“Lilly and I are to be dressed alike,” I said. “‘Slaves of the royal household.’ Madame Rayburn said we were to wear Turkish trousers of yellow muslin, with blue tunics, and red sashes tied at the side. Won’t we look like guys?”
I spoke with affected disdain and real complacency, gloating—like Mr. Rushworth—over the finery I pretended to despise. Elizabeth stared at us dispassionately. “Lilly will look well in anything,” she remarked with disconcerting candour, at which Lilly blushed a lovely rose pink. She knew how pretty she was, but she had that exquisite sweetness of temper which is so natural an accompaniment of beauty. Perhaps we should all be sweet-tempered if we could feel sure that people looked at us with pleasure.
“You will have to wear Turkish trousers, too,” said Tony maliciously to Elizabeth; “and get down on your knees in them.”
“No, I won’t,” returned Elizabeth scornfully. “I’m not a Turk. I’m a Moorish princess,—Zara’s niece.”
“Moors and Turks are the same,” said Tony with conviction.
“Moors and Turks are not the same,” said Elizabeth. “Turks live in Turkey, and Moors live—Whereabouts is this play, anyway, Marie?”
“Granada,” said Marie. “The Spanish army, under Ferdinand and Isabella, is besieging Granada. I wish I were a Moor instead of a pious Spanish lady. It would be a great deal more fun. I’ve always got pious parts.”
This was true, but then most of the parts in our convent plays were pious, and if they were given to Marie, it was because she was so good an actress,—the only one our Second Cours could boast. Elizabeth, indeed, had her merits. She never forgot her lines, never was frightened, never blundered. But her absolutely unemotional rendering of the most heroic sentiments chilled her hearers’ hearts. Marie was fervid and impassioned. Her r-r’s had the true Gallic roll. Her voice vibrated feelingly. She was tall for thirteen, without being hopelessly overgrown as Emily and I were. Strangest of all, she did not seem to mind the foolish and embarrassing things which she was obliged to do upon the stage. She would fling her arms around an aged parent, and embrace her fondly. She would expound the truths of Christianity, as St. Philomena. She would weep, and pray, and forgive her enemies, as the luckless Madame Elisabeth. What is more, she would do these things at rehearsals, in her short school frock, with unabated fervour, and without a shade of embarrassment. We recognized her as a Heaven-sent genius, second only to Julia Reynolds and Antoinette Mayo (who I still think must have been the greatest of living actresses), yet in our secret souls we despised a little such absolute lack of self-consciousness. We were so awkward and abashed when brought face to face with any emotion, so incapable of giving it even a strangled utterance, that Marie’s absorption in her parts seemed to us a trifle indecent. It was on a par with her rapid French, her lively gestures, her openly expressed affection for the nuns she liked, and the unconcern with which she would walk up the long classroom, between two rows of motionless girls, to have a medal hung around her neck on Sunday night at Primes. This hideous ordeal, which clouded our young lives, was no more to Marie than walking upstairs,—no more than unctuously repeating every day for a fortnight the edifying remarks of the pious Spanish lady.
Plays were the great diversions of our school life. We had two or three of them every winter, presented, it seemed to me, with dazzling splendour, and acted with passionate fire. I looked forward to these performances with joyful excitement, I listened, steeped in delight, I dreamed of them afterwards for weeks. The big girls who played in them, and of whom I knew little but their names, were to me beings of a remote and exalted nature. The dramas themselves were composed with a view to our especial needs, or rather to our especial limitations. Their salient feature was the absence of courtship and of love. It was part of the convent system to ignore the master passion, to assume that it did not exist, to banish from our work and from our play any reference to the power that moves the world. The histories we studied skipped chastely on from reign to reign, keeping always at bay this riotous intruder. The books we read were as free as possible from any taint of infection. The poems we recited were as serene and cold as Teneriffe. “Love in the drama,” says an acrimonious critic, “plays rather a heavy part.” It played no part at all in ours, and I am disposed to look back now upon its enforced absence as an agreeable elimination. The students of St. Omer—so I have been told—presented a French version of “Romeo and Juliet,” with all the love scenes left out. This tour de force was beyond our scope; but “She Stoops to Conquer,” shorn of its double courtship, made a vivacious bit of comedy, and a translation of “Le Malade Imaginaire”—expurgated to attenuation—was the most successful farce of the season.
Of course the expurgation was not done by us. We knew Goldsmith and Molière only in their convent setting, where, it is safe to say, they would never have known themselves. Most of our plays, however, were original productions, written by some one of the nuns whose talents chanced to be of a dramatic order. They were, as a rule, tragic in character, and devout in sentiment,—sometimes so exceedingly devout as to resemble religious homilies rather than the legitimate drama. A conversation held in Purgatory, which gave to three imprisoned souls an opportunity to tell one another at great length, and with shameless egotism, the faults and failings of their lives, was not—to our way of thinking—a play. We listened unmoved to the disclosures of these garrulous spirits, who had not sinned deeply enough to make their revelations interesting. It was like going to confession on a large and liberal scale. The martyrdom of St. Philomena was nearly as dull, though the saint’s defiance of the tyrant Symphronius—“persecutor of the innocent, slayer of the righteous, despot whose knell has even this hour rung”—lent a transient gleam of emotion; and the angel who visited her in prison—and who had great difficulty getting his wings through the narrow prison door—was, to my eyes at least, a vision of celestial beauty.