Black Narcissus

by Rumer Godden

  It was not for nothing that Kanchi had those ripe sweet cheeks and that honey-coloured skin. Dean Sahib had saved her so far, now she had to save herself; to save herself up for something that glimmered on the far horizon, that she could not put into words. She was doing well with the nuns; that was easy because she was quick and glib. She helped Ayah with her work in the mornings before she went to the Lace School, and nothing could have annoyed Ayah more than that; and after the schools were closed she did light work for Sister Briony. She went over the morning’s dusting with a feather brush that Sister Briony had given her. In the cold light that came through the glass panes, the colours of her sleeves and veil moved like wings; and if one of the men came by, a peon or a house-boy, or one of the workmen, he seemed to be constrained to stand watching her; and as if the feathers of the brush had tickled him, a slow delighted smile came into his face and he would forget the hammer he had been sent to fetch, or let his tray tilt further and further, until the milk dribbled out of the jug and Ayah pounced from a doorway.

  Kanchi flicked on with her brush, the lids of her eyes and her small smile making the shape of three half-moons in her face.

  In the Lace School the girls sat on the verandah with their cushions while the new school was being built. Samya, the Bhotiya girl, was glossy with health and grooming; Maili was plump too, her nose ring gave her the appearance of a charming little bull, but there was something about Kanchi’s waist, the demure supple knot of her skirt length that stole the eye away; and there were far too many excuses, Pin Fong told Mr Dean, to go past the verandah from the men.

  ‘You behave. I’m watching you,’ said Mr Dean, and Kanchi kept her eyes on her bobbins. She wanted to stay, for a time at any rate. Dean Sahib was right, she had made a little silly of herself and that was better forgotten. She wanted to stay here, where the food was good and she was filling out into even more delightful curves; where her presence was pleasantly annoying to Ayah, and she was gaining prestige by her monkey cleverness in making this lace and learning the Catechism.

  She was taking pains to impress the nuns and the grieved and puzzled way she looked at Mr Dean was very well done. He smiled at her and said: ‘That’s a good girl,’ and added: ‘If you give them any trouble, mind, I’ll send you back to your uncle.’ When she had been there a day she said she had never been so happy in her life; when she had been there a week, she wanted to become a Christian.

  ‘Isn’t that wonderful!’ cried Sister Honey. ‘In one short week!’

  ‘Almost too wonderful,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’

  ‘Sister, I don’t want to discourage her.’

  ‘A little opposition won’t discourage her if she’s really sincere,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘You can teach her some Scripture if you like, providing her uncle doesn’t object, and she can see Father Roberts when he comes.’

  Her uncle had no objections. ‘Teach her anything you like,’ he said generously. ‘I don’t suppose it will do her any harm.’

  Though Sister Clodagh spoke in such a lukewarm way, as Sister Honey said, with the help of a dictionary and grammar that the Brothers had left behind she began laboriously to translate the Catechism, some prayers and a few easy hymns to be used in the school. It was slow, difficult work; it was hard not to dream as she did it, and she seemed to get very little done at a time.

  ‘What are you working on?’ asked Mr Dean, as he tied the money bags, catching sight of the grammar. Without asking he looked at the book spread on her desk and read ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ and the translation beside it. ‘You’ve got that wrong,’ he said. ‘That’s not the imperative. Let me show you.’ Below it in her writing he saw her notes. ‘Have I hurt anyone in any way? Have I tried to do to others as I would like them to do to me? Have I considered others as more important than myself? Have I spoken kindly to others, never saying anything that would hurt another’s feelings? Have I thought kindly of everyone?’

  ‘Very salutary for you and for me,’ he said, ‘but are you going to translate it all? It’ll take you a month of Sundays.’

  ‘It’s for Kanchi and others like her,’ she said. ‘Kanchi says she would like to be a Christian.’

  ‘Do you believe her?’

  ‘Of course it remains to be seen if she’s sincere,’ she answered coldly.

  ‘And meanwhile, you’re doing all this work for that improbable pea that is Kanchi’s soul. Good God, Sister, don’t you know trash when you see it?’

