Frances gazed at her hands. Their appearance was the greatest amongst
the minor trials of convent life. She wondered wistfully what Rosamund
would think of them. They were small hands, with long, nervous
fingers, and now each knuckle was swelled and purple from the cold and
unaccustomed manual work, and the chilblains on the back of almost
every one had broken and exposed raw cracks and fissures to the chill
morning air.
The novice with her serge habit tucked up so as to expose the stout
black underskirt below, the coarse cotton stockings and heavy, ill-made
shoes, bore small resemblance to Frances Grantham in her blue coat
and skirt and brown velvet hat, arriving at the convent door some few
months before.
Her face was fuller, and had more colour in it, but there was a deep
black shadow under each eye denoting lack of sufficient sleep.
This question of sleep had assumed for Frances, as for her companions,
a prominence that seemed strange and unnatural.
Hitherto Frances had slept for eight hours every night, sometimes for
longer, and had never thought of the amount of rest she took in any but
the most cursory and matter-of-fact fashion. In the first days of her
convent life, the novice-mistress spoke to her of the early rising as a
trial which might perhaps prove severe. Frances thought: “Getting up at
five in cold weather must be an effort, until one gets used to it.”
She heard the bell clang out its one hundred strokes every morning, at
the first stroke of which the novice in the cubicle on either side of
her sprang from her straw mattress to the thin strip of carpet that
lay beside each bed. For the first six weeks she had fallen asleep
again instantly, and only been roused by the small alarm clock set for
six o’clock which her novice-mistress had made her use. Then she asked
for permission to rise with the others and follow the full routine of
the day, and it was granted her. The first stroke of the “cloche à cent
coups” was now the signal for her also to leave her pallet and begin
the day with the ritual of mental prayer prescribed for each religious
during her robing. Heavy and sodden with sleep though her eyelids felt,
Frances found that the mere physical anticipation of the inexorable
clang that heralded five o’clock, would very often wake her even
earlier, and keep her awake, tense and nervous with the fear that she
might lack courage enough to rise on the very instant that the first
sound of the bell should clash into the air.
But she always found that the physical effort, in some mysterious way,
was overcome, and that accomplished, she lost the sense of mental
stress, and was only conscious of the overpowering need of sleep.
Through the winter months, when even a liberal application of ice-cold
water failed to rouse her more than momentarily, she seldom knew by
what mechanical process she had dressed, and found her way down the
dark stone corridor and steep stairway only lighted by a flickering
little oil-lamp, until she was on her knees in the as-yet-unwarmed
chapel, waiting for the stroke of half-past five to proclaim the hour
for meditation.
Kneeling upright upon the boards, her hands clasped upon the back of
a _prie-dieu_ too high to support her elbows, the struggle with her
atrophied senses gradually began. Conscious effort was succeeded by
the spasmodic violent starts that proclaimed her will to be alive, and
gaining dominion over her relaxed muscles.
From the stall where the novice-mistress knelt, invariably upright,
her wide-open gaze fixed upon the High Altar, came the slow unemphatic
announcements of the Points of Meditation, cutting across the cold,
still atmosphere of the chapel.
Frances forced her mind to receive the words, then gradually to attach
to them a meaning. After that, in spite of cold and the cramp that
almost invariably seized her from the effort to remain motionless upon
her knees, her mind was awake, and her battle with sleep was over until
the evening. Through the recital of the Office, and the early Mass,
attention was seldom an effort to Frances. Afterwards, the rapid,
efficient sweeping and dusting of her cubicle and the struggle to turn
the heavy _paillasse_ on the wooden planks which formed the bed, left
her heated and glowing, only anxious lest she should be late in taking
her place in the long refectory for breakfast.
Instructions and religious exercises filled the morning, and the midday
recreation succeeded dinner.
“The test of a good novice is her attitude towards the community
recreation,” was a favourite axiom of the novice-mistress.
Frances had been told that this recreation might prove to be a great
trial, and sometimes wondered whether there was anything abnormal in
her extreme and childlike enjoyment of this part of her religious life.
The ten or twelve novices, most of whom were Irish or English,
one American, two Spanish and the rest French, spent the allotted
forty-five minutes in company of the novice-mistress, and of one
another. The conversation was general, usually gay, and always
impersonal.
Up and down the small garden the little group paced slowly on
fine days, carefully avoiding the larger gathering of “la grande
communautée,” also assembled in recreation round the Superior. Little
or no intercourse was permitted between the novices and the professed
religious.
