The Abbess of Crewe (6 page)

‘Amen.’

Alexandra sits in the downstairs parlour where visitors are
generally received. She has laid aside the copy of
The Discourses
of
Machiavelli which she has been reading while awaiting the arrival of her two clergymen
friends; these are now ushered in, accompanied by Mildred and Walburga.

Splendid Alexandra rises and stands, quiet and still, while they approach. It is
Walburga, on account of being the Prioress, who asks the company to be seated.

‘Father Jesuits,’ says Walburga, ‘our Sister Alexandra will
speak.’

It is summer outside, and some of the old-fashioned petticoat roses that climb the walls
of the Abbey look into the window at the scene, where Alexandra sits, one arm resting on
the table, her head pensively inclining towards it. The self-controlled English sun
makes leafy shadows fall on this polished table and across the floor. A bee importunes
at the window-pane. The parlour is cool and fresh. A working nun can be seen outside
labouring along with two pails, one of them probably unnecessary; and all things keep
time with the season.

Walburga sits apart, smiling a little for sociability, with her eye on the door wherein
soon enters the tray of afternoon tea, so premeditated in every delicious particular as
to make the nun who bears it, leaves it, and goes away less noteworthy than ever.

The two men accept the cups of tea, the plates and the little lace-edged napkins from the
sewing-room which Mildred takes over to them. They choose from among the cress
sandwiches, the golden shortbread and the pastel-coloured
petit fours.
Both men
are grey-haired, of about the same middle age as the three nuns. Alexandra refuses tea
with a mannerly inclination of her body from the waist. These Jesuits are her friends.
Father Baudouin is big and over-heavy with a face full of high blood-pressure; his
companion, Father Maximilian, is more handsome, classic-featured and grave. They watch
Alexandra attentively as her words fall in with the silvery acoustics of the
tea-spoons.

‘Fathers, there are vast populations in the world which are dying or doomed to die
through famine, under-nourishment and disease; people continue to make war, and will not
stop, but rather prefer to send their young children into battle to be maimed or to die;
political fanatics terrorize indiscriminately; tyrannous states are overthrown and
replaced by worse tyrannies; the human race is possessed of a universal dementia; and it
is at such a moment as this, Fathers, that your brother-Jesuit Thomas has taken to
screwing our Sister Felicity by night under the poplars, so that her mind is given over
to nothing else but to induce our nuns to follow her example in the name of freedom.
They thought they had liberty till Felicity told them they had not. And now she aspires
to bear the crozier of the Abbess of Crewe. Fathers, I suggest you discuss this scandal
and what you propose to do about it with my two Sisters, because it is beyond me and
beneath me.’

Alexandra rises and goes to the door, moving like a Maharajah aloft on his elephant. The
Jesuits seem distressed.

‘Sister Alexandra,’ says the larger Jesuit, Baudouin, as he opens the door
for her, ‘you know there’s very little we can do about Thomas. Alexandra
—’

‘Then do that very little,’ she says in the voice of one whose longanimity
foreshortens like shadows cast by the poplars amid the blaze of noon.

Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian will sit late into the night
conferring with Mildred and Walburga.

‘Mildred says handsome Maximilian, ‘I know you can be counted on to be tough
with the nuns.’

That Mildred the Novice Mistress is reliably tough with the lesser nuns is her only
reason for being so closely in Alexandra’s confidence. Her mind sometimes wavers
with little gusts of timidity when she is in the small environment of her equals. She
shivers now as Maximilian addresses her with a smile of confidence.

Baudouin looks from Mildred’s heart-shaped white face to Walburga’s strong
dark face, two portraits in matching white frames. ‘Sisters,’ Baudouin says,
‘Felicity ought not to be the Abbess of Crewe.’

‘It must be Alexandra,’ Walburga says.

‘It shall be Alexandra,’ says Mildred.

‘Then we have to discuss an assault strategy in dealing with Felicity,’ says
Baudouin.

‘We could deal with Felicity very well,’ Walburga says, ‘if you would
deal with Thomas.’

‘The two factors are one,’ Maximilian says, smiling wistfully at Mildred.

