CHAPTER XV
THE TUNNEL
The only other occupant of the railway-carriage was a nun who sat in the farther corner reading her breviary or some pious book. Letizia soon fell fast asleep, her head pillowed on her mother’s lap, while Nancy, watching the flaring chimneys in the darkness without, was thinking of that old lady who had flared like them in the murk of Lebanon House. After two hours of monotonous progress Letizia woke up.
“Muvver,” she said, “I fink I’ve got a funny feeling in my tummy.”
“I expect you’re hungry, pet. You didn’t eat a very good tea.”
“It was such a crumby cake; and when I blowed some of the crumbs out of my mouf, one of those aunts made a noise like you make to a gee-gee, and I said, ‘Yes, but I’mnota gee-gee,’ and then the plate what I was eating went out of the room on a tray.”
“Well, I’ve got a sponge cake for you here.”
Letizia worked her way laboriously through half the cake, and then gave it up with a sigh.
“Oh, dear, everyfing seems to be all crumbs to-day.”
“Try some of the lemonade. Be careful, darling, not to choke, because it’s very bubbly.”
Letizia made a wry face over the lemonade.
“It tastes like pins, muvver.”
The nun who overheard this criticism put down her book and said, with a pleasant smile, that she had a flask of milk which would be much better for a little girl than lemonade. She had, too, a small collapsible tumbler,from which it would be easier to drink than from a bottle.
“Is that a glass, muvver?” Letizia exclaimed. “I was finking it was a neckalace.”
“Thank Sister very nicely.”
“Is that a sister?” Letizia asked incredulously.
The various relationships to which she had been introduced this day were too much for Letizia, and this new one seemed to her even more extraordinary than the collapsible metal tumbler. Nancy explained to the nun that they had been making a family visit to hitherto unknown relations in Brigham, to which the nun responded by saying that she, too, had been making a kind of family visit inasmuch as she had been staying in Lancashire at the mother house of the Sisters of the Holy Infancy.
“Right out on the moors. Such a lovely position, though of course it’s just a little bleak at this time of year.”
She had laid aside her pious book and was evidently glad to talk for a while to combat the depression that nocturnal journeys inevitably cast upon travellers in those days before corridors were at all usual in trains. In those days a railway compartment seemed such an inadequate shelter from the night that roared past in torrents of darkness on either side of it. The footwarmers, glad though one was of them, only made the chilly frost that suffused the upper portion of the carriage more blighting to the spirit. The dim gaslit stations through which the train passed, the clangour of the tunnels, the vertical handle of the door which at any moment, it seemed, might become horizontal and let it swing open for the night to rush through and sweep one away into the black annihilation from which the train was panting to escape, the saga of prohibitions inscribed above the windows and beneath the rack which gradually assumed a portentous and quasi-Mosaic significance—all these menacing, ineluctable impressions were abolished by the introduction of the corridor with its assurance of life’s continuity.
Nancy told the nun that she was a Catholic, and they talked for a time on conventional lines about the difficulty of keeping up with one’s religious duties on tour.
“But I do hope that you will go on trying, my dear,” said the nun.
The young actress felt a little hypocritical in allowing her companion to presume that until this date she had never relinquished the struggle. Yet she was not anxious to extend the conversation into any intimacy of discussion, nor did she want the nun to feel bound by her profession to remonstrate with her for past neglect. So instead of saying anything either about the past or the future, she smiled an assent.
“You mustn’t let me be too inquisitive a travelling companion,” said the nun, “but I notice that you’re in deep mourning. Have you lost some one who was very dear to you?”
“My husband.”
The nun leaned over and with an exquisite tenderness laid her white and delicate hand on Nancy’s knee.
“And you have only this little bright thing left?” she murmured.
Letizia had been regarding the nun’s action with wide-eyed solemnity. Presently she stood up on the seat and putting her arms round her mother’s neck, whispered in her ear:
“I fink the lady tied up with a handkie is nice.”
“You have conquered Letizia’s heart,” said Nancy, smiling through the tears in her eyes.
“I’m very proud to hear it. I should guess that she wasn’t always an easy conquest.”
“Indeed, no!”
“Letizia?” the nun repeated. “What a nice name to own! Gladness!”
“You know Italian? My husband’s grandmother was Italian. I often wish that I could speak Italian and teach my small daughter.”
“What is Italian, muvver?” Letizia asked.
“Italian, Letizia,” said the nun, “is the way all the people talk in the dearest and most beautiful country in the world. Such blue seas, my dear, such skies of velvet, such oranges and lemons growing on the trees, such flowers everywhere, such radiant dancing airs, such warmth and sweetness and light. I lived in Italy long ago, when I was young.”
