"What have I been doing since you saw me last?" Miss Penny repeated my
question in her loud, emphatic voice. "Well, when did you see me last?"
"It must have been June," I computed.
"Was that after I'd been proposed to by the Russian General?
"Yes; I remember hearing about the Russian General."
Miss Penny threw back her head and laughed. Her long ear-rings swung and
rattled corpses hanging in chains: an agreeably literary simile. And her
laughter was like brass, but that had been said before.
"That was an uproarous incident. It's sad you should have heard of it. I
love my Russian General story. '_Vos yeux me rendent fou_.'" She laughed
again.
_Vos yeux_--she had eyes like a hare's, flush with her head and very
bright with a superficial and expressionless brightness. What a
formidable woman. I felt sorry for the Russian General.
"'_Sans coeur et sans entrallies_,'" she went on, quoting the poor
devil's words. "Such a delightful motto, don't you think? Like '_Sans
peur et sans reproche_.' But let me think; what have I been doing since
then?" Thoughtfully she bit into the crust of her bread with long,
sharp, white teeth.
"Two mixed grills," I said parenthetically to the waiter.
"But of course," exclaimed Miss Penny suddenly. "I haven't seen you
since my German trip. All sorts of adventures. My appendicitis; my nun."
"Your nun?"
"My marvellous nun. I must tell you all about her."
"Do." Miss Penny's anecdotes were always curious. I looked forward to an
entertaining luncheon.
"You knew I'd been in Germany this autumn?"
"Well, I didn't, as a matter of fact. But still--"
"I was just wandering round." Miss Penny described a circle in the air
with her gaudily jewelled hand. She always twinkled with massive and
improbable jewellery.
"Wandering round, living on three pounds a week, partly amusing myself,
partly collecting material for a few little articles. 'What it Feels
Like to be a Conquered Nation'--sob-stuff for the Liberal press, you
know--and 'How the Hun is Trying to Wriggle out of the Indemnity,' for
the other fellows. One has to make the best of all possible worlds,
don't you find? But we mustn't talk shop. Well, I was wandering round,
and very pleasant I found it. Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig. Then down to
Munich and all over the place. One fine day I got to Grauburg. You know
Grauburg? It's one of those picture-book German towns with a castle on a
hill, hanging beer-gardens, a Gothic church, an old university, a river,
a pretty bridge, and forests all round. Charming. But I hadn't much
opportunity to appreciate the beauties of the place. The day after I
arrived there--bang!--I went down with appendicitis--screaming, I may
add."
"But how appalling!"
"They whisked me off to hospital, and cut me open before you could say
knife. Excellent surgeon, highly efficient Sisters of Charity to nurse
me--I couldn't have been in better hands. But it was a bore being tied
there by the leg for four weeks--a great bore. Still, the thing had its
compensations. There was my nun, for example. Ah, here's the food, thank
Heaven!"
The mixed grill proved to be excellent. Miss Penny's description of the
pun came to me in scraps and snatches. A round, pink, pretty face in a
winged coif; blue eyes and regular features; teeth altogether too
perfect--false, in fact; but the general effect extremely pleasing. A
youthful Teutonic twenty eight.
"She wasn't my nurse," Miss Penny explained. "But I used to see her
quite often when she came in to have a look at the _tolle Engländerin_.
Her name was Sister Agatha. During the war, they told me, she had
converted any number of wounded soldiers to the true faith--which wasn't
surprising, considering how pretty she was."
"Did she try and convert you?" I asked.
"She wasn't such a fool." Miss Penny laughed, and rattled the miniature
gallows of her ears.
I amused myself for a moment with the thought of Miss Penny's
conversion--Miss Penny confronting a vast assembly of Fathers of the
Church, rattling her earrings at their discourses on the Trinity,
laughing her appalling laugh at the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception, meeting the stern look of the Grand Inquisitor with a flash
of her bright, emotionless hare's eyes. What was the secret of the
woman's formidableness?
But I was missing the story. What had happened? Ah yes, the gist of it
was that Sister Agatha had appeared one morning, after two or three days
absence, dressed, not as a nun, but in the overalls of a hospital
charwoman, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven
head.
