The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark Read Free Book Online Page A

gone. The meal over, the nuns’ hands are folded.
    ‘Amen,’ they say.
    ‘Sisters, be vigilant, be sober.’
    ‘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