Sister was immensely interested and a good deal amused, and laughed—rather immoderately and in the wrong place, as Copple thought when he described his coffin masterpiece with the name-plate bearing his own name, and the dodge of starting on the elephant with a trunk at each end.
“Well, I’ve heard a lot of queer things about the front, Copple,” she said, busying herself on the last bandage. “But I didn’t know they went in for sculpture. ‘Ars longa, vitæ brevis.’ That’s a saying in Latin, and it means exactly, ‘Art is long, life is short.’ You’d understand it better if I put it another way. It means that it takes a long, long time to make a perfect elephant——”
“It does,” said Copple. “But if you begins ‘im like I told you, with a trunk each end——”
“There, that’ll do,” said the Sister, pinning the last bandage. “Now lie down and I’ll make you comfortable. A long time to make a perfect elephant; and life is very short——”
“That’s true,” said Copple. “Especially up Wipers way.”
“So, if making elephants gives some people the greatest possible pleasure in life, why not let them make elephants? I’m an artist of sorts myself, or was trying to be before the war, so I speak feelingly for a brother elephant-maker, Copple.”
“Artist, was you?” said Copple, with great interest. “That must be a jolly sorter job.”
“It is, Copple—or was,” said the Sister, finishing the tucking-up. “Much jollier than a starched-smooth uniform and life—and lots in it.” And she sighed and made a little grimace at the stained bandages she picked up. “But if you and thousands of other men give up your particular arts and go out to have your short lives cut shorter, the least I can do is to give up mine to try to make them longer.”
Copple didn’t quite follow all this. “I wish I’d a bit o’ chalk stone, Sister,” he said; “I’d teach you how to do a elephant with the two trunks.”