"Dead," said Miss Penny; "she looked as though she were dead. A walking
corpse, that's what she was. It was a shocking sight. I shouldn't have
thought it possible for anyone to change so much in so short a time. She
walked painfully, as though she had been ill for months, and she had
great burnt rings round her eyes and deep lines in her face. And the
general expression of unhappiness--that was something quite appalling."
She leaned out into the gangway between the two rows of tables, and
caught the passing waiter by the end of one his coat-tails. The little
Italian looked round with an expression of surprise that deepened into
terror on his face.
"Half a pint of Guinness," ordered Miss Penny. "And, after this, bring
me some jam roll."
"No jam roll to-day, madam."
"Damn!" said Miss Penny. "Bring me what you like, then."
She let go of the waiter's tail and resumed her narrative.
"Where was I? Yes, I remember. She came into my room, I was telling you,
with a bucket of water and a brush, dressed like a charwoman. Naturally
I was rather surprised. 'What on earth are you doing, Sister Agatha?' I
asked. No answer. She just shook her head, and began to scrub the floor.
When she'd finished, she left the room without so much as looking at me
again. 'What's happened to Sister Agatha?' I asked my nurse when she
next came in. 'Can't say.'--'Won't say,' I said. No answer. It took
nearly a week to find out what really had happened. Nobody dared tell
me; it was _strengst verboten_, as they used to say in the good old
days. But I wormed it out in the long run. My nurse, the doctor, the
charwomen--I got something out of all of them. I always get what I want
in the end." Miss Penny laughed like a horse.
"I'm sure you do," I said politely.
"Much obliged," acknowledged Miss Penny. "But to proceed. My information
came to me in fragmentary whispers. 'Sister Agatha ran away with a
man.'--Dear me.--'One of the patients.'--You don't say so.--'A criminal
out of the jail.'--The plot thickens.--'He ran away from her.'--It
seems to grow thinner again.--'They brought her back here; she's been
disgraced. There's been a funeral service for her in the chapel--coffin
and all. She had to be present at it--her own funeral. She isn't a nun
any more. She has to do charwoman's work now, the roughest in the
hospital. She's not allowed to speak to anybody, and nobody's allowed to
speak to her. She's regarded as dead.'" Miss Penny paused to signal to
the harassed little Italian. "My small 'Guinness,'" she called out.
"Coming, coming," and the foreign voice cried "Guinness" down the lift,
and from below another voice echoed, "Guinness."
"I filled in the details bit by bit. There was our hero, to begin with;
I had to bring him into the picture, which was rather difficult, as I
had never seen him. But I got a photograph of him. The police circulated
one when he got away; I don't suppose they ever caught him." Miss Penny
opened her bag. "Here it is," she said. "I always carry it about with
me; it's become a superstition. For years, I remember, I used to carry a
little bit of heather tied up with string. Beautiful, isn't it? There's
a sort of Renaissance look about it, don't you think? He was
half-Italian, you know."
Italian. Ah, that explained it. I had been wondering how Bavaria could
have produced this thin-faced creature with the big dark eyes, the
finely modelled nose and chin, and the fleshy lips so royally and
sensually curved.
"He's certainly very superb," I said, handing back the picture.
Miss Penny put it carefully away in her bag. "Isn't he?" she said.
"Quite marvellous. But his character and his mind were even better. I
see him as one of those innocent, childlike monsters of iniquity who are
simply unaware of the existence of right and wrong. And he had
genius--the real Italian genius for engineering, for dominating and
exploiting nature. A true son of the Roman aqueduct builders he was, and
a brother of the electrical engineers. Only Kuno--that was his
name--didn't work in water; he worked in women. He knew how to harness
the natural energy of passion; he made devotion drive his mills. The
commercial exploitation of love-power, that was his specialty. I
sometimes wonder," Miss Penny added in a different tone, "whether I
shall ever be exploited, when I get a little more middle-aged and
celibate, by one of these young engineers of the passions. It would be
humiliating, particularly as I've done so little exploiting from my
side."
She frowned and was silent for a moment. No, decidedly, Miss Penny was
not beautiful; you could not even honestly say that she had charm or was
attractive. That high Scotch colouring, those hare's eyes, the voice,
the terrifying laugh, and the size of her, the general formidableness of
the woman. No, no, no.
