Sister Teresa — Chapter 21

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, pages 121-126, 1,946 words

XXI

The wind had gathered the snow into the bushes and all the corners of the common, and the whole earth seemed but a little brown patch, with a dead grey sky sweeping by. For many months the sky had been grey, and heavy clouds had passed slowly, like a funeral, above the low horizon. The wind had torn the convent garden until nothing but a few twigs remained; even the laurels seemed about to lose their leaves. The nuns had retreated with blown skirts; Sister Mary John had had to relinquish her digging,and her jackdaw had sought shelter in the hen-house.

One night when the nuns assembled for evening prayer, the north wind seemed to lift the roof as with hands; the windows were shaken; the nuns divined the wrath of God in the wind, and Miss Dingle, who had learnt, through pious incantations, that the Evil One would attempt a

descent into the convent, ran to warn the porteress of the danger. At that moment the wind was so loud that the porteress listened perforce to the imaginings of Miss Dingle’s weak brain, thinking, in spite of herself, that some communication had been vouchsafed to Miss Dingle. ‘Who knows,' her thoughts said, ‘who can say; the ways of Providence are inscrutable;' and she looked at the little daft woman as if she were a messenger.

As they stood calculating the strength of the lock and hinges the door bell suddenly began to jingle.

'He would not ring the bell; he would come down the chimney,' said Miss Dingle.

'But who can it be,' said the porteress, ‘and at this hour?’

'This will save you;' Miss Dingle thrust a rosary into the nun’s hand and fled down the passage; 'be sure to throw it over his neck.’

The nun tried to collect her scattered thoughts and her courage. Again the bell jingled; this time the peal seemed crazier than the first, and rousing herself into action, she asked through the grating who it might be.

'It is I, Sister Evelyn; open the door quickly, Sister Agnes.’

The nun held the door open, thanking God it was not the Devil, and Evelyn dragged her trunk through the door, letting it drop upon the mat abruptly.

‘Tell dear Mother I want to speak to her — say that I must see her — be sure you say that, and I will wait for her in the parlour.’

'There is no light there; I will fetch one.’

'Never mind, don’t trouble. I don’t want a light; but go to the Reverend Mother and tell her I must see her before I see anyone else.’

There could be no doubt that something grave had happened, and the porteress hurried down the passage. Evelyn sat at the table looking into the darkness, thinking of the last time she had been in this room. It was just a month ago that she had been called away to Rome. For days he had fluctuated between life and death, sometimes waking to consciousness, then falling back into trance. In spite of the hopes the doctors had held out to him, he insisted that he was dying. ‘I am worn to a thread,' he said. 'I shall flicker like that candle when it reaches the socket — and then I shall go out. But I am not afraid of death — death is a great experience, and we are all better for every experience. There is only one thing — ’

He was thinking of his work; he was sorry he was called away before his work was done; and then he seemed to forget it, to be absorbed in things of greater importance.

And Evelyn thought she must have drowsed a little as she sat waiting for the sound of the nun’s soft woollen slippers in the hall, for now the Prioress stood beside her she had not heard her come in.

'My dear Evelyn, you need not tell me, I know what has happened. Come, let us kneel down and say a prayer.

She was about to say she needed no prayer, but the impulse to obey the Reverend Mother was stronger, and the prayer they said seemed to quiet her grief, and she began to speak of the month she had spent in Rome. Once the Reverend Mother sought to dissuade her from the painful story, but seeing that it relieved her to tell it she allowed her to tell, and she told it in her impetuous way. Sometimes the wind interrupted the Prioress’s attention, and she thought of the safety of her roofs, and once Evelyn noticed the wind, and her notice of it served to accentuate the terror of her grief. 'I waited by his bedside seeing the soul prepare for departure. The soul begins to leave the body several days before it goes; it flies round and round like a bird that is going to some distant country. I must tell you all about it, Mother. He lay for hours and hours, looking into a corner of the room. I am sure he saw something there; and one night I heard him call me. I went to him and asked him what he wanted; but he lay quite quiet, looking into the corner of the room, and then he said, “The wall has been taken away.” I know he saw something there. He saw something, he learnt something in that last moment that we do not know. That last moment is the only real moment of our lives, the only true moment — all the rest is falsehood, delirium, froth. The rest of life is contradictions, distractions and lies, but in the moment before death I am sure everything becomes quite clear to us. Then we learn what we are. We do not know ourselves until then. If I ask who am I, what am I, there is no answer. We do not believe in ourselves, because we do not know who we are; we do not know enough of ourselves to believe in anything. We do not believe; we acquiesce that certain things are so because it is necessary to acquiesce, but we do not believe in anything, not even that we are going to die; for if we did we should live for death and not for life. Oh, Mother, I am very different from the woman who left the convent a month ago. To sit by a dying man, day after day, and talk of death is a great experience. It is not so much what he says to you about death as what you can read in his face; no, not read, you guess the truths which he is beginning to experience.

