The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes

'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.'