"You said he had been in prison," I said. The silence, with all its
implications, was becoming embarrassing.
Miss Penny sighed, looked up, and nodded. "He was fool enough," she
said, "to leave the straight and certain road of female exploitation for
the dangerous courses of burglary. We all have our occasional accesses
of folly. They gave him a heavy sentence, but he succeeded in getting
pneumonia, I think it was, a week after entering jail. He was
transferred to the hospital. Sister Agatha, with her known talent for
saving souls, was given him as his particular attendant. But it was he,
I'm afraid, who did the converting."
Miss Penny finished off the last mouthful of the ginger pudding which
the waiter had brought in lieu of jam roll.
"I suppose you don't smoke cheroots," I said, as I opened my cigar-case.
"Well, as a matter of fact, I do," Miss Penny replied. She looked
sharply round the restaurant. "I must just see if there are any of those
horrible little gossip paragraphers here to-day. One doesn't want to
figure in the social and personal column to-morrow morning: 'A fact
which is not so generally known as it ought to be is, that Miss Penny,
the well-known woman journalist, always ends her luncheon with a
six-inch Burma cheroot. I saw her yesterday in a restaurant--not a
hundred miles from Carmelite Street--smoking like a house on fire.' You
know the touch. But the coast seems to be clear, thank goodness."
She took a cheroot from the case, lit it at my proffered match, and went
on talking.
"Yes, it was young Kuno who did the converting. Sister Agatha was
converted back into the worldly Melpomene Fugger she had been before she
became the bride of holiness."
"Melpomene Fugger?"
"That was her name. I had her history from my old doctor. He had seen
all Grauburg, living and dying and propagating for generations.
Melpomene Fugger why, he had brought little Melpel into the world,
little Melpchen. Her father was Professor Fugger, the great Professor
Fugger, the _berümter Geolog_. Oh, yes, of course, I know the name. So
well.... He was the man who wrote the standard work on Lemuria--you
know, the hypothetical continent where the lemurs come from. I showed
due respect. Liberal-minded he was, a disciple of Herder, a
world-burgher, as they beautifully call it over there. Anglophile, too,
and always ate porridge for breakfast--up till August 1914. Then, the
radiant morning of the fifth, he renounced it for ever, solemnly and
with tears in his eyes. The national food of a people who had betrayed
culture and civilisation--how could he go on eating it? It would stick
in his throat. In future he would have a lightly boiled egg. He sounded,
I thought, altogether charming. And his daughter, Melpomene--she sounded
charming, too; and such thick, yellow pig-tails when she was young! Her
mother was dead, and a sister of the great Professor's ruled the house
with an iron rod. Aunt Bertha was her name. Well, Melpomene grew up,
very plump and appetising. When she was seventeen, something very odious
and disagreeable happened to her. Even the doctor didn't know exactly
what it was; but he wouldn't have been surprised if it had had something
to do with the then Professor of Latin, an old friend of the family's,
who combined, it seems, great erudition with a horrid fondness for very
young ladies."
Miss Penny knocked half an inch of cigar ash into her empty glass.
"If I wrote short stories," she went on reflectively "(but it's too much
bother), I should make this anecdote into a sort of potted life history,
beginning with a scene immediately after this disagreeable event in
Melpomene's life. I see the scene so clearly. Poor little Melpel is
leaning over the bastions of Grauburg Castle, weeping into the June
night and the mulberry trees in the garden thirty feet below. She is
besieged by the memory of what happened this dreadful afternoon.
Professor Engelmann, her father's old friend, with the magnificent red
Assyrian beard.... Too awful--too awful! But then, as I was saying,
short stones are really too much bother; or perhaps I'm too stupid to
write them. I bequeath it to you. You know how to tick these things
off."
"You're generous."
"Not at all," said Miss Penny. "My terms are ten per cent commission on
the American sale. Incidentally there won't be an American sale. Poor
Melpchen's history is not for the chaste public of Those States. But let
me hear what you propose to do with Melpomene now you've got her on the
castle bastions."
