Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) Read Free Page A

sideboard and was rummaging about in one of the compartments. Presently he looked round and addressed her.
    ‘You don’t ’appen to ’ve seen Miss Varvara’s ’orn?’
    The nurse tossed her head.
    ‘I have not. You don’t suppose I’d touch the filthy thing.’
    Turpin chuckled resignedly, and sloped towards the door.
    ‘She’ll just ’ave to drink out of a cup this morning.’
    ‘Or else she could condescend to come down and look for her own nonsense.’
    I thought that the sooner I had some idea what was going on, the happier I should feel.
    ‘What was all that about horns?’ I asked when the butler had gone.
    She replied: ‘As well as you, Mrs. Ellison has a granddaughter staying here. She comes from savage parts—which is putting it mildly, if you ask me. Anyway she owns a dirty old goblet carved from some animal’s horn—she says it’s a rhinoceros’s—and every drop she drinks must come out of it.’
    ‘What’s the idea?’
    ‘It’s supposed to be a guard against poison.’
    I had a vague memory of having heard this superstition before and of its being associated with a particular country.
    ‘Isn’t that a Chinese notion?’
    Nurse Fillis nodded. ‘Mind you, the place she comes from is hardly proper China, where I’m told there are some very nice people. It’s somewhere right at the back.’
    ‘Why does this girl think she’ll be poisoned?’
    ‘It is the way she’s been brought up. You should hear her talk to her grandmother—how Governor This strangled Governor That and did I don’t know what to his fancy women—dreadful language sometimes. One makes allowances, but it’s time she learnt.’
    I remained silent, partly because I could not think what to say next, and partly prompted by an elementary sense of social tactics. About the young woman with the rhinoceros-horn I had no ideas, but it seemed to me that I recognized Nurse Fillis. She was the counterpart of several undergraduates whom I knew, the nervous, introspective ones who believed that everyone was watching them; who had elaborate fantasies under exteriors like suet; who for long periods would converse only in monosyllables, and then suddenly burst into plaints or denunciations followed by still more embarrassing apologies.
    Sure enough, silence produced reaction. First she bent over her plate and began to eat as if she were digging her way to the Antipodes. But what she needed was reassurance, not distraction, and presently she addressed me in a subdued tone.
    ‘I hope you didn’t think I was talking out of turn, Mr. Lindley.’
    ‘If I had, I shouldn’t have listened.’
    It was a nasty and priggish remark for a boy of twenty. I can only plead that I was not speaking in my own personality. When I was young my dramatic sense (and also a certain lack of self-confidence) often caused me to substitute other people in the situations which I found beyond me, and to speak with their voices. So now I was snubbing Nurse Fillis in the accents of my aunt who was a mem-sahib of the old school, and could smell presumption across half a continent.
    Indeed, two years before, when we first met Mrs. Ellison in Brittany, she had once or twice unnecessarily slapped down the nice little Irish nurse who was then looking after the old lady.
    Until this summer, Mrs. Ellison had gone every year to St. Plou-les-Navets, chiefly because her husband had done so. Though he travelled widely for business, Mr. Ellison had not really approved of places abroad. But St. Plou he exempted from that category: at which I do not greatly wonder, for it had taken to itself many of the beastlier features of a British seaside resort, including the incivility, the crowds, and the noise. It was not, you would have thought, the place for an elderly woman who had lately suffered a minor stroke. Not that Mrs. Ellison was enfeebled. Although she found it convenient to keep a nurse in attendance, the only outward signs of her illness were a tendency to become