[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
"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 tkat 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 tftoughts, his serious,
despairing thoughts abou 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, nd 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
68
hospital; the opportunities, few. There could be no favourable circumstances and 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
mad 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
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]