"That's simple," I said. "I know all about German university towns and
castles on hills. I shall make her look into the June night, as you
suggest; into the violet night with its points of golden flame. There
will be the black silhouette of the castle, with its sharp roofs and
hooded turrets, behind her. From the hanging beer-gardens in the town
below the voices of the students, singing in perfect four-part harmony,
will float up through the dark-blue spaces. '_Röslein, Röslein, Röslein
rot_' and '_Das Ringlein sprang in zwei_'--the heart-rendingly sweet old
songs will make her cry all the more. Her tears will patter like rain
among the leaves of the mulberry trees in the garden below. Does that
seem to you adequate?"
"Very nice," said Miss Penny. "But how are you going to bring the sex
problem and all of its horrors into the landscape?"
"Well, let me think." I called to memory those distant foreign summers
when I was completing my education. "I know. I shall suddenly bring a
swarm of moving candles and Chinese lanterns under the mulberry trees.
You imagine the rich lights and shadows, the jewel-bright leafage, the
faces and moving limbs of men and women, seen for an instant and gone
again. They are students and girls of the town come out to dance, this
windless, blue June night, under the mulberry trees. And now they begin,
thumping round and round in a ring, to the music of their own singing.
"_Wir können spielen_
_Vio-vio-vio-lin_
_Wir können spielen_
_Vi-o-lin_
"Now the rhythm changes, quickens.
"_Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,_
_Bumstarara, Bumstarara,_
_Und wir können tanzen Bumstarara,_
_Bumstarara-rara._
"The dance becomes a rush, an elephantine prancing on the dry lawn under
the mulberry trees. And from the bastion Melpomene looks down and
perceives, suddenly and apocalyptically, that everything in the world is
sex, sex, sex. Men and women, male and female--always the same, and all,
in the light of the horror of the afternoon, disgusting. That's how I
should do it, Miss Penny."
"And very nice, too. But I wish you could find a place to bring in my
conversation with the doctor. I shall never forget the way he cleared
his throat, and coughed before embarking on the delicate subject. 'You
may know, ahem, gracious Miss,' he began--'you may know that religious
phenomena are often, ahem, closely connected with sexual causes.' I
replied that I had heard rumours which might justify me in believing
this to be true among Roman Catholics, but that in the Church of England
--and I for one was a practitioner of Anglicanismus--it was very
different. 'That might be,' said the doctor; he had had no opportunity
in the course of his long medical career of personally studying
Anglicanismus. But he could vouch for the fact that among his patients,
here in Grauburg, mysticismus was very often mixed up with the
_Geschlechtsleben_. Melpomene was a case in point. After that hateful
afternoon she had become extremely religious; the Professor of Latin had
diverted her emotions out of their normal channels. She rebelled against
the placid Agnosticismus of her father, and at night, in secret, when
Aunt Bertha's dragon eyes were closed, she would read such forbidden
books as _The Life of St. Theresa, The Little Flowers of St. Francis,
The Imitation of Christ_, and the horribly enthralling _Book of
Martyrs_. Aunt Bertha confiscated, these works whenever she came upon
them; she considered them more pernicious than the novels of Marcel
Prévost. The character of a good potential housewife might be completely
undermined by reading of this kind. It was rather a relief for Melpomene
when Aunt Bertha shuffled off, in the summer of 1911, this mortal coil.
She was one of those indispensables of whom one makes the discovery,
when they are gone, that one can get on quite as well without them. Poor
Aunt Bertha!"
"One can imagine Melpomene trying to believe she was sorry, and horribly
ashamed to find that she was really, in secret, almost glad." The
suggestion seemed to me ingenious, but Miss Penny accepted it as
obvious.
"Precisely," she said; "and the emotion would only further confirm and
give new force to the tendencies which her aunt's death left her free to
indulge as much as she liked. Remorse, contrition--they would lead to
the idea of doing penance. And for one who was now wallowing in the
martyrology, penance was the mortification of the flesh. She used to
kneel for hours, at night, in the cold; she ate too little, and when her
teeth ached, which they often did,--for she had a set, the doctor told
me, which had given trouble from the very first,--she would not go and
see the dentist, but lay awake at night, savouring to the full her
excruciations, and feeling triumphantly that they must, in some strange
way, be pleasing to the Mysterious Powers. She went on like that for two
or three years, till she was poisoned through and through. In the end
she went down with gastric ulcer. It was three months before she came
out of hospital, well for the first time in a long space of years, and
with a brand new set of imperishable teeth, all gold and ivory. And in
mind, too, she was changed--for the better, I suppose. The nuns who
nursed her had made her see that in mortifying herself she had acted
supererogatively and through spiritual pride; instead of doing right,
she had sinned. The only road to salvation, they told her, lay in
discipline, in the orderliness of established religion, in obedience to
authority. Secretly, so as not to distress her poor father, whose
Agnosticismus was extremely dogmatic, for all its unobtrusiveness,
Melpomene became a Roman Catholic. She was twenty-two. Only a few months
later came the war and Professor Fugger's eternal renunciation of
porridge. He did not long survive the making of that patriotic gesture.
