Sister Teresa — Chapter 40

London: T. Fisher Unwin, 8 July 1901, pages 229-234, 1,906 words

XL

When the Prioress died Evelyn’s life seemed a figment, and life, whether she remained in the convent or left it, seemed to her to be equally unbearable. The anguish was heightened in her by the rites, by the black cloths, by the chants, and by the unconsciousness of Nature. A keen wind was blowing, and the sky brightened at intervals as the procession moved through the gardens. The bare trees were shaken,

and she desired to wave innocently in the air as they did, to mingle with the beautiful, peaceful earth; the earth seemed the only peaceful thing, and she longed to join it and to partake once again of its dark and happy life.

In losing the Prioress she had lost everything, the others had only lost a Prioress, who would be replaced by another Prioress, and a new conviction of her loneliness awoke in her when she knelt by the newly-made grave. She remembered Sister Mary John, whom she would never see again. Even God seemed to have deserted her, yet she had made many sacrifices for Him.

When she announced that she would not vote for the new Prioress the nuns viewed her still more coldly. They asked her if she thought that none among them was worthy to fill the place of the late Prioress. Or did she feel no further interest in the welfare of the convent. Evelyn answered that the choice of the new Prioress would probably decide whether the rule of the order should be widened, whether they should cut themselves off from the Mother House in France, and that she would like to avoid the responsibility of taking sides.

‘But,' said Sister Winifred, ‘no one has a right to shirk her responsibility; that is why we elected you a choir Sister.’

She could not vote — on that point her resolution did not seem to admit of any change; the nuns continued to press her, and she did not like to remind them that she had freed the convent from debt, in order that it might remain a contemplative order. As she hesitated, Sister Winifred came to her rescue, saying, —

'Sister Teresa has no doubt very good reasons for abstaining from voting.’

Evelyn’s defection left little doubt in Sister Winifred’s mind that Mother Philippa would be elected, and in that case the new buildings would be finished before a year was out, a school would be in progress, and before ten years the conversion of Wimbledon to Rome would be an accomplished fact. The few nuns who still clung to the ancient tradition of the order could offer no serious opposition to so constant an energy as Sister Winifred’s. Mother Philippa was elected Prioress, and at the end of the month the subject of conversation during the morning recreations was the possibility of obtaining the Bishop’s consent to their separating themselves from the Mother House in France and entering upon scholastic activity. Monsignor, who had just returned to England, was sent for, and it was hoped he would use his very great influence with his lordship.

'Where, for instance,' the Prioress said to him, ‘could parents get children taught as they could here? But I am very sorry to say that Sister Teresa lost her voice this winter; we miss her voice sadly at Benediction, but for teaching it won’t matter in the least, and then she is an excellent pianist, she can even teach composition.' Monsignor sympathised with the sublime idea that a constant stream of petitions was necessary to save this world from the wrath of God, but at the same time it did not seem to him that a school would seriously infringe upon the tradition of the order. He spoke volubly for some minutes, partly in the hopes of distracting Evelyn’s attention from the Reverend Mother's remarks concerning her, which had seemed to him injudicious. At the same moment Evelyn was thinking how, just as she had finished her work, it had undone itself, it had just crumbled away, and she saw it scattering like a little heap of dust. True it was that she was leaving the convent, but she did not wish the idea abandoned — the idea that she had striven for; she wished it to be carried on by others; she knew herself to be weak, she knew she must fall out of the ranks, but her belief in the ideal was unimpaired. And she thought of these things as she calculated the height of the garden walls, as she listened to Mother Philippa telling Monsignor the price they would charge for boarders and for non-boarders, and the advantages that such a school would offer to the villa residents. But before she could leave the convent she must finish the Prioress’s book. Her promise to the Prioress to finish her history of the convent, its story as it had existed under her headship, had become sacred to Evelyn, and the unfinished manuscript was the last tie that bound her to the convent. She had hoped to finish it in six weeks or a month, but the book was not yet finished; new difficulties arose, and the old difficulties seemed insuperable, and this manuscript which she worked at day after day became like some redoubtable secret enemy. 'If I do not write I shall never get away from here,' she cried to herself in the silent cloisters, and raising her eyes from the paper she thought of herself as of a prisoner scraping her way through an unending wall.

