Читать книгу There are Victories - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 4

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It was now three years since Mrs. Throop placed her daughter, Ruth, in the gnarled and tired hands of the Mother Superior of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Montreal. At first she had protested, she wanted the girl at home, but Major Throop was an intolerant man and he soon had his way.

Three short childhood years! An endless procession of swift, joyous days. Who would have thought that the stone-fenced gray buildings of the convent could conceal so much happiness from the curious eyes of non-believing passers-by? Or is it that the simple happiness of children is to be found everywhere: in a cloistered convent, a squalid slum dwelling (where adults moil and suffer but where children laugh and play in happy ignorance), or in the dull, stuffy atmosphere of the home of a merchant or stock trader?

Ruth no longer awoke in the night and called for her mother. In the quiet routine of the convent she was happy. Her companions were girls of her station in life; the daughters of wealthy merchants, brokers, government officials. The convent day was short, crowded with lessons, devotion and games. And there was Sister Constance who taught drawing and coached the girls in the social graces:

“Now you curtsey and say ‘how d’you do.’ No, no, not so, but with your lips like this. See!” Sister Constance tightened her lips primly and said: “Stewed prunes and prisms—how d’you dew.” The girls laughed and after class went about saying “stewed prunes and prisms” to each other.

There was painting in water colors: ochre sunsets and schooners sailing on green and purple seas, brigantines painted in such a fashion as to drive a marine engineer to despair—pictures which the girls’ parents proudly hung on walls for envious relatives to see. Nor was the art of music forgotten:

“Who can tell me who the three B’s of music are?”

A fluttering of hands and a timid, stammering girl rises to her feet:

“Bach——”

A long pause followed by the breathless, ill-suppressed excitement of the girls who know.

Finally: “Beethoven——”

Another pause and the gentle prompting of the Sister:

“Come, come! Bach and Beethoven. And who else?”

The Sister calls upon another girl and the answer is triumphantly given.

“Brahms, that’s right,” the Sister says. “Papa Brahms he was called.” There are amused smiles from the girls as the Sister continues: “A fatherly gentleman he was—you may see his picture in the library. He is seated at the piano and has a very important beard.”

Later in the afternoon there were piano lessons by Sister Espérance who had short, firm fingers and who played divinely and could have been a famous virtuoso. All the girls were extremely sorry for her, for it was a well-known fact that she could, if she had so desired, be playing at His Majesty’s Theatre on Guy Street in a yellow evening gown with officers and gentlemen at her feet. They felt very proud of their music teacher, looking upon her lessons as a simple, devout gift laid at the feet of God. But the most romantic figure at the convent, in the eyes of the girls, was the Mother Superior herself. She, so the story ran, was once loved by an English lord who was, naturally, a Protestant. He would have taken her to his castle in England but he insisted that she renounce her faith and accept his. This, of course, she had refused to do—and here she was!

Three years have passed since the afternoon when Ruth, accompanied by her mother, came to the convent and now the girl sits before the piano struggling with a two-hand arpeggio in a Mozart sonata. Three years in which there is scarce time to think of a prim and hard-mouthed mother.