The pelicans

by E. M. Delafield

Frances was making the five days’ Retreat which preceded the ceremony of her prise d’habit.

She was serenely happy.

There was no doubt in her mind with regard to the step which she was about to take. It was merely a longed-for milestone on the road to the attainment of her heart’s desire. Although more conscious than ever before, during these few days’ pause in the activity of her daily life, of an intense physical fatigue, she felt strangely uplifted in spirit, and as though newly inspired with a spiritual energy which might overcome that rock in the way of salvation, her physical frailty.

Strangely mingled with her exaltation of mind, was a trivial, childish feeling of dread lest Rosamund might find her altered. She assured herself in vain that she had not changed in any way that could strike her sister with a sense of alteration. But she knew that her whole perspective had changed, and that what was to her the reality of life would seem no more to Rosamund than a mysterious, and rather futile, phase.

She found herself wondering, wistfully and rather nervously, what the regulations would be as to conduct in the parlour.

That her interview with Rosamund, brief though it was to be, would be fraught with these, Frances could not doubt. In letters to her sister, she had again and again to consider the injunctions laid upon every nun or novice of the Order. Terms of excessive endearment, exaggerated expressions of affection or solicitude, were alike unbecoming to a religious, and of all the many details of her daily life that Rosamund longed to know and Frances to impart, only a very few, and those of the least personal character, did not come under the ban of convent secrecy. The letters were always signed by the writer’s full “name in religion.”

Frances, during the hour allotted to letter-writing on Sundays, had often seen her American neighbour, in the unavoidable proximity of the small, closely-ranged desks, crying silently over those difficult letters, which in her case were never answered. Frances surmised involuntarily that the changed handwriting, forced to conform to a sloping, pointed, French model, the stilted phraseology which was the inevitable outcome of that enforced reserve, the strange signature, with its orthodox preface, “Your loving child in Christ,” were so many additional pangs to those who understood no conventual shibboleths and resented with a resentment that was the more bitter for its utter lack of comprehension, being robbed of child or sister.

Rosamund would understand, Frances had told herself passionately, inditing those first strange little letters, that made her heart ache for the disappointment they must carry with them. And that Rosamund had understood she knew from her replies, guarded and restrained enough, but breathing no hint of doubt or perplexity.

All letters to or from the members of the novitiate were, of course, examined by the novice-mistress, as were those of the professed nuns by the Superior. Nor was this censorship a nominal one. Mère Thérèse understood Spanish as well as French, and had a fair knowledge of English, but twice already Frances had been told to translate various unintelligible portions of her correspondence. Once, only a few weeks ago, she had heard the calm habitual silence of the little room where the novices’ desks were ranged against the wall violently broken by the noise of sudden uncontrollable sobbing. Frances blamed herself that she had not had the presence of mind to keep that custody of the eyes enjoined by every precept and practice of the religious life, but she had raised her head quickly and instinctively, and had seen Sœur Marie-Edmée crying hysterically over the torn pieces of a letter lying on her desk.

It was not difficult to guess that her letter to the anxious, waiting mother or little sister in the South of France had been found unsuitably restrained or full of indiscreet detail, and would not be sent that week.