The Bazaar and Other Stories by Elizabeth Bowen Read Free Book Online

still
looking wonderingly at her, she had lassoed him; the folds of the
muffler, warm and scratchy, pleasantly titivated the soft flesh under
his chin.
     
“I think that looks very nice,” said Miss Pym, generously.
     
“ Puis, je vais aller jusqu’à Naples . . .” 7
     
Mrs. Hobson adjusted and tweaked the muffler, her sleeve
brushed against his cheek. Outside, they heard the breathy sound of
the rain, and, indoors, the film of mist thickened on the mirrors. The
smell of their woollen clothes against the radiator was warm and
comforting. Soon, as evening fell, the lamps would be lighted, and
Herr Müller would turn on the other radiators. Perhaps somebody
would ask him to tea in their bedroom. Then there would be dinner.
After dinner, he would seek out Miss Pym, tête-à-tête on a settee in the
lounge, and show her his album with the views of other parts of
Switzerland.
     
In this quiet island in the centre of Europe, the dusk gathered and
the rain drifted down. Deep in the hotel the chef prepared another
dinner for those forty useless mouths, and in the office at the back
of the empty lounge Herr Müller lurked like a spider.
     
M. Grigoroff, while they unwound the muffler from his throat,
leaned back smiling. He found great comfort in the society of
women.
Moses
S
he had a way of dawdling, and though Mr. Thomson
had timed his appearance for ten minutes later than the hour of the
rendezvous, he had still, he discovered, an unanticipated quarter of
an hour’s wait. Why, indeed, put it at even a quarter of an hour?
Standing at the foot of the Scala di Spagna, he lashed his walkingstick angrily to and fro behind him. He looked – and felt – a little
of the Lion; legs apart, staring indignantly up the Scala under his
tilted hat-brim. The hot steps curved up, their whiteness blistering
his eyes. They curved up and up till Mr. Thomson sweated at the
thought of them; till his kindly brim came down upon them, cut
them off. Behind him, in the piazza, Roman trams slid and clanged;
there were ascending triplets, multitudinies of hoots. The fountain
spattered, feathery and faint.
    In her hotel at the top of the Scala she was inaccessible to him.
God forbid that he should go up to meet her! Whichever fork of the
staircase he went up by, she would come down the other; balancing
her parasol on her shoulder, perhaps even twirling it; smiling at the
further distances of Rome, with the possibility, the even imminent
possibility, of a Mr. Thomson utterly out of focus. When they were
married, he would stand behind her, always, while she put her hat
on, breathing audibly and clicking the lid of his watch. Meanwhile,
the proprieties ordained for them hotels sundered by the breadth of
several piazze, and she was free, up there, to dawdle with her hat.
    A flower-seller wondered loudly why the beautiful gentleman
would buy no flowers. These dark-skinned peoples never showed
the heat, and she was cool as bronze as she turned the whites of her
eyes at him from under her awning, under her awning where the
banked-up flowers were sultry and dim. Her swinging earrings
glittered in the dusk. He thought how delighted Fenella would be if
he gave her irises, and those tawny carnations, cinnamon-scented.
How aloofly she would trail round Rome, carrying sheafs and sheafs
of them that wilted in the heat, in and out of the churches. She
would not have so much as a finger free to hold the other guidebooks, from which he was not reading aloud. He resolved never to
buy Fenella irises or carnations while they were in Rome.
    Somewhere, in a cool church, black and clammily fragrant after
the sunshine, the Moses of Michelangelo, he knew, sat looking
out across the ages.
MOSES 1 He gathers the destinies of peoples under his
knotted hands. He hears the thunders of God in his ears, and sits
tense. His lips may even now be loud with the thunders of Sinai. Mr.
Thomson, familiar with many guide-books, knew exactly how he
sat, but all the same, he wanted to