Anna

by Norman Collins

“It is unthinkable,” he said bitterly.

  She leaned forward towards him, and made a little gesture with her arms as though she were about to stretch them out towards him appealing for his protection.

  “I have told you,” she said, that there is no one else.”

  It was not until then that he spoke the words for which she had been waiting. And as he was saying them she held her breath, praying that the moment might last forever.

  “I love you, Anna,” he said. “No one else is ever going to marry you.”

  Her mind became filled with memories, of all the beautiful, passionate women she had read about; it seemed that at last she had become one of them. Her lips, fuller and more pouting than ever, were held up towards him, and she closed her eyes as she felt his arms begin to go round her.

  “Perhaps I shall swoon,” she reflected. “Perhaps I really shall swoon.”

  But in Charles’s arms she did not swoon. The pressure of his lips on hers excited her too much. It was as though all her life had been leading forward to this single blissful moment

  “How innocent she is,” he was thinking. “How young. I do not believe that she has ever surrendered herself to anyone before.”

  He raised his head and looked at her.

  “You’re so beautiful, Anna; so much more beautiful than anything else I’ve ever seen.”

  She lifted her hands to his face and began smoothing back the hair at his temples as he knelt before her. It felt crisp and hard to her fingers as she touched it; she had never touched a man’s hair.

  “I’m glad you think so,” she said.

  And the words as she spoke them made her glad; they were words that she had often imagined on her lips. They seemed the justification, the very reason, for her entire existence.

  “Come away with me, Anna,” he said. “Come with me back to Paris.”

  The folly of what he was asking, the impossibility of it, did not deter him. He admired his own recklessness.

  “Let us go away together. Let us go back to Paris,” he repeated.

  “Do you want me so much?” she asked.

  “I shall never again be able to live without you.”

  He began kissing her again, until it seemed the truth that he could not bear to be separated.

  “We were born for each other,” he said. “Our lives were meant to come together. Nothing could prevent it.”

  He had buried his head on her shoulder and was kissing her again, her neck, her throat, the little muslin bow upon her bosom.

  “Anna,” he said. “I have never known happiness until this moment.”

  The phrase troubled him slightly as he uttered it. It had seemed the perfect, the graceful thing to say; and beyond all doubt he meant it. But it recalled dim, uneasy memories too, that phrase. His mind groped backwards, and he saw another apple-orchard with the sun slanting through the branches and another girl—darkhaired this one—smiling up at him. That orchard had been somewhere in the deep South, in Provence. He had been very young at the time. The girl’s name was …but he had forgotten it; forgotten it, even though he had cried all night and remained pale and melancholy for days when his father had discovered them and had taken him away from her. And there had been Suzanne: he had met her first when she was taking singing lessons from the same Professor; it had been in a small boat moored to some willows that he had spoken the words then. At the time, that Saturday afternoon at St. Germain had seemed the summit of his life; he even remembered the pale, grey cravate which he had bought specially for the outing. Those self-same words, too, had been said to the little Italian girl in her nasty, suffocating bedroom in Madame Manchon’s disgraceful establishment. And that had been less, considerably less, than a year ago.

  “Why should they haunt me now?” he asked himself. “My thoughts towards Anna are so different. She is everything that is pure.”

  “But you’re suddenly sad,” he heard Anna saying. “Your face is quite different. What is it you’re thinking?”

  “It’s nothing,” he protested. “Nothing that you would understand. It is simply … simply that I have never been in love before.”

  She drew his face up to hers so that she might kiss him.

  “Oh Charles,” she said again. “My darling. My own darling.”

  They were interrupted by the voice of Herr Karlin, who had wandered out into the garden and was calling for his daughter.

  IV

  In Wiesbaden the Baron had just finished his shopping. He had bought ties and shirts mainly—his present ones now seemed, somehow, too drab, too sombre for his mood. Not since his youth had he enjoyed buying anything so much. And already the magic of the purchases had begun to work on him and he felt younger. On the spur of the moment he stopped and bought himself a hat as well: it was small and green and had a little cockade of feathers stuck into it at the back.

  The last shop that he visited was very different from the others. It was the kind of shop which the Baron had not been into for the last thirty years. As he closed the door behind him he felt self-conscious a little, as though he were too large, too masculine, for the place.

  “I want a bag,” he said. “A very pretty one. For a lady.”

  But the bags which they brought did not please him.

  “I want something better,” he said. “I want a good bag.”

  The proprietress herself then came forward. She laid on the counter a small silk pochette studded with seed pearls; two larger pearls formed the clasp.

  “This is new from Paris,” she said. “It is for the coming season.”

  In his present mood, it amused the Baron to buy such a piece of nonsense.

  “I will take it if you will work an ‘A’ into the design,” he said at last. “I wish the letter to be in gold, with more of those small pearls surrounding it. I want it to be a very beautiful bag when it is finished.”

