From a long distance she heard herself say quite steadily: “That’s just it. I don’t love you. I can’t go on with it.”
“But, my little love, won’t you give it a chance—our life together?” He was pleading now in a way she had never expected, and it hurt so that she thought she must scream aloud. “I know I’ve been to blame. I must have hurt you dreadfully over that cursed business with Frayne. It was that, wasn’t it? Oh! when I think of you going away all alone! Dearest, where did you go? Where were you all last night—?”
And at that Anna picked up her last weapon:
“I was at Mario Frayne’s flat, you must know. And you had every right to be jealous about what happened before. And it’s Mario who’s going to get me on the stage—” Oh, if only Tony would say something—not stand there slowly going grey, as though she had wounded him and the blood was draining out of him.
“God in heaven,” said Tony at last, in a hoarse little whisper. “Then it was true all the time—even before I met you—what they said about you in the village!”
Anna was silent, in a sort of leaden despair.
“No wonder that damned postmistress sniggered, and Irwin looked wise, and Orpington tried to delay things. And you! You stuffed me up with that foolery about not liking men to touch you—that it was something you couldn’t help—that it was different with me. And all the time you were nothing but a little—”
“Oh, don’t!” Anna found her voice at last.
With a fearful effort Tony controlled himself, though she saw he was trembling. He sat down rather heavily at his desk fingering at the papers nervously as a much older man might have done.
“Can I go now?” she said at last.
“Go?” He looked up stupidly. “Yes—yes, go where you like—with Frayne, or anyone else you fancy. Go to the ends of the earth if you want to. I don’t care.”
She got up slowly. She wished achingly that he hadn’t used that expression. He had said once—a long, long time ago, or was it just a few days?—that he would come to her from the ends of the earth—if she called.
She paused beside her chair for a moment, but he didn’t even look up.
And so she went slowly out of the room, and through the outer office, where Bentham looked curiously at her because she didn’t appear to notice that he held open the door and said “Good morning” to her. Down two flights of marble steps, because she didn’t see the lift door standing open, waiting for her. Out into the sunshine, where Manora waited in the car.
“Why, you’re still waiting,” she said vaguely.
“Yes, I said I would wait half an hour,” Manora reminded her.
“Half an hour,” Anna repeated wonderingly. “Have I only been half an hour?”
“Less than that. Just twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes!
It had taken twenty minutes to smash her world to atoms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Manora drove rather slowly, without attempting to speak. Then at last Anna said:
“Where are we going?”
“Well, home, unless you want to go anywhere else?”
“Oh no, there’s nowhere I want to go, thank you. Nowhere at all.” And then Anna had to bite her lip to keep herself from weeping because Tony had told her she could go anywhere she wanted. Right to the ends of the earth if she liked. He didn’t care.
When they reached the block of flats in St. James’s, Manora said: “You come up and see my flat now.”
And because it didn’t seem to matter what she did, or where she went, Anna came without protest.
The flat was bigger than Frayne’s, and everywhere there was the scent of extremely expensive cigars.
“This is the studio,” Manora explained, leading Anna into a long, pleasant room. “For this we choose the flat.”
There was very little furniture in the room except a grand piano and some comfortable chairs. But everywhere there were piles of music—on chairs, on the piano, and even on the floor.
At one end of the modernistic black marble mantlepiece stood a large three-quarter-length photograph of Manora. She was wearing a velvet evening coat over a light dress, but something in the way she was laughing, and the unexpected pose with her hand on her hip, suggested a Balkan peasant girl, working havoc among the men of her village.
At the other end was the photograph of a man. Just the head and shoulders. He was extraordinarily handsome in a slightly flamboyant way, and was gazing away to some far horizon with great, melancholy dark eyes. But the arrogant determination of his mouth rather contradicted the melancholy, and somehow suggested that he could look after himself very well.
“Schreiner,” explained Manora, touching the photograph with an odd little mixture of awe and condescension.
Anna thought it odd for Manora to speak of him by his surname like that, but perhaps one did that with a very great person.
Manora tossed off her hat and made Anna take off hers.
“Oh yes, Mr. Frayne said you were a singer.” Anna suddenly remembered that Frayne had mentioned the fact.
“But of course.” Manora’s blue eyes opened wide. “You had not heard of me before ?”
Anna smiled faintly. “I don’t know your other name, you know,” she said,
“Vanescu. I am Manora Vanescu. Now you know? ... No?” Manora gave a little shriek of laughter. “You have not heard of me? Oh, how wonderful!”
“I’m sorry.” Anna stammered a little. “You see, I—”
“No, no,” Manora interrupted her, still laughing. “You must not mind. Is so amusing. But there,” she added tolerantly, “in England all things are possible.”
Anna laughed a little at that, and Manora immediately seized on the break in her unhappiness.
“You must sing for me.” she said. “Yes, Mario Frayne has said to me that you are good, and I want to hear you.”
Anna shook her head. But Manora took no notice; merely began to run through a pile of music scores.
“Mario says you are good in French opera. What will you have? Whatever you please—Carmen, Manon, Thais, Faust, Hoffmann?”