Nancy looked up in amazement as the nun stopped speaking, for her voice sounded fresh and crystalline as a girl’s, her cheeks were flushed with youth, her eyes were deep and warm and lucent as if the Southern moon swam face to face with her in the cold March night roaring past the smoky windows of the carriage. Yet when Nancy looked again she saw the fine lines in the porcelain-frail face, and the puckered eyelids, and middle-age in those grave blue eyes. In Italy, then, was written the history of her youth, and in Italy the history of her love, for only remembered love could thus have transformed her for a fleeting instant to what she once was. At that moment the train entered a tunnel and went clanging on through such a din of titanic anvils that it was impossible to talk, for which Nancy was grateful because she did not want Letizia to shatter the nun’s rapture by asking questions that would show she had not understood a great deal about Italy or Italian. Presently the noise of the anvils ceased, and the train began to slow down until at last it came to a stop in a profound silence which pulsed upon the inner ear as insistently as a second or two back had clanged those anvils. The talk of people in the next compartment began to trickle through the partition, and one knew that such talk was trickling all the length of the train, and that, though one could not hear the words through all the length of the train, people were saying to one another that the signals must be against them. One felt, too, a genuine gratitude to those active and vigilant signals which were warning the train not to rush on through that din of anvils to its doom.
And then abruptly the lights went out in every singlecompartment. The blackness was absolute. People put up windows and looked out into the viewless tunnel, until the vapours drove them back within. Now down the line were heard hoarse shouts and echoes, and the bobbing light of the guard’s lamp illuminated the sweating roof of the tunnel as he passed along to interview the engine driver. In a few minutes he came back, calling out, “Don’t be frightened, ladies and gentlemen, there’s no danger.” Heads peered out once more into the mephitic blackness, and the word went along that there had been a breakdown on the line ahead and that their lighting had by an unfortunate coincidence broken down as well. Everybody hoped that the signals behind were as vigilant as those in front and that the red lamps were burning bright to show that there was danger on the line.
“I aspeck the poor train wanted a rest, muvver,” said Letizia. “I aspeck it was sleepy because it was out so late.”
“I know somebody else who’s sleepy.”
“P’r’aps a little bit,” Letizia admitted.
“Dear me, shemustbe tired,” her mother said across the darkness to the nun. “Well, then, put your head on my lap, old lady, and go right off to sleep as soon as ever you can.”
For some time the two grown-ups in the compartment sat in silence while the little girl went to sleep. It was the nun who spoke first.
“I wonder whether it will disturb her if we talk quietly? But this utter blackness and silence is really rather dispiriting.”
“Oh, no, Sister, we shan’t disturb her. She’s sound asleep by now.”
“Does she always travel with you when you’re on tour?” the nun asked.
“Until now she has. You see, my husband only died at Christmas and we were always together with her. I am a little worried about the future, because I can’t affordto travel with a nurse and landladies vary and of course she has to be left in charge of somebody.”
“Yes, I can understand that it must be a great anxiety to you.”
Nancy thought how beautiful the nun’s voice sounded in this darkness. While the train was moving, she had not realised its quality, but in the stillness now it stole upon her ears as magically as running water or as wind in pine-tree tops or as any tranquil and pervasive sound of nature. In her mind’s eye she was picturing the nun’s face as it had appeared when she was speaking of Italy, and she was filled with a desire to confide in her.
“That is really the reason I’ve been to Brigham,” Nancy said. “I thought that I ought to give my husband’s relations the opportunity of looking after Letizia. Not because I want to shirk the responsibility,” she added quickly. “Indeed I would hate to lose her, but I did feel that she ought to have the chance of being brought up quietly. My own mother died when I was very young, and my father who is on the stage allowed me to act a great deal as a child, so that really I didn’t go to school till I was over twelve, and it wasn’t a very good school, because I was living in Dublin with an aunt who hadn’t much money. Indeed I never really learnt anything, and when I was sixteen I went back to the stage for good. I’m only twenty-four now. I look much older, I think.”
“I shouldn’t have said that you were more than that,” the nun replied. “But how terribly sad for you, my dear, to have lost your husband so young. Many years ago before I became a nun I was engaged to be married to a young Italian, and he died. That was in Italy, and that is why I still always think of Italy as the loveliest country and of Italian as the most beautiful language. But you were telling me about your relations in Brigham.”
Nancy gave an account of her visit, and particularly of the interview with Letizia’s great-grandmother.
“I think the old lady was quite right. I cannot imagine that bright little sleeping creature was intended to be brought up in such surroundings. Besides, I don’t think it is right to expose a Catholic child to Protestant influences. Far better that you should keep her with you.”
“Yes, but suppose I cannot get an engagement? As a matter of fact, I have only a pound or two left, and the prospect is terrifying me. I feel that I ought to have gone on acting at Greenwich. But to act on the very stage on which my husband had died in my arms! I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t have done it.”
“My dear, nobody would ever dream of thinking that you could. It’s cruel enough that you should have to act on any stage at such a time. However, I feel sure that you will soon get an engagement. Almighty God tries us in so many ways—ways that we often cannot understand, so that sometimes we are tempted to question His love. Be sure that He has some mysterious purpose in thus trying you even more hardly. Nobody is worth anything who cannot rise above suffering to greatness of heart and mind and soul. Do not think to yourself that a foolish old nun is just trying to soothe you with the commonplaces of religious consolation. To be sure, they are commonplaces that she is uttering, but subtleties avail nothing until the truth of the great commonplaces has been revealed to the human soul. Our holy religion is built up on the great commonplaces. That is why it is so infinitely superior to the subtleties of proud and eccentric individuals as encouraged by Protestantism. What a long time we are waiting in this darkness! Yet we know that however long we have to wait we shall sometime or other get out of this tunnel.”
