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
