Far away along the beach two figures were slowly approaching. White flannel trousers, a pink skirt.
«Nature,» Mr. Topes enunciated, with a shake of the head. «One always comes back to nature. At a moment such as this, in surroundings like these, one realises it. One lives now—more quietly, perhaps, but more profoundly. Deep watery. Deep waters….»
The figures drew closer. Wasn’t it the marquis? And who was with him? Barbara strained her eyes to see.
«Most of one’s life,» Mr. Topes went on, «is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking. Your father and I, we collect pictures and read about the dead. Other people achieve the same results by drinking, or breeding rabbits, or doing amateur carpentry. Anything rather than think calmly about the important things.»
Mr. Topes was silent. He looked about him, at the sea, at the mountains, at the great clouds, at his companion. A frail Montagna madonna, with the sea and the westering sun, the mountains and the storm, all eternity as a background. And he was sixty, with all a life, immensely long and yet timelessly short, behind him, an empty life. He thought of death and the miracles of beauty; behind his round, glittering spectacles he felt inclined to weep.
The approaching couple were quite near now.
«What a funny old walrus,» said the lady.
«Walrus? Your natural history is quite wrong.» The marquis laughed. «He’s much too dry to be a walrus. I should suggest some sort of an old cat.»
«Well, whatever he is, I’m sorry for that poor little girl. Think of having nobody better to go about with!»
«Pretty, isn’t she?»
«Yes, but too young, of course.»
«I like the innocence.»
«Innocence? Cher ami! These English girls. Oh, la la! They may look innocent But, believe me….»
«Sh, sh. They’ll hear you.»
«Pooh, they don’t understand Italian.»
The marquis raised his hand. «The old walrus….» he whispered; then addressed himself loudly and jovially to the newcomers.
«Good evening, signorina. Good evening, Mr. Topes. After a storm the air is always the purest, don’t you find, eh?»
Barbara nodded, leaving Mr. Topes to answer. It wasn’t his sister. It was the Russian woman, the one of whom Mrs. Topes used to say that it was a disgrace she should be allowed to stay at the hotel. She had turned away, dissociating herself from the conversation; Barbara looked at the line of her averted face. Mr. Topes was saying something about the Pastoral Symphony.
Purple face powder in the daylight; it looked hideous.
«Well, au revoir.»
The flash of the marquis’s smile was directed at them. The Russian woman turned back from the sea, slightly bowed, smiled languidly. Her heavy white eyelids were almost closed; she seemed the prey of an enormous ennui.
«They jar a little,» said Mr. Topes when they were out of earshot—»they jar on the time, on the place, on the emotion. They haven’t the innocence for this … this….»—he wriggled and tremoloed out the just, the all too precious word—»this prelapsarian landscape.»
He looked sideways at Barbara and wondered what she was so thoughtfully frowning over. Oh, lovely and delicate young creature! What could he adequately say of death and beauty and tenderness? Tenderness….
«All this,» he went on desperately, and waved his hand to indicate the sky, the sea, the mountains, «this scene is like something remembered, clear and utterly calm; remembered across great gulfs of intervening time.»
But that was not really what he wanted to say.
«You see what I mean?» he asked dubiously. She made no reply. How could she see? «This scene is so clear and pure and remote; you need the corresponding emotion. Those people were out of harmony. They weren’t clear and pure enough.» He seemed to be getting more muddled than ever. «It’s an emotion of the young and of the old. You could feel it, I could feel it. Those people couldn’t.» He was feeling his way through obscurities. Where would he finally arrive? «Certain poems express it. You know Francis Jammes? I have thought so much of his work lately. Art instead of life, as usual; but then I’m made that way. I can’t help thinking of Jammes. Those delicate, exquisite things he wrote about Clara d’Ellébeuse.»
«Clara d’Ellébeuse?» She stopped and stared at him.
«You know the lines?» Mr. Topes smiled delightedly. «This makes me think, you make me think of them. ‘F’aime dans les temps Clara d’Ellébeuse….’ But, my dear Barbara, what is the matter?»
She had started crying, for no reason whatever.
The End
Nuns at Luncheon
«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
