They entered the first door. Dora found herself in a small square room which was completely bare except for two chairs and the shiny linoleum upon the floor. The chairs were drawn up at the other side of the room against a great screen of white gauze which covered the upper half of the far wall.
Mrs Mark went forward. “The other half of the room,”she said, “on the other side, is within the enclosure.” She pulled at the wooden edge of the gauze screen and it opened as a door, revealing behind it a grille of iron bars set about nine inches apart. Behind the grille and close up against it was a second gauze screen, obscuring the view into the room beyond.
“You see,” said Mrs Mark, “the nun opens the screen on the other side, and then you can talk through the grille.” She closed the screen to again. It all seemed to Dora quite unbelievably eerie.
“I wonder if you’d like to talk to one of the nuns?”said Mrs Mark. “I’m afraid the Abbess is certain to be too busy. Even James and Michael only manage to see her now and then. But I’m sure Mother Clare would be very glad to see you and have a little talk.”
Dora could feel her bristles rising with alarm and indignation. “I don’t think I would have anything to talk to the nuns about,” she said, trying to prevent her voice from sounding aggressive.
“Well, you know,” said Mrs Mark, “I thought it might be nice for you to talk things over. The nuns are wise folk and you’d be surprised at what they know of how the world goes on. Nothing shocks them. People often come here to make a clean breast of their troubles and get themselves sorted out.”
“I have no troubles which I care to discuss,” said Dora. She was rigid with hostility, shuddering at these phrases. She’d see the place in hell before she’d let a nun meddle with her mind and heart. They retreated into the corridor.
“Think it over anyway,” said Mrs Mark. “Perhaps it’s the sort of idea that takes some getting used to. Now we’ll call on Paul. He works down there in the last parlour.”
Mrs Mark knocked and opened the door revealing a room similar to the first one, only furnished with a large table at which Paul was working. The gauze screen was closed.
Paul and Dora were glad to see each other. Paul looked up from the table and fixed a beaming smile upon his wife. His delight whenever she found him at his studies had always struck Dora as childish and touching. She was pleased now to see him so importantly at work, and immediately felt proud of him, regaining her vision of him as a distinguished man, how obviously superior, she felt, to Mark Strafford and those other drearies. Dora’s capacity to forget and to live in the moment, while it more frequently landed her in grave trouble, made her also responsive without calculation to the returning glow of kindness. That she had no memory made her generous. She was unrevengeful and did not brood; and in the instant as she crossed the room it was as if there had never been any trouble between them.
“These are some of the manuscripts I’m working on,”Paul was saying in a low voice. “They’re very precious and I’m not allowed to take them away.” He was leaning over the table and opening several large leather-bound volumes with thick and brightly illuminated pages for Dora to see. “Here are the early chronicles of the nunnery. They’re unique of their kind. This is called a‘chartulary’, which contains copies of charters and legal documents. And here is the famous Imber Psalter. See these fantastic initial letters, and the animals running up the side of the page? And this is a picture of the Abbey as it was in 1400.”
Dora saw a complex of white castellated buildings against a background of very leafy green trees and blue sky. “I suppose it wasn’t really so white,” she said. “It looks more like Italy. However does all that gold stuff stay on? Why, there’s the old tower!”
“Sssh!” said Paul. “Yes, that’s the tower that still exists. It’s a very formalized picture, of course. And here’s the Bishop who founded the place holding a model of the Abbey in his hand. You get a better idea of the lay-out from that. The modern Abbey follows the ground-plan of the old one, though of course they haven’t attempted to reproduce the medieval buildings. That section still survives as well as the tower. In this old Book of Evidences you can see -”
“We mustn’t keep you too long,” said Mrs Mark. “And I must show Dora the chapel and buzz her round the market-garden and get back to my own jobs.”
Paul was disappointed. “I’ll show you more tomorrow,” he said, and squeezed Dora’s arm as she turned away.
Dora, who would like to have stayed, gave him a rueful smile behind Mrs Mark’s retreating back. She was already determining how she would mock that lady when she was once more alone with Paul. Mockery did not come easily to Dora, and had to be thought out beforehand. Her jests at other people’s expense were often a trifle laboured. She followed Mrs Mark now, smiling to herself, and cheered too by the ease of her complicity with Paul.
Mrs Mark took the last few steps along the corridor and entered a little vestibule with two doors, one opening into the garden and the other into the chapel. She opened the inner door and propelled Dora through it into an almost complete blackness. As she strained her eyes to see, Dora was conscious of Mrs Mark vigorously genuflecting beside her. Then she began to be aware that she was in a small box-like room with a highly polished parquet floor, some religious prints on the walls, and a number of chairs and hassocks. A strong smell of incense pervaded the place. The room faced inwards towards an enormous grille which this time stretched from floor to ceiling for the whole width of the room. Some of the bars had been severed to make a door, which was closed. There was a low rail, set a few feet back on the near side of the grille, and behind the bars could be dimly seen, at a higher level upon a dais, an altar set sideways on to the room. Two long white curtains, drawn back now to reveal the scene, hung from a brass rail which traversed the grille. Near the altar a small red light was burning. An annihilating silence came from within.
“This is the visitors’ chapel,” said Mrs Mark, speaking now in such a low whisper that Dora could hardly hear her.“What you see through the bars is the high altar of the nuns’chapel. The main body of the chapel faces the altar and can’t be seen from here. By this arrangement we can participate in the services without ever seeing the nuns, which of course would be forbidden. There is a mass at seven every morning which visitors may attend. That’s the gate the priest comes through to give communion to anyone who is in this chapel. When the nuns are receiving the sacrament these curtains are closed to cut this chapel off from the main one. This is the place where outsiders like us can come nearest to the spiritual life of the Abbey.”
A soft rustle came from somewhere in the distance, round the corner beyond the bars, and then the sound of a footstep.
“Is someone -?” whispered Dora.
“There is always a nun in the chapel,” murmured Mrs Mark. “It is a place of continual prayer.”
Dora felt stifled and suddenly frightened and began to retreat towards the door. The rich exotic smell of the incense roused some ancestral terror in her Protestant blood. Mrs Mark genuflected, crossing herself, and followed. In a moment they were out in the bright sunlight. The tall grasses moved, mingling with the reeds at the water’s edge, and the lake flickered quietly in the sun. The wide scene, with a slanting view of Imber Court and a hazy distance of parkland elms, was laid out under a cloudless sky. There was something incredible about the proximity of that dark hole and that silence. Dora shook her head violently.
“Yes, it is impressive, isn’t it?” said Mrs Mark.“There is a wonderful spiritual life here. One just can’t help being affected by it.”
They began to walk back across the causeway.
“We’ll take that little path to the left,” said Mrs Mark, “and cut through behind the house to the market- garden.”
The path led them from the end of the causeway a little way along the shore, and then turned away to the right, skirting a thick wood. A glint of greenhouses was to be seen ahead. As they turned by the wood, leaving the edge of the lake, the thin tinkling of the hand bell followed them from across the water.
Dora burst out, “It’s terrible to think of them being shut up like that!”
“It is true”, said Mrs Mark, “that these women lay upon themselves austerities from which you and I would shrink in terror. But just as we think the sinner better than he is when we imagine that suffering ennobles him, so we do less than justice to the saint when we think that his sacrifices grieve him in the way they would grieve us. Indian file here, I think.”
Mrs Mark led the way along the narrow track which could still just be found in the middle of the encroaching grass, tall and bleached to a faded yellow. Long feathery plumes, brittle with dryness, leaned from either side, touching the shoulders of the two women as they passed. Still stirred and affected by what she had seen, Dora