  ‘No one’s soul is trash,’ she said steadily. ‘Everyone is valuable to God.’

  ‘I should like to know just what He’d give for that thieving, self-seeking, shallow little opportunist.’

  ‘He gave Himself.’

  ‘Have you no sense of proportion?’ he cried, and then: ‘Do you really believe that? Sister, the people here worship the mountain. They think it concerns itself with them. They’re silly, aren’t they?’

  She was silent, her lips set, and he repeated: ‘Everyone is valuable to God. What’s the use of teaching them that?’

  On impulse she asked him: ‘What would you teach them, Mr Dean?’

  ‘I wouldn’t teach anyone,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘but if I were you, I should teach them poverty.’

  ‘Poverty?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Poverty. All of them. We’re all hoping for something better, if not here, in another world. Teach us to expect nothing, to do with nothing, for that’s all we’ll get. Damn it all,’ he said, ‘in your churches it should be envied. In God’s house it should be better to be poor than rich. That’s what I don’t understand about you. You’re Christians, you’ve consecrated your lives to Christ; you can talk as you did about poor Kanchi’s soul, and yet in your Church, you seem to me as far removed from His teaching as any other business institution, like the Stock Exchange or the Admiralty or the I.C.S. In your chapel, the General himself ought to give way to a little coolie girl and have a seat at the back on the floor.’

  Sister Clodagh tried to imagine herself showing the General to a seat at the back on the floor.

  ‘If you did,’ he said, as she thought it, ‘you’d make a profound impression on him.’

  ‘But what sort of impression?’ she said. ‘Remember we owe our house and dowry to the General, even our beds and food. You can’t get away from the world and it has to have some social order.’

  ‘That’s nearly as good an argument as mine,’ he said, ‘but think of the Sunnyasi. All right, I’m going. Give me those papers. I know this language better than I do my own. You’d better let me do these for you.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘It’s all right, I don’t expect you to sympathize with my opinions any more than I do with yours. I won’t put in a word of my own. It’ll be done line for line as you’ve written it.’

  ‘Kanchi will –’

  ‘I’m not doing it for Kanchi,’ he said. ‘Simply to stop you wasting your time.’

  14

  The weather grew steadily colder. The sun shone with a primrose light that gilded but did not warm; the snows had lost their blue shadows, they glittered with slopes of ice.

  The Sisters needed fires now and the worsted mittens for their hands that, Ayah told them, made them look like monkey’s paws; their feet were frozen because the wind came, through the cracks of the walls and floors, and their noses had a peculiar blue look. Sister Ruth had a cough and Sister Briony could hardly stand for chilblains. All the Sisters of the Order in India slept on mattresses of native cotton; they were thin and wore into lumps, and now at night the Sisters shivered so that they could not sleep, in spite of the newspapers that they spread under them. Sister Clodagh went to the market and bought blankets, the coarse cheap blankets issued to the coolies.

  ‘You can’t use those,’ cried Ayah in horror.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Sister Briony. ‘They’re warm.’

  ‘But you’re ladies!’ said Ayah. ‘Well, I suppose it’s all part of your ho
liness, but it’s an uncomfortable sort of holiness to me. Look at our Holy Man; he has a good English blanket and skins to lie on, and there’s never been anyone holier than he.’

  They had noticed that the Sunnyasi had a great fire and Sister Clodagh had seen a snow leopard skin hung outside his hut, but he still sat motionless in front of it, his face turned to the snows.

  Joseph collected broken apple wood for their fires and the ponies brought in logs from the forest. The wood was stacked in the passage and the house smelled of it, and the Sisters found chips of bark and moss in their skirts at night. The ponies, coming through the forest, had fringes of ice on their eyelashes and the hairs in their ears frozen stiff; when they breathed, they smoked through their nostrils like dragons, and Sister Philippa used to give the old pony ‘Love’ a seer of hot milk when he came in.

