The White Sister

by F. Marion Crawford

CHAPTER VII

There is a religious house in Rome, beyond the Tiber and not far from Porta Portese, which I will call the Convent of the White Sisters of Santa Giovanna d'Aza. Their order is a branch of a great and ancient one, though it has not had a separate existence a very long time. The convent contains one of the best private hospitals in Italy, and the Sisters also go out as trained nurses, like those of several other orders. But they do something more, which the others do not; for almost every year two or three, or even four of them go out to the Far East to work in the leper hospitals which missionaries have established in Rangoon and elsewhere; and a good many have gone in the last ten years, but few will ever return.

The convent is much larger than any one would suppose who judged merely from the uninteresting stuccoed wall which faces the quiet street, and in which there are a few plain windows without shutters and a large wooden door, painted a dull green. This door, which is the main entrance, is opened and shut by the portress as often as a hundred times a day and more; but when it is open there is nothing to be seen within but a dark vestibule paved with flagstones; and the portress's wooden face is no more prepossessing than the wall itself. If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid, mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely relieved from her duties for a few hours at a time, and all the patients must pass her when they enter or leave the house, as well as the doctors, and the visitors whose smart carriages and motor cars often stand waiting in the narrow street. Fifty times a day, perhaps, the door-bell rings and Sister Anna deliberately flaps down the five steps in her heavily-soled slippers to admit one person or another, and fifty times, again, she flaps down to let them out again. The reason why she does not go mad or become an imbecile is that she is Swiss. That, at least, is how it strikes the celebrated surgeon, Professor Pieri, who is at the convent very often because he has many of his patients brought there to be operated on and nursed.

The truth is that the hospital is a thoroughly modern one, which has been built as an extension of buildings that date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is managed on soundly scientific principles, without the least fuss, or any 'board of trustees' or 'committee of management,' or any of that cumbrous administration which makes so many public hospitals as intricate as labyrinths, only to be threaded with a clue of red tape, and proportionately unpractical.

There is a still and sunny garden within, surrounded by a wide and dry cloister, above which the ancient building rises only one story on the three sides of the square; but on the fourth side, which looks towards the sun at noon, there are three stories, which have been built lately, and the hospital wards are in that wing, one above the other. On the opposite side, a door opens from the cloister to the choir of the church, which has also an outer entrance from the street, now rarely used; for the chaplain comes and goes through the cloister, the vestibule, and the green door where the portress is.

Beyond her lodge there is a wide hall, with clerestory windows and glass doors opening to the cloister and the garden; and from this hall the hospital itself is reached by a passage through which all the patients are taken. The Mother Superior's rooms are those above the cloister on the further side of the garden, and have three beautiful thirteenth century windows divided by pairs of slender columns, so that each window has two little arches.

In the middle of the garden there is an old well with three arches of carved stone that spring from three pillars and meet above the centre of the well-head, and the double iron chain runs over a wheel, and has two wrought copper buckets, one at each end of it; but the water is now used only for watering the flowers. There are stone seats round the well, too, on which three old nuns often sit and sun themselves on fine days. They are the last of the Sisters of the old time, when there was no hospital and no training school, and the nuns used to do anything in the way of nursing that was asked of them by rich or poor, with a good heart and a laudable intention, but without even the simplest elements of modern prophylaxis, because it had not been invented then. For that has all been discovered quite recently, as we older men can remember only too well.

There are many roses in the garden, and where there is most sun there is a large bed of carnations, but not of the finer sorts; they are just plain red and white ones, that fill the air with a scent of warm cloves on still mornings in the late spring, when it is beginning to be hot. But if this description has seemed tedious, you must know that Angela lived in the convent and worked there for five whole years after Giovanni was lost in Africa; so that it was needful to say something about her surroundings.

An accomplished psychologist would easily fill a volume with the history of Angela's soul from the day on which she learned the bad news till the morning when she made her profession and took the final vows of her order in the little convent church. But one great objection to psychological analysis in novels seems to be that the writer never gets beyond analysing what he believes that he himself would have felt if placed in the 'situation' he has invented for his hero or heroine. Thus analysed, Angela Chiaromonte would not have known herself, any more than those who knew her best, such as Madame Bernard and her aunt the Princess, would have recognised her. I shall not try to 'factorise' the result represented by her state of mind from time to time; still less shall I employ a mathematical process to prove that the ratio of dx to dy is twice x, the change in Angela at any moment of her moral growth.