St. Peter's Finger

chapter 14

hobbies

“The ever-flourishing and fruitful soil

Unpurchased food produced: all creatures were

His subjects, serving more for love than fear.”

george sandys: Deo Opt. Max.

« ^ »

Mother patrick was grafting fruit-trees. It was the Saturday half-holiday for the private-school children, and the day, although dull, was calm and not cold. She descended the ladder when she saw Mrs. Bradley, and waved her grafting knife.

“Go and find me two sensible children, dear,” she said. Feeling rather like a sensible child herself, Mrs. Bradley grinned amiably and walked towards the school. But no children, sensible or otherwise (and, in any case, how she was to pick out the one kind from the other, since she could neither see with Mother Patrick’s eyes nor think with her mind, she did not know), were anywhere to be seen. At last, in a corner of the vestibule, she found a child, who, challenged, said that her name was Mary Maslin. Mary Maslin was crying.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Bradley formally, “but I have been asked by Mother Patrick to find her two sensible children. Can it be that you are a sensible child? For, if so, half my task is accomplished.”

“But I don’t want to help Mother Patrick. I don’t want to help anybody,” said Mary Maslin, through sobs. Mrs. Bradley sat down beside her on a bench which covered school boot-holes, and observed that it was not a very nice day for anybody to be out of doors.

“It isn’t that,” said Mary, obviously in need of a confidante. “It’s because my mother’s come back here to take me away.”

“To take you away from school?”

“Yes. She’s going to let me have a private governess, and perhaps I’m to go to New York. But I don’t want a private governess. I want to stay here with the girls.”

“It certainly seems rather trying,” Mrs. Bradley agreed, “to be obliged to leave school in the middle of term like this.”

“All because of what happened to Ursula,” Mary observed without reticence. “It’s so stupid. As if I should do a dreadful thing like that! They know quite well I shouldn’t!”

“Of course not. But I can understand your mother’s feelings.”

“She wants Ulrica to come away, too. She wants to have her stay with me, and for us to share the governess. And I don’t want that! I don’t like Ulrica much. She’s clever and I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not. I’d hate to be clever and horrible, and I don’t want her anywhere near me! I suppose I can’t say so to mother, but Ulrica scares me. I don’t feel comfortable with her.”

“But you don’t feel comfortable at all,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out. “Look here, Mary, I think I can make you a promise. I will speak to your mother, and although I shall not be able to prevent her from taking you away from the school—in fact, it’s just as well that you should go—a change will do you good— I certainly will see to it that Ulrica doesn’t go with you.”

“Will you?” said Mary Maslin, cheering up a little. “Well, that’ll be something, anyway. Thanks a lot. Well, all right, then, I’ll go and hold bits of stick for Mother Patrick. Doesn’t she look lovely on a ladder?”

Off she went, and Mrs. Bradley, left with a new idea, walked out of the building in quest of one more child. Failing to find one, she went back herself, and meekly assisted in the work. Some of the orchard trees were large and old, and had been cut back by the gardener some weeks earlier in preparation for Mother Patrick’s talents. She first cut them back a little more, and then made a slit between the bark and the wood. Mrs. Bradley and Mary Maslin held delicately-prepared grafts and handed them up on demand, to be inserted in the slit like rather spiky trimming on a hat.

Mother Patrick on a ladder certainly was a fearful and wonderful sight. She had a man’s trick of balance whilst using both her hands, and yet it seemed all the time that her large, ungainly body, its bulk apparently added to by her habit, must at any moment descend, among splintered wreckage, on to the snowdrop-sprinkled orchard ground below.

When the grafts were properly inserted, Mrs. Bradley and Mary handed clay which Mother Patrick clapped upon and moulded round the tree to keep the air, Mrs. Bradley supposed, or curious insects, or, possibly, prying eyes, from the delicate grafts. There was need for something to speculate on, for, as is the way with those who merely stand at the foot of a ladder and hand things up to the master-builder above, the assistants grew tired a long time before Mother Patrick was ready to give up.

“That’s all,” she said at last. “You are a good child, Mary. You must try to do as well in my subjects as your cousin Ulrica can do. Still, to-day you have done well. I shall pray for our work to be blessed. I cannot give you a merit now, because it is holiday time, but remind me to give you one in the next mathematics lesson—however badly you behave!”

