Part 6 (1/2)
He lost his head, imagining that the priest guessed his thoughts and was turning him out, but this notion was so foolish, that he shrugged his shoulders, and more sensibly thought that men were not admitted to this convent of women, and that the abbe who had seen him was sending the beadle to beg him to leave.
The beadle came straight to him; Durtal was ready to take his hat, when in persuasive and gentle tones that functionary said that the procession was about to begin, that it was the custom for the gentlemen to follow the Blessed Sacrament, and that although he was the only man there, the abbe thought he would not refuse to follow the procession about to start.
Overwhelmed by this request, Durtal made a vague gesture, in which the beadle seemed to see a.s.sent.
”No,” he thought as soon as he was left alone; ”I will not meddle with the ceremony; first I know nothing about it, and I should spoil it all, and again I will not make a fool of myself.” He prepared to slip away quietly, but he had no time to carry out his intention; the usher brought him a lighted candle and asked him to accompany him. He put the best face he could on the matter, and while thinking that he was blus.h.i.+ng all over, he followed the beadle to the altar.
There the beadle stopped him and bid him not to move. The whole congregation was now standing, the girls' school divided into two files, preceded by a woman carrying a banner. Durtal came in front of the first rank of nuns.
Their veils lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised before the Blessed Sacrament, before G.o.d. Durtal was able to look at these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all seemed at the beginning or end of a cold; they were evidently country girls, and the novices, known by their grey robes under the white veil, were still more common looking; they had certainly been accustomed to farm labour, and yet on seeing them all turned to the altar, the poverty of their faces, the ugliness of their hands blue with cold, their broken nails, injured in the wash, disappeared; their eyes, modest and humble under their long lashes, changed their coa.r.s.e features into pious simplicity. Lost in prayer, they did not even see his curious looks, and did not even suspect a man was there examining them.
Durtal envied the admirable wisdom of these poor girls who alone understood it was mad to wish to live. He thought: ”Ignorance leads to the same result as knowledge. Among the Carmelites are rich and pretty women who have lived in the world and left it, wholly convinced of the vainness of its joys; and these nuns, who evidently know nothing, have had an intuition of that vacuity which it has needed years of experience for the others to gain. By different ways they have arrived at the same meeting-place. Then what clearness of thought is revealed by their entrance into an Order! for if indeed they had not been gathered by Christ, what would have become of these unhappy girls? Married to drunkards and hammered by beatings; or perhaps maids in taverns, ill-treated by their masters, brutalized by the other servants, destined to the scorn of the streets and the dangers of ill-usage. And without knowing anything they have avoided it all, have remained innocent, far from these perils, and far from this defilement, under an obedience which is not ign.o.ble, disposed by their very way of life to experience, should they be worthy, the most powerful joys which the soul of a human creature can feel. They remain, perhaps, beasts of burthen, but at any rate G.o.d's beasts of burthen.”
He had got so far in his reflections when the beadle beckoned to him.
The priest, who had descended from the altar, held the little monstrance; the girls' procession was moving before him. Durtal pa.s.sed in front of the line of nuns who did not take part in the ceremony, and torch in hand he followed the beadle, who carried behind the priest an open white silk parasol.
Then the harmonium in the gallery filled the church with its drawling tones, like an enlarged accordion, and the nuns standing beside it intoned the old chant, rhythmical as a march, the ”Adeste Fideles,”
while below the novices and the faithful repeated after each stanza the sweet chorus of invitation, ”Venite adoremus.”
The procession went several times round the chapel, above the heads bowed in the smoke from the censers, which the choir boys swung, turning at each pause to face the priest.
”Well, after all, I have not come so badly out of it,” said Durtal to himself, when they had returned to the altar. He thought his part was finished, but, this time without asking his permission, the beadle asked him to kneel at the communion rail in front of the altar.
