Sister Teresa — Chapter 10

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, pages 61-67, 2,433 words

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The truth had come to her from a strange side, but it does not matter from what side the truth comes so long as it is the truth. She had neglected her father during the last year, and now she was planning to leave him for three, four or six months. But he did not seem to care whether she came or stayed away. His ideas seemed to fill his life completely — there seemed no place for her in it. When she went to see him, he was glad to see her, but he never seemed to want her; and Wimbledon was but a few miles from Dulwich; if he wanted her he would be able to go to see her, and she intended to get him a good servant who would look after him and see that he had his meals regularly. But now Owen had awakened a scruple in her, and she could not deny to herself that her place was by her father’s side. Yet, to abandon the poor nuns seemed cruel, and she thought she might lay the matter before her father — he alone could say whether he wanted her, and if he did not want her she would be wasted. But he would say he did not want her; he would let her go to the convent because he would not thwart her wishes. Owen had challenged her to lay the matter before Monsignor, and Owen was right; and she smiled as she sat writing to the priest. That Owen and Monsignor should agree on one subject amused her not a little. Next day she went to Monsignor.

She told him that the Prioress had said she would not be able to endure the strain of staying with them as a visitor; and as she would not say that she intended to become a nun, the Prioress had hesitated whether she could accept her under such conditions. To make the Prioress’s way a little easier, she had said that her constant visits to the Wimbledon convent had left no doubt in her mind that true spiritual elevation can only be attained through the cloister. She had admitted that she would like to become a nun if she could realise the ideal which some three or four in the convent seemed to her to have realised — the Prioress, Sister Mary John and Mother Hilda. She knew the nuns very well by this time, and these were the only ones who had reached a high degree of spiritual perfection. The larger number were pious women who had accepted the cloister from commonplace motives. Some had accepted it in order to escape from freedom — to many freedom is irksome and a rule of life a necessity; some few, no doubt, had entered the convent from disappointment.

It seemed strange to Monsignor that the Prioress should accept her as a postulant, knowing that she did not intend to stay in the convent; and Evelyn had to admit that she had said she hoped that six months in the convent would discover a vocation in her.

‘And if you find you have a vocation you will leave your father for ever?’

Monsignor spoke of the duty of children towards their parents, and of the age of Mr Innes, and he pointed out that his interest in artistic things rendered him incapable of dealing with the practical affairs of life. He laid stress on the fact that if she were to leave her father and anything were to happen to him she would never be able to forgive herself, nor did he think she would find in the convent any nobler mission than she would find waiting for her in Dulwich. He said that if the Prioress had consented to relax the rule, as she had been advised, and had built a laundry, these monetary difficulties would not have arisen, and Evelyn, whose sympathies were all with the contemplative orders, gathered up her courage and spoke of Martha and Mary; Mary had been content to worship at the feet of Christ; but Martha had fussed about external things, and these, though intended to give him honour, were not so valuable to him as the mere loving worship of Mary. Christ himself had said that Mary had chosen the better part, and was not this a vindication of the contemplative orders? Monsignor answered that Christ had mixed with the publicans and Pharisees.

She had put her case in his hands, and was going to abide by his decision. She would go to her father, live with him, attend upon him, do all that a daughter should do. She had not realised that her postulancy could not have been more than an experiment. Monsignor had made this clear to her; and, as if to reward her for her obedience to him, she found a letter from her father on her table, asking her to go to the British Museum to copy some music. She had had nothing to do for a long time, and it was a pleasure to spend the morning in the Museum; and she went to Dulwich in the afternoon, delighted with her transcriptions.

And while he praised her copying she waited for an opportunity to tell him she was giving up her flat and coming to live with him.

He played the bar twice over, and asked if she had copied it correctly. Yes, she was sure she had copied it correctly.

'I was beginning to fear that your artistic life was dead, but it will come back to you. I remember the time when a piece of music like this would have interested you. Did it bore you to copy it?’

'I liked to copy it because I was copying it for you. I can see that it reflects a time when men’s lives must have been very beautiful.’

Her father was sixty years of age, and he might live until he was eighty. So for twenty years she would play the old music and sing Elizabethan songs; and this was going to be her life, however unlike herself it might seem.

The absurd dish of hard mutton which her father could not eat and forgot to complain about, helped her to understand that the simple duty of seeing he had wholesome food was her duty before all other duties — her supposed duties towards art, and her duty towards the nuns, the duty she had lately invented for herself. Ulick came in after dinner, and she wondered how he could drink the thick mixture which the servant put on the table, calling it coffee. They did not waste much time over it. Ulick had brought part of his second act with him, and she was asked to sing it. ‘Manuscript music at sight,' she said, and though it was Ulick’s music she could feel no interest in it. Her thoughts were often carried back to the nuns and she forgot her cue. Her inattention annoyed her father, and she wondered what he and Ulick were arguing about so hotly — about a dramatic situation, she thought, and all the while she sat thinking what Ulick would say when she told him that she had been intending to enter a convent for six months. She remembered how sympathetic he had been when he returned from Ireland; she could not think of him otherwise than as sympathetic; but the monastic ideal conflicted as much with his ideas as it did with Owen’s tastes.

