Black Narcissus

by Rumer Godden

  Presently she got up from her knees and went into the side room. At the sink where they filled the vases, she washed her face and bathed her eyes. As she turned off the tap she whipped round at a noise; it was only the towel slithering off the rail; that was all, but as she bent to pick it up she was trembling.

  At six o’clock she went out to ring the Angelus.

  The light on the drive was blinding after the chapel; her strained eyes blinked, her skirts dragged at her as she went to the bell. The top of the horse-block and the steps were slippery with dew; she had to step up carefully, lifting her skirt, and balance carefully as she reached for the bell.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace.’ She searched for the River, winding below among the orange trees; the light in the gulf was miraculously clear and blue.

  ‘Blessed art thou –’ Her eyes were too tired to see the eagles. The specks of tea swam in the paler green; that sharp white just below was where they had been cutting the bamboos.

  ‘Blessed is the Fruit of thy womb Jesus –’ Fear came over her then, the fear of the night and her vigil, and the chapel. There was someone behind her, holding her skirt on the block. Desperately she rang the bell.

  A wet hand came over her shoulder, and an arm with a mad strength. The bell jerked with a clang. Her fingers tore at Sister Ruth’s arms and her gripping hands, that were pushing and forcing her to the railings. She hung over them, balanced on the wet block, swaying above the gulf. Then her boot slipped on the stone and she fell heavily sideways, missing the railings and hitting the gravel beside the block.

  As she fell she snatched at Sister Ruth.

  She had a vision of her mad wet face against the sky, as she rocked on the slippery stone. She tried to catch at her habit to help her, but the stuff was slimy with wet and dirt. Then Sister Ruth seemed to fall into the sky with a scream, as she went over the railings.

  Sister Clodagh pulled herself to her knees against the block. She could not stand, the fight was going round her in circles. Painfully, inch by inch, she dragged herself to the edge and forced her eyes to look down.

  She had fallen where they had been cutting the bamboos. Her hand and veil were flung out curiously sideways. A spike had driven through her chest, holding her up with her head hanging down.

  When they reached her she was dead.

  32

  The nuns kept watch in the chapel for two days and nights, kneeling two by two by the bier, but as soon as Pin Fong could make the coffin they buried Sister Ruth. The grave was dug at the foot of a tree on the hill above the drive, and every day they found it daubed with whitewash and a pot of milk or marigolds laid beside it.

  ‘The people are afraid of the ghost, the bhût,’ said Ayah. ‘They say she has gone into the tree and no one will pass under it.’

  The servants had been afraid of the body. They said that the bamboo spike had pierced the heart and that Sister Ruth would never rest. They went down from the kitchen to their quarters all together at night, the whites of Joseph’s eyes rolling with fear.

  Sister Clodagh could not discover who visited the grave; when the servants were questioned they were obstinately silent. It was more than ever strange because the people would not come near the Convent; they were far more afraid of the Sisters than the Sisters had ever been of them, but morning after morning there were offerings on the grave, fresh milk and butter and fresh bright flowers.

  ‘I think it’s horrible! Horrible!’ sobbed Sister Honey. ‘Sister Adela had turfed it so nicely and Pin Fong had made such a beautiful cross. It’s horrible!’

  That feeling of horror was everywhere. The servants were frightened and sullen, the nuns avoided speaking to them and one another, and yet they kept close together; they could not bear to be alone. The useless heavy days dragged on; the heart had even gone out of Sister Briony, she had not turned out a cupboard for days.

  ‘It would be sheer waste of time,’ she said. ‘I know Sister Clodagh is only waiting for the letters to come with permission for us to go.’

  Father Roberts wrote that he had tried to come to them. ‘I managed to get on my pony,’ he wrote, ‘but I was too weak to ride. None of you have been out of my thoughts and prayers. Though I cannot come to you, you are in my prayers.’

  He might have written ‘I told you so.’ Sister Clodagh was ashamed and abashed when she thought of the old sick priest and the things he might have said.