  He came out of the shop again into the sunshine. The leafy streets of Wiesbaden stretched before him, dappled and smiling. Inside his heart, he felt strangely satisfied and well-content: it was as though the years had unwound themselves backwards through his life and he was a young man again. He had just bought a present for a pretty girl—and thirty lonely years had slid magically away, swirling him back into the full stream of things again. But in some queer fashion it was the image of his own dead Hermione who kept coming into his mind until it might have been only yesterday when he had last seen her. Whenever he began to think about her, however, she eluded him, ghost-like; and it was Anna’s pouting lips and long lashes that he saw again. And Anna remained; there was nothing of dust and shadows to trick him there.

  “I shall marry her very soon,” he told himself for the thousandth time. “We will go to Italy together. I shall be very happy. And she will be happy, too.”

  Squaring his shoulders, he blew out his cheeks and sauntered on more jauntily than before. He was a vigorous, upstanding figure of a man; the hairdresser whom he had visited that morning had touched up his hair on the temples. No one—no one—he kept repeating, would have taken this distinguished customer for anything more than forty-five.

  V

  The letter from M. Latourette demanding his son’s return came on the fourth morning of his stay.

  Even though it was obvious that he could remain there no longer—he had, indeed, already announced his departure for the next day—Charles Latourette turned a little cold at the sight of the familiar writing on the envelope. And the brutality of his father was something that disgusted him.

  “What is the matter with you?’ the letter asked. “Have you broken your leg, or is it that you have fallen in love with a pretty German Mädchen? No matter what it is, you must return now, as the business needs you. There is an excellent train at.…” Charles crumpled the letter in his hand and threw it on the floor in disgust…

  From the moment Anna had heard of his return, she had surrendered herself to another of her moods. It seemed that the flower of life, which suddenly so miracluously had o
pened, was already closing again; as though, at dawn, night had come. She used a powder without any rouge in it, so that her pallor, her distress, should be more pronounced.

  “You will speak to your father the moment you get back? The very moment?” she persisted.

  “The instant I arrive,” he assured her. “Can you doubt me?”

  “My darling, I shall never doubt you,” she answered. “Never. It is only the parting that terrifies me. I am afraid. Once you are gone, how do I know that I shall ever see you again?”

  “I have told you that I shall come back. Only this time when I come back, it will be to ask your father if I may marry you.”

  “Then you think your father will agree? You think that he will give you the money.”

  “I don’t question it. He must agree when I tell him. He shall agree.”

  She uttered a sigh of delicious happiness.

  “I can only bear it when you speak like that,” she told him.

  Because he could find no words to answer her, he took her in his arms and began kissing her again. It was a moment together that they had stolen. They were seated on the low sofa in the little alcove of the drawing-room, and they knew that at any moment they might be interrupted. The Baron himself was expected to arrive later. Charles tried to forget it.

  Dinner that night nearly choked him. It was Charles Latourette’s last meal there, and everything about the room, about the meal itself, was tinged with a fine melancholy. The unbearable anguish of departure hung over everything.

  He raised his eyes, and through the glow of the silver candelabra on the table he saw Anna’s eyes fixed on his. They were shining with a deep, unnatural lustre, as though there were tears ready at any moment to break through. And, as he looked, he saw her raise her handkerchief and apply it first to the corner of one eye and then to the corner of the other. The sight overwhelmed him.

  “How contemptible I am,” he now told himself. “I am thinking of my own emotions while she is thinking only of me.”

  As he raised his head again, he saw another pair of eyes staring at him. They were the Baron’s eyes. Behind those thick, distorting glasses there was crude, naked hatred there, an animosity which which was not disguised. And, as he looked, he saw the Baron, his eyes not flickering, glance swiftly in Anna’s direction and then return, still hostile and threatening, to him. The meaning of the glance was obvious. Charles Latourette did not dispute it. He was content in the knowledge of his own victorv.

  “She loves only me,” he repeated. “I have nothing to fear but myself.”

  And he grew ashamed of himself for being weak.

  It was after Anna and Berthe had passed through into the drawing-room, and the men were left alone together, that he became more than ever conscious of this weakness, of his physical incapacity to defend himself. He relapsed into the awkward, embarrassed silence of someone who is in a sense an inferior. The others recognised the inferiority, Herr Karlin tacitly and politely, the Baron rudely and without concealment. In the result they talked rapidly across him in German: Charles Latourette had the sensation of being the third person at a table at which only two were sitting.

  “They imagine that they can dictate the policy of all Europe,” the Baron was saying. “That is what is so intolerable.”

  “They will go too far,” said Herr Karlin ominously. “They’ll find out their mistake.”

  “In Spain they have gone too far already,” the Baron observed. “They have opposed our King’s nomination.”

  Herr Karlin spread out his hands.

  “But what does this opposition amount to?” he asked. “France is in no condition to fight.”

  The Baron drank off the remainder of his brandy and took a deep breath.

  “Then they should be challenged,” he said. “It’s only force that they will understand.”

  Herr Karlin shook his head.

  “There’ll be no need to apply force,” he said. “They haven’t forgotten Königgratz. They aren’t anxious to face the German army. That’s why they’ve sent their Ambassador to Emms again.”

  The Baron leant across and dropped his voice a little as though in some pretence that Charles Latourette would no longer be able to hear.

