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this world to do, M. Hackett, to paint the experiences of the heart.’
    (– Gibbering dotard, you can talk till your teeth fall out. I shall go on precisely as I have been doing, even if I can only paint her for an hour and a quarter a day. –) An evening of nameless embarrassment, with Hackett’s friends coughing, shuffling, eating noisily, asking questions to which they knew the answer, and telling anecdotes of which they forgot the endings. Anny had not appeared, evidently she was considered unworthy; the patronne came in again, bringing not soup but the very height of Brittany’s grand-occasion cuisine, a fricassee of chicken. Who would have thought there were chickens in Palourde?
    Hackett woke in what he supposed were the small hours. So far he had slept dreamlessly in Palourde, had never so much as lighted his bedside candle. – Probably, he thought, Bonvin made the same unpleasant speech wherever he went. The old impostor was drunk with power – not with anything else, only half a bottle of muscadet and, later, a bottle of gros-plant between the six of them. – The sky had begun to thin and pale. It came to him that what had been keeping him awake was not an injustice of Bonvin’s, but of his own. What had been the experiences of Anny’s heart?
    Bonvin, with his dressing cases and book-boxes, left early. The horse omnibus stopped once a week in the little Place François-René de Chateaubriand, at the entrance to the village. Having made his formal farewells, Bonvin caught the omnibus. Hackett was left in good time for his appointment with Anny.
    She did not come that day, nor the next day, nor the day after. On the first evening he was served by the boot-boy, pitifully worried about getting in and out of the door, on the second by the hotel laundrywoman, on thethird by the patronne. ‘Where is Anny?’ She did not answer. For that in itself Hackett was prepared, but he tried again. ‘Is she ill?’ ‘No, not ill.’ ‘Has she taken another job?’ ‘No.’ He was beginning, he realized, in the matter of this plain and sullen girl, to sound like an anxious lover. ‘Shall I see her again?’ He got no answer.
    Had she drowned herself? The question reared up in his mind, like a savage dog getting up from its sleep. She had hardly seemed to engage herself enough with life, hardly seemed to take enough interest in it to wish no more of it. Boredom, though, and the withering sense of insignificance can bring one as low as grief. He had felt the breath of it at his ear when Bonvin had told him – for that was what it came to – that there was no hope of his becoming an artist. Anny was stupid, but no one is too stupid to despair.
    There was no police station in Palourde, and if Anny were truly drowned, they would say nothing about it at the Hôtel du Port. Hackett had been in enough small hotels to know that they did not discuss anything that was bad for business. The red-haired body might drift anywhere, might be washed ashore anywhere between Pointe du Grouin and Cap Prehel.
    That night it was the laundrywoman’s turn to dish up the fish soup. Hackett thought of confiding in her, but did not need to. She said to him: ‘You mustn’t keep asking the patronne about Anny, it disturbs her.’ Anny, it turned out, had been dismissed for stealing from the hotel – some money, and a watch. ‘You had better havea look through your things,’ the laundrywoman said, ‘and see there’s nothing missing. One often doesn’t notice till a good while afterwards.’

Beehernz
    T o Hopkins, deputy artistic director of the Midland Music Festival, an idea came. Not a new idea, but rather comforting in its familiarity, an idea for the two opening concerts next year. He put it forward, not at the preliminary meeting, still at quite an early one.
    ‘Out of the question if it involves us in any further expense,’ said the chairman.
    ‘No, it’s a matter of concept,’ said Hopkins. ‘These are Mahler concerts,