“No. I was alone. Celia wanted to do some shopping. I went out of the town and round by the woods. There are some fine views from the high ground on the south there.”
Mrs. Corbridge said that she did think one sometimes wanted to be all alone with nature, though nothing about her suggested that she often gratified that need.
“A bit melancholy, walking for an hour or two with no one to speak to,” replied Mr. Corbridge who, like so many Americans, enjoyed the company of others.
“I did speak to someone.”
For the life of him, David could not imagine why he had said that, and he would have liked to take the words back. Only his aunt asked immediately,
“To whom? Were you practising your German on some of the natives? Or did you team up with some other tourists?”
“Neither. The girl I spoke to was a Russian.”
Both the Americans looked suitably grave at the mention of the enemies of democracy.
“Russian? But you can’t speak Russian,” objected David’s aunt.
“No, of course not. She spoke English.”
“An English-speaking Russian, hiking in the Bavarian Uplands. It sounds improbable,” declared Lady Ranmere.
“I didn’t say she was hiking.” Her nephew smiled, for the hearty-sounding word applied to his elusive companion could hardly have been more incongruous.
Mrs. Corbridge observed here that there were times when one wondered what the Russians were at. Even the best of them, she added broad-mindedly.
“What was she doing, darling?” Lady Ranmere enquired, and for a moment her glance lingered affectionately but penetratingly on her nephew.
“She was standing at the edge of the wood, looking down on the town below.” He was not aware that his tone subtly conveyed the reconstruction of a scene which had had significance for him. “I spoke to her. And she told me she was a—a displaced person, living in some barracks on the other side of the river.”
“Oh, poor thing!” exclaimed Lady Ranmere. But before anyone else could add anything to that, Celia entered, creating a diversion which was, for varying reasons, welcome to all of them.
At twenty-five, Celia Preston was tall, slender, and with that indefinable quality called poise. She had grey eyes which could look sleepy, but which missed very little, an exquisite complexion, and smooth, impeccably dressed fair hair. Perhaps her outstanding quality was her serene coolness. Some men found this attractive; David among them.
She kissed her mother now, smiled at David and politely greeted the others. And when her mother—who thought Celia superseded in interest all other subjects of conversation—asked eagerly, “What did you buy, darling?” she smiled with faint indulgence and said,
“Only one or two souvenirs of the less aggressive variety, and a rather lovely knitted sweater. One of the shops had a display of work done by the displaced persons. It seems there is a sort of camp for them in the town.”
“Why, how funny! We were just talking about them when you came in. David met one,” exclaimed Mrs. Preston, rather as though she were speaking of an unusual but harmless type of animal.
“David did?” Celia’s cool grey glance rested on him for a moment. “How was that?”
He explained briefly. And Mrs. Corbridge, who, like many of her countrywomen, was kindness itself when it came to the practical relief of distress, said,
“Now isn’t that just fine, to think one can do something? You must tell me where the shop is, Miss Preston, and I’ll go there first thing tomorrow and buy some sweaters for my two daughters. I do think it’s a wonderful thing if these poor souls can do some useful work and be paid for it.”
“Perhaps your girl knits?” Lady Ranmere looked reflectively at her nephew.
“Perhaps,” he agreed shortly, for he felt vaguely irritated. Anya knitting seemed as much in character to him at that moment as the idea of a wood-nymph scrubbing. But then he told himself not to be a fool, and that if his young discovery did knit and sell her work, good luck to her. He would see to it that his womenfolk benefited her in their shopping.
The conversation changed then, and he thought, with a touch of relief, that no one had noticed his inexplicable interest in the unknown girl.
He was wrong, however. For much later that evening, when he and Celia were lingering over their after-dinner coffee, while the others returned to their bridge, Celia said thoughtfully, “You were somehow worried about that D.P. girl, weren’t you, David?
For a moment he thought of laughing off the subject impatiently. But a sort of eagerness to speak once more of Anya stopped him.
“I don’t know that ‘worried’ is quite the term.” He made that sound casual. “But I admit I was shaken by the miserable existence she described. And she was a nice little thing. One couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.”
He knew, with a slight sense of shame, that he was not describing his reactions truthfully. But if he were to speak of Anya at all, he must do so in terms Celia would accept. A nice little thing who one pitied was quite in order. A strange, elusive ghost of a girl who caught at one’s heart was not.
“One is sorry for anyone who is homeless and wandering on the face of the earth,” Celia replied, with quite unwonted emotion.
“Why, Celia—” he was astonished—“you said that almost as though you felt the tragedy personally.”
“Perhaps I do.” With a slender, well-manicured finger she traced a nervous pattern on the tablecloth. “I’ve sometimes wondered if Martin ended up in one of those dreadful camps. Destitute and too proud to come home. Or suffering from loss of memory or—or something like that.”
“Martin?”
“My step-brother. Did no one ever tell you about him?”
“Why, yes. My aunt mentioned him once. But somehow I imagined he disappeared too long ago for you to remember him.”
“Oh, he did,” Celia admitted. “But blood is a curious thing, David. Not to have known him doesn’t make him unimportant.”