  “Someone told me in Wiesbaden,” he confided, “someone high up in the Chancellery, that they kept the French Ambassador waiting for two hours before they even let him know that the King wasn’t there.”

  He smiled, rolling his lips right back from the gums at the memory of the incident.

  “Kept him waiting,” he added. “Just like a tradesman.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Herr Karlin answered. “There’ll be no war. A country like France cannot risk a war. A major war in Europe would be very different from a skirmish in Algiers.”

  The Baron did not reply immediately. He stared in front of him, breathing deeply, as if hesitating whether to reply at all.

  “I tell you that they cannot be taught,” he said at last. “They must be shown. They must be trampled down and annihilated before there can be any lasting peace and order on the Continent.”

  The last sentence was spoken quite slowly, with the emphasis placed carefully and deliberately. Charles Latourette heard and understood each word as it was uttered. His heart, which seemed momentarily to have stopped, raced suddenly, and a violent trembling took possession of his whole body.

  “I can endure no more,” he told himself. “I must challenge him. God grant that I am strong enough not to show that I am afraid.”

  Thrusting back his chair, he rose and faced the Baron.

  As he did so, he felt a hand laid upon his shoulder, gently pushing him back into his chair: it was Herr Karlin’s.

  “And what does our visitor think of the chances of war?” he asked, speaking very quietly, almost as one might speak to a child. “It is always so interesting to hear the other side in these differences.”

  VI

  The house was very quiet now; so quiet that the catch of Anna’s door, when she opened it, seemed to sound along the entire landing. It was an hour since the Baron had departed. And from Herr Karlin’s room there already came the sound of deep, heavy breathing. Anna paused. Her hair, plaited loosely for the night, fell in a thick rope over her shoulders, and her dressing-gown unbuttoned at the throat showed her white neck. She was wearing little heel-less slippers which made no sound as she moved.

  Behind her in the other bed lay Bertha. She was sleeping. Anna had bent over her, holding the candle and screening it carefully with her hand so that the light should not fall across the sleeper’s face. But Berthe had not stirred, and Anna snuffed out the candle, leaving herself in the darkness of the silent house.

  She went three steps down the soft carpet of the landing, and stopped again. The atmosphere of sleep was so heavy, so muffling, that she felt like an intruder from some other world. Each of the closed doors seemed to challenge her.

  “But he cannot be asleep,” she told herself. “He must be as wakeful and tormented as I am.”

  The bedroom which had been given to Charles Latourette lay at the end of a little corridor which branched off from the main landing. A glass screen cut it off from the rest of the house.

  “I shall be safe,” she promised in her own mind, “once I am behind the screen. Only Charles will hear me then. And he will come to the door of his room and we shall be alone together. He will kiss me again and tell me that he loves me, and then I shall be able to sleep, happy. Soon he will be back here asking if he may marry me. And my father will give his consent. And then every night we shall be together.”

  She had reached the screen, which shone transparent in the darkness, and she pushed open the creaking glass door. After she had opened it she was afraid to close it again as the noise in her ears was loud, betraying. But no one in the household had stirred; the thick, enfolding atmosphere of sleep remained unbroken. Very cautiously she closed the door again behind her. She was isolated now from the rest of the still household. In front
of her stood only the door of Charles Latourette’s room. Her heart was now beating so unbearably that she became fearful for her own safety.

  “I must remain calm,” she told herself. “Otherwise I may be discovered. Once he has put his arms round me again, once I have heard his voice and felt his face to mine, I shall return to my own room, and no one but Charles will know what I have risked to be with him. How could I let him go away without telling him that I would die for him? How could I content myself with a cold farewell before the others?”

  She had knocked twice on his door—the first time it had been so soft and furtive that she upbraided herself for her indecision— before she heard a movement inside the room. Then, just as she was about to knock again, the door opened and Charles Latourette stood there.

  He had not undressed. All that he had done was to remove his jacket, loosen his cravat, and throw himself down upon the bed, He had lain there, watching the bright moonlight and thinking over his own misery.

  “I am not rich enough to marry,” he had told himself a score of times. “I shall never be able to support her.”

  His insufficiency humiliated him.

  “All that I can do is to wait for the train that is to take me away from her.”

  He was still lying stretched out on the bed when he heard Anna’s knock upon the door. He started. Then, with heart pounding, he crossed the room and pulled back the catch. For a moment he stood motionless.

  “Anna!” he said.

  She came forward, timidly it seemed, and held out her hand to him.

  “I only came to say good-bye,” she said. “I could not bear to have you go without saying good-bye.”

  “So you were thinking about me, too?”

  “Oh Charles, how can you doubt it?”

  He had drawn her to him by now and his arms were round her as she had imagined them.

  “I love you, Anna,” he said. “I love you.”

  She closed her eyes with bliss at the words that she had wanted to hear spoken again, and her body remained pressed close to his. She felt his hands caressing her, stroking her hair, passing across her bosom, where the loose gown exposed it. And when he drew her back into the room with him it did not seem possible to her that she should resist.