Love Is My Reason

by Mary Burchell

  LOVE IS MY REASON

  Mary Burchell

  The heroine of this novel, Anya, is a “displaced person”; a young girl who for most of her life had known nothing but the ugliness and hardship of various refugee camps. Then came the day when her life was strangely linked with an English party visiting Bavaria. David Manworth was the first to wish to help her; his cousin Bertram’s professional eye saw in her possibilities for a stage career; kind Mrs. Preston wanted to make her one of the family; only Celia Preston, with an eye on David, was unwelcoming.

  Returning to England with them, Anya found that even in a secure and prosperous world there can be doubts and anxieties; but in the end she was to attain a happiness greater than she had ever dared to imagine.

  Mary Burchell’s pre-war work for the victims of Nazism has become famous, and her sympathy for the victims of war, so often shown in a practical way in her life, gives a specially warm interest to this novel.

  CHAPTER ONE

  She was standing at the edge of the wood when he first saw her, and for a fanciful moment David Manworth felt she must be some elusive spirit of the place who might vanish if he made too sudden a sound or movement.

  From where she stood it was possible to look down on the medieval town below and the rolling country which surrounded it, and even as he watched her she flung out her thin arms, as though to embrace the rich beauty of the scene. The warm spring breeze which blew, heavily scented, across the flowering uplands of Bavaria flattened her colourless cotton dress against her, emphasizing the beautiful lines of her young figure, and he found himself thinking—almost as though the fact really mattered—

  “Too thin, of course.”

  Then she turned and saw him. And because a startled look flashed into her wide blue eyes, and the gesture with which she smoothed her bright, streaming hair was embarrassed, he instinctively hastened to reassure her.

  “Hello,” he said in his most matter-of-fact way, speaking without thinking in his own language. “Were you—” Then, recollecting himself, he was about to drop into German when she startled him in his turn by replying in a clear, soft, though curiously accented English.

  “Hello,” she said shyly. “Where you too enjoying—this?” Once more, though rather less dramatically this time, a comprehensive gesture took in the scene below.

  “Why, yes.” He drew slowly nearer to her, still feeling that she might suddenly turn and flash away into the woods and be lost to him. And, even then, some curious, inner instinct told him that her going would be a loss.

  “I’m staying in the district,” he offered, because he had to say something to keep her with him. “I came out from England a few days ago. Look, you can see the green roof of my hotel below there.”

  He was standing beside her now, and he pointed out the roof of the Drei Kronen Hotel in the town below them. But her glance did not follow the way he pointed. It remained fixed on him, and after a moment she said, as though to herself.

  “So you come from England?”

  “Yes. Have you ever been there?”

  “I?” She seemed astounded at the question. “But no. Of course not.”

  “I thought you might have.” He smiled and glanced at her with a curiosity he could not suppress. “You speak the language so extraordinary well.”

  “You are very kind.” She smiled too then and flushed with almost childlike pleasure. “I learned it from my mother.”

  “Then she was English?”

  “Oh, no. ‘She was Russian. But she was a teacher of modern languages.”

  “Was she?” Somehow a teacher of modern languages seemed oddly out of keeping with anything so elusive and unusual as this girl. “Then—” he hesitated—“are you Russian?”

  She nodded.

  “But you live here, in Augustinberg?”

  She nodded again, but as though she were not eager to go into that question. He was intrigued, however, and—used to having what he wanted—he pressed his queries further.

  “Show me where you live,” he urged her. “Can we see it from here?” And again he looked down on the town below them.

  For a moment he thought she was going to deny his request. Then, with an odd gesture of defiance, she pointed beyond the winding river to the less crowded part of the town.

  “Do you see the church tower of St Augustin?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, to the right, the line of red roofs?”

  “Yes.”

  “And beyond that, further away from the river, there is a group of building round an open courtyard.”

  “Yes.”

  “That is where I live.”

  “There! But it looks like a barracks.”

  “It was a barracks once. Now it is the home of more than five hundred people. I am one of them.”

  “You are?” He was staggered and curiously embarrassed. “But—I don’t understand. What is the building now?”

  “It is a camp, mein Herr. A camp for displaced persons.”

  Slowly his thought shifted into focus again.

  “Then you are a—displaced person?” Somehow the term was oddly distasteful, particularly as applied to this girl. But she accepted the description without demur.

  “Yes. I am what is called a displaced person. I have no home and no country. Only a Russia which no longer exists.”

  “But—” He frowned, trying to make the facts fit into any of his previous knowledge. “You’re much too young to be a refugee from the Russian Revolution. How did you come to be here?”

  She hesitated, and it struck him that he was showing perhaps an unpardonable degree of curiosity.

  “I’m sorry. Perhaps you don’t want to tell me. Only you are—” he dunged the wording—“I was interested, somehow.”

  She smiled—that lovely fugitive smile which was like a shaft of sunlight across the thin seriousness of her oval face.

  “You are very kind,” she said again, “to be interested.” And he saw she spoke without irony. She meant it. She thought his curiosity friendly and well-intentioned. Which, he supposed a little amusedly, it was.