“No, of course not!”
“I’m not going to pretend I grieve or worry about him often. But sometimes something makes me think of him.” She was silent for a minute, and because he was oddly touched by this unfamiliar side of Celia he was silent too. Then she went on, “I was only about four when he went away. Mother was absurdly young when she first married. Seventeen or something like that. And Martin was the only child of her first marriage. I think he was at college when she was left a widow and married again.”
“Then he was about twenty when you were born?”
“Yes. He would be about forty-five now if—if he were alive. But—” she gave a slight shrug, as though to cast off her own foolishness—“it’s silly to talk like this. If he were alive he would surely have turned up long ago.”
“I think you can assume so, my dear,” David agreed. “Tell me, what was he like? Did you ever see a photograph of him?”
“Why, of course.” She looked surprised. “Have you never noticed that Mother wears a photograph of him in that old-fashioned fob brooch of hers? It’s so clumsy I sometimes wish she wouldn’t. But I suppose it’s an understandable piece of sentiment.”
She smiled then, with an air of cool indulgence which was more like the Celia he knew. Grieve she might for a lost brother, but nothing would induce her to wear any reminder of him that might conflict with her ideas of elegance.
“I have noticed it,” David admitted. “I always supposed it was your father as a young man.”
“Oh, no,” said Celia, and one somehow felt that she would not have allowed her father to be party to such a lapse of taste.
“I see.” He smiled. “And because of Martin you felt a sympathetic interest in my Anya?”
The moment he had said that, he knew he should have used a different phrase. “The D.P. girl,” or “the poor little thing I mentioned.” To call her “my Anya” had given her an identity, and a most unwelcome sort of identity in Celia’s eyes, he saw.
But she said quite p
leasantly, “Anya? Is that her name? How did you know?”
“I asked her and she told me,” he replied briefly.
“Oh—yes?” she said, and he wondered why he had ever supposed Celia was warmly interested in Anya. Then, after a faintly uncomfortable pause, Celia went on, “You know, if you really want to help her, you could possibly arrange for her to get a domestic job.”
“ A domestic job?”
“Yes. Some of these poor things make quite good servants if someone will have the patience to train them.”
“I daresay you are right,” he said rather stiffly, trying not to feel furious at the condescending goodwill with which Celia made her suggestion. “But I’m not specially likely to see her again, I suppose.”
“Well, I suppose not,” Celia agreed. And suddenly everything was pleasant and friendly between them again.
During the next few days, David was not aware that he looked out specifically for the girl he had met on the hillside. There was some agreeable sight-seeing to do, and they motored out into the surrounding country on several days. But, without knowing it, he did glance with special attention at people he passed in the narrow streets of the town. And once he even hurried to overtake a thin, shabby girl whose figure seemed momentarily familiar.
When he came up with her, however, he saw that the hair which was gathered under her coloured scarf was coarse and dark, and there was nothing elusive or enchanting about the heavy face she turned upon him.
By the end of the first week, he would have said that Anya had almost slipped from his mind. And then, early one evening—when the others had gone on ahead to their rooms and David came in alone after garaging the car—he became aware that some sort of commotion was taking place in the usually quiet and decorous lounge of the Drei Kronen. In a gesticulating group stood an excited chambermaid, a couple of waiters, and the manager himself, all more or less talking at once.
It was, perhaps, the angry repetition of the word “Polizei” which drew David’s attention, for the police are not often openly invoked in the lounge of a well-conducted hotel. And then, as he glanced across, the manager suddenly stepped to one side, disclosing, to David’s astonished and disturbed gaze, Anya, standing there twisting her thin hands together, but looking, in spite of her shabbiness and her obvious fear, somehow contemptuous of the gesticulating Teutons.
Without pausing for thought, David came over at once and, addressing the manager in a peremptory tone, asked. “What’s the trouble here?”
“Meester Manvorth—” the manager, immediately respectful, dropped into his serviceable, though heavily accented English—“it is of no importance. Just one of the D.P.’s—displaced persons, you say—from the camp on the other side of the river. Maria caught her hanging around the corridors. One must have care. They are all thieves. But the police will attend to it. All will be arranged.”
At the further mention of the police, the fear in the girl’s face deepened, but she gave no other sign of having understood. Nor did she make any sort of appeal to David. She just stood there and looked at him, her eyes dark blue in her white face.
David was never quite sure what prompted his next words. But he found himself saying coldly.
“There is some mistake, I think. The lady is a friend of mine. She came to see me.”
If he had been in a mood to smile, the abject change in the manager’s attitude would have amused him.
“M-mein Herr, I cannot tell you—I apologize—I could not know. Maria here—” The manager shot a furious glance at the now open-mouthed chambermaid who had involved him in such embarrassment with one of his most valued clients. “If the lady had explained—again I apologize—”
“Very well.” David gave him a curt nod. “Mistakes happen, but this was an unfortunate one. Let us have no more fuss, however.” And, putting out his hand, he took Anya’s cold fingers in his. “Come, we’ll sit over here and talk.” Like magic the others faded away. But not until he had found them seats in a quiet corner of the empty lounge did David look rather sternly at the girl before him and say drily, in English, “And perhaps now you will tell me what you were doing, hanging about the hotel corridors.”