The bell rings for Vespers. Walburga, looking straight ahead, says, ‘We shall have
to miss Vespers.’

‘We’ll miss all the Hours until we’ve got a plan,’ Mildred says
decisively.

‘And Alexandra?’ says Baudouin. ‘Won’t Alexandra return to join
us? We should consult Alexandra.’

‘Certainly not, Fathers,’ Walburga says. ‘She will not join us and we
may not consult her. It would be dishonourable —’

‘Seeing she is likely to be Abbess,’ says Mildred.

‘Seeing she will be Abbess,’ Walburga says.

‘Well, it seems to me that you girls are doing plenty of campaigning,’
Baudouin says, looking round the room uncomfortably, as if some fresh air were
missing.

Maximilian says, ‘Baudouin !’ and the nuns look down, offended, at their
empty hands in their lap.

After a space, Mildred says, ‘We may not canvass for votes. It is against the
Rule.’

‘I see, I see,’ says large Baudouin, patiently.

They talk until Vespers are over and the black shape comes in to remove the tea tray.
Still they talk on, and Mildred calls for supper. The priests are shown to the
visitors’ cloakroom and Mildred retires with Walburga to the upstairs lavatories
where they exchange a few words of happiness. The plans are going well and are going
forward.

The four gather again, conspiring over a good supper with wine. The bell rings for
Compline, and they talk on.

Upstairs and far away in the control room the recorders, activated by their voices,
continue to whirl. So very much elsewhere in the establishment do the walls have ears
that neither Mildred nor Walburga are now conscious of them as they were when the
mechanisms were first installed. It is like being told, and all the time knowing, that
the Eyes of God are upon us; it means everything and therefore nothing. The two nuns
speak as freely as the Jesuits who suspect no eavesdropping device more innocuous than
God to be making a chronicle of their present privacy.

The plainchant of Compline floats sweetly over from the chapel where Alexandra stands in
her stall nearly opposite Felicity. Walburga’s place is empty, Mildred’s
place is empty. In the Abbess’s chair, not quite an emptiness as yet, but the
absence of Hildegarde.

The voices ripple like a brook:

And Alexandra’s eyes grieve, her lips recite:

Winifrede, taking over Mildred’s duty, is chanting in true
tones the short lesson to Felicity’s clear responses:

Sisters: Be sober and vigilant:

for thy enemy the devil, as a raging lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour.
Him do thou resist …

‘Aye, I am wistful for my kin of the spirit’; softly
flows the English verse beloved of Alexandra:

Well then, so call they,
the swirlers out of the mist of my

soul,

They that come stewards, bearing old
magic.

But far all that, I am
homesick after mine own kind …

F
ELICITY’S
work-box is known as
Felicity’s only because she brought it to the convent as part of her dowry. It is
no mean box, being set on fine tapered legs with castors, standing two and a half feet
high. The box is inlaid with mother-of-pearl and inside it has three tiers neatly set
out with needles, scissors, cottons and silks in perfect compartments. Beneath all these
is a false bottom lined with red watered silk, for love-letters. Many a time has
Alexandra stood gazing at this box with that certain wonder of the aristocrat at the
treasured toys of the bourgeoisie. ‘I fail to see what mitigation soever can be
offered for that box,’ she remarked one day, in Felicity’s hearing, to the
late Abbess Hildegarde who happened to be inspecting the sewing-room. Hildegarde made no
immediate reply, but once outside the room she said, ‘It is in poison-bad taste,
but we are obliged by our vows to accept mortifications. And, after all, everything is
hidden here. Nobody but ourselves can see what is beautiful and what is not.’

Hildegarde’s dark eyes, now closed in death, gazed at Alexandra. ‘Even our
beauty,’ she said, ‘may not be thought of.’

‘What should we care,’ said Alexandra, ‘about our beauty, since we are
beautiful, you and I, whether we care or not?’

Meanwhile Felicity, aggrieved, regarded her work-box and opened it to see that all was in
order. So she does every morning and by custom, now, she once more strokes the elaborate
shining top after the Hour of Prime while the ordinary nuns, grown despicable by
profession, file in to the sewing-room and take their places.

