Call and I'll Come

by Mary Burchell

  “She’ll do very well. She’ll do very well.” Tony kept on repeating the words to himself while the doctor attended to him. “Little darling Anna. She’ll do very well. Oh, my God, it’s a second chance!”

  Finally they let him go back to her, to wait until the country ambulance should be summoned.

  She smiled at him when he came in, and held out one arm to him. He came at once and knelt beside her again, so that he could put his head against her, just as he had before the doctor had interrupted them.

  They were silent for a moment, and then she said timidly: “You won’t force me to go back and be a singer now, will you?”

  “Force you, Anna!” he exclaimed, horrified. “My dear, I wouldn’t force you to do anything.”

  She nodded her head slowly, and smiled gravely like a wise child.

  “Oh yes, you would. You’d think you knew what was best for me. That’s why I’ve been lying here hoping and hoping I was badly hurt, so that you couldn’t send me away for a long while—not until I’d had a chance to plead with you.”

  He held her close at that.

  “I have been a fool, haven’t I?” he said a little bitterly.

  “Yes,” Anna told him. “But so have I. We’ve both made some terribly silly mistakes, considering that people in love are supposed to understand each other.”

  Tony touched her cheek with gentle, anxious fingers.

  “You do realise how much you’re giving up, if you stay with me, don’t you?” he said.

  “Giving up?” She looked surprised.

  “I shall be quite a poor man, for a while at any rate,” he pointed out.

  “I don’t mind,” Anna said. “I never really got used to being rich. Being poor comes much more naturally to me.”

  He laughed with genuine amusement at that.

  “And what about your career—your voice? Darling, don’t think I’m jealous of your heavenly voice I’m really wildly proud of it. When I listened to you that time in Paris, the beauty of it brought a lump into my throat, even while it frightened me too.”

  “Why should it frighten you?”

  “Because—oh, it’s selfish of me to influence you like this”—he pressed his head boyishly against her—“only every note seemed to take you farther away. And every round of applause seemed to show more clearly that there was no place for me in your life. If I’d been really decent, I shouldn’t even have come round to see you afterwards. I should just have gone back to England quietly without saying anything.”

  “And why didn’t you?” She was smiling now.

  “Couldn’t,” he said, dropping his eyes. “I just had to see you for a minute. I thought it would give me courage to go back and face the business over here. I was a bit scared about it, you know.”

  “Oh, I wish I’d known,” she said impulsively.

  “Would you have given it all up even then?” he said very tenderly. “Even in all the first excitement and triumph?”

  “Of course.”

  “There really isn’t any ‘of course’ about it, my darling. Not many women would see it that way.”

  “Oh yes, they would. Why—” She stopped.

  “What, Anna?”

  “I was thinking of something Manora said once,” she said slowly.

  “And what was that?” He smiled a little. He didn’t think he would be specially interested in anything Vanescu had said, but evidently Anna had agreed with her.

  “She said that no woman worth the name would value a voice above a child who would look at her with the eyes of the man she loved.”

  “Anna!” He wasn’t smiling now. He was quite still and quiet. Then at last he said very humbly: “I think perhaps I have a terrible lot to learn about you, Anna. But I will try, darling. I will try, if you’ll find the patience to teach me.”

  “Oh, Tony, how sweet you are when you say that,” she said, and it was she who smiled at him now.

  He remembered wonderingly that once he had been a little scared when she had smiled like that, as though she were years older than he. Now it was the sweetest and most reassuring thing in the world.

  “Why do you smile at me as though I’m a little boy?” he said, pressing his cheek against her.

  “Because to every woman there are always moments when the man she loves seems to be her little boy too,” she told him.

  “Darling, how ridiculous and wonderful!”

  “But you like it?”

  “I adore it.”

  “And it reassures you, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “that’s just what it does do. I don’t quite know why.”

  “Don’t you? Then I’ll tell you.” She gently tilted up his face so that he looked into those eyes of hers which he had once thought held so many secrets. Now they were radiantly clear and held nothing but tenderness for him. “It’s the smile that mothers give their children when they mean ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m here. You have only to call—and I’ll come.’ ”