“But what you said, mein Herr.” Leaning forward, she addressed him with childlike simplicity. “I—I came to speak to you.”
“To me? But why? And why didn’t you ask for me at the desk, in the ordinary way?”
“I—I didn’t know how to ask for you.”
“I told you my name.”
“But I remembered only D-David,” she explained timidly, and he found himself wishing that it did not give him such curious pleasure to hear her say his name like that.
“Well—” insensibly his tone softened—“why did you want to speak to me, Anya?”
“There was no one else.” She made a strange little gesture, inescapably suggestive of emptiness. “And I am in great trouble.”
For a startled and distasteful moment, he wondered what awkward story was about to be unloaded upon him. And then something about the still loneliness of her figure smote him.
“What is it?” he asked, more gently than he usually spoke.
“It is my father, mein Herr. He is very ill. But he will not have the camp doctor because he is a German and my father despises the Germans. The other people in the room, they have their own troubles. I think my father is dying. And I have no one—no one else in all the world.”
“My dear, I’m terribly sorry. But—” he hesitated—“what did you think I could do? I mean—why did you come to me?”
A little flicker of light seemed to pass over her wan face at that, and she looked for a moment as though she glimpsed something bright, beyond the drab horizon of her daily life.
“You smiled at me, that evening on the hill,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And you spoke to me—kindly.”
And then suddenly, on the last word, her voice broke and, without even bothering to put her hands over her face, she began to cry. Slow, cold tears which trickled down her face and fell bleakly on her faded cotton frock.
David was not a man to be easily moved, and, like most Englishmen, he was usually made uncomfortable by any open display of emotion. But something in this girl’s deep and simple tragedy transcended all ordinary experience. And that broken little reference to his very passing kindness hurt in a way that was almost physical.
“Don’t,” he said gently, and he found himself offering her his own immaculate handkerchief. “Don’t cry, child. I’ll do what I can to help you. What do you want me to do?”
She dried her eyes at that, and looked at him over the handkerchief.
“Would you come and see my father, mein Herr?”
“If you think it would do any good, certainly. But I’m not a doctor, you know.”
“But my father will listen to you,” she declared with conviction.
“You think so?” He smiled faintly. “I don’t speak any Russian, I’m afraid.”
“But he speaks French.”
“Well, then, I daresay we can manage in French.”
“And to you he might also speak German. Not to the officials. He pretends he does not understand them.”
He sounded, David could not help thinking, a somewhat difficult customer. But he had promised this girl to do what he could, and so he said,
“Wait a moment while I leave a message at the desk, and I’ll come with you.” Then, faintly put out at having to make the next query, “I suppose I shall be allowed into the camp. I mean—there’s no—regulation against outsiders coming in?”
“I shall explain.”
He wondered somewhat what form her explanations would take, but forbore to pursue that further. Going over to the desk, he scribbled a note to his aunt, merely saving that he had gone out and might not be in for dinner. Then, ignoring the curious glance of the desk-clerk, he accompanied Anya out of the hotel.
“Shall I get mv car?” he enquired.
“That would be nice.” She gave him a p
leased smile. “And a car impresses them at the gate,” she added naively. So they walked across to the garage, and a few minutes later they were driving towards the river in David’s Bentley.
Tragic though her mission was, she could not, he saw, help being intrigued and excited by the handsome car. Once or twice she ran an admiring finger along the edge of the leather work, and she even gave a slight laugh of pleased astonishment when he pressed a lever which made the window slide down out of sight.
“Do that again,” she begged. And, touched at the feeling that she was really very young still, he obligingly made the window go up and down again to please her.
“Now you must direct me,” he told her, when they had crossed the main bridge of the town. And, as though recalled to the seriousness of their errand, she proceeded to give grave directions.
In less than ten minutes they arrived in a drab, dusty road, bordered on one side by a high-walled building from which the paint was peeling.
“This is it,” she said. And with something between curiosity and misgiving, he turned his car in under the archway she indicated.
Immediately a man in uniform emerged from a nearby doorway, and, leaning from the window, Anya addressed him in such a thick Bavarian dialect that David could not follow her. For a moment the man looked doubtful. Then, glancing at the handsome car and the Englishman who was driving it, he shrugged and raised the wooden bar which acted as a barrier across the entrance.
They drove on, and into a dreary-looking quadrangle which had once perhaps been grassed over, but where now only a few coarse tufts of dusty grass struggled to exist. At a half-whispered word from his companion he turned left, and a moment later they stopped before an open doorway from which six or eight children rushed out, wide-eyed and interested.
“Lock the car,” Anya instructed him briefly, and then she spoke to the children in a language he took to be Polish. They all wagged their heads virtuously and apparently swore solemnly to touch nothing. Then Anya led the way into the building and up a flight of stone steps.
Love Is My Reason Page 2
