Anna Read online

  To-night, however, as Anna passed the study she heard the sound of voices. There was her father’s, slow and mumbling and contentious. And raised above it was the voice of the Baron Krantz. A loudly-spoken, assertive man, he repeated everything that he said; it was as though by saying things a second time he established a kind of authority for the first remark.

  “It is written by Jews for Jews,” he was saying. “It stinks.”

  There was a pause.

  “It stinks,” he said again. “Jews write it. It is for Jews.”

  Outside; in the gloom of the hall, Anna removed her hat and stood peering into the long mirror. She looked pale, very pale and delicate.

  “Perhaps I am going into a decline,” she thought. “Perhaps when the spring comes I shall not be here.”

  The notion excited her. When she was dead they would find her diary, she told herself, they would discover too late this rare human being whom they might have known. They would remember her and say: “To think that she was brought up here in Rhinehausen.”

  She went slowly upstairs to her bedroom. Her younger sister was there already, in front of the dressing-table. The child was changing her frock for dinner. Her plump, innocent-looking shoulders were bare, and her elbows dimpled as she straightened them. Anna sat down upon the corner of her own bed and regarded her.

  “Poor Berthe,” she reflected. “She is too young yet to understand anything. She does not even want to live. She will be content to spend all her life in Rhinehausen.”

  The girl in front of the mirror began to brush out her hair; it was thick and heavy and flaxen. Anna’s own hair was as thick. But it was gold, not flaxen, and it fell farther below her waist when it was down. Anna had seen men turn to admire it as she passed.

  “The Baron is downstairs,” Berthe told her over her shoulder.

  Anna remained on the edge of the bed, dangling one foot over it.

  “He is always here,” she remarked at last. “It is the food he stays for. He will eat too much, and get a little drunk and talk about his first wife.”

  “You used to like him,” Berthe answered. “You’ve always been his favourite.”

  “His favourite! Anna shuddered.

  “Do you think I care anything for being his favourite? He still thinks that I am a child, I tell you. He strokes my head.”

  She threw her arms up suddenly above her head and uttered a deep sigh.

  “Merciful heaven,” she asked, “shall I never escape from this? Shall I ever be free?”

  Berthe did not answer immediately; she was used to these moods of her sister.

  “Perhaps you’ll marry,” she suggested. “Then you will be free.”

  “I shall never marry,” she answered. “Men are too vulgar. They are gross. I shall go into a convent. I shall shut myself away.”

  She rose from her bed as she said it and went over to the dressingtable. Beside her sister, her own paleness worried her. She decided that she would put some rouge on her cheeks before she went down to dinner. Even if it was only the Baron who was to be there, she saw no reason why she should look so wan, so wraithlike.

  The Karlins dined well. Meals in that household were taken seriously. They were eaten with a straightforward German appetite—not licked and sampled as in France. Hühnersuppe and Hühnerbraten appeared on the table twice a week. And Herr Karlin, with his napkin up to his chin, ate with a conscientious single-mindedness of purpose. By the end of the meal he was usually wiping his forehead as well as his lips. But, compared with the Baron, he was a comparatively light feeder.

  To-night, the Baron was at his most affable, conspicuously so. As soon as Anna entered, he rose and kissed her hand. He bowed very low, so that his face grew flushed, and the veins throbbed visibly on each temple. Even his eyes protruded. Then, when he recovered himself, the wrinkles of fat across the back of his neck stood out again in a sharp pink line above his collar. But, in a way, Anna was pleased that it should have been her hand that he had kissed. The