Through the Narrow Gate by Karen Armstrong

Author:Karen Armstrong [Armstrong, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007382880
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1997-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

That Christmas week of 1963 saw a meeting of the Provincial Chapter. The superiors of all the seventeen houses of the English Province converged on Tripton, each bringing with her a delegate elected by her community. The Birmingham delegate was Mother Katherine, and it was odd to see her walking down the Cloister or to serve her in the refectory without being able to exchange a single word or even a smile. But since the end of the meeting of the chapter fell on the feast of the Epiphany, which was a special day in the Order, the professed were allowed to visit the Noviceship. Mother Katherine came and I was delighted to see her. She gave me the official embrace of the Order, our wimples touching starchily on each side, but her eyes told me of her pleasure at seeing me in the habit. It was difficult in the crowded Noviceship to find a place to talk privately, but at last I discovered an almost empty room. It was the old Noviceship community room, which, because of the recent increase in numbers, had been abandoned. It now yawned emptily. We sat side by side on a broad window seat; other visiting nuns and novices were doing the same. We chatted pleasantly for a while, Mother Katherine giving me news of Birmingham. It was strange to be sitting beside her as a member of her Order, knowing now so many of the things she had never been able to tell me before.

Suddenly her face froze and she sat staring into space, her eyes glazed, her lips parted slightly. I waited anxiously for her to speak.

“This,” she said slowly and expressionlessly, “used to be our community room. Mother Gertrude was my Novice Mistress. Have you heard of her?”

I nodded. Mother Gertrude was a legend in the Order. She had been Novice Mistress for twenty years and had trained her novices with exceptional severity.

“She was Mother Walter’s Novice Mistress too. Were you in the Noviceship together?”

“Yes.” Mother Katherine’s voice was flat. “She was a perfect novice. I was always in trouble; I did everything wrong. But afterward Mother Gertrude used to say that Mother Walter was the best novice she had ever trained, the one who absorbed her spirit most thoroughly.” For a moment worry flickered across her face and she looked at me searchingly. Since Mother Gertrude’s time there had been two other Novice Mistresses; one was Mother Jerome, who had trained Mother Albert, a stern woman, I gathered, but lacking in the ferocity of her predecessor. Then came Mother Leo. A year before I entered, Mother Walter had been appointed.

I noticed that Mother Katherine’s face had slowly become drained of all its normal vitality, turning a muddy grey. Her eyes stared dully ahead at the empty fireplace.

“On that wall,” she said, still speaking in that low, dazed voice, “we had a text. We changed it every day. Do you do that?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And over there,” she went on, waving in a trancelike manner, “we had cupboards and things.

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