On wet days, and not infrequently on days which Frances regretfully
thought delightfully fresh and moist, but at which the novice-mistress
raised protesting hands and exclamations of “Ce climat anglais!”
the perambulations of the novitiate took place in a long corridor
some six or seven feet broad, the length of which it was possible to
traverse slowly, in little groups of three or four, always with the
novice-mistress as central point. Many of the novices walked backwards,
so as to face her continually. Most of them held knitting, or wool
which could be wound on to cards whilst still walking, but as soon as
she made a move into the small community room, mending and darning
baskets were produced and set upon the floor beside each low wooden
stool ranged against the wall. The novice-mistress sat also upon a
stool, placed on a low, wooden dais at the end of the room. She thus
dominated the room as naturally as she did the conversation. In her
early days at the convent it was a continual cause of wonder to Frances
that this conversation, general as it was, could remain so animated and
yet so singularly impersonal.
The welfare of the Order in general was often discussed, the old days
when its headquarters had been in Paris tenderly recalled by the
novice-mistress, and her varied reminiscences of those times and of the
expulsion which ensued, eagerly listened to by the little assembly.
Sometimes there was talk of such small technicalities as the origin
of some point of Rubric, or a broader question of Church ruling, but
for the most part the conversation ran cheerfully upon trivial lines.
It was always conducted in French, and the famous Gallicanism--“Moi,
je”--was apt to provoke a general burst of merry laughter and a
humorous glance or word of rebuke from the novice-mistress. But
pronouns relating to the first person singular were seldom much in
evidence.
The knowledge that she must not seek to place herself beside any one
companion, that she must not move from her low stool during recreation
without asking and obtaining leave to do so, and that any form of
personality beyond the most trivial allusion must be excluded from
her conversation, failed to disturb Frances’ calm enjoyment of the
three-quarters of an hour which always seemed to her so quickly over.
Rising from her little stool on the first stroke of the bell which
proclaimed renewed silence, she was generally conscious of distinct
exhilaration, resulting from the interval of talk and laughter. In
virtue of her English nationality, Frances was often allowed to make
her half-hour’s spiritual reading out of doors. This she did after the
midday recreation, gravely kilting her serge habit above the stiff
woollen underskirt, and pacing the round of the garden with steady,
measured footsteps, her head bent over some devotional volume bound in
stout brown paper with a little gummed blue label on the back.
The afternoon’s routine of instructions, choir-practices, and the like
was unbroken till supper at seven o’clock. The institution of afternoon
tea held no place in the convent curriculum, and Frances, who had
been told that this might at first present itself to her in the light
of a deprivation, found herself, on the contrary, thankful that no
additional meal should intervene between the substantial dinner and
supper.
The amount of coarse but nourishing food which she found herself
expected to assimilate was a continual source of wonder and at first of
distress, to the novice. Where were the ascetic fasts and austerities
of the religious life, if one was required to make two such meals every
day? Even on the regular days of fasting and abstinence decreed by
the Church, Frances found that she was only allowed to indulge in a
modified form of abstention.
Even after six months’ novitiate, she still looked doubtfully at the
brown platter heaped with butter beans, the hunk of bread, and the huge
slab of cold meat that so often constituted her midday portion. She
knew that she might not leave anything unfinished, and the half-hour
allotted to dinner was apt to hurry past her and bring her to her feet
at the recital of Grace with half of her allowance still untouched.
“_Ma mère, puis-je aller finir au réfectoire?_” was the formula which
was oftenest on her lips in those early days. And on the permission
being given, Frances would valiantly return to the attack.
Supper presented fewer difficulties. A religious or biographical work
was read aloud, and whilst giving her full attention to that, Frances
found it easier to dispose of the pudding-basin full of soup and the
mighty wedge of pudding or the vegetable stew which might form the
repast.
But the ethics of the case still troubled her.
Finally she brought her difficulty to Mère Thérèse.
“You must eat in order to work, my child. Remember that you have
entered an order where there is much manual labour to be done, and also
the instruction of our poor people, our _dames pensionnaires_ to attend
to. Had you entered an order where physical austerity is the first
object, then indeed you would not complain of having too much.
“But tell me, my little Sister, is it not a greater hardship to you to
follow the holy rule of obedience and eat all that is set before you,
than it would be to deprive yourself of all but the bare necessities?”
She laughed shrewdly at Frances’ conscious expression, and indeed no
argument could have prevailed more strongly with the little novice.
