worked quickly and well.

  The back rooms were mended and divided into cubicles for the Sisters’ sleeping quarters, and the door leading to that part of the house was padded with baize to shut out the rest of it; a wall was knocked down between two small rooms to make a large Refectory and the salon was left as a reception room. They put the figure of the Sacred Heart there, where Mr Dean had made a wooden niche for it and painted it in gold. The schools were rising from the ruins on the west lawn and already the statues of St Elizabeth, St Catherine, St Teresa and St Helen were arranged along the corridor, while St Faith herself was opposite the porch.

  ‘There she is,’ said Mr Dean, who had lifted her into place for them. ‘She’s your patron or name saint or whatever you call her, isn’t she? Now the old Palace is a proper Convent.’

  But it was not. Even with the alterations it was different from any Convent they had known.

  Theirs was an Anglo-Catholic Order that had its headquarters at Canstead in Sussex. Many of them had been pupils at the school and had gone back there as postulants, Sister Clodagh and Sister Briony among them. They all knew the story of how Sister Clodagh had come there, all the way from Ireland as a very little girl, because her mother had been a pupil there before her.

  The Order had spread to the East and sent a stream of Sisters to Egypt and Persia and India and China. In India Sister Clodagh had found the same brick buildings, the same green walls and echoing s
tone stairs; the same figures of saints in coloured plaster, the same close warm Convent smell, mixed with incense and wax polish. The reception room floor had even been laid in wood to match the parquet at home and the chapel had been copied exactly from the chapel at Canstead. The corridors were crowded with girls in neat blouses, the white figures of the Sisters were everywhere, and there was always a subdued busy bustle or else deliberate meditative silence.

  Here the house was never still, it strained and spoke in the wind that broke all privacy. There was no such thing as privacy at Mopu, every sound was carried through the house and the rooms were built of windows opening on the endless corridors where the servants and workmen came walking by; and yet sometimes there was that sense of emptiness that was almost frightening, as if the house had swallowed everyone; you could walk in it for minutes and meet nobody. It was as if it had swallowed them up, they and the restraints they had brought to it; they were gone under the old familiarity, their saints tossed down like beads, the bell on its thread of sound snapped off.

  The house would not conform; look at the way they tried to say St Faith’s and always said Mopu. The flimsy walls did not shut out the world but made a sounding box for it; through every crack the smell of the world crept in, the smell of rain and sun and earth and the deodar trees and a wind strangely scented with tea. Here the bell did not command, it sounded doubtful against the gulf; the wind took the notes away and yet it brought the sound of the bells at Goontu very strongly; pagan temple bells. And everywhere in front of them was that far horizon and the eagles in the gulf below the snows. ‘I think you can see too far,’ said Sister Philippa. ‘I look across there, and then I can’t see the potato I’m planting and it doesn’t seem to matter whether I plant it or not.’

  Then there were the people, the servants and the patients and the children; they were disconcertingly outspoken and familiar; they had no manners at all, because their manners were such a part of them that they ceased to be manners. Mr Dean was like that, he was so like these people that he was almost of them; he had ‘gone native’ in a way that Father Roberts had not meant. ‘And not a bad way either,’ thought Sister Clodagh and caught herself up quickly.

  At any rate, she told herself, the difference seemed to be stimulating. All the Sisters were living and working well, extraordinarily well; even Sister Ruth was giving no trouble, though sometimes she was pale and silent and had a way of staring resentfully with those green eyes that had such a peculiar glitter. There was fierce competition in the schools; since the first day Sister Honey longed to teach the children, and she would have left her threads and patterns and delicate weaving in a moment if Sister Ruth had given her the chance.

  Sister Briony never had a second to spare, and her thoughts were all of the new dispensary that Mr Dean was building for her with such sense and economy; and Sister Philippa was beginning to take a real interest in the garden and had asked if she might borrow the book that Mr Dean said he would lend her on Himalayan plants.

  But Sister Clodagh found it difficult to work herself. That first day in Mr Dean’s bungalow and in the orchard she had been reminded of Ireland – and of Con. Not reminded, there was nothing to remind her, but they were back again, she had to face that. She had started her old dreams and they were worse for all the years between, when she had not felt a tremor or a touch. She was afraid that she was going to be drawn into it again, but so far she had kept it down, except for the dreams. She tried not to worry, but to let herself drift on the days and be busy with all the work there was to be done.

  She told Pin Fong that she wanted work to stop on Sundays; he smiled politely and came on Sunday with his men.

  ‘Why have you come, Mr Pin? It’s Sunday.’

  ‘I work all same, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to.’

  ‘I want to. Gleat much work to be done.’

  On Sundays now the Convent was not quiet, there was incessant tapping and hammering and sawing, and the noise of trowels spreading concrete and the comings and goings of ponies. There were the voices of the men and the voice of Mr Dean; his voice penetrated even to the chapel which was furthest away. Sister Clodagh had to ask him to come at more convenient times.