In the autumn of 1914 he caught a fatal influenza. Melpomene was alone
in the world. In the spring of 1915 there was a new and very
conscientious Sister of Charity at work among the wounded, in the
hospital of Grauburg. Here," explained Miss Penny, jabbing the air with
her forefinger, "you put a line of asterisks or dots to signify a six
years' gulf in the narrative. And you begin again right in the middle of
a dialogue between Sister Agatha and the newly convalescent Kuno."
"What's their dialogue to be about?" I asked.
"Oh, that's easy enough," said Miss Penny. "Almost anything would do.
What about this, for example? You explain that the fever has just
abated; for the first time for days the young man is fully conscious. He
feels himself to be well, reborn, as it were, in a new world--a world so
bright and novel and jolly that he can't help laughing at the sight of
it. He looks about him; the flies on the ceiling strike him as being
extremely comic. How do they manage to walk upside down? They have
suckers on their feet, says Sister Agatha, and wonders if her natural
history is quite sound. Suckers on their feet--ha, ha! What an
uproarious notion! Suckers on their feet--that's good, that's damned
good! You can say charming, pathetic, positively tender things about the
irrelevant mirth of convalescents the more so in this particular case,
where the mirth is expressed by a young man who is to be taken back to
jail as soon as he can stand firmly on his legs. Ha, ha! Laugh on,
unhappy boy. It is the quacking of the Fates, the Parcæ, the Norns!"
Miss Penny gave an exaggerated imitation of her own brassy laughter. At
the sound of it the few lunchers who still lingered at the other tables
looked up, startled.
"You can write pages about Destiny and its ironic quacking. It's
tremendously impressive, and there's money in every line."
"You may be sure I shall."
"Good! Then I can get on with my story. The days pass and the first
hilarity of convalescence fades away. The young man remembers and grows
sullen; his strength comes back to him, and with it a sense of despair.
His mind broods incessantly on the hateful future. As for the
consolations of religion, he won't listen to them. Sister Agatha
perseveres--oh, with what anxious solicitude!--in the attempt to make
him understand and believe and be comforted. It is all so tremendously
important, and in this case, somehow, more important than in any other.
And now you see the _Geschlechtsleben_ working yeastily and obscurely,
and once again the quacking of the Norns is audible. By the way," said
Miss Penny, changing her tone and leaning confidentially across the
table, "I wish you'd tell me something. Tell me, do you
really--honestly, I mean--do you seriously believe in literature?"
"Believe in literature?"
"I was thinking?" Miss Penny explained, "of Ironic Fate and the quacking
of the Norns and all that."
"'M yes."
"And then there's this psychology and introspection business; and
construction and good narrative and word pictures and _le mot juste_ and
verbal magic and striking metaphors."
I remembered that I had compared Miss Penny's tinkling ear-rings to
skeletons hanging in chains.
"And then, finally, and to begin with--Alpha and Omega--there's
ourselves, two professionals gloating, with an absolute lack of
sympathy, over a seduced nun, and speculating on the best method of
turning her misfortunes into cash. It's all very curious, isn't
it?--when one begins to think about it dispassionately."
"Very curious," I agreed. "But, then, so is everything else if you look
at it like that."
"No, no," said Miss Penny. "Nothing's so curious as our business. But I
shall never get to the end of my story if I get started on first
principles."
Miss Penny continued her narrative. I was still thinking of literature.
Do you believe in it? Seriously? Ah! Luckily the question was quite
meaningless. The story came to me rather vaguely, but it seemed that the
young man was getting better; in a few more days, the doctor had said,
he would be well--well enough to go back to jail. No, no. The question
was meaningless. I would think about it no more. I concentrated my
attention again.
