II

Family tradition necessitated that Eileen should at least complete her

education at a convent in the outskirts of Paris, and her first communion

was delayed till she should "make" it in that more pious atmosphere. The

O'Keeffe convoyed her across the two Channels, and took the opportunity

of visiting a "variety" theatre in Montmartre, where he was delighted

to find John Bull and his inelegant womenkind so faithfully delineated.

So exhilarated was he by this excellent take-off and a few _bocks_ on the

Boulevard, that he refused to get down from the omnibus at its terminus.

"_Jamais je ne descendrai, jamais_," he vociferated. Eileen was, however,

spared the sight of this miniature French revolution. She was lying

sleepless in the strange new dormitory, watching the nun walking up and

down in the dim weird room reading her breviary, now lost in deep shadow

with the remoter beds, now lucidly outlined in purple dress with creamy

cross as she came under the central night-light. Eileen wondered how she

could see to read, and if she were not just posing picturesquely, but

from the fervency with which she occasionally kissed the crucifix

hanging to the rosary at her side Eileen concluded she must know the

office by heart. Her own Irish home seemed on another planet, and her

turret-bedroom was already far more shadowy than this: presently both

were swallowed up into nothingness.

She commenced her convent career characteristically enough by making a

sensation. For on rising in the morning she felt ineffably feeble and

forlorn; she seemed to have scarcely closed her eyes, when she must be up

and doing. The tiny hand-basin scarcely held enough water to cool her

brow, still giddy from the sea-passage; to do her hair she had to borrow

a minute hand-glass from her neighbour, and when after early mass in the

chapel she found other prayers postponing breakfast, she fainted most

alarmingly and dramatically. She was restored and refreshed with

balm-mint water, but it took some days to reconcile her to the rigid

life. To some aspects of it, indeed, she was never reconciled. The

atmosphere of suspicious supervision was asphyxiating, after the

disorderliness and warm humanity of her Irish home, after the run of the

stables and the kennels, and the freedom of the village, after the chats

with the pedlars and the beggars, and the borrowing and blowing of the

postman's bugle, after the queenship of a host of barefooted gossoons,

her loyal messenger-boys. Now her mere direct glance under reproof

was considered "_hardi_." "Droop your eyes, you bold child," said the

shocked Madame Agathe. A fancy she took to a French girl was checked.

"_On defend les amities particulieres_," she was told to her

astonishment. But on this one point Eileen was recalcitrant. She would

even walk with her arm in Marcelle's, and somehow her will prevailed.

Perhaps Eileen was trusted as a foreigner: perhaps Marcelle, being a

day-boarder, weighed less upon the convent's conscience. There came a

time when even their desks adjoined and were not put asunder. For by this

time _Madame La Superieure_ herself, at the monthly reading of the marks,

had often beamed upon Eileen. The _maitresse de classe_ had permitted

her to kiss her crucifix, and the music-mistress was enchanted with her

skill upon the piano and her rich contralto voice, such a godsend for the

choir. In her very first term she was allowed to run up to the dormitory

for something, unescorted by an _Enfant de Marie_. "Ascend, my child,"

said Madame Agathe, smiling sweetly, for Eileen had outstripped all her

classmates that morning in geography, and Eileen, with a prim "_Oui, ma

mere_," rose and sailed with drooping eyelashes to the other end of the

schoolroom, and courtesied herself out of the door, knowing herself the

focus of envy and humorously conscious of her goodness. She had learned

to love this soothing sensation of goodness, as she sat in her blue

pelerine on a hard tabouret before her desk, her hands folded in front of

her, her little feet demurely crossed. The sweeping courtesy of entrance

and exit dramatised this pleasant sense of virtue. Later her aspirant's

ribbon painted it in purple.

She worked hard for her examinations. "_Elle est si sage, cet enfant_,"

she heard Madame Ursule say to Madame Hortense, and she had a delicious

sense of overwork. But she was not always _sage_. Once when her school

desk was ransacked in her absence--one of the many forms of

espionage--she refused to rearrange its tumbled contents, and when she

was given a bad mark for disorder, she cried defiantly, "It is Madame

Rosaline who deserves that bad mark." And the pleasure of seeing herself

as rebel and phrasemaker was no less keen than the pleasure of goodness.