  ‘I come when there’s something that needs me,’ he said. ‘I’m a busy man, Sister Clodagh, and I can’t hang about waiting for this or that reason. Sunday is the day when I’m able to give most time to the work as the factory’s closed. Let’s get on and finish it and then you needn’t be bothered with us any more.’

  ‘You know it isn’t that. Sunday with us is a day of quiet,’ she said. ‘And we find it disturbing to hear you when we’re in chapel.’

  ‘In chapel you oughtn’t to hear me,’ he said gravely. ‘If you were truly in prayer nothing could disturb you.’

  She stared at him in amazement and then left him and went back into the empty chapel.

  How dared he answer her like that? She knelt staring at the mountain framed in the window. How dared he? She was too angry to pray and sat down with her hands in her lap trying to control herself. As she sat there her anger seemed to leave her tired and irritated. She looked at the narrow room; it had seemed peaceful, almost pretty, with its window hung with creepers, its shining benches and the altar bright with cosmos flowers; now she found herself thinking that if the mountain had a voice, it would be like Mr Dean’s, magnified a thousand times, disturbing the world instead of one small whitewashed room, and she found herself wishing that it could. She liked it, she gloried in it; she had lived too long with the delicate and small and petty.

  Then she knelt down and pressed her fingers into her eyes, and her hands into the back of the bench in front of her and her knees into the floor. How could the years she had given to God be small and petty? She tried to think how, to Him, the mountain was as infinitesimal as the sparrows; instead she thought how the eagles, filled with His life, were beaten down before it.

  It seemed to press through the window and fill her eyes with startling clearness like a railway poster, white painted with blue on a blue sky. She got up to look for Sister Briony.

  ‘We must fit curtains to the chapel window,’ she said. ‘The light is far too bright.’

  8

  Sister Clodagh thought that the time had come when she could speak to Mr Dean about the Holy Man on the Convent grounds; they had established themselves now, she felt, and it was not only the Holy Man; the path with the stone steps was a short cut to the factory and the River and, all day long, people could be seen on the sky-line. Anyone climbing the steps stood straight into the sky, and the wind in their clothes and the sky with its scarves of cloud and the trumpet shapes of the trees, made the figures like gay and flimsy dancers cut from paper.

  They were very distracting. Sister Honey and Sister Ruth could watch them from the school verandahs; the coolies rested their cone baskets on the stones, the women sat down in parties to smoke, the ponies climbed the steps like cats and sometimes there would be Tibetan monks in red and blue robes, their shaved heads flashing and shining in the sun with sweat.

  ‘We ought to put a grotto there,’ said sentimental Sister Honey, ‘a grotto so that they might drink. We have a lovely statue of dear St Vincent de Paul coming to us from the senior pupils at Canstead; he would make a beautiful grotto, wouldn’t he?’

  She was talking to Mr Dean, who said: ‘Why should they want a grotto when they have a stream?’

  ‘Oh, well –’ Sister Honey was confused and then said: ‘If the saint were over the grotto, wouldn’t they think of him while they drank? Think of the good thoughts they would have if they thought each time of St Vincent de Paul who sent them the water.’

  ‘Come to that,’ said Mr Dean, ‘it was God who sent the stream.’

  He often tripped her up like that, to see her blush and stammer and contradict herself, but he did it so very gently that she liked it and continually invited it.

  ‘And this is St Juan of Aliros,’ she would
say, taking him reverently from his packings. ‘He was martyred at fifteen years of age with swords and arrows, and all the gutters of Aliros ran with blood.’

  ‘They couldn’t have,’ said Mr Dean.

  ‘Couldn’t have? Why not?’

  ‘Aliros has no gutters.’

  It was not very reverent of him, but still she liked him; it was impossible to believe that anyone so kind in small things could really mean to be unkind in big. ‘I think he’s only teasing,’ she said to Sister Ruth. ‘I suppose his face is wicked, though it is so charming; but then that’s how one would expect it to be, wouldn’t one?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Sister Ruth.

  ‘Well, he has a very bad reputation,’ Sister Honey sank her voice. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t tell you, but I think you ought to know. Sister Laura talked about it and that’s why Reverend Mother wouldn’t let her come back here. Father Roberts warned Sister Clodagh against him and, that first time they came here to see the house, he behaved very badly; Mr Dean, I mean, not Father Roberts. He said something to her about the women here. Sister Laura said she could hardly believe her ears.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘She couldn’t quite catch it, but he told her that he had educated the local ladies or something like that. You can tell he’s not really a good man, the way he exposes himself,’ said Sister Honey with a shudder. ‘I do think that Sister Clodagh should make him wear more respectable clothes when he comes here. I’m afraid he’s not at all a good man.’

  Sister Ruth’s eyes were fixed on the figures on the sky-line, but she did not see them. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it’s true, but if it is it won’t make any difference to me.’

  The people took to sitting on the path to watch the nuns; they laughed and talked about them and handed round cigarettes and made a party of it. They embarrassed them acutely.

  ‘It’s not pleasant to be talked about and laughed at in a language you can’t understand,’ said Sister Ruth resentfully, and Sister Clodagh said: ‘I can’t wait for the General. I must speak to Mr Dean.’