The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online

refectory tables, dispensing sieved nettles and mashed potatoes.
    Winifrede stands at the lectern. She starts to read, announcing Ecclesiasticus, chapter
     34, verse 1:
    Fools are cheated by vain hopes, buoyed up with the fancies of
     a dream. Wouldst thou heed such lying visions? Better clutch at shadows, or chase
     the wind. Nought thou seest in a dream but symbols; man is but face to face with his
     own image. As well may foul thing cleanse, as false thing give thee a true warning.
     Out upon the folly of them, pretended divination, and cheating omen, and
     wizard’s dream! Heart of woman in her pangs is not more fanciful. Unless it be
     some manifestation the most High has sent thee, pay no heed to any such; trust in
     dreams has crazed the wits of many, and brought them to their ruin. Believe rather
     the law’s promises, that cannot miss their fulfilment, the wisdom that trusty
     counsellors shall make clear to thee.
    Winifrede stops to turn the pages to the next place marked with a
     book-marker elaborately embroidered from the sewing-room. Her eyes remotely sweep the
     length of the room, where the kitchen nuns are bearing jugs up the aisles, pouring water
     which has been heated for encouragement into the nuns’ beakers. The forks move to
     the faces and the mouths open to receive the food. These are all the nuns in the
     convent, with the exception of kitchen nuns and the novices who do not count and the
     senior nuns who do. A less edifying crowd of human life it would be difficult to find;
     either they have become so or they always were so; at any rate, they are in fact a very
     poor lot, all the more since they do not think so for a moment. Up pop the forks, open
     go the mouths, in slide the nettles and the potato mash. They raise to their frightful
     little lips the steaming beakers of water and they sip as if fancying they are partaking
     of the warm sap of human experience, ripe for Felicity’s liberation. Anyway, the
     good Winifrede reads on, announcing Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 11. ‘Sisters,
     hear again,’ she says, ‘the wise confessions of Solomon’:
    Then my thought took a fresh turn; man’s art does not
     avail, here beneath the sun, to win the race for the swift, or the battle for the
     strong, a livelihood for wisdom, riches for great learning, or for the craftsman
     thanks; chance and the moment rule all.
    The kitchen staff is gliding alongside the tables now, removing
     the empty plates and replacing them with saucers of wholesome and filling sponge pudding
     which many more deserving cases than the nuns would be glad of. Winifrede sips from her
     own glass of water, which is cold, puts it down and bends her eyes to the next book
     marked with its elaborate markers, passage by passage, which she exchanges with the good
     book on her lectern. She dutifully removes a slip of paper from the inside cover and
     almost intelligent-looking in this company reads it aloud in her ever-keening voice:
     ‘Further words of wisdom from one of our Faith’:
    If you suspect any person in your army of giving the enemy
     intelligence of your designs, you cannot do better than avail yourself of his
     treachery, by seeming to trust him with some secret resolution which you intend to
     execute, whilst you carefully conceal your real design; by which, perhaps, you may
     discover the traitor, and lead the enemy into an error that may possibly end in
     their destruction …
    In order to penetrate into the secret designs, and discover the condition of an
     enemy, some have sent ambassadors to them with skilful and experienced officers in
     their train, dressed like the rest of their attendants …
    As to private discords amongst your soldiers, the only remedy is to expose them to
     some danger, for in such cases fear generally unites them …
    ‘Here endeth the reading,’ Winifrede says, looking
     stupidly round the still more stupid assembly into whose ears the words have come and
     from which they have