She went about her avocations — a quiet nun, gentle, almost demure; her resolution to escape deep in her heart, and the nuns began to think she had at last become like themselves. Only at recreation did she try to avoid the rule. If it were fine the nuns sat in a circle in the shade of a favourite tree, and gossiped about little external pieties — the lighting of candles and the repainting of the statuettes, and to appear interested in these conversations had always been the greatest of Evelyn’s conventual difficulties, and now it seemed more difficult than ever. One day they were babbling of the advantage it would be to them if some of their pupils distinguished themselves in painting or in music when they left the convent. Sister Winifred cast down her eyes and blushed, and Evelyn felt they could talk better without her. She availed herself of this little incident to steal away.

To walk by herself in the sun, in the evening light, thinking of the dead Prioress, or of the nun who had gone away because she could not endure her love, seemed like happiness, and she felt she could be happy in the convent if her friends could be given back to her. When they were with her the convent was a pure aspiration, meagre and a little grey, perhaps, but still pure and true. And while thinking of the grey pieties of the cloister her eyes turned to the sun-setting. The sunset seemed to steal into her heart, and to become a source of secret joy to her. She wondered what was the influence of the sun; it made the woods grow green and the flowers blossom, it drew all things into itself, the rays darted from the horizon to the zenith, and she stood at the highest point of the garden watching the light, breathless and delighted. She saw the beautiful earth quiescent like a nun watching before the sacrament. The plants lifted their leaves to the light. Everything knew it, even the stones in the centre of the earth; she watched the distant woods submerged in the light of the sun; her soul dilated and knew its light; the shell broke which till now had darkened it from her; her flesh and spirit seemed to become one with it; her immortal spirit seemed to ascend into the immortal light; her eyes seemed to see into the depths of the sea, and her ears were soothed by the murmur of the waves.

The great secret was revealed; she understood the mysterious yearning which impels us in turn to reject and to accept life; and she had learnt these things merely by watching the flowers raising their leaves to the light.

She sat down in the grass and watched a sun-flower till it seemed a sentient being whose silent adoration of its distant shepherd in the heavens was turning it into the likeness of the glory it longed to reach. She closed her eyes to imagine it better, and the sun-flower in her thoughts grew and expanded, and went upwards to the brimming love which gave it life; and the imagined ecstasy of the meeting thrilled her heart, and she remembered that yesterday the elevation of the Host had left her unmoved. Why was it that the mere sight of a flower evoked a vanished sweetness which no ritual could awaken in her? And in another moment of revelation she knew that to seek the Real Presence on the altar alone is a denial of the Divine Being elsewhere, and she felt the door would be closed to her until in every mood and in every place she could recognise the sacrament as an eternal act in nature.

She was wakeful that night, but in the darkness there was light, and she felt that it had come to lead her out as it had led her into the convent, for there are not two lights, but one light.

Her book was finished, and she awaited her opportunity — her opportunity was the accident that Sister Agnes should be called away suddenly and leave her keys on the nail; and the little porteress rarely left her door, and when she did her keys were at her girdle. Winter passed into spring and Evelyn still waited, and she sometimes said 'if the opportunity does not occur soon I shall not have the strength,' and she asked herself if she would have the strength to begin life again. The weeks went by, and one day in April the porteress passed her in the passage, the keys were not at her girdle, and Evelyn walked down the Georgian hall and down the covered way, and taking the keys from the nail she opened the door.

At that moment the pigeons left their roosts and flew towards the fields. The fields were shining in the morning light; thrush and cuckoo were calling, the spring moved among the first primroses, and Evelyn stood watching the spring-tide.

She had only to take a step to regain her life in the world, but she could not take that step. She no longer even seemed to desire it. In the long months she had been kept waiting a change had taken place in her. She felt that something had broken in her, and she closed the door, and having locked it she hung the keys on the nail.

And walking up the covered way, dimly aware that she was walking, she remembered that she would soon come to the end of the covered way, and would meet Sister Agnes returning to her post. And then she remembered that she had left something undone in the sacristy, and she returned there quickly and began to arrange some flowers for the Virgin’s altar.