The Abbess of Crewe Read Online Free PDF Page B

satin-stitch, white upon white, having traced the words with her fine pencil:
     ‘
Opus Anglicanum
’. Her little frail fingers move securely and
     her silver thimble flashes.
    The other sewing nuns are grouped around her, each busy with embroidery but none so
     clever at her work as Felicity.
    ‘You know, Sisters,’ Felicity says, ‘our embroidery room is becoming
     known as a hotbed of sedition.’
    The other nuns, eighteen in all, murmur solemnly. Felicity does not permit laughter. It
     is written in the Rule that laughter is unseemly. ‘What are the tools of Good
     Works?’ says the Rule, and the answers include, ‘Not to say what is idle or
     causes laughter.’ Of all the clauses of the Rule this is the one that Felicity
     decrees to be the least outmoded, the most adapted to the urgency of our times.
    ‘Love,’ says Felicity softly, plying her little fingers to her satin-stitch,
     ‘is lacking in our Community. We are full of prosperity. We prosper. We are
     materialistic. May God have mercy on our late Lady Abbess Hildegarde.’
    ‘Amen,’ say the other eighteen, and the sun of high summer dances on their
     thimbles through the window panes.
    ‘Sometimes,’ Felicity says, ‘I think we should tend more towards the
     teachings of St Francis of Assisi, who understood total dispossession and
     love.’
    One of her nuns, a certain Sister Bathildis, answers, her eyes still bent on her
     beautiful embroidery, ‘But Sister Alexandra doesn’t care for St Francis of
     Assisi.’
    ‘Alexandra,’ says Felicity ‘has actually said, “To hell with St
     Francis of Assisi. I prefer Sextus Propertius who belongs also to Assisi, a contemporary
     of Jesus and a spiritual forerunner of Hamlet, Werther, Rousseau and Kierkegaard.”
     According to Alexandra these fellows are far more interesting neurotics than St Francis.
     Have you ever heard of such names or such a doctrine?’
    ‘Never,’ murmur the nuns in unison, laying their work on their laps the
     easier to cross themselves.
    ‘Love,’ says Felicity as they all take up their work again, ‘and
     love-making are very liberating experiences, very. If I were the Abbess of Crewe, we
     should have a love-Abbey. I would destroy that ungodly electronics laboratory and
     install a love-nest right in the heart of this Abbey, right in the heart of
     England.’ Her busy little fingers fly with the tiny needle in and out of the stuff
     she is sewing.
    ‘What do you make of that?’ says
     Alexandra, switching off the closed-circuit television where she and her two trusted
     nuns have just witnessed the scene in the sewing-room, recorded on video and sound
     tape.
    ‘It’s the same old song,’ Walburga says. ‘It goes on all the
     time. More and more nuns are taking up embroidery of their own free will, and fewer and
     fewer remain with us. Since the Abbess died there is no more authority in the
     convent.’
    ‘All that will be changed now,’ Alexandra says, ‘after the
     election.’
    ‘It could be changed now,’ Mildred says. ‘Walburga is Prioress and has
     the authority.’
    Walburga says, ‘I thought better than to confront Felicity with her escapade last
     night and half of the day. I thought better of it, and I think better of preventing the
     nuns from joining the sewing-room faction. It might provoke Felicity to lead a
     rebellion.’
    ‘Oh, do you think the deserters can have discovered that the convent is
     bugged?’ says Mildred.
    ‘Not on your life,’ says Alexandra. ‘The laboratory nuns are far too
     stupid to do anything but wire wires and screw screws. They have no idea at all what
     their work adds up to.’
    They are sitting at the bare metal table in the private control room which was set up in
     the room adjoining the late Abbess’s parlour shortly before her death. The parlour
     itself remains as it was when Hildegarde died although within a few weeks it will be
     changed to suit Alexandra’s taste. For certainly Alexandra is