She learnt to look upon the completion of her meals as a task to be
performed conscientiously, and felt a glow of triumph when she was able
to wash the wooden fork and spoon and the blunt knife in her little
pewter bowl of water, and place them in due order upon the table before
the signal for rising was given.
The evening recreation which succeeded supper was a repetition of
the morning one, and did not terminate until the clanging bell at
eight o’clock proclaimed that the convent world had entered into “_le
grand silence_,” which would remain unbroken save for the most urgent
necessity, until after Mass the following morning.
Collecting the manuals containing the office for the day from her
tiny pigeon-hole, Frances would join the noiseless, softly hurrying
throng of novices and descend to the chapel. On her knees at the high
_prie-dieu_, which she would presently leave for a carved stall when
the general recital of the office began, she embarked nightly upon the
hardest struggle of her present existence--that against an overpowering
need of sleep. Again and again Frances fell asleep while kneeling, only
to wake instantly with a violent start, and force her eyelids, heavy as
lead, to remain open over her filmed, unseeing eyes.
The novice in the stall next her, a Spanish child not yet nineteen,
slumbered uneasily as unwillingly every night through the recital
of Matins and Lauds, and one of Frances’ most effective devices for
keeping herself awake was that of gently pushing her neighbour into
position when the nuns rose for the _Gloria Patri_ that concluded every
psalm.
She half envied little Sister Encarnaçion that uncomfortable
three-quarters of an hour’s sleep. For her own part, Frances never
quite lost consciousness, although the curious intermittent buzzing
in her head often prevented her from hearing her own voice joining
in the psalms and hymns. But it was always with intense, though most
involuntary, thankfulness, that she sank on to her knees for the last
time, for the two or three moments silent devotion that preceded
the final signal at which the novices rose and filed slowly, two by
two, from the chapel. It was then generally some few minutes before
half-past nine, but if the big clock on the stairs, which she passed
every night, its ticking loud and portentous in the absolute silence,
showed the hour to be even a very little later than usual, Frances was
conscious of a purely physical sensation of sick dismay and resentment
at the abridgement of her night.
In her cubicle she undressed as rapidly and silently as possible,
and fell asleep almost as she lay down on her _paillasse_. To its
iron hardness and the absence of any support but the smallest and
stiffest of bolsters, she had never given a thought, since the first
week when her arms and sides for a little while had shown the faint
discoloration of bruises.
The days, regular and incessantly occupied, flew by with a rapidity
that she had never known before, and it was always with a sort of shock
of surprise that Frances greeted the arrival of each Saturday morning,
the day which was marked for her by the unfailing arrival of Rosamund’s
weekly letter.
She had long ago, with tears, asked her sister to conform to the
convent regulation, which did not extend its approval to more than one
weekly letter from home for its novices, although no definite commands
were issued except in the matter of the letters sent out. These
might not exceed one every Sunday to a parent or guardian, and one a
fortnight to a sister or brother. Frances, however, was permitted to
reverse the custom, and it was to Rosamund that her Sunday letter was
always addressed.
One of the strangest and hardest pangs that her torn and divided
loyalty was to suffer, lay in the knowledge that no restriction was
placed upon the correspondence of a nun or novice and any other member
of the Order, domiciled in “one of our houses abroad.”
That this tie, strong and sacred although she believed it to be,
should be held closer than that of blood, remained to Frances an
incomprehensible and rather heartrending convention of which she
shunned the thought as a temptation to disloyalty.
Her sense of proportion, like that of all those who lead the cloistered
life altered strangely and rapidly.
Her letters to Rosamund, the aching dread lest the new life should
separate her irrevocably from Rosamund, the little tender recollections
of their life together, of Lady Argent’s kindness, of Hazel and her
two babies, that had thronged her mind at first, had given place
imperceptibly but with the strangest rapidity, to other preoccupations
and other aspirations.
Nowadays, the things which mattered most were naturally those which
filled the atmosphere into which she found herself transplanted.
The field of her external interests was naturally an extremely narrow
one. The novice-mistress, the small society of her fellow-novices, and
an occasional one or two of the older nuns, were the only human beings
with whom she ever came into contact, and this intercourse, extremely
limited as it was, took place either in one of the few rooms where
speech was permitted, or in the narrow confines of the convent garden.
It was as brief as possible, and was always, except when receiving
direct spiritual guidance from Mère Thérèse, as impersonal as the sense
of discipline on either part could make it.