Felicity opens the box. She surveys the neat compartments, the reels and the skeins, the
needles and the little hooks. Suddenly she gives a short scream and with her tiny
bad-tempered face looking round the room at everybody she says, ‘Who has touched
my work-box?’

There is no answer. The nuns have come all unprepared for a burst of anger. The day of
the election is not far off. The nuns have come in full expectance of Felicity’s
revelations about the meaningful life of love as it should be lived on the verge of the
long walk lined with poplars.

Felicity now speaks with a low and strained voice. ‘My box is disarranged. My
thimble is missing.’ Slowly she lifts the top layer and surveys the second.
‘It has been touched,’ she says. She raises the lowest recess and looks
inside. She decides, then, to empty the work-box the better to examine the contents of
its secret compartment.

‘Sisters,’ she says, ‘I think my letters have been
discovered.’

It is like a wind rushing over a lake with a shudder of birds and reeds. Felicity counts
the letters. ‘They are all here,’ she says, ‘but they have been looked
at. My thimble is lost. I can’t find it.’

Everyone looks for Felicity’s thimble. Nobody finds it. The bell goes for the Hour
of Terce. The first part of the morning has been a sheer waste of sensation and the nuns
file out to their prayers, displaying, in their discontent, a trace of individualism at
long last.

How gentle is Alexandra when she hears of Felicity’s
distress! ‘Be gentle with her,’ she tells the senior nuns. ‘Plainly
she is undergoing a nervous crisis. A thimble after all — a thimble. I
wouldn’t be surprised if she has not herself, in a moment of unconscious desire to
pitch all her obsessive needlework to hell and run away with her lover, mislaid the
ridiculous thimble. Be gentle. It is beautiful to be gentle with those who suffer. There
is no beauty in the world so great as beauty of action. It stands, contained in its own
moment, from everlasting to everlasting.’

Winifrede, cloudily recognizing the very truth of Alexandra’s words, is yet
uncertain what reason Alexandra might have for uttering them at this moment Walburga and
Mildred stand silently in the contemplative hush while Alexandra leaves them to continue
their contemplations. For certainly Alexandra means what she says, not wishing her
spirit to lose serenity before God nor her destiny to be the Abbess of Crewe. Very soon
the whole community has been informed of these thoughts of the noble Alexandra and
marvel a little that, with the election so close at hand, she exhorts gentleness towards
her militant rival.

Felicity’s rage all the next day shakes her little body to shrieking point. There
is a plot, there is a plot, against me, is the main theme of all she says to her sewing
companions between the Hours of Lauds and Prime, Prime and Terce, Terce and Sext. In the
afternoon, she takes to her bed, while her bewildered friends hunt the thimble and are
well overheard in the control room in all their various exchanges and conjectures.

Towards evening Walburga reports to Alexandra, ‘Her supporters are wavering. The
nasty little bitch can’t stand our gentleness.’

‘You know, Walburga,’ Alexandra muses, ‘from this moment on, you may
not report such things to me. Everything now is in your hands and those of Sister
Mildred; you are together with Fathers Baudouin and Maximilian, and you are with the aid
of Winifrede. I must remain in the region of unknowing. Proceed but don’t tell me.
I refuse to be told, such knowledge would not become me; I am to be the Abbess of Crewe,
not a programmed computer.’

Felicity lies on her hard bed and at the midnight bell she rises for Matins. My God,
there is a moving light in the sewing-room window! Felicity slips out of the file of
black-cloaked nuns who make their hushed progress to the chapel. Alexandra leads.
Walburga and Mildred are absent. There is a light in the sewing-room, moving as if
someone is holding an electric torch.

The nuns are assembled in the chapel but Felicity stands on the lawn, gazing upward, and
eventually she creeps back to the house and up the stairs.

So it is that she comes upon the two young men rifling her work-box. They have found the
secret compartment. One of the young men holds in his hand Felicity’s
love-letters. Screaming, Felicity retreats, locks the door with the intruders inside,
runs to the telephone and calls the police.