AN EXILE IN REVOLT.
What surprises me most when I recall those days is my own rapid
development. The tiny inarticulate pensive creature of Ireland is, as if
by magic, turned into a turbulent adventurer, quick with initiation,
with a ready and violent word for my enemies, whom I regarded as many,
with a force of character that compelled children older than myself to
follow me; imperious, passionate, and reckless. How did it come about?
It needed long months of unhappiness at home to make me revolt against
the most drastic rule, and here it sufficed that a nun should doubt my
word to turn me into a glorified outlaw.
I confess that whatever the deficiences of my home training, I had not
been brought up to think that anybody lied. My mother never seemed to
think it possible that any of her children could lie. In fact, lying was
the last vice of childhood I was acquainted with. You told the truth as
you breathed, without thinking of it, for the simple reason that it
could not possibly occur to you not to tell the truth. This was, I knew,
how I took it, though I did not reason so. I believe it was that villain
Frank who broke a statue of an angel, and behind my back asserted that
he had seen me do it. I had no objection in the world to break forty
statues if it came in the day's work, and so far from concealing my
misdeeds, I was safe to glory in any iniquity I could accomplish. So
when charged with the broken angel, I said, saucily enough I have no
doubt--oh! I have no wish to make light of the provocations of my
enemies--that I hadn't done it.
The Grand Inquisitor was a lovely slim young nun, with a dainty gipsy
face, all brown and golden, full-cheeked, pink-lipped, black-browed. I
see her still, the exquisite monster, with her long slim fingers, as
delicate as ivory, and the perfidious witchery of her radiant dark
smile.
"You mustn't tell lies, Angela. You were seen to break the statue."
I stood up in vehement protest, words poured from me in a flood; they
gushed from me like life-blood flowing from my heart, and in my passion
I flung my books on the floor, and vowed I would never eat again, but
that I'd die first, to make them all feel miserable because they had
murdered me. And then the pretty Inquisitor carried me off, dragging me
after her with that veiled brutality of gesture that marks your refined
tyrant. I was locked up in the old community-room, then reserved for
guests, a big white chamber, with a good deal of heavy furniture in it.
"You'll stay here, Angela, until I come to let you out," she hissed at
me.
I heard the key turn in the lock, and my heart was full of savage hate.
I sat and brooded long on the vengeance I desired to wreak. Sister
Esmeralda had said she would come at her good will to let me out. "Very
well," thought I, wickedly; "when she comes she'll not find it so easy
to get in."
My desire was to thwart her in her design to free me when she had a mind
to. My object was to die of hunger alone and forsaken in that big white
chamber, and so bring remorse and shame upon my tyrants. So, with
laboured breath and slow impassioned movements, I dragged over to the
door all the furniture I could move. In my ardour I accomplished feats I
could never have aspired to in saner moments. A frail child of eight, I
nevertheless wheeled arm-chairs, a sofa, a heavy writing-table, every
seat except a small stool, and even a cupboard, and these I massed
carefully at the door as an obstruction against the entrance of my
enemy.
And then I sat down on the stool in the middle of the chamber, and tore
into shreds with hands and teeth a new holland overall. Evening began to
fall, and the light was dim. My passion had exhausted itself, and I was
hungry and tired and miserable. Had any one else except Sister Esmeralda
come to the door, I should have behaved differently, for I was a most
manageable little creature when not under the influence of the terrible
exasperation injustice always provoked in me. But there she stood, after
the repeated efforts of the gardener called up to force open my prison
door, haughty, contemptuous, and triumphant, with me, poor miserable
little me, surrounded by the shreddings of my holland pinafore, in her
ruthless power.
A blur of light, the anger of madness, the dreadful tense sensation of
my helplessness, and before I knew what I had done I had caught up the
stool and wildly hurled it at her triumphant visage. Oh, how I hated
Sister Esmeralda! how I hated her!
The moment was one of exceptional solemnity. I was not scolded, or
slapped, or roughly treated. My crime was too appalling for such
habitual treatment. One would think I already wore the black shroud of
death, that the gallows stood in front of me, and beside it the coffin
and the yawning grave, as my enemy, holding my feeble child's hand in a
vice, marched me down the corridor into the dormitory, where a
lay-sister was commanded to fetch my strong boots, my hat and cloak.
The children were going joyously off to supper, with here and there, I
can imagine, an awed whisper in my concern, as the lay-sister took my
hand in hers; and in silence by her side, in the grey twilight, I walked
from the Ivies beyond the common down to the town convent, where only
the mothers dwelt. I knew something dreadful was going to happen to me,
and being tired of suffering and tired of my short troubled life, I
hoped even then that it would prove death. I did not care. It was so
long since I had thought it worth while caring!
And so I missed the lovely charm of that silent walk through the
unaccustomed twilight, with quaint little shops getting ready their
evening illumination, and free and happy persons walking to and fro,
full of the joy of being, full of the bliss of freedom. My heart was
dead to hope, my intelligence, weary from excess of excitement and pain,
was dull to novelty.
In the town convent I was left awhile in aching solitude in the brown
parlour, with its pious pictures and big crucifix. I strained eye and
ear through the silent dusk, and was relieved when the superioress--a
sort of female pontiff, whom we children saw in reverential stupefaction
on scarce feast-days, when she addressed us from such heights as Moses
on the mountain might have addressed a group of sparrows--with two other
nuns entered. It looked like death, and already the heart within me was
dead. I know so well now how I looked: white, blue-veined, blue-lipped,
sullen, and indifferent.
My wickedness was past sermonising. I was simply led up-stairs to a
brown cell, and here the red-cheeked lay-sister, a big brawny creature,
stripped me naked. Naked, mind, though convent rules forbid the whipping
of girls. I was eight, exceedingly frail and delicate. The superioress
took my head tightly under her arm, and the brawny red-cheeked
lay-sister scourged my back with a three-pointed whip till the blood
gushed from the long stripes, and I fainted. I never uttered a groan,
and I like to remember this infantine proof of my pride and resolute
spirit.