Her small duties, for the faithful accomplishment of which she would
receive no commendation, loomed enormous to Frances. She took a joyful
pride in the thorough sweeping of the only long corridor which the
house contained, and which had been given into her charge, and she
looked forward anxiously to her bi-weekly mornings in the kitchen,
where the lay-sisters laughed furtively and good-naturedly at her utter
ignorance of those primary laws of _le ménage_ which never seemed to
present any difficulties to her French and Spanish contemporaries.
On two evenings a week she taught in an elementary class of the poor
school attached to the convent, and was gradually learning not to
tremble at the apprehension that the six or seven-year-old urchins
would decline to be instructed in the multiplication table by anyone so
young and so frightened.
The novices, as a rule, were never sent amongst the lady boarders,
but when she had been at the convent some four months, Frances was
told that she was to work regularly under the Mère Econome. She thus
found herself deputed occasionally to take an interview on behalf of
the much-occupied Mère Caroline, so that she was not without fugitive
intercourse with those whom she had soon learned to designate, in all
due charity and perfectly unconscious arrogance, as “_les personnes du
dehors_.”
During these brief interviews the little novice was always highly
conscious of the gulf which should lie between the manners of ordinary
social intercourse and the demeanour of a young religious obliged
through obedience to hold a needful conversation with an inhabitant of
the outer world.
She was careful to say the prescribed _Ave Maria_ to herself on the
threshold of the small parlour where these conversations took place,
and would enter holding herself unconsciously more upright than usual,
her eyes downcast, and her hands tucked away under her wide sleeves. It
had frequently been impressed upon her that a religious “_ne s’affaise
pas sur sa chaise comme si elle avait l’habitude des fauteuils_,” and
consequently she sat on the extreme edge of her chair, very much erect,
and with her feet carefully concealed beneath the ample folds of her
habit.
The business in hand she disposed of as rapidly as the extreme
eloquence with which most of the lady boarders were afflicted,
permitted.
It was no temptation to Frances to prolong the conversations in the
parlour. She was naturally shy, and had, all her life, more or less
unconsciously, preferred silence to speech.
She also became aware, as must all those who pursue a way of spiritual
endeavour, that silence is the preliminary to concentration.
The atmosphere of the convent, which Frances had heard spoken of
outside its walls as “peaceful” and “gentle” was, to her awakened
perceptions, mainly one of intense concentration. The whole place,
silent and monotonous, and even trivial in detail, was instinct with
a force that seemed to vibrate through the stillness. Frances could
discern this force in the chapel, in the refectory, most of all
perhaps in the cold, narrow dormitory. The words which came oftenest
to her mind were the “_Ego dormio: et cor meum vigilat_,” painted in
red letters a foot high on the whitewashed wall just above the narrow
window.
She could not have spoken of this impression of tense unceasing life
which for her lay behind all the convent routine, but she felt a new
sensation as of being mentally at rest, as though she were at last able
to share and recognize the scale of relative values prevailing in her
surroundings.
Of the progress of her spiritual life she was scarcely aware. Frances
was not introspective, and possessed that curious detachment from
herself sometimes observable in extremely and fundamentally innocent
personalities.
She listened to the instructions given, both general and particular,
with the careful attention of a conscientious child, noted her failures
to observe good resolutions in a tiny paper notebook kept in her
pocket, and made it a matter of habit to observe scrupulously the more
minute details of her daily duties.
She was naturally careful, and had been taught order by Mrs. Tregaskis,
but her tendency to sit and dream was a source of much heart-searching
to Frances.
“Vous êtes dans la lune, ma petite sœur,” was a brisk reminder often
uttered by Mère Thérèse, and Frances would return to earth with a
guilty start and a few words of fervent contrition and resolution in
her heart.
When the winter was drawing to a close, and Frances had been at the
Convent nearly six months, Mère Thérèse spoke to her of her _prise
d’habit_. The ceremony, goal of every novice’s thoughts, was the first
stage of the religious life proper. The novice exchanged her own name
for a religious one bestowed upon her by the Superior, her hair was cut
off, and the white Cross of her Order fastened upon the front of her
habit. It was the preliminary step to the vows which she would take
later on.
“Oh, ma Mère!” stammered Frances, her face one flush of joy.
“I think so, little one. I have spoken to Notre Mère Supérieure, and
the ceremony will probably be for Easter Monday ... you must be very,
very fervent....”
Frances lay awake till dawn, heavy with sleep, yet too much excited to
sleep, and thanking God with all the fervour of her innocent heart.