  In these long sad days something strange was happening to Sister Clodagh. She thought it was as if she were born again; as if at the end of their time at Mopu had come the birth of a new Clodagh, a birth out of death. First there had been the days when she had dreamed and drifted, her life shaping itself to the old dreams of Con with the little sharpness of reminders from the young General and Mr Dean; then the days had become altogether sharp and she had striven with intensity and agony. Now all that had fallen away; she was defenceless and unencumbered as a new-born child. She had no pretences, no ambitions and no pride; she hardly had an identity. She was not Sister Clodagh any longer, she was a new, not very certain Clodagh, and it seemed to her that she had new eyes and a new understanding.

  She had written to Mother Dorothea; not in an outburst of grief and self-reproach, but telling it as simply as a child would have told it with none of the little bits left out. It began with the rest they had taken that first day in the forest and her thoughts as she turned the wine-cup in her fingers. They were all in it, everything was in it; the things she had thought and said and done, the things they had all thought and said and done; she had written them all out quite simply in her letter to Mother Dorothea and she sent the letter off and waited for Mother Dorothea’s answer to come, telling her what to do and what her punishment would be. She had no doubt at all that they would be recalled and she knew what to expect for herself.

  Sister Philippa had said it all before her, she was only treading out the path that the wise Sister had made. ‘It will be a bad mark against you.’ ‘It’s what I need.’ How well she understood that now.

  But when Mother Dorothea’s letter came, the colour flooded into her face and for the first time in all those days the tears came into her eyes. Her knees trembled so that she had to sit down.

  ‘Dear, dear, Sister, don’t let it upset you so,’ cried Sister Briony who was with her. ‘How can she judge when she didn’t feel the circumstances, if you know what I mean? As soon as I see her I’ll explain and she’ll understand how wonderful you’ve been in this terrible time. I’m sure you didn’t do yourself justice when you wrote. I know you blame yourself. She won’t do that when she knows –’

  Sister Clodagh shook her head. ‘She doesn’t –’ she tried to say. ‘It isn’t like that – It’s so unexpected. It’s the surprise that’s making me cry.’

  It was the surprise. ‘This is the first letter I have ever had from you that pleased me,’ wrote Mother Dorothea at the end of her letter. There were two letters; one officially recalling them, and this to Sister Clodagh herself. ‘This is the first letter I have ever had from you that pleased me in spite of the terrible news it brought. In it I seem to find a new Clodagh, one whom I had long prayed to meet.’

  After a while she went into the Sisters and at once they looked at her with attention, for there was a subdued but certain happiness about her that seemed to give her wings. It was strange to see happiness again.

  ‘Sisters,’ she said, and she said it as if she truly meant them as her sisters, ‘you can begin to pack.’

  ‘At once?’ asked Sister Honey.

  ‘Why not?’ said Sister Adela. ‘There’s nothing to keep us here.’

  There was nothing. Nothing in the disused class-rooms and the empty dispensary and clinic and the house cut off from the outside world. Silently they began to pack.

  They could not tell what the servants and people thought. They knew that at once the news had gone up to the village and down to the lines, ‘They are packing!’ and they seemed to be watched by a hundred unseen eyes that
counted every box, every little piece of their identity as they took it from the house and folded it away. No one came. Sometimes they thought they heard footsteps, rustlings, but it was only the wind; Sister Honey had a dream that Om escaped from his mother and came toddling up the path to her arms, but he changed into a little girl and ran away from her.

  After that she had an idea of asking Joseph to bring Om secretly to say good-bye, but in the sense of that glowering watchfulness she did not dare. In the evenings she used to go up to the gate where the games of hopscotch had been played, and the children’s voices seemed still to tremble on the air. There was no one there. It was the wind that tugged at her veil and the wind that stirred the branches of the trees and made them whisper. ‘I hate this wind,’ she said.

  Sister Clodagh often came up and joined her there. They did not speak but looked down over the edge of the steps to where the coolie lines showed blank and still and shut away from them. ‘It’s as if they had built a wall between us,’ sighed Sister Clodagh.