One other institution found her regularly rebellious, and that was the

pious reading which came punctually at half-past eight every morning. She

was bored by all the holy heroines who seemed to have taken vows of

celibacy at the age of four. "Devil take them all," she thought

whimsically one morning. "But I dare say these good little people have no

more reality than our 'little good people' who dance reels with the dead

on November Eve. I wish Dan O'Leary had taught them all to shake their

feet," and at the picture of jiggling little saints Eileen nearly gave

herself away by a peal of laughter. For she had learned to conceal her

unshared contempt for the holy heroines, and found a compensating

pleasure in the sense of amused superiority, and the secret duality which

it gave to her consciousness. She even went so far as to ransack the

library for these beatific biographies, and when she found herself

rewarded for "diligent reading" her amusement was at its apogee. And

thus, when the first awe and interest of the strange life receded, Eileen

was left standing apart as on a little rock, criticising, satirising, and

even circulating verses among the few cronies who were not sneaks. The

dowerless "sisters" who scrubbed the floors, the portioned _Mesdames_,

with their more dignified humility, the Refectory readers, the Father

Confessors, the little _Enfants de Jesus_, the big _Enfants de Marie_,

who sometimes owed their blue ribbon to their birth or their money rather

than to their exemplary behaviour, all had their humours, and all figured

in Eileen's French couplets. The difficulty of passing these from hand to

hand only made the reading--and the writing--the spicier. Literature did

not interfere with lessons, for Eileen composed not during "preparation,"

but while she sat embroidering handkerchiefs, as demure as a sleeping

kitten.

When the kitten was not thus occupied, she was playing with skeins of

logic and getting herself terribly tangled.

She put her difficulties to her favourite nun as they walked in the

quaint arcades of the lovely old garden, and their talk was punctuated

by the flippant click of croquet-balls in the courtyard beyond.

"Madame Agathe is pleased with me to-day," said Eileen. "To-morrow she

will be displeased. But how can I help the colour of my soul any more

than the colour of my hair?"

"Hush, my child; if you talk like that you will lose your faith. Nobody

is pleased or vexed with anybody for the colour of their hair."

"Yes, where I come from a peasant girl suffers a little for having red

hair. Also a man with a hump, he cannot marry unless he owns many pigs."

"Eileen! Who has put such dreadful thoughts into your head?"

"That is what I ask myself, _ma mere_. Many things are done to me and I

sit in the centre looking on, like the weathercock on our castle at home,

who sees himself turning this way and that way and can only creak."

"A weathercock is dead--you are alive."

"Not at night, _ma mere_. At home in my bedroom I used to put out my

candle every night by clapping the extinguisher upon it. Who is it puts

the extinguisher upon me?"

The good sister almost wished it could be she.

But she replied gently, "It is God who gives us sleep--we can't be always

awake."

"Then I am not responsible for my dreams anyhow?"

"I hope you don't have bad dreams," said the nun, affrighted.

"Oh, I dream--what do I not dream? Sometimes I fly--oh, so high, and all

the people look up at me, they marvel. But I laugh and kiss my hand to

them down there."

"Well, there's no harm in flying," said the nun. "The angels fly."

"Oh, but I am not always an angel in my dreams. Is it God who sends these

bad dreams, too?"

"No--that is the devil."

"Then it is sometimes he who puts the extinguisher on?"

"That is when you have not said your prayers properly."

Eileen opened wide eyes of protest. "Oh, but, dear mother, I always say

my prayers properly."

"You think so? That is already a sin in you--the sin of spiritual pride."

"But, _ma mere_, devil-dreams or angel-dreams--it is always the same in

the morning. Every morning one finds oneself ready on the pillow, like a

clock that has been wound up. One did not make the works."

"But one can keep them clean."

Eileen burst into a peal of laughter.

"_Qu'avez-vous donc?_" said the good creature in vexation.

"I thought of a clock washing its face with its hands."

"You are a naughty child--one cannot talk seriously to you."

"Oh, dear mother, I am just as serious when I am laughing as when I am

crying."

"My child, we must never cultivate the mocking spirit. Leave me. I am

vexed with you."

As her first communion approached, however, all these simmerings of

scepticism and revolt died down into the recommended _recueillement_. Her

days of retreat, passed in holy exercises, were an ecstasy of absorption

into the divine, and the pious readings began to assume a truer

complexion as the experiences of sister-souls, deep crying unto deep. Oh,

how she yearned to take the vows, to leave the trivial distracting life

of the outer world for the peace of self-sacrificial love!

As she sat in the chapel, all white muslin and white veil, her hair

braided under a little cap, the new rosary of amethyst--a gift from

home--at her side, her hands clasped, exalted by incense and flowers and

the sweet voices of the choir, chanting Gounod's Canticle, "_Le Ciel a

visite la terre_," she felt that never more would she let this celestial

visitant go. When after the communion she pulled the last piece of

veiling over her face, she felt that it was for ever between her and the

crude world of sense; the "Hymn of Thanksgiving" was the apt expression

of her emotions.

But next time she came under these aesthetic, devotional influences--even

as her own voice was soaring heavenward in the choir--she thought to

herself, "How delicious to have an emotion which you feel will last for

ever and which you know won't!" And a gleam of amusement flitted over her

rapt features.