"Sister Agatha," I heard Miss Penny saying, "prayed, exhorted,
indoctrinated. Whenever she had half a minute to spare from her other
duties she would come running into the young man's room. 'I wonder if
you fully realise the importance of prayer?' she would ask, and, before
he had time to answer, she would give him a breathless account of the
uses and virtues of regular and patient supplication. Or else, it was:
'May I tell you about St. Theresa?' or 'St. Stephen, the first
martyr--you know about him, don't you?' Kuno simply wouldn't listen at
first. It seemed so fantastically irrelevant, such an absurd
interruption to his thoughts, his serious, despairing thoughts about the
future. Prison was real, imminent and this woman buzzed about him with
her ridiculous fairy-tales. Then, suddenly, one day he began to listen,
he showed signs of contrition and conversion. Sister Agatha announced
her triumph to the other nuns, and there was rejoicing over the one lost
sheep. Melpomene had never felt so happy in her life, and Kuno, looking
at her radiant face, must have wondered how he could have been such a
fool as not to see from the first what was now so obvious. The woman had
lost her head about him. And he had only four days now--four days in
which to tap the tumultuous love power, to canalise it, to set it
working for his escape. Why hadn't he started a week ago? He could have
made certain of it then. But now? There was no knowing. Four days was a
horribly short time."
"How did he do it?" I asked, for Miss Penny had paused.
"That's for you to say," she replied, and shook her ear-rings at me. "I
don't know. Nobody knows, I imagine, except the two parties concerned
and perhaps Sister Agatha's confessor. But one can reconstruct the
crime, as they say. How would you have done it? You're a man, you ought
to be familiar with the processes of amorous engineering."
"You flatter me," I answered. "Do you seriously suppose--" I extended my
arms. Miss Penny laughed like a horse. "No. But, seriously, it's a
problem. The case is a very special one. The person, a nun, the place, a
hospital, the opportunities, few. There could be no favourable
circumstances--no moonlight, no distant music; and any form of direct
attack would be sure to fail. That audacious confidence which is your
amorist's best weapon would be useless here."
"Obviously," said Miss Penny. "But there are surely other methods. There
is the approach through pity and the maternal instincts. And there's the
approach through Higher Things, through the soul. Kuno must have worked
on those lines, don't you think? One can imagine him letting himself be
converted, praying with her, and at the same time appealing for her
sympathy and even threatening--with a great air of seriousness---to kill
himself rather than go back to jail. You can write that up easily and
convincingly enough. But it's the sort of thing that bores me so
frightfully to do. That's why I can never bring myself to write fiction.
What is the point of it all? And the way you literary men think
yourselves so important--particularly if you write tragedies. It's all
very queer, very queer indeed."
I made no comment. Miss Penny changed her tone and went on with the
narrative.
"Well," she said, "whatever the means employed, the engineering process
was perfectly successful. Love was made to find out a way. On the
afternoon before Kuno was to go back to prison, two Sisters of Charity
walked out of the hospital gates, crossed the square in front of it,
glided down the narrow streets towards the river, boarded a tram at the
bridge, and did not descend till the car had reached its terminus in the
farther suburbs. They began to walk briskly along the high road out into
the country. 'Look!' said one of them, when they were clear of the
houses; and with the gesture of a conjurer produced from nowhere a red
leather purse. 'Where did it come from?' asked the other, opening her
eyes. Memories of Elisha and the ravens, of the widow's cruse, of the
loaves and fishes, must have floated through the radiant fog in poor
Melpomene's mind. 'The old lady I was sitting next to in the tram left
her bag open. Nothing could have been simpler.' 'Kuno! You don't mean to
say you stole it?' Kuno swore horribly. He had opened the purse. 'Only
sixty marks. Who'd have thought that an old camel, all dressed up in
silk and furs, would only have sixty marks in her purse. And I must have
a thousand at least to get away. It's easy to reconstruct the rest of
the conversation down to the inevitable, 'For God's sake, shut up,' with
which Kuno put an end to Melpomene's dismayed moralising. They trudge on
in silence. Kuno thinks desperately. Only sixty marks; he can do nothing
with that. If only he had something to sell, a piece of jewellery, some
gold or silver anything, anything. He knows such a good place for
selling things. Is he to be caught again for lack of a few marks?