  ‘If I went to the market what would they do?’ she had asked Mr Dean.

  ‘They wouldn’t do anything,’ he said, ‘but it would be very embarrassing for them.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it would,’ she said.

  They thought Ayah was longing to be rid of them. ‘You want us to go, don’t you, Ayah?’

  But Ayah answered, ‘Yes and no.’ For once she did not seem quite certain what she wanted. ‘I thought I would be glad and so I am,’ she said. ‘I hoped you’d go and quickly too, and now I’m sorry. Yes, in a way I’m sorry. But I’ll soon get over that,’ she added cheerfully.

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘You’ll have forgotten all about us, and if anyone speaks of us, you’ll wonder who we were. You don’t remember things for long here, do you?’

  ‘Why should we?’ asked Ayah. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I remember my Srimati Devi here. I don’t know why that is. You are better to me than she was, but she belongs here and you don’t.’

  It seemed that even the weather was waiting for them to go, waiting for them to go and for the rains to come. The sky was empty of clouds and the valley in the haze seemed empty below; the hills were curiously vague and pale, the whole panorama was colourless and the clouds were heavy in the north.

  Still the rain held off. ‘It would be better for us to go before it comes,’ said Sister Briony. ‘We don’t want to travel in the first break of rain.’

  ‘The garden will be ruined when it does come,’ said Sister Adela, ‘with all these half-built terraces. I can’t think why Sister Philippa ever started them. I don’t want to be here to see it. I hope it won’t come before we go.’

  ‘I don’t think it will,’ said Sister Clodagh, and she thought with a stab of pain of the deluge coming after they had gone to wipe these small traces of them away.

  ‘It seems a long time to wait just to see the General,’ said Sister Adela. ‘We could have got safely to Darjeeling by now.’

  But Sister Clodagh had told Mother Dorothea that to go without seeing him would be like running away, and now Sister Briony answered Sister Adela and said: ‘We have to stay and apologize. It’s the very least we can do.’

  ‘It’s so sad,’ said Sister Honey, ‘when you think how eagerly we came here and how hard we worked. It’s so sad I can hardly bear it.’

  ‘It’s no use thinking of it like that,’ said Sister Adela. ‘Every Order has its failures. I don’t say this couldn’t have been avoided, but I expect we’ve all learnt something from it. Now we must look forward to trying again somewhere else.’

  But Sister Honey was thinking of the children again, and their brown rosiness and the feeling of their hands pulling her and twitching her skirt. ‘Lemini, Lemini, come.’ If she shut her eyes she could hear them still. In spite of the baby, and she was sure she had broken her heart for him, in spite of the baby she could not bear to go.

  Sister Briony looked at her store-room and cupboards and the rows of jam and jelly and pickles that she must leave behind, and at her neat dispensary; she had a lump in her throat that made it difficult to tell the servants what to do. She was so sorry to leave the servants that she did not know how to tell them so; she could only give them their orders very sorrowfully and gently; none of them would look at her directly, but hung about her standing first on one foot and then on the other.

  ‘They are so honest and truthful,’ she sighed. ‘There isn’t a single thing missing from the house. Even Kanchi brought that vase back.’

  ‘Only because the young General made her,’ said Sister Adela.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. They preferred to forget about Kanchi and the young General.

  He had come back on the afternoon of Sister Ruth’s death. Sister Clodagh, sleepless and haggard, had to come out and see him. ‘What do you want?’ she asked tersely.

  He looked a little dismayed, but he said: ‘Sister, I have just heard the news about Sister Ruth. I’m most bitterly sorry.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘You’re angry with me?’ he said in surprise. ‘Please don’t be angry.’

  ‘General, I’m tired and very distressed. You haven’t been near us for days, you haven’t even sent us word that you weren’t taking your lessons, and then you must choose this day of all days to come.’

  ‘I didn’t choose it,’ he said, more surprised. ‘I came at once as soon as I heard the news because it reminded me of you.’

