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

see for himself. The guide-books
were (for once) unanimous in urging him to go and see the Moses.
    It – he – was one of the reasons why one came to Rome; and, having
seen it, one staggered away from Rome with a sense of the greater
repleteness. The wrist-bones and sinews, they said, were particularly
to be observed as the characteristic of the work of this great artist.
The wrist-bones and sinews . . . “O-oh,” whinnied Mr. Thomson,
stamping his feet, mopping the back of his neck. They had only
three days more. Was he never to see anything but blazing steps,
and these myriads of burning, whirling, infinitesimal particles of
sound and colour around him that he doubted to be Rome?
    “Never to see anything? We are
sore let and hindered,” he
murmured. “Sore, sore, sore let – ”
     
“Well, you’re very late,” said Fenella.
     
She stood two or three steps above him, a little pink but tolerably
cool.
     
“ Late . . . ?”
     
“I’ve been waiting up there nearly five minutes.”
     
“ Up there?”
     
“ Oh , but you are too impossible!” she cried. “You do waste my
time. You know it was ages ago you were to meet me, up at the top
of the Scala. We might have been half-way to the what’s-his-name
by now!”
     
Indeed, they might have been further than half-way. How cool
the church would be, how black and dusky-pale the arches. How
reverently would he observe the wrist-bones and the sinews of the
Moses, and sense the gathered imminence of thunder by that altar
of the quiet church!
     
She descended a step and stooped to peer under the brim of his
hat.
     
“Hot? But you must try, darling, you must try and remember.”
     
He mopped his neck all the way round.
     
She looked round her. “It doesn’t matter really,” she said quickly.
“But I would love some irises . . . I could do without carnations,
though they’re not very expensive. Then we’ll have an ice. Waiting
about has made me hot, you see. I’m sorry I was cross,” she added,
leading him towards the flower-stall. “You are nice, and one can’t
expect you to be perfect.”
     
The flower-woman charged exorbitantly for the irises and
carnations. Compound interest, thought Mr. Thomson, for the time
he had made her wait. They had been, in fact, these three, for the
last five minutes, an angry and attentive triangle. “Who’s going to
carry all these things?”
     
“Oh,” she said, generously, “I will. You need only carry the guidebooks.” 2
     
When their spoons were beginning to tinkle at the bottoms of
their second ices, she said, licking her lips, “Now then. Come on.
What about the what’s-his-name – the Moses?”
     
He sucked the ends of his moustache. “Those flowers look
awfully nice against your dress,” he said absently. “Topping. The
Moses? Oh, confound the Moses! Let’s sit here a little longer. It’s so hot .”
“Just Imagine . . .”
N
oel and Nancy had a childhood in common, at
Wimbledon, in the midst of the most frightful dangers and
insecurity. Noel read too much and Nancy was too credulous; there
came, successively, as their capacity for fear sophisticated, to be
tigers under the back stairs, Indians down in the shrubbery that
gathered together with tomahawks and crept out punctually at the
approach of dusk, and, at last, a clammy-faced Thing on the top
landing that reached out for them through the banisters as they
went up. Imagination can build palaces, too, and there were
excursions into a high-pitched happiness, but these occurred less
regularly and were less memorable. Nancy came from South
America, where she had been born, Noel assured her, under some
kind of curse. “It mayn’t get you here,” he said comfortingly, “but if
you ever go back . . . ”
    Nancy was a rather curd-faced child, with hair skinned back so
tightly into a pigtail that her eyes seemed stretched open wider than
ever. She was prettily mannered, slyish but deeply affectionate, and
she loved Noel embarrassingly, with an