“It doesn’t matter. Please, not anything,” Anna said.
“Yes, you must.” There was no arguing with Manora’s smiling determination. “Hoffmann, then, since you will not choose. See, I will play for you, though very badly.”
She flicked over the pages.
“Here,” she announced triumphantly. “You sing this? Antonia’s air?”
Anna stood rather obstinately silent in the curve of the piano, while Manora played the opening bars. Then, since there was no resisting her smile, Anna began to sing.
She had sung the air a hundred times for the old Frenchman who had thought her voice so beautiful. But today there was something specially poignant in the song of the dying Antonia who snatched pathetically at a happiness which she knew, in her heart, had already vanished.
Oh, why did everything seem to remind her of the aching bruise on her own heart?
There was faint hope still struggling with resignation in Antonia’s song, and Anna’s voice reflected it more pitifully than she knew. By the time she reached the end she was very near tears, and she stood there waiting, only half interested, for Manora’s verdict.
But the verdict came from the other end of the room:
“Sehr schon!”
Anna swung round, to face an immensely tall man, who was standing there with one hand holding a cigar and the other thrust into the pocket of his very magnificent purple dressing-gown.
She recognised him at once. There was no mistaking him. Conrad Schreiner—even handsomer than his photograph, and even more awe-inspiring than his reputation.
Anna looked at him shyly, fascinated by a face of such contrasts—by the unexpectedly grey hair against his tanned skin, and the way the kindly expression of his soft brown eyes contradicted the arrogance of his mouth.
He came forward slowly and, towering over her, addressed her in German in a deep, abrupt
voice.
“She speaks no German. She is English,” Manora said, apparently quite unmoved by this apparition.
“And I,” said Schreiner, speaking with a very shocking accent, “speak nearly no English. Except”—and suddenly he flashed a quite wonderful smile at Anna—“when I am in France. Then I speak English to the French, and they say my accent is so good.”
Anna smiled, and felt less nervous.
“You don’t know French, then?” she said timidly.
“I? No. Three words perhaps. No more.” Schreiner seemed to have great contempt for any language of which he knew so little. “But no matter. You understand me. And now you sing again.”
Anna made a quick movement of protest, for, since the last song had brought her so near tears, she felt she could bear no more. But Schreiner brushed that aside.
“The trio near the end of the act. You know that?”
“Yes, but—”
“We will have that.”
Anna had no wish to sing, but she was powerless against the force of Schreiner’s commanding vitality. She was swept into the musical whirlpool in her turn—singing as Antonia was supposed to sing, desperately, under protest, because she was being forced to do so by the power of someone else’s personality.
It seemed to Anna that she and the character of Antonia were one. That she shared Antonia’s terror in knowing that if she sang she must die—and yet she could do nothing but sing. It merged into the tragedy of her own impotent struggle against the inevitable.
She could hear the steady stream of Manora’s heavenly voice, the sweet, pleading despair of her own singing, and the occasional sinister bass cackle from Schreiner.
After a while she knew she was crying, that the tears were running down her cheeks; but even that could do nothing to stop the inevitable forward sweep of the music, driven on by Schreiner’s almost demoniac power.
And then, suddenly, it was over. And she was standing there drained of all emotion, shivering a little and sobbing.
She heard Schreiner say calmly: “There is no reason to cry. You are nearly a great singer. Give to her a handkerchief, Manora.”
And Manora’s arms were round her, and she was drying her tears and comforting her—“for all the world,” thought Anna, “as though I’d had a tooth out.”
“You must not mind,” Manora soothed her. “Very often he makes me cry too, but he is not really angry.”
“Sometimes I am angry,” came warningly from Schreiner, who was pencilling something on a score. “Come here.”
Manora gave Anna a friendly little push, and she went slowly over to where the great man still sat at the piano.
“You cry no longer, eh?” he said, looking up at her.
Anna shook her head and smiled faintly.
“I am sorry,” she began.
“It is of no consequence,” said Schreiner. “Now, sing these scales.”
Anna sang, and was suddenly rather intrigued to see the nod Which Schreiner and Manora exchanged.
“You—you do really like my voice?” she asked Schreiner timidly.
“Do you think I sit here and listen to you all this time if I find your voice horrible?” was the reply. “Tell me, do you have any stage experience?”
“No.” Anna shook her head.
“That we should have to give her,” Manora observed. “Mario too will be helpful. He is a good friend of hers.”
“Eh?” Schreiner looked at her with eyebrows slightly raised in inquiry.
“No, no, no, not like that.” Manora frowned quickly and shook her head. “But I mean he will like to help her. I will him telephone.”
And before Anna could protest she had seized up the telephone and rung up Frayne with the request that he would come across to their flat.
Five minutes later Frayne joined them. As he came in he gave Anna a concerned glance, but she managed to smile a little at him in return.
Schreiner nodded curtly to Frayne and merely stated: “She is good. I take her. You explain.”
“Is that really so?” Frayne turned to Manora.
“I think so,” Manora said, smiling.
“Yes, yes, yes,” affirmed Schreiner impatiently. “You explain to her.”