  “My mother and father fled from Russia before the war,” she explained. “For some years they had been able to compromise—to make the best of a worsening situation. But it was difficult. My grandparents on both sides had belonged to the earlier regime. It was increasingly difficult to earn a living, and even to keep out of the hands of the secret police. They fled to Czechoslovakia.”

  “To Czechoslovakia?” To David Manworth, whose ideas of security were based on a lifetime spent in the political safety of the British Empire, Czechoslovakia—raped twice in a generation by different aggressors—seemed an odd choice of sanctuary. But perhaps these things looked different in different parts of Europe.

  “Yes. I was a baby then, of course. We lived in Prague—precariously, but we lived—” The little shrug indescribably conveyed the impression of one who did not seek to look further ahead than today’s problems. “Then in 1945 the Russians came. And again we fled. We have been refugees ever since.”

  “We?” he queried, because it seemed best to ask conventional questions only in the face of this calm recital of disaster.

  “My mother and father and I. My mother died four years ago. That was in one of the camps in Silesia. It was colder there,” the girl explained unemotionally, “and the shelter was not so good.”

  “My God,” said David Manworth softly. “You mean one perhaps—died of the cold there?”

  “And the weariness and general sickness and the lack of hope,” the girl agreed, but not as though she were asking pity for this state of affairs. This was the way the world—her world—was arranged. She accepted it, because acceptance of the inevitable was something one
had learned in the long, long years.

  “Is it—” he bit his lip involuntarily—“better in the camp where you are now?”

  “Oh, yes. It is crowded, but it is heated in the winter, and the people with whom we share a room, my father and I, are nice. They are an elderly married couple. Polish. Brought to Germany for slave-labour by the Nazis during the war.”

  “I see,” he said. But he knew that he did not. Nothing in all his well-ordered, comfortable existence provided him with a measuring stick for such conditions. He had known crowded camp life during the war, and there had been danger and fear and acute discomfort, of course. But nothing in what he would have called normal life paralleled what this girl was telling him, in that soft, beguiling voice of hers.

  For a moment he even wondered if she were spinning a tale in order to interest or touch him. But the next minute he dismissed the idea. She was so casual about it all.

  Most of the facts were not even remarkable to her, he saw. He had asked for information and she was imparting it. That was all.

  Some people—his aunt, for instance, playing bridge down there in the hotel, or his cousin Bertram or even Celia—would possibly have ended the conversation before now But something—some indescribable feeling compounded of fascination and horrified curiosity—made him go on.

  “Do you mean that four of you live in one room?”

  “It is a big room,,” she assured him. “One divides it with blankets or a cupboard or some cardboard, you know.”

  He didn’t know. He felt it was an affront to all humanity that she did know. But because he was more moved than was at all usual with him, he simply asked abruptly, “What is your name?”

  “Anya,” she said, and she smiled at him slowly, so that the beautiful hollows under her high cheek-bones deepened slightly, and he thought suddenly that it was the loveliest name he had ever heard.

  “Anya,” he repeated And then, realizing incredulously that his voice had held a quality of tenderness impossible to explain or justify, he added briskly, “Mine is David. David Manworth. I’m staying here with a—a party of friends.”

  “You are not alone?” In some strange way she seemed to be withdrawing from him, like a ghost that fades away at cockcrow. And there was something mournful now in the quality of her voice.

  “No, I’m not alone. But does it matter?” And then, to his astonishment, he found himself adding hastily, “I think my aunt would like—“

  “No, no,” she said quickly, before he could even propound whatever plan it was that was forcing itself upon him. “I must go now.”

  “But wait—” He even put out a hand to detain her, but she slipped past him like a shadow. “I want to know where to find you again. You mustn’t go like that.”

  But she had gone, running in and out among the trees, like some light-footed creature born of the woods and the flowers and the late spring evening.

  If he had run after her, he supposed, he could have caught her. At least, it would have mortified him to think anything else, since he had been a notable runner in his college days. But there would have been something ridiculous, even reprehensible, in chasing after an unknown girl through the late spring dusk. And, if she wanted to leave him, she was perfectly entitled to do so. They had talked long enough.

  So he argued with himself as he slowly took the more direct path down to the town. But all the time the impression or her lingered with him—with astonishing clarity, considering the elusive quality of her personality.

  “She is quite lovely,” he said once, aloud, and his thoughts lingered with strange pleasure on the clear, dark blue of her eyes, the delicate charm of that oval face, the tumbled beauty of her disordered bright hair, and the curious allure of her soft red mouth.

  He was surprised to realize how acutely he must have observed her. Even the little hollow at the base of her beautiful throat was a clear point of recollection for him. Too clear, he thought, and frowned slightly, for he was not a man to lose his head over women. Even the women of his own world.

  There had been friendships and flirtations, of course. One did not reach thirty-two and considerable success as a barrister, without a good deal of worldly experience. But the only woman who had ever made a lasting impression upon him was Celia Preston.

