Mortal Coils

"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