“She always calls it ‘behaving.’ She really means ‘answering’ or ‘working,’ ” Mary explained, as she and Mrs. Bradley went to wash. “She really believes that everybody can do her sickening old algebra and geometry if they like. Just like Mother Saint Simon and her science. And they’re for ever throwing Ulrica up at me. Did you have a clever cousin when you were at school?”

“Never. There were no clever members of our family,” Mrs. Bradley replied. “Now I remember, though, I did not go to school.”

“Did you have a governess, then?”

“Alas, no. My father taught us. We merely learned to read, and not to lose our tempers when we argued.”

“What did you read?”

“Oh, Lewis Carroll, and the Bible, and the Swiss Family Robinson,” Mrs. Bradley replied.

“I have never read any of those. Perhaps that is why we are different.”

“It is quite likely. And now, is it time for tea?”

“You don’t fast, do you, during Lent?”

“No. But I never eat much, except when I come upon my chauffeur eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

“Ulrica is trying to fast, but Mother Saint Francis won’t let her. She says we are growing children, and need our food.”

“Most sensible.”

“Yes, it is, really. That’s what I think.”

“Mary,” said Mrs. Bradley, with some suddenness, “was Ulrica in class, do you know, on the afternoon that Ursula died?”

Mary stared at her.

“I really don’t know,” she said. “We’re not in the same form, you see.”

“The third and the fourth forms did have a lesson together that afternoon, though, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but I’m only in the second form,” Mary replied, “and Ulrica thinks I’m much too stupid to be helped with my work the way she’d begun to help Ursula.”

Mrs. Bradley nodded, and asked, again with some suddenness, whether Mary would like to go to tea with her in the guest-house.

“I’d love to,” the child replied with considerable eagerness. “Mother asks us once a week, while she’s staying here, one of us at a time because we’re not supposed to go to the guest-house in pairs. But mother’s gone to Kelsorrow. If you asked permission, I could come. They’d let me. They always let us if anyone asks. Oh—but—” She paused, and looked slightly embarrassed. “You’ll have to write me down on the slate, you know.”

Mrs. Bradley nodded.

“You mean that the cost of your tea will be added to my bill. Of course. Come along. Do we have cake in Lent?”

They walked over to the school refectory and Mrs. Bradley obtained the required permission. Tea in the guest-house was over by half-past five, and as Mary had to get back in her classroom by six to do her preparation, they parted immediately, and Mrs. Bradley strolled over to the nuns’ Common Room, to which she had been bidden, earlier in the day, by Mother Simon-Zelotes, who wanted to discuss Mendel’s theory of heredity.

Mrs. Bradley had not forgotten that from five o’clock until half-past six the nuns sang Compline and went on to Matins and Lauds, and the Common Room, she thought at first, was deserted. In the corner by the fire, however, was the old lay-sister Catherine, her gnarled hands, brown as the fruit trees which Mother Patrick had re-vitalised that afternoon, lying folded together in her lap, her lips moving easily in prayer, the facile, comforting prayers of habit, her rheumed eyes focused vacantly on heaven—or purgatory, perhaps—Mrs, Bradley could not guess. Her broad feet—not essentially nun-like, just the broad and easy-shod feet of any very old woman—were planted upon the fender for warmth, and to help support in an upright position the soldierly, hard, old body.

Mrs. Bradley seated herself without a word, and watched how the rosary passed through the brown old hands. So they sat for a long time, until the old woman looked up from her beads, nodded and mumbled a bit, and then said, in the abrupt manner of the aged, who always speak the middle and not the beginning of their thoughts, “I told them it would not do. I always said so.”

“The hot water system?” Mrs. Bradley intelligently enquired. The lay-sister nodded.

“When I was a girl, we boiled every drop in the copper, and carried it up in pails. There was none of the danger then.”

“I suppose not, sister. Didn’t the people scald themselves sometimes, though?”

“I never heard of it. Things ought to be done in God’s way, and if water is going to be heated it ought to be boiled on a fire. Brother Fire. Good Brother Fire.” Her voice mumbled on. She had forgotten Mrs. Bradley, and her thoughts were lost in the wide and echoing halls of dim-lit memory. Content to be left to her own thoughts, Mrs. Bradley sat motionless. The darkness gathered. Soon the old lay-sister slept.