  The air grew so fine and cold that the hills and the trees and the house shimmered in it and the nuns, in their white veils, seemed to wear haloes as they worked. Sister Clodagh thought their faces had changed, that it was not only the light that made them shine, and she sent down a very favourable report to Reverend Mother.

  On Fridays they fasted until three o’clock, and kept Saturday, when the schools were closed, as their day of silence; in the cold, at that altitude, to fast was nearly unbearable. Every Friday by middle day she was on the point of ordering coffee and bread at the very least, but every Friday they had managed to hold out and she had not ordered it yet. She had meant to ask about it in her weekly letter to Mother Dorothea, but she had only asked for a dispensation for Sister Ruth as she did not seem well.

  On the second Friday in December she had a feeling of light-headedness, as if, when she walked, she were standing still and the air flowed past her and the ground spread away in rings under her feet. She seemed ringed with air in which there was no colour, only a sense of colour; of the white walls and the green trees and grass, the dots of nuns wearing their black winter habits and a blue whiteness that was the air itself. She felt her own heart beating, a suffocation in her head and she thought suddenly that if she were one of the eagles flying in the gulf she would feel like this, seeing on tilted wings the colours of earth and snows and sky. However she soared and struggled, the gulf pressed down on her, and she gained not an inch on the mountain.

  The sense of fright came back to her that she had felt in the Rest House at Goontu; restlessly she left her desk and walked round the Convent in this strange ringing and flowing, trying to still the fear in her mind. ‘It’s because I’m hungry,’ she thought. ‘We shall have to give up the fast here. I’ll find Sister Briony and tell her to get coffee.’

  She went to the dispensary, but there was only Sister Honey putting belladonna on a hill-woman’s breast; at the smell of the belladonna she almost vomited and went hastily away.

  The lace workers were sitting together on one mat to keep warm; they blew on their fingers before touching the bobbins and Kanchi slipped her hands in her sleeves as soon as the Sister turned her back. Sister Ruth had Joseph for an English writing lesson; in spite of her breakfast she looked cold and blue. Joseph was writing the letters of the alphabet, his pencil kept on squeaking on his slate, and at each squeak Sister Ruth drew her brows together and winced; then Joseph gave her a humble and sorrowful glance and delicately, with his tongue out, would try the pencil again.

  Sister Briony was busy in the kitchen and yard. ‘I had to come out,’ she said, ‘to store away these apples. I couldn’t leave them lying about. Sister Blanche has taken over for me.’ Her skirts were tucked up out of the wet and Sister Clodagh could see her great feet, hobbling with chafecracks and chilblains. She was putting the apples on the shelves, arranging them in rows so that they did not touch one another.

  ‘Are they worth all that?’ asked Sister Clodagh.

  ‘I’m not really storing them, I’m just putting them here until I have time to make them into jam.’

  ‘Aren’t they too bitter for jam?’

  ‘Oh, no! We mustn’t waste them. If they’re too bitter for jam, they’ll make jelly if I put plenty of sugar.’

  ‘But wouldn’t that be a waste of sugar?’

  ‘I shouldn’t use the best sugar. There’s the country sugar they sell in the market and I can buy that. It’s quite pure, and at any rate it will be thoroughly well boiled.’

  ‘So long as you’re sure you won’t give us all typhoid –’

  ‘Oh, no! Besides, we’ve all been inoculated.’

  ‘And it would be a pity to waste that, wouldn’t it?’ said Sister Clodagh. Sister Briony annoyed her this morning, how could she be always and consistently the same? Not hunger, nor surprise, nor atmosphere could move her, she followed her own nose cheerfully, for ever in her cheerful, familiar little rut. Without asking for the coffee, she left her and walked down the corridor.

  The boards of the floor seemed to widen and narrow as she walked and the panes of glass to pass by her in a blur, until she came to the front door which was open. There the wheeling colours resolved themselves into a young man sitting on a pony in the porch.

  It was the General’s nephew, the young General Dilip Rai. He and his pony had been in the porch for a long time; he had not seen a bell-pull before and there was no knocker, it was so quiet that he did not like to shout. His pony sniffed the flower pots on the steps and pushed one with his nose. Hot with horror, the young General reined him back.

