“In five minutes!” screamed Anne, looking at the gold wrist watch that Richard Sotheby had given her. Grandison seized his pocket-book and cigarettes, they snatched up their Panama hats and fled down the cool staircase with its smell of varnish and of glue, out into the baking heat of the street.
There was no taxi to be seen and no tram.
“Run!” he cried, and they ran, though the air came hot to the mouth and the sun slashed through their silk shirts, scorching their shoulders. They were late, but the char-a-banc had waited for them, and when Grandison had cried out: “No breakfast!” it waited while he rushed into the station buffet and came back with a bottle of sweet champagne, a long roll of bread and a green water-melon. They sat in the front seats, and the oilcloth cushions ran with their clean sweat, while they were drinking champagne out of the palms of their hands and spilling it over their knees as the heavy car lurched and bumped on the road. They laughed, and the melon juice ran over their chins and into their ears; they spoke their thoughts aloud heedless of the American ladies and the party of English school-teachers behind them, and the whole char-a-banc of twenty people was united by the happiness of watching them. Looking at the outlines of their shoulders, everyone was moved to a gay, slightly tipsy sentimentality; the discomfort of a whole day’s jolting, of being a school-teacher and wearing stays, or a double-breasted waistcoat and starched collars and side-whiskers, all such ills passed unnoticed. As for the lovers, they paid no attention to their companions and scarcely even looked at the sights they had come to see. Strolling through the Roman theatre and the bull-ring at Arles, they made silly jokes about asparagus, and on the way home broke into their first quarrel, Anne maintaining that a cigale was a grasshopper, while Grandison reiterated that it was a sedentary dragonfly with a beetle’s body.
“A letter for you, Sir,” said the porter as they entered the hotel, and they looked at each other in embarrassment, wondering how they could have come to forget Richard’s letter. A word from him meant so much to both of them! But recollecting how it was that they had so nearly missed the bus that morning, they broke out laughing.
“Bad news,” said Grandison, his face changing suddenly. “Richard’s father, the grocer, has gone bankrupt. The worst is that I cannot help feeling I have had my share in causing it by my cursed extravagance. Richard paid for everything for me, and for Ginette.” As he said this his face flushed scarlet.
“It is more likely to be the hotel,” said Anne.
“Yes, that is what Richard says, and then there is a message about your father,” he added, handing her the letter. His face was still flushed, but the first feeling of shame had passed into one of anger with the outside world that threatened to break in upon his happiness.
Dry Coulter.
Dear Seal,
Why do you and Anne send me so many postcards? I ask because I got six yesterday; very disturbing when I am doing my best to forget you. “Let the dead bury their dead.” What does that mean? Perhaps I have got the phrase wrong, but for some reason though I don’t understand what it means I find it expresses my feelings.