“Yes, but if we wait much longer,” said Nancy, “I will have another problem to face when we get to London, for I will never dare arrive back at my present landlady’s too late.”
“I can solve that problem for you, at any rate,” said the nun. “I shall be met at Euston by a vehicle, and Iknow that our guest-room is free to-night. So don’t let your night’s lodging worry you.”
After this they sat silent in the darkness for a long time. The presence of the nun filled Nancy with a sense of warm security and peace of mind. Gradually it seemed to her that this wait in the tunnel was a perfect expression of the dark pause in her life, which, beginning with the death of Bram, had ended in her visit to Brigham. A conviction was born in her brain, a conviction which with every minute of this immersion in absolute blackness became stronger, that somehow the presence of the nun was a comforting fact, the importance of which was not to be measured by her importance within the little space of the railway-carriage, but that the existence of this nun was going to influence the whole of her life, which must soon begin again when the train emerged from the tunnel. The curtain would rise once more upon the pantomime, and, whatever the vicissitudes that she as the heroine of it might have to endure, there would always be a Fairy Queen waiting in the wings to enter and shake her silver wand against the powers of Evil. It was very childish and sentimental to be sitting here in the dark dreaming like this, Nancy kept telling herself; but then once more the mystery of the tunnel would enfold her as one is enfolded by those strange half-sleepy clarities of the imagination that flash through the midway of the night when one lies in bed and hopes that the sense of illumination that is granted between a sleep and a sleep will return with daylight to illuminate the active life of the morning. Her thoughts about the nun reassumed their first portentousness; the comparison of her own life to a pantomime appeared once more with the superlative reality of a symbol that might enshrine the whole meaning of life. Then suddenly the lights went up, and after a few more minutes the train was on its way again.
Nancy was glad indeed on arriving at Euston toward two o’clock of a frore and foggy night to drive away withSister Catherine in the queer conventual vehicle like a covered-in wagonette with four small grilled windows. To have argued with Miss Fewkes about her right to enter the tall thin house in Blackboy Passage at whatever hour she chose would have been the climax to the Brigham experience.
The Sisters of the Holy Infancy were a small community which was founded by one of several co-heiresses to a thirteenth-century barony by writ, dormant for many centuries. Instead of spending her money on establishing her right to an ancient title Miss Tiphaine de Cauntelo Edwardson preferred to endow this small community and be known as Mother Mary Ethelreda. The headquarters of the community were at Beaumanoir where Sister Catherine, the right-hand of the now aged foundress, had been visiting her. This was a Lancashire property which had formerly been held by Miss Edwardson’s ancestors and repurchased by her when she decided to enter the religious life. In London the house of the community was situated in St. John’s Wood where the Sisters were occupied in the management of an extremely good school. There was a third house in Eastbourne which was used chiefly as a home for impoverished maiden ladies.
Sister Catherine was head-mistress of St. Joseph’s School, and it was there that she took Nancy and Letizia from Euston. The porteress was overjoyed to see her, having been working herself up for the last two hours into a panic over the thought of a railway accident. The white guest-room was very welcome to Nancy after the fatigue of this long day, so long a day that she could not believe that it had only been fifteen hours ago that she set out from Euston to Brigham. She seemed to have lived many lives in the course of it—Bram’s life as a boy with his brother, old Mrs. Fuller’s eighty years of existence, Sister Catherine’s bright youth in Italy, and most wearingly of all, Letizia’s future even to ultimate old age and death. And when she did fall asleep she wastravelling, travelling all the time through endless unremembered dreams.
In the morning Letizia greatly diverted some of the nuns by her observations on the image of the Holy Child over the altar, which was a copy of the famous image of Prague.
“Muvver, who is that little black boy with a crown on His head?”
“That is the baby Jesus, darling.”
“Why is He dressed like that? Is He going out to have tea with one of His little friends?”
Nancy really did not know how to explain why He was dressed like that, but hazarded that it was because He was the King of Heaven.
“What has He got in His hand, muvver? What toy has He got?”
“That’s a sceptre, and a thing that kings hold in their hands.”
“Are you quite sure that He is the baby Jesus, muvver?” Letizia pressed.
“Quite sure, darling.”
“Well, I don’t fink he is. I fink he’s just a little friend of the baby Jesus, who He likes very much and lets him come into His house and play with His toys, but I don’t fink that little black boy is the baby Jesus. No, no, no, no, no!” she decided, with vigorous and repeated shakes of the head.
Nancy was sorry when they had to leave St. Joseph’s School and return to Blackboy Passage.
“I fink here’s where the little friend lives,” Letizia announced.
“Oh, darling, you really mustn’t be so terribly ingenious. You quite frighten me. And what am I going to do about you next week when the dear Kinos will be gone?”