  ‘Did it really?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered gravely. ‘Sister, I have done a very wrong thing, but I didn’t mean to do it. I don’t mean to do anything wrong again, and I’m going to give up being clever and famous. I’m going to be exactly like my ancestors. I’ve been reading books about them; they were warriors and princes, Sister. They were modest and brave and polite and they never did anything cheating; that’s why I came to you as soon as I was reminded, to tell you what I had done.’

  ‘Must you tell me now?’

  ‘Please, Sister.’

  ‘Well, what have you done?’ she asked wearily.

  ‘Sister Clodagh, I have had Kanchi for a week. At least,’ he corrected himself, ‘I have had her for eight days, and as I don’t want to do anything cheating, I have brought her back to ask you if I may have her for always.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather late to ask when she’s been with you for a week, no, eight days, already?’

  ‘Well, yes, it is rather. I know it would have been more polite to ask you first, but I took her before I had time to think of that. As soon as I did think of it,’ he added virtuously, ‘I brought her straight to you.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She wouldn’t come in. I couldn’t make her come in. She said she would until we were here, and then she said she wouldn’t. She asked me to give you this –’ he held out the little brass vase from the chapel. ‘But I couldn’t make her come in.’

  ‘In that case it seems to be settled already. But you must go and see Mr Dean. He’s responsible for her. I have her trunk and some money her uncle gave me as her dowry. If Mr Dean agrees, she had better have it.’

  ‘But I’m not going to marry her,’ said Dilip. ‘You know I can’t do that. My uncle would never allow it.’

  ‘What is to become of her then?’

  ‘I want her as a concubine,’ he said. ‘My ancestors had concubines. You see, my marriage will be arranged, and I shall not see my wife very much. She will not be very sympathetic. I wish you could see my wedding, Sister Clodagh. My ancestors had elephants and horses and a hundred bridesmaids dressed in violet and red. I shall have mine exactly like that.’

  ‘And poor Kanchi is to be a concubine?’

  ‘Yes. They all had concubines and the concubines all committed suttee when they died.’

  ‘And will Kanchi have to commit suttee?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s old-fashioned now. I only told you that to show you how faithful and good the
y were. I’m sure Kanchi will be faithful and good too.’

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ said Sister Clodagh. ‘But what about you?’

  ‘Me?’ he said and flushed. ‘You are cross with me, Sister Clodagh.’

  ‘I’m afraid I am. I’m sorry, General. I can’t be polite any longer and I must ask you to go. I’m very tired and very sad.’

  ‘Have I made you sad?’ he asked quickly.

  ‘A little,’ she answered. ‘Yes, you’ve made me sad and very disappointed. And now, General, please excuse me.’

  ‘Then I may have Kanchi?’

  ‘Kanchi doesn’t belong to me. You must settle that with her and Mr Dean and your uncle. It can be nothing to do with us now.’

  Without speaking he mounted his pony and turned it on the drive. He waved to her and his hand was above the tops of the rose trees: when he moved forward his waist was level with the clouds and over the crest of his pony’s head the mountain reared into the sky, blue-white above the sparkling mane. She shut her eyes; when she opened them he was gone.

  ‘What is going to happen here next?’ Sister Briony had cried when Sister Clodagh told her. ‘What will his uncle say?’

  ‘We shall know soon enough. He must be back before the rains break.’ They seemed to talk of nothing else but that, and now Sister Briony said again: ‘Well, I hope he is. We don’t want to travel in the first outbreak of rain.’

  Mother Dorothea’s letters came and went, and further letters came from Father Roberts; all the arrangements were made, the packing cases and heavy luggage had gone and still the General did not come. ‘We shall get caught in it if we wait much longer,’ said Sister Briony.

  ‘It will be much cooler down below if it breaks before we get there,’ said Sister Honey. ‘Mother Dorothea said the heat had been terrible.’

  ‘Dear Reverend Mother,’ said Sister Briony. ‘How nice it will be to see her again. She wrote such a kind and understanding letter to Sister Clodagh. She did not write as if she were angry, though of course she must have been very grieved.’