The first of the Community to join them was Mother Cyprian, who, under special dispensation, was to get on with some embroidered bookbindings. She lit the lamp —there was no gas laid on in the buildings which abutted on the cloister—exchanged smiles and bows with Mrs. Bradley, seated herself beneath the light and began to mount the embroidery she had done on a square of fine, strong linen. Mrs. Bradley asked permission to look at the work. It was exquisitely done on satin, and Mother Cyprian explained that after the backing had been put on she would be able to do the heavier work in braid, which the satin, without its backing, could not support.

“Then, too,” she said, delighted to show her work, “the paste which I shall use to connect the embroidery with the book which I wish to bind would damage the delicate satin if I applied it directly. The backing is useful. It comes between. It is like—” She paused for a simile which should be at once intelligible to her hearer and satisfying to herself—“it is like—”

Invention failed her, but old Sister Catherine, awakened by the light and the sound of talking, piped out, in a voice like a badly-played viola:

“It is like the blessed saints who intercede for us. Holy Saint Joseph, protector of the Blessed Virgin Mary…” Her mumbling voice droned on.

“She is Irish,” Mother Cyprian observed, as though this was both an explanation and an excuse, but of what oddity the explanation, and for what impropriety the excuse, Mrs. Bradley did not understand. Sister Catherine went to sleep again, and made small moaning noises in the corner. Mrs. Bradley woke her very gently, and led her to the door and down the steps. Docile, the old woman said good night to her and went away to her bed. When Mrs. Bradley came back to the Common Room, Mother Cyprian had finished her work, and was pressing it out to lie smooth.

“Did you teach Ursula Doyle?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

“Yes. I teach needlework,” the nun replied, looking up. “All the children come to me at some time during the week, both the private-school children and the orphans.”

“And what did you make of Ursula?”

“She was a good child, very quiet. Very happy at the end—I mean, the last time I saw her.”

“That would have been—” Mrs. Bradley now knew the school time-table off by heart—“on the Thursday morning, Mother Saint Cyprian, I think?”

She had not known the nun’s name until Mother Cyprian mentioned the subject she taught, although she had guessed it from seeing her with her embroidery.

“On the Thursday, yes, madame,” said the nun. She leaned forward, and, contrary to the habit of the religious, who either looked directly in front of them or else kept their eyes cast down, she looked Mrs. Bradley in the eye. “We cannot believe that that poor child took her own life. She was so happy at the end. She was quite beautiful with happiness. Her cousins will tell you the same.”

Her cousins, Mrs. Bradley reflected, ought to be able to tell her a very great deal, but she shrank from questioning either of them too closely regarding the death of the child. It would do no harm, though, she felt, to interview Ulrica again. She enquired of Mother Cyprian how long the children spent over preparation.

“Until seven o’clock when they are aged ten to twelve; from twelve to fourteen until half-past seven, and the others until eight o’clock,” Mother Cyprian answered. “But if you wish to speak to Ulrica, or to any of the children, during the Preparation time, no doubt it could be arranged.”

“I should like to speak, not to Ulrica, but to somebody else in her form,” Mrs. Bradley said. Mother Cyprian nodded.

“An excellent idea,” she agreed. “I think it is time that Ulrica was cleared of all suspicion of knowing anything about her cousin’s death.”

At this Mrs. Bradley, who had supposed her secret thoughts to be hers alone, positively started with surprise. Mother Cyprian smiled very slightly.

“But, of course, we have all thought what you think,” she remarked. “Was she not the heiress, if her cousin should die? And, behold, her cousin did die.”

To say that Mrs. Bradley was taken aback by this candid statement would be to speak less than the truth. So the Community had considered murder! They had even put a name to the murderer, which was more than she herself so far had done.

Mother Cyprian smiled with seeming guilelessness. Mrs. Bradley had the helpless feeling that, even if she stayed in the convent for the rest of her life—and her parents had averaged eighty-seven point nine four years, and her grandparents, counting all four of them, just over fifty—she would never understand the workings of the minds of the religious, either individually or as a community.

She sat, and pondered, and scribbled, and Mother Cyprian took up needle and silks, and commenced another piece of embroidery, already backed, this time, because it was on velvet.