Anna had the odd impression that it could not really be herself in whom these voluble and apparently famous people were so much interested. She felt more as though she were just a spectator while they discussed someone quite different from the Anna whose life had ceased to mean anything important two hours ago, when she had left Tony’s office.
Then Frayne began to explain to her, gently, almost soothingly, as though she had been ill and hadn’t quite recovered.
“Schreiner thinks your voice even more beautiful than I expected, and he says you have been well trained.”
Anna smiled at that, and none of them knew that the hint of tenderness which made her mouth quiver was for the little old Frenchman who had believed so passionately in her voice, and had not been wrong after all.
“And what does he want to do about it?” she asked, still waiting rather nervously for the exact interpretation of Schreiner’s abrupt “I take her”.
Frayne laughed a little.
“He wants to complete your training, Anna—your stage training, I mean—and, if you turn out as well as we expect, he wants to launch you in opera as his find. It’s a tremendous opportunity for you. No one will train you better than Schreiner.”
Anna glanced across at Schreiner, who was pencilling his score again, and once more felt the tears very near the surface.
“But why should you all be so kind?” she said a little unsteadily.
“It is not kindness,” put in Schreiner without looking up. “It is business.”
“We wish to be kind too,” amended Manora earnestly.
Schreiner got up suddenly and came over to Anna. He took her by the shoulders and turned her so that she had to look up into his face.
“Listen to me,” he said slowly, in his bad English. “I can make of you, I think, a great singer. There will be very hard work and probably many more tears before I finish—but the material is there. For you in the end there will be fame and money, if you want it. For me it will be enough if I have found and made another great voice.”
Anna stared back, fascinated, into Schreiner’s intent face. She felt as though she were drifting rapidly away from the shores of any life she had ever known, and she was powerless to resist the current that carried her along.
“Well?” Schreiner suddenly gave her his wonderful smile.
“Yes. I—I will do whatever you tell me,” she said slowly.
“Ha!” Schreiner laughed shortly. “Then you will be unique.”
Manora smiled at Schreiner and said: “Is not good for you if we always say, ‘Yes, yes.’ ”
He looked at Manora then, and Anna was staggered at the amused tenderness in his glance. As if Schreiner had said it aloud, she knew in that second that Manora was all his world. That he needed her just exactly as he needed air and food and light; and that everything which made him Conrad Schreiner would die if he lost her.
“Oh!” she thought passionately. “To be loved like that! To know that you are necessary. To give instead of always gratefully receiving!”
For a moment her longing and envy almost choked her.
Reserved and inarticulate herself, Anna was astounded and more than a little embarrassed at such a display. But Frayne merely grinned, and seemed to be quite used to this.
Frayne said, with a matter-of-fact air, “Well, we seem to have settled the broad lines of Anna’s future. Now, what about the details?”
“I settle that,” Manora announced firmly. “I think, my child, is necessary that we find a home for you.” Her blue eyes were very kindly as they rested on Anna’s troubled face.
“I’m afraid it’s terribly difficult. You see—you see—” Anna broke off, stammering a little.
“I know.” Manora came over to her quickly and took her hand .“Is
not possible that you ask your husband for anything—”
“She has a husband?” exclaimed Schreiner, his face going dark with annoyance. “In a career that is not good.”
Perhaps Manora saw the way Anna’s teeth caught at her trembling lower lip, because she said quickly: “This you leave to me. We have a room here in the flat, and for the time you stay with us.”
Anna’s head was bent a little, so that she did not see the warning look with which Manora quelled the astounded protest on Schreiner’s face.
“I can’t—I really can’t,” Anna said, in a low voice. “You’ve been much too kind to me already.”
“No, no, you need friends just now.” Manora stroked her dark, bent head, in a way that was oddly comforting. “And we are glad that we can help you. Schreiner agrees with me.”
“Most certainly. When did Schreiner do anything else?” murmured that gentleman. But he too smiled kindly at Anna, and added: “It seems that either I am stupid, or Manora knows more than I. But if in our house you will be happy, then, please, I hope that you will stay.” And he took her hand and kissed it with a ceremonious little air which she found touching and faintly amusing.
And so Anna stayed.
Sometimes during the next few weeks she had the peculiar feeling that she stood upon some fantastic stage, and that, instead of being a real person, with feelings and impulses of her own, she just waited for strings to be pulled, and then automatically responded.
She tried very hard to fit into this new life satisfactorily. All that part of her mind and heart which had been Tony’s was almost numb. There was just a dull, heavy ache there which she tried desperately—and not very successfully—to ignore.
She was touched and a little dismayed at the extent of Manora’s generosity. Nothing would do but that she must supply Anna with money when she found she had none at all.
“But suppose I’m not a success?” Anna protested, very troubled. “Suppose I never make enough money to pay all this back?”
Manora shrugged. “Why think of that? You will be a success. Schreiner has said so.”
“Does Mr. Schreiner never make a mistake?” Anna could not help asking.
“Very seldom. And he does not like to be reminded of those he does make,” added Manora, with a little laugh.
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