"I tried to stay my soul with ritualism," she said, talking to Miss H. and myself when we were alone after dinner, "and at first I thought I was going to get some comfort out of it. I made my father furious by entering one of Miss ——'s famous sisterhoods. But it wouldn't do. Ritualism of course was not more illogical then than now, but the actors weren't as well up in their parts, and how queer some of our performances at —— were! I remember a retreat I made there, in which I was put into a cell bare of everything save a table and chair, and a Testament upon the table, and there I was left alone the whole day, seeing no creature save a Sister who, speechless, thrust my dinner and tea in at me! You may imagine the imbecile condition in which night found me.
"And as a punishment for some fault I was ordered to go to communion for four months without going to confession! Miss ——, our Reverend Mother, behaved exactly as if she had taken her notions of the external character and dignities of her office from some swelling, stern, ridiculous Lady Abbess in a no-popery novel! We undertook everything—teaching, the care of hospitals, training of servants, district work, Magdalen houses, and to these active employments we joined the contemplative, strictly cloistered life! We had no special training for either one of our labors; we had no completed constitutions or rule, and one was liable, at any moment, to be whisked from one's quiet cell and sent alone at night, across the kingdom, to some duty for which one was no more fitted than a baby or a savage.
"I was set, in the beginning, to clean lamps, and black-lead the grates, but failed in this business so completely that I was given a district in East London to afflict with visitations and instructions. Trying one day to convey some idea of the Real Presence to a voluble old woman who was one of the sisterhood's most devoted protégées, I said, 'Then, Sally, since you know who is in the church, I hope you never go in or out without showing proper respect.' 'Oh, yessum, yessum!' she assured me. 'Indeed, 'm, I allays bobs to the eagle!' (the brass eagle of the lectern!). With all Sally's bobbings to the eagle and to us sisters, she was a dreadful old harpy, and made me think always of two old women my father overheard talking one day at Cirencester. There is a fund there which was long ago bequeathed by some pious person for the furnishing small stipends to such aged poor people as should daily devoutly hear mass. Of course since the revenues have lapsed into Anglican hands this sum is used now for those who attend the early service. And this was what my father heard:
"First old crone, loquitur: 'These be hard times, Betty. How d'ye think of getting a livelihood this winter?'
"Second old crone: 'They be hard, for shore, Anne, and I'm a-thinking of taking to yorly priors (early prayers) for a quarter!'
"One of my droll, dreadful district visitor experiences I shall never forget. In the process of my visitations I stumbled, one day, into the room of a woman very haggard and very yellow, but as the woman was dressed and moving actively about, I had no idea of her having any special ailment, save dirt. But as soon as she knew who I was, a visiting Sister, she began to tell me how ill she was—ill of a disease that not another person in the whole kingdom had—the doctor said so—spotted leprosy. And how physicians came constantly to see her, and brought, each one, other physicians—how, in short of a horrible long, she was a sort of gruesome doctor's pet!
"The woman's husband—for she was married, had eleven children, and another baby coming soon—was working away at a cobbler's bench in the room's only window, and she constantly appealed to him: 'Dr. So-and-So said there wasn't another case like mine in this country, didn't he, Jim? And he didn't see how it was it hadn't killed me off long ago—you remember, Jim? And that young Scotch doctor that was so astonished to see what a family I had—you haven't forgotten him, have you, Jim?' And the man corroborated all her statements with a pride in having a wife so uniquely afflicted impossible to describe! Then she insisted I must see and dress the awful sores that made her shoulders and one breast a great wound, telling me, as I half fainted over the task, that I didn't do it half so well as any of the doctors, and begging me, when I had finished, to stop long enough for her to give me a cup of tea in that place, insufferable at best with the dirty cobbler and five or six of the wretched babies, but become, after my mauvais quart d'heure with the terrible woman, a chamber of horrors in which to delay one further instant would, I felt, make me daft, or shudderingly sea-sick, for life!
"I stopped a year and a half in the sisterhood, trying, as I said, to make it do; but either I'm too logical, or have too keen a sense of the ridiculous, for the farce of our active-uncloistered-severely-contemplative-enclosed life, a religious order without a constitution, frowned on by all the bishops, carrying on its dearest devotional practices in hiding from all proper ecclesiastical authority, became intolerable to me; and when, one fine day, there came from 'Reverend Mother' an order to go and nurse a man ill with typhus—an agricultural laborer living alone in his cottage—and to my remonstrances that I knew nothing of the disease, my plea for a companion less ignorant or at least clear instructions for my own guidance, no answer was vouchsafed save an oracular assurance that if I did my part of obedience, light would be given me, I revolted, sent a contumacious message that though I believed the age of miracles by no means past, I had never seen any wrought in our order, and could not risk the poor man's life upon so vague a prospect, and presently bid farewell to my Anglican convent and to ritualism. Several Sisters have returned to the world since, and four of these have gone over to Rome. Two of these have married. One, whom I loved most dearly, is a Poor Clare in Ireland, and the other has used her fortune to open a crèche, where she works harder than any of her nurses, and carries, I should say, the lightest heart in London.
"I have no doubt there is more system, more decorum—I use the word in its literal sense—in the Anglican sisterhoods now. I'm quite amazed sometimes at the closeness of the imitation of the real thing when I go to Margaret street, or to St. Alban's—the altars, the lights, the confessionals, the stations, the black-cassocked figures gliding about, removing their berettas and dropping on one knee as they pass the altar—all the furniture; but a dreadful feeling of emptiness—as if the house's owner had moved away! Do you ever look at the pictures and the titles of books in the windows of the High Church bookshops? What would have been thought of them five years ago even? And at ——'s in Oxford street, a High Church friend tells me, they have a room into which you may be ushered by inquiring for the 'Penitential Department,' if the card bearing the name of a clerical voucher, which you must present, be satisfactory, and where you may purchase disciplines—nail-studded armlets, waist-belts—perhaps hair shirts, though I don't remember that they figured in my friend's list.
"And, two years ago, I think it was, I witnessed a little scene that was as extraordinary as it was absurd. I was coming up from Cromer, and our train had halted for the usual time in the station at Norwich. It's a large station, trains constantly rolling in and out, and crowds of passengers, guards, porters flying about. While we waited, above the din suddenly was heard a singular and regular thud! thud! coming down the platform. Thud! thud! on it came, and the noise, and the queer, sudden hush of most of the other racket made us all look eagerly out to see what it could be. It was a progression—a procession—a man in soutane, barefooted, I believe, preceded by some sort of a servitor carrying a monstrous book—breviary, 'Livre des Heures'—I know not what, and a tall wooden crosier, whose foot it was that made the thud! thud! At a little distance behind the man in the soutane, whom I recognized directly as Mr. Lyne—the famous Father Ignatius, a self constituted Benedictine Abbot—followed two Anglican Sisters. The servitor and Father Ignatius betook themselves into a first-class carriage, the Sisters remaining outside, and presently the crosier head was thrust out of the window, and Father Ignatius appeared behind it with hand outstretched to bless the Sisters, who knelt devoutly on the platform to receive the benediction. Up to this point everybody had behaved with wonderful restraint; but the last stroke was too much, and it was amid a perfect scream of laughter from passengers, officials, cabmen, and gamins, that the train steamed out of the station, bearing the Benedictine Abbot away, but surely not leaving the lambs of the flock comfortless."