The+convent

Waddington brought a message from the Mother Superior to Kitty with an invitation to visit the convent. There were six nuns under command of the Mother Superior in Mei-tan-fu, only three of them were from those seven nuns she brought to China ten years before the epidemic. When they left France they left it for ever. To Waddington it seemed a real sacrifice. The English can make themselves at home in any part of the world but the French have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical bond. The nuns built the convent. Mother Superior made the plans and supervised the work. The nuns were miserably poor. The parlour of the convent was a small room. It contained a large table covered with a chequered oilcloth and round the walls was a set of stiff chairs. At one end of the room was a statue, in plaster, of the Blessed Virgin. Peace dwelt in the convent. It was so strange because all round about the epidemic of cholera was raging. In the convent there was an infirmary for sick soldiers where every day somebody died.

The Mother Superior was a very remarkable woman. She belonged to one of the greatest families in France but she didn’t wish it to be talked of. It was impossible to ask her an indiscreet question. The Mother Superior was dressed in white with a red heart burning on her breast. She was a woman of middle age, forty or fifty, it was impossible to say. There were few wrinkles on her smooth, pale face. The face was long, with a large mouth and large, even teeth. The nose, though not small, was delicate and sensitive. It was the eyes, under their thin black brows, which gave her face its intense and tragic character. They were very large, black, and though not exactly cold, by their calm steadiness strangely compelling. But the most striking thing about her was the air she had of authority tempered by Christian charity. To be obeyed was natural to her, but she accepted obedience with humility. She had the condescension of a great lady and the humility of a saint. Kitty felt that notwithstanding her cordiality there was something in the Mother Superior that held people at a distance. When Kitty met her for the first time the Superior’s eyes held her in a long and unembarrassed look of appraisal. It was so frank that it was not uncivil; you felt that here was a woman whose business it was to form an opinion of others.

The convent sheltered tens of orphans (in the sense that their parents had wished to be rid of them). They were girls which were considered “useless” in poor families. The nuns even gave a few cash to the parents for every child otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the trouble to bring the child to the convent. Unwanted girls were doomed to a certain death.

There were some rooms in the convent where the orphans were doing plain sewing or working at embroideries. Only tiny children were playing. When Kitty saw them she shuddered a little, for in their uniform dress, sallow-skinned, stunted, with their flat noses, they looked to her hardly human. They were repulsive. But the Mother Superior stood among them like Charity itself. The orphans adored her.

The nuns at the convent thought Walter was a hero. They had an unbounded admiration for him and swore by his name. The way the nuns spoke of Walter was unexpected to Kitty. The Mother Superior’s tone was very gentle when she praised him. Oddly enough it gave Kitty a little thrill of pride to know that the Mother Superior and the Sisters and thought so well of her husband.

Kitty had an idea that the religious were always grave. Sister St Joseph with her cheerful, easy laughter, her sweet and childlike merriment not a little astonished Kitty. Kitty liked to talk to her. They could chatter about the Mother Superior, Waddington, his Manchu woman, Walter, about everything. Later she was astonished at the interest the nuns took in her when they had learned about her pregnancy. On a flimsy pretext they came to looked at her as if they had been just common woman, curious and talkative.

Kitty went to the convent from curiosity. She had nothing else to do. But the convent impressed and changed her. In the convent it seemed to Kitty that she was transported into another world situated strangely neither in space nor time. Those bare rooms and the white corridors, austere and simple, seemed to possess the spirit of something remote and mystical. The little chapel, so ugly and vulgar, in its very crudeness was pathetic; it was very humble; and the faith which had adorned it, the affection which cherished it, had endued it with a delicate beauty of the soul. The methodical way in which the convent’s work was carried on in the midst of the epidemic showed a coolness in the face of danger and a practical sense, almost ironical it was so matter of fact, which were deeply impressive.

Kitty asked the Mother Superior to let her work in the convent. She explained that she couldn’t bear to think that she was idle. The Superior agreed but said some very remarkable words to Kitty that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul. Kitty found the work a refreshment to her spirit. She went to the convent every morning soon after sunrise and worked there till night. First the Mother Superior gave into her care the smaller children. Later, when Kitty had disclosed her talent to cook quite well and to sew beautifully, she was sent to supervise the stitching and hemming of the younger girls. Kitty felt that the orphans liked her and she liked them in return.

Kitty had a queer feeling that she was growing. The constant occupation in the convent distracted her mind. She begat to regain her spirit; she felt better and stronger. She got the sense of liberation, from Charley Townsend, from her previous life. After Walter’s death she came to the convent because she had nowhere to go. The Mother Superior insisted on her return to Hong Kong. Kitty had to obey.

But to all that moving experience Kitty got in the convent there was a shadow which disconcerted her. She felt an aloofness there which oppressed her. The Mother Superior and the nuns were friendly and even cordial, but at the same time they held something back. Kitty felt that she was nothing but a casual stranger in the convent. There was a barrier between her and them. They spoke a different language not only of the tongue but of the heart. When the door of the convent was closed behind her she felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit which with all her soul she hankered. At the very end of the novel Kitty thought about her future life and it seemed to her a path, “not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace”.