Melpomene is also thinking. Evil must often be done that good may
follow. After all, had not she herself stolen Sister Mary of the
Purification's clothes when she was asleep after night duty? Had not she
run away from the convent, broken her vows? And yet how convinced she
was that she was doing rightly! The mysterious Powers emphatically
approved; she felt sure of it. And now there was the red purse. But
what was a red purse in comparison with a saved soul--and, after all,
what was she doing hut saving Kuno's soul?" Miss Penny, who had adapted
the voice and gestures of a debater asking rhetorical questions, brought
her hand with a slap on to the table. "Lord, what a bore this sort of
stuff is!" she exclaimed. "Let's get to the end of this dingy anecdote
as quickly as possible. By this time, you must imagine, the shades of
night were falling fast--the chill November twilight, and so on; but I
leave the natural descriptions to you. Kuno gets into the ditch at the
roadside and takes off his robes. One imagines that he would feel
himself safer in trousers, more capable of acting with decision in a
crisis. They tramp on for miles. Late in the evening they leave the high
road and strike up through the fields towards the forest. At the fringe
of the wood they find one of those wheeled huts where the shepherds
sleep in the lambing season.
"The real 'Maison du Berger.'"
"Precisely," said Miss Penny, and she began to recite:
"_Si ton coeur gémissant du poids de notre vie_
_Se traine et se débat comme un aigle blessé...._
"How does it go on? I used to adore it all so much when I was a girl.
_"Le seuil est perfumé, l'alcôve est large et sombre,_
_Et là parmi les fleurs, nous trouverons dans l'ombre,_
_Pour nos cheveux unis un lit silencieux._
"I could go on like this indefinitely."
"Do," I said.
"No, no. No, no. I'm determined to finish this wretched story. Kuno
broke the padlock of the door. They entered. What happened in that
little hut?" Miss Penny leaned forward at me. Her large hare's eyes
glittered, the long ear-rings swung and faintly tinkled. "Imagine the
emotions of a virgin of thirty, and a nun at that, in the terrifying
presence of desire. Imagine the easy, familiar brutalities of the young
man. Oh, there's pages to be made out of this--the absolutely
impenetrable darkness, the smell of straw, the voices, the strangled
crying, the movements! And one likes to fancy that the emotions pulsing
about in that confined space made palpable vibrations like a deep sound
that shakes the air. Why, it's ready-made literature, this scene. In the
morning," Miss Penny went on, after a pause, "two woodcutters on their
way to work noticed that the door of the hut was ajar. They approached
the hut cautiously, their axes raised and ready for a blow if there
should be need of it. Peeping in, they saw a woman in a black dress
lying face downward in the straw. Dead? No; she moved, she moaned.
'What's the matter?' A blubbered face, smeared with streaks of
tear-clotted grey dust, is lifted towards them. 'What's the
matter?'--'He's gone!' What a queer, indistinct utterance. The
woodcutters regard one another. What does she say? She's a foreigner,
perhaps. 'What's the matter?' they repeat once more. The woman bursts
out violently crying. 'Gone, gone! He's gone,' she sobs out in her
vague, inarticulate way. 'Oh, gone. That's what she says. Who's
gone?'--'He's left me.'--'What?'--'Left me....'--'What the devil...?
Speak a little more distinctly.'--'I can't,' she wails; 'he's taken my
teeth.'--'Your what?--'My teeth!'--and the shrill voice breaks into a
scream, and she falls back sobbing into the straw. The woodcutters look
significantly at one another. They nod. One of them applies a thick
yellow-nailed forefinger to his forehead."
Miss Penny looked at her watch. "Good heavens!" she said, "it's nearly
half-past three. I must fly. Don't forget about the funeral service,"
she added, as she put on her coat. "The tapers, the black coffin, in the
middle of the aisle, the nuns in their white-winged coifs, the gloomy
chanting, and the poor cowering creature without any teeth, her face all
caved in like an old woman's, wondering whether she wasn't really and in
fact dead--wondering whether she wasn't already in hell. Good-bye."