Until eight o’clock they sat there, and then Mother Cyprian put her work away, turned out the lamp and lighted the candles. Then she stood still beside the door as the Mother Superior, followed by most of the Community, entered the room. It was the hour of recreation before the De Profundis bell at nine.

Mrs. Bradley was interested to find out how the recreation hour would be spent by the nuns, but thought it incumbent upon her to leave them to their devices. They welcomed her presence, however, and asked her to stay, so she seated herself in a corner, took out her note-book and busied herself—or appeared to busy herself—while they took their places at the great, semicircular, deeply polished table and took out darning, mending and patching. This they had brought in calico bags tied with tape.

The fire glowed strongly and brightly red, the yellow candlelight doubly-lined the faces of the older nuns, and gave more than their due of beauty to the smooth soft cheeks of the younger. It pleased Mrs. Bradley to do nothing but sit there and watch them. They were a fine and comforting picture, for the older nuns had the largeness of aunts in her childhood; the beautiful nuns were like Virgins stepped out of their frames. They sat so still, except for their busy fingers, and their calm, fresh faces were so smooth, benign and comely, that they made a group for a painter, and Mrs. Bradley’s one regret was that her nephew Carey Lestrange could not be there. With keen pleasure, seated in the shadows, she watched them, aware of a faint nostalgia, aware of sadness and a most curious feeling of envy.

Then they talked with her—Mother Simon-Zelotes discussing Mendel’s theories, and the others (heads nodding, Mother Amrose’s long nose twitching with militant zeal, Mother Timothy’s false teeth gleaming more bone-like than whited bones under the moon), making good use, as they were expected to do, of the hour of recreation. Mrs. Bradley, discussing Mendel, the Spanish war, a bye-election in the Midlands, plain-song, electric fires, watched the age-sharpened, delicate profile of the gentle-voiced Mother Superior and Mother Francis’ sharp eyes; mused on the loveliness of Mother Benedict, the youthfulness of Mother Mary-Joseph, the cherubity of Mother Jude and the charitable brow and large, fine, craftsman’s hands of Mother Simon-Zelotes as she sketched swift diagrams of pea seeds, and talked about blue eyes in rabbits, and negroid characteristics as a Mendelian dominant.

There came a tap at the door, and, in response to a quiet reply from the Mother Superior, a little girl, about eight years old, came in and stood, with her hands behind her back, opposite the centre of the table.

“Well, Kathleen?” said Mother Francis, from the Mother Superior’s left. Kathleen, it appeared, was prepared to recite to the nuns, and, encouraged by the Mother Superior, began in a big, bold voice, got stuck half-way, was prompted by the young nun Mother Mary-Joseph, and finished gamely, rather fast, but remembering the rest of the words.

“Thank you, Kathleen,” said the Mother Superior, nodding. The child came round the table to her side, and the old woman kissed her gently, blessed her, and commended her for the night to the keeping of God.

This ritual was repeated six or seven times with different children, and apparently was a feature of school life to which the boarders were accustomed. When the children had all gone to bed, Mother Benedict read aloud, in a clear, grave voice, a chapter from the life of the founder of the Order.

Then the Mother Superior turned to Mrs. Bradley, who had long since put away her note-book.

“My friend…?” she said; and left the whole of the sentence a question. Mrs. Bradley rose, under the eyes of all the Community, and came to the centre of the table. Mother Mary-Joseph from the right-hand end of the semi-circular arc, brought up a straight-backed chair. Mrs. Bradley thanked her, and sat down. There was the kind of expectant hush to which she had grown accustomed, and scarcely noticed, but to a sensitive stranger it would have seemed as though the nuns were all holding breath, and that in the air was a tension as keenly stretched as the string of a violin; but Mrs. Bradley spoke briskly, and without hesitation or preamble.

“I have found out nothing of importance, but I think that both Mary Maslin and Ulrica Doyle should be sent to their homes,” she said.

“To their respective homes?” asked Mother Francis. “But Ulrica has no home, except with her aunt, Mrs. Maslin. She usually spends her holidays here, at the school. Otherwise there is the grandfather in New York.”

“They ought not to go together,” said Mrs. Bradley.