‘I know that my father knew the truth before he died. Yes, he was always a Catholic — that is not what I mean; I mean the real belief that comes at that moment, when we know what we are and where we are going. We are certain of everything then. Then we believe as we have never believed before. You will tell me that those who live in the world believe in God — so they do, I suppose, in a way; they acquiesce; but if they really believed, if they knew, as my father knew before he died, they would give up everything and go about in rags, and pray, and lose themselves in thoughts of God. They would forget to eat, they would not notice hunger or thirst; and they would fade away, their eyes fixed upon something that we may not see — that something which my father saw before he died. Even here, in this convent of perpetual adoration, you do not seem to me to believe enough, for if you believed that God were really there, on the altar, you would neither eat nor drink; you would remain kneeling until you lost yourselves in death — until you found your true selves.’

'After an experience like yours, Evelyn, one sees life quite differently, and it is through such experiences that we discover our real selves and the way that God intends us to walk in. It is only through great grief that we come to know ourselves. We can easily dispense with our joys; but no one would forego any great sorrow they have been through. I believe we would endure it all over again rather than that we should be as we were before.’

'Mother, all that is real in life is our sense of its unreality.’

'But we are here for God’s own purpose; we must remember that. We must live because it is God’s holy will.’

'Sometimes it is difficult to live; there are times when it seems much easier to die.’

'My dear child, I have been through what you are going through now, and it may help you to know that in times of great sorrow it is easier to live in a convent than it is to live in the world. You know what our life is. You will find its simplicity a help.’

'Will you have me in the convent?’

‘Yes, of course we will. You did not think we should close our door on you in your trouble. You came to us in our trouble.’

'I knew you wouldn’t, Mother.’

She stretched out her hand, and clasping the old nun’s hand she told her of her journey to Rome, of her life in Rome, of her daily prayers in a certain church. She spoke of the nurses, of the doctors and the funeral, and then burst into tears, and the Prioress strove to calm her in vain. Evelyn reproached herself for having allowed her father to go to Rome without her. The convent had been a temptation, and she had yielded to it as she had to other temptations. Then seeing that she had pained the Reverend Mother, she asked her to forgive her.

'It is hard to distinguish sometimes between right and wrong; it should be easy, but it isn’t, and I know that it pleased me to help the convent with my singing. I do not know that that is not why I have come here. Is my grief real grief? Sometimes I forget it; sometimes I find myself thinking of indifferent things — of what I shall sing for you at Benediction — at other times I am overwhelmed in grief and then through all my grief the thought comes: that this is as it should be.’

The wise Prioress did not answer her. A few moments seemed a great while, and she awoke from her trance to hear the Prioress telling her that she had experienced a great sorrow very early in her life; it had been the means of awakening in her that sense of the unreality of things which comes to us all sooner or later; and in the midst'of her grief Evelyn wondered how this woman had survived her grief for forty years; how she still ruled her convent according to her idea.

Evelyn did not know it, but the Prioress knew that her will had gone out to Evelyn like a friend, and she knew that her eyes had a power; and she wished Evelyn to lose her individuality in a rule of life clear and explicit. And Evelyn wished the same. Obedience had come to seem the only sweetness left in the world. Her past life, all of it — she did not except a single year, not even her postulancy — it all seemed trivial and amateurish: now she was to begin the serious business of life.