The pelicans

by E. M. Delafield

She laughed shrewdly at Frances’ conscious expression, and indeed no argument could have prevailed more strongly with the little novice. She learnt to look upon the completion of her meals as a task to be performed conscientiously, and felt a glow of triumph when she was able to wash the wooden fork and spoon and the blunt knife in her little pewter bowl of water, and place them in due order upon the table before the signal for rising was given.

The evening recreation which succeeded supper was a repetition of the morning one, and did not terminate until the clanging bell at eight o’clock proclaimed that the convent world had entered into “le grand silence,” which would remain unbroken save for the most urgent necessity, until after Mass the following morning.

Collecting the manuals containing the office for the day from her tiny pigeon-hole, Frances would join the noiseless, softly hurrying throng of novices and descend to the chapel. On her knees at the high prie-dieu, which she would presently leave for a carved stall when the general recital of the office began, she embarked nightly upon the hardest struggle of her present existence—that against an overpowering need of sleep. Again and again Frances fell asleep while kneeling, only to wake instantly with a violent start, and force her eyelids, heavy as lead, to remain open over her filmed, unseeing eyes.

The novice in the stall next her, a Spanish child not yet nineteen, slumbered uneasily as unwillingly every night through the recital of Matins and Lauds, and one of Frances’ most effective devices for keeping herself awake was that of gently pushing her neighbour into position when the nuns rose for the Gloria Patri that concluded every psalm.

She half envied little Sister Encarnaçion that uncomfortable three-quarters of an hour’s sleep. For her own part, Frances never quite lost consciousness, although the curious intermittent buzzing in her head often prevented her from hearing her own voice joining in the psalms and hymns. But it was always with intense, though most involuntary, thankfulness, that she sank on to her knees for the last time, for the two or three moments silent devotion that preceded the final signal at which the novices rose and filed slowly, two by two, from the chapel. It was then generally some few minutes before half-past nine, but if the big clock on the stairs, which she passed every night, its ticking loud and portentous in the absolute silence, showed the hour to be even a very little later than usual, Frances was conscious of a purely physical sensation of sick dismay and resentment at the abridgement of her night.

In her cubicle she undressed as rapidly and silently as possible, and fell asleep almost as she lay down on her paillasse. To its iron hardness and the absence of any support but the smallest and stiffest of bolsters, she had never given a thought, since the first week when her arms and sides for a little while had shown the faint discoloration of bruises.

The days, regular and incessantly occupied, flew by with a rapidity that she had never known before, and it was always with a sort of shock of surprise that Frances greeted the arrival of each Saturday morning, the day which was marked for her by the unfailing arrival of Rosamund’s weekly letter.

She had long ago, with tears, asked her sister to conform to the convent regulation, which did not extend its approval to more than one weekly letter from home for its novices, although no definite commands were issued except in the matter of the letters sent out. These might not exceed one every Sunday to a parent or guardian, and one a fortnight to a sister or brother. Frances, however, was permitted to reverse the custom, and it was to Rosamund that her Sunday letter was always addressed.

One of the strangest and hardest pangs that her torn and divided loyalty was to suffer, lay in the knowledge that no restriction was placed upon the correspondence of a nun or novice and any other member of the Order, domiciled in “one of our houses abroad.”

That this tie, strong and sacred although she believed it to be, should be held closer than that of blood, remained to Frances an incomprehensible and rather heartrending convention of which she shunned the thought as a temptation to disloyalty.