  He looked at the crucifix. He recognized it and he expected to find it there, for the Brothers had had one and these were real Jesus Christ ladies, but he wondered what the holy water stoup was for; it looked too small for drinking and he thought perhaps it was for flowers. His Great Uncle had marigold and melted butter and pots of curds and milk on his shrine; he thought this one would have been all the prettier for some marigolds.

  There was a box marked LETTERS and underneath ‘Servants of Mary’. That was a strange idea to put the servants’ letters in a box; in his house none of the servants could read or write so that it would have been no good to send them letters, but perhaps here, where he had heard they were all so clever, the servants had already been taught to read and write and the Sisters gave them their orders by letter. He supposed that the principal Sister was Mary.

  Ayah and Joseph had told him that the nuns were called Mother and Sister, just as the Brothers had been Father and Brother; it made him blush to think of calling them that, but he had practised it aloud and he wished one of them would come.

  When he saw Sister Clodagh coming down the corridor, he dismounted; his pony rubbed its face on his legs and dribbled on his shoe; as she came to the door, he was rubbing one shoe over the other trying to make it clean.

  He was just as she remembered him, in the dark fitting achkan and the gold earrings, but now he had come so close he seemed suddenly much more of a man. He carried a hat and gloves and stick, and he smelled of cigarettes and there was a line of hair, almost like a moustache, on his upper lip; he might be seventeen, she thought.

  She looked at him without speaking and tried to think just why it was he made her think of Con. She could hardly bear to look at him. Con had fair hair and a skin almost too white for a man but the quality of him was there in the young General waiting to speak to her. Con was in America; he was over forty, but she could not believe that. He was far more here, in this young Rajput, fumbling with his hat and gloves.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, ‘I want to see the Superior Sister.’

  He spoke English naïvely, as if he were not quite certain of the effect it would produce, and at the sound of his voice, his little horse put its face against his arm.

  ‘I’m the Sister Superior,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘What – what can I do for you?’

  ‘I want to be a student here with you. I want to study a lot of learning. I have heard about you, that you are all very clever. I want to study mathematics and history and poetry and languages. Have you a Sister to teach these things? I have a note from my Uncle to you, to ask
you to encourage me.’

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ said Sister Clodagh, not taking the note. ‘We only teach children and young girls.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘A convent doesn’t take men pupils.’

  ‘That’s not very polite to men.’

  ‘We don’t mean it like that. It’s the custom. The Brotherhoods are for teaching men, the Convents for the girls.’

  ‘But there aren’t any Brotherhoods here now, so that I think you should teach me. Jesus Christ was a man,’ he added, looking at the crucifix.

  ‘He took the shape of a man,’ she said, trying in her light-headedness to choose adequate words.’

  ‘But you needn’t count me as a man,’ said Dilip Rai. ‘I’m only interested in studious things. I needn’t count as a man.’

  She looked at his height and his slimness and his face with its delicate moustache and at his hands, hairless and small, but unmistakably a man’s.

  ‘How can I be a student if you don’t help me?’ he asked. ‘Please. My Uncle was going to send me to Paris and London and Edinburgh, for all of which I have introductions and a very great admiration. I was to go to the University of Cambridge; now that my brother is dead my Uncle says that I mustn’t go. I thought if I studied and learnt quickly, he might change his mind and think me so clever that it would be a pity not to send me after all. How can I do that if you won’t help me? My dear tutor, Narayan Babu, has gone away and the Brothers have gone away too; I have no one left but you. And there is something else. I have to marry and have a baby son; it is our custom that my Uncle should choose my wife, but Narayan Babu has taught me that is old-fashioned and I am modern, I want to choose my wife myself. I should like to marry a girl that you have taught and then, if you teach me too, we should enjoy our culture together in our own home. I should like to marry a Bengali; I have only known one Bengali, but I think they are very intelligent, don’t you? In fact, I cut this out of the paper. Of course it’s only an idea, you may not approve, but would you please read it and give me your advice.’