  Charming, self-possessed, graceful, with an unerring instinct for quality in everything material, as well as the more subtle ranges of the arts, Celia was everything that the wife of a rising barrister should be. And if the undoubted attraction between them deepened during these weeks in Bavaria, David had little doubt that they would be announcing their engagement on their return to London.

  The prospect pleased him immensely. Any man who married Celia might well be proud and happy. She would grace his home, delight his own people, flatter his family pride, give him the kind of children which—when he thought about it at all—he visualized as completing a good and satisfactory life.

  And if something obscure and inexplicable in him occasionally whispered that there were other indefinable, far-off things to set one’s heart upon, he dismissed the feeling with a sort of humorous impatience, telling himself that this was just the perverse strain in every human creature which tends to ask for the moon, however far away and incomprehensible it may appear.

  As he entered the Hotel Rrei Kronen twenty minutes later, he was thinking less of the girl he had just encountered and more of the companions who made up the party with whom he had come abroad.

  First there was his aunt, Lady Ranmere, the intelligent and still good-looking widow of a well-known brain specialist, who had died the previous year. David had been fond of his uncle—indeed, everyone who had known Sir Henry Ranmere had liked and respected him—and since the death of his own parents when he himself was in his teens, he had regarded the Ranmeres more in the nature of parents than aunt and uncle.

  This deepening of the family tie had not extended to his cousin, Bertram Ranmere, who was something of an enigma. Refusing firmly to follow in his father’s distinguished footsteps, he had turned his undoubted talents to stage production and, to his father’s disappointment and his mother’s pride, took a not unimportant place in the theatre life of London.

  Good-looking amusing and coolly sure of himself, Bertram had a provoking, rather puckish sort of approach to life. David himself had sufficient humour and tolerance to accept his cousin as he was, but he thought Bertram lightweight, and strongly suspected that he often deliberately flouted the views of his immediate associates for the sheer pleasure of seeing how they would take it.

  Their party was completed by Celia and her mother. Mrs. Preston and Lady Ranmere were old acquaintances, and, although their temperaments were too different for them ever to have developed into close friends, the fact was that they had known each other a long while, and as one gets older there is something in this fact which draws people together,

  “Dear Teresa is, of course, a little bit of a poor thing,” Lady Ranmere had once told David good-humouredly, with an air of being a thousand miles removed from that category herself. “Even as a girl she was sweet rather than strong, and obstinate rather than intelligently pliant. But we are as God made us, and there it is.”

  Lady Ranmere was on rather good terms with God and approved of most of His arrangements.

  David—who at that time considered that he was falling in love with Celia—spoke up lazily for her mother.

  “She is very charming, Aunt Mary. And I suppose being widowed twice does tend to make one melancholy.”

  “But, you know—” his aunt had given him a very bright and shrewd glance—“I never thought Teresa minded terribly about losing either of them. Oh, I don’t mean that she didn’t grieve very suitable and wish she had them back again. Separately, of course, not both together. But Teresa’s real tragedy was when she lost her boy.”

  “Did Celia have a brother, then?” He was interested.

  “A step-brother. Martin Deane was Teresa’s son by her first marriage.”
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br />   “And he died?”

  “No one ever knew. He just disappeared. He went off on some holiday abroad and never returned. Lost somewhere in the Balkans, I believe.”

  “But he couldn’t be! I mean people aren’t. Just like that.” David thought poorly of the Balkans, but he felt that this was taking thing too far.

  “Well, he was,” Lady Ranmere declared, with good-humoured energy. “I was a youngish woman at the time, of course, and not very much in touch with Teresa, so I don’t know the full facts and never liked to question her. But I suppose he ran after a girl, or got killed in a duel or overtaken by an avalanche or something.” Lady Ranmere’s admirable common sense did not prevent her from also having a vivid and ingenious imagination. “There are lots of things that can happen to people—in the Balkans.”

  “But not without a trace,” her nephew had objected. “Accidents are reported, enquiries are made through consulates and all that sort of thing.”

  “Well, I suppose they made all possible enquiries. I do remember that Teresa was ill over it at the time. I sometimes wondered—” Lady Ranmere looked reflective—“if there had been some sort of trouble at home first. Something which made Teresa wonder if he chose to disappear.”

  “It all sounds rather sensational,” David had objected.

  “But life is sensational,” his aunt had retorted. “In some ways, much more sensational than fiction.”

  He had not agreed with her at the time. But as he came into the comfortable, though unpretentious, lounge of the Drei Kronen, for some odd reason he remembered his aunt’s words.

  She was sitting there now, the game of bridge over, chatting amiably with Celia’s mother and a middle-aged American couple with whom she had struck up an acquaintance.

  “Hello, my dear.” Her bright, keen eyes smiled at him as he came across to the group. “You know Mr. and Mrs. Corbridge, don’t you?”

  Polite greetings were exchanged.

  “Have you and Celia been out somewhere?” Mrs. Preston smiled faintly at him too. The smile a mother bestows upon a man to whom she is willing to entrust her daughter.