There was no movement among the nuns. They sat as still as carved wooden figures in their high-backed, uncushioned chairs, while the surface of the deeply polished table reflected the candle-light and the flashing of Mother Cyprian’s steel needles, for Mother Cyprian, alone of the Community, had continued her work after Mrs. Bradley had spoken. The atmosphere had changed, although not a sister had moved. It was as though she had shouted loudly, and they were all listening to the fading away of the echoes. Peace was gone, and she felt like a bird of ill-omen, and looked the part, too, with her yellow skin and brilliant eyes, and her mocking, crocodile grin. It was almost as though the devil had got into the Common Room. The candlelight accentuated her ugliness as it did the beauty of Mother Benedict and the white hands, made smaller by contrast with the wide heavy sleeves of their habits, of young Mother Mary-Joseph and red-lipped Mother Francis. The only one of the Community whom Nature permitted to keep Mrs. Bradley in countenance, was the old nun Mother Bartholomew, the ex-actress Rosa Cardosa, who retained, in the religious life, the marked features, the mobile, expressive mouth, the raddled complexion and the endearing, extravagant gestures of the profession she had outgrown. Discipline, however, had imposed its iron gag even upon Mother Bartholomew, and, although her eyes spoke clearly, her tongue made no remark. In fact, the dead silence, by its very continuation, soon became slightly uncanny, until, at a sign from the Superior, the black-habited, white-coifed religious took up their patching and darning and again bent their eyes upon their work. The Mother Superior leaned forward across the table, her needle between finger and thumb.

“You mean that there was no accident, but that the child was killed intentionally?” she said.

“That is what I mean,” replied. Mrs. Bradley.

“Will you tell us—” the old voice was so gentle that Mrs. Bradley, conscious of the blow which her news must be to many of those who heard her, wished heartily, not for the first time, that she could have found something different to report “—why you have come to this conclusion?”

Mrs. Bradley read all her notes aloud. She offered no comments, and, when she had finished, she felt, rather than heard, the long sigh which went up from those who accepted her findings.

There were some who did not. Mother Benedict said, when the Superior had invited the nuns to speak:

“I cannot see that you have proved your contention. Pardon me if I am stupid.”

“I will re-examine the theory of suicide, if that is the general wish,” said Mrs. Bradley, “but the theory of accident seems to me untenable.”

“I agree that it could not have been accident,” said Mother Benedict slowly, but she spoke without conviction, and as though her common sense and her intellectual acceptance of the facts were not in agreement.

“The police would not be prepared to act on this amount of evidence,” said Mrs. Bradley soothingly. “But I do suggest, for your own sakes, that you get rid of those children at once—and separately. Ulrica Doyle, as I said, must not go home with Mary and Mrs. Maslin.”

“But you are not accusing Mrs. Maslin of having killed her niece!” exclaimed Mother Simon-Zelotes. Mrs. Bradley shook her head.

“I have scarcely a shred of evidence at present against Mrs. Maslin, but, all the same, I think that Mary Maslin and Ulrica Doyle should not both go to the same house. I mention this because I believe that Mrs. Maslin has proposed it.”

“Yes, Mrs. Maslin did wish that,” said Mother Mary-Joseph, gazing, bright-eyed, at Mrs. Bradley.

“It is nearly the end of recreation time,” said the Mother Superior, almost in tones of rebuke. “We thank you for your advice, my friend,” she added. “We must think it over carefully. We will pray.”

She rose, and the nuns rose with her, and they filed out, taking their work, and left Mrs. Bradley alone. In less than a quarter of an hour, she knew, they would enter the church for night prayers. She had half an inclination to follow them, but, instead, she put out all but one candle, and by its flickering, solitary light —there was a ghostly draught somewhere that would not allow the candle flame to grow upright—she took out a little book of pictures—a British Museum copy of some of the pages of a late medieval Book of Hours.

“‘The Flight into Egypt,’ ” she read, “‘and the Massacre of the Innocents.’ ”

The draught blew more strongly. The door the nuns had carefully closed was opening. Mrs. Bradley ducked, saved by the never-sleeping instinct of self-preservation which still plays sentry even for the highly civilised. There was a loud crash. The door slammed to; the missile, whatever it was, had landed squarely and then had fallen to the floor. Mrs. Bradley stayed where she was and counted fifty. Then she got up, walked over to the door and locked it, lighted a second candle and searched for what had been thrown. It was a hammer. She had seen several like it in the metal-work hut, and had no doubt that it had come from one of the racks. It had smashed a religious picture. The glass was all over the floor.