They were going back to London together, and on the way back she would tell him.

‘I cannot wait another minute,' she said, interrupting the conversation, ‘I shall miss my last train.' Mr Innes wished her to stay, but she felt she must confide to Ulick her decision to live with her father and leave the convent to the mercy of Providence.

They hurried away; and he felt she had something to confide to him, and she told him the moment they were outside what had happened.

He took her hands, and he held them, but he held them so gently and looked at her so fondly that she felt his gentleness to be the most exquisite thing in the world.

'Ulick, you did not hear me; I said I was sorry to abandon the nuns, I’m going to live with father.’

‘You will go to your father for a while; you will do all you can to live with him, but something is drawing you from him, Evelyn; your life is not with him, and we cannot live except where our life is.’

He addressed her earnestly about her soul, saying that the grey pieties of the cloister could not enclose all there is of God on earth for her. And becoming suddenly impassioned, he spoke with scorn of those who renounce a great deal in order to gain a little; and he told her that she had been appointed to express spiritual truths in art, and that she had done this with extraordinary power and purity, and that she made a great mistake in forsaking the higher medium for the lower.

He asked her why she believed that God was more in the host on the altar than in the cup of this great lily, and leaning over a pretty paling they held the flower in their hands. She might have answered, and she was minded to answer, that if we believe God is everywhere we hardly believe that he is anywhere. But she refrained from argument, knowing it to be useless, and she liked to hear him, even when she did not agree with him, and with his wide grey eyes looking at her earnestly, he spoke of the great joy there is in flinging off the fear of creeds and living in our spiritual instincts and in our bodily instincts; and he asked her if she did not think she could serve God by tendance on flowers, and by tendernesses to the beasts in the fields and the beasts by the hearth.

She wished he would forget the convent, she wished to forget it herself; it were better to do so since she could never enter it. She was thinking now of the beauty of the night, and of him, and of his ideas, which, though they were not hers, were near enough to her to be appreciated by her; for what Ulick said might easily have been said by Saint Francis d’Assisi.

As they walked along the moonlit road a little of his music came back to her, and she tried to remember it, but it was hardly rememberable. But it pleased him to hear her try to remember it, it pleased them to sit on a bench and try to read the score by the light of the moon. The blossoming branches above them showered white dust upon the manuscript in their hands.

Art was to Ulick what it had become to Evelyn, a means rather than an end, and seeing her soul in peril he could not talk to her of his music, obsessed as his imagination was by the thought that she was going to lose her soul in abstinences and rituals.

‘I think you would sooner see me dead, Ulick, than in a convent.’

‘Many times; there is something unspeakably painful in the death of a soul.’

‘I know what you mean, that piety is not sufficient. Many nuns lose themselves in mechanical pieties.’

'Since life has been given to us it is given to us for acceptance and not for refusal. You will lose your soul, Evelyn, by stripping yourself of your womanhood which God gave you to serve Him with, and by renouncing your art which was given you that you might reveal Him to others. You will lose your soul by seeking God in prayerbooks rather than in the stars, and by seeking Him in scrolls rather than in the sunset and in the morning winds. The convent is an unspeakable degradation of self, and therefore a degradation of God. Nothing fills me with such terror as the convent.’

She tried to speak to him. of his music, but he only listened for a moment.

‘Music,' he said, ‘is only a medium, the soul is the important thing.’

To keep her soul he said she must fly from the city where men lose their souls in the rituals of materialism. He must go with her to the pure country, to the woods and to the places where the invisible ones whom the Druids knew ceaselessly ascend and descend from earth to heaven, and heaven to earth, in flame-coloured spirals. He told her he knew of a house by a lake shore, and there they might live in communion with Nature, and in the fading lights, and in the quiet hollows of the woods she would learn more of God than she could in the convent. In that house they would live, and their child, if the Gods gave them one, would unfold among the influences of music and love and long traditions.

‘Wandering in the woods and underneath the boughs we shall know that the great immortal presences are by us, and the peace they instil into our hearts will be the proof that they applaud our flight from priests and creeds.’

Every star that the eye can see was visible that night, and the interspaces were filled with a pale bloom, the light of stars so distant that their light is but a milky whiteness on the sky.

Nothing had been said for some while, and Ulick wondered if what he had said had influenced her in the least, and he watched for some sign; but she sat without speaking, her eyes fixed on the sky, lost in contemplation of the extraordinary diagram extending into space without end. Her thoughts returned suddenly from the infinite space, and she said, —

'I shall always consider, Ulick, that the convent ideal is the highest, and that they are wisest who choose it.’

'But you give no reason,' he answered.

‘Everything is faith in the end,' she said; ‘all things come to be matters of faith.’

They had missed their last train, and she was glad of it. She said she would not go back to Dowlands, for on this dry, windless night she would enjoy the long walk under the stars, and he must go on telling her his dreams, his ideas, and his visions.