He was ill at ease and annoyed, at knowing that the whole school and the whole convent was behind him, nor was he accustomed to kneel; it seemed as if wedges were thrust into his limbs, as if he were subjected to the tortures of the Middle Ages. Embarra.s.sed by his taper, which was guttering, and threatened to cover him with spots, he s.h.i.+fted his position quietly, trying to make himself more comfortable by slipping the skirts of his great coat between his knees and the steps; but in moving he only increased the evil, his flesh was folded back between the bones, and his skin was chafed and burning. He sweated at last with the pain, and feared to distract the fervour of the community by falling; while the ceremony went on for ever, the nuns sang in the gallery, but he listened no more and deplored the length of the service.
At last the moment of Benediction approached.
Then in spite of himself, seeing himself there, so near to G.o.d, Durtal forgot his sufferings, and bowed his head, ashamed to be so placed, like a captain at the head of his company, in the first rank of this maiden troop; and when in a great silence, the bell tinkled, and the priest turning, lightly cut the air in the form of a cross, and, with the Blessed Sacrament, blessed the congregation kneeling at his feet, Durtal remained, his body bent, his eyes closed, seeking to hide himself, to make himself small, and not be seen there in front amid that pious crowd.
The psalm ”Laudate Dominum, omnes gentes,” rang out when the beadle came to take his taper. Durtal could hardly resist a cry, when he had to stand up; his benumbed knees cracked, and their joints would hardly work.
Yet he regained his place somehow; let the crowd pa.s.s, and approaching the beadle, asked him the name of the convent, and the order to which the nuns belonged.
”They are the Franciscan missionaries of Mary,” answered the man, ”but the chapel is not theirs as you seem to think; it is a chapel of ease for the parish of St. Marcel de la Maison Blanche: it is only joined by a corridor to the house those sisters occupy behind us there in the Rue de l'Ebre. They join in the offices, in fact, just as you and I may do, and they keep a school for the children of the district.”
”It is a touching little chapel,” thought Durtal, when he was alone. ”It is well matched with the neighbourhood it shelters, with the gloomy brook of the tanners, which runs through the yards below the Rue de la Glaciere. It gives me the effect of being to Notre Dame de Paris what its neighbour the Bievre is to the Seine. It is the streamlet of the church, the pious pavement, the miserable suburb of wors.h.i.+p.
”How poor and yet how exquisite are those nuns' voices, which seem non-s.e.xual and mellow! G.o.d knows how I hate the voice of a woman in the holy place, for it still remains unclean. I think woman always brings with her the lasting miasma of her indispositions and she turns the psalms sour. Then, all the same, vanity and concupiscence rise from the worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre liturgical hymns are only addressed to G.o.d from the lips outward, for at bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her sequences may not be contaminated she employs the voices of the boy and the man.
”Yet in convents of women, that is changed; it is certain that prayer, communion, abstinence and vows purify the body and the soul, as well as the vocal odour which proceeds from them. The emanations from them give to the voices of the nuns, however crude, however ill-trained they may be, their chaste inflexions, their simple caresses of pure love, they recall to it the ingenuous sounds of childhood.
”In certain orders, they seem even to prune it of the greater part of its branches, and concentrate the threads of sap which remain in a few twigs;” and he thought of a Carmelite convent to which he had gone from time to time, remembered their failing, almost expiring voices, where the little health that remained to them was concentrated in three notes, voices which had lost the musical colours of life, the tints of open air, keeping only in the cloister those of the costumes they seemed to reflect, white and brown, chaste and sombre tones.
Ah! those Carmelites, he thought of them now, as he descended the Rue de la Glaciere, and he called up the memory of a profession, the thought of which took entire possession of him every time he meditated on convents.
He saw again in memory a morning in the little chapel in the Avenue de Saxe, a chapel, Spanish Gothic in style, with narrow windows glazed with panes so dark that the light which remained in their colours did not pa.s.s through them.
At the end rose the high altar in shade, raised on six steps; on the left a large iron grating in an arch was covered with a black curtain, and on the same side, but almost at the base of the altar, a little arch traced on the plain wall, like a lancet window, with an aperture in the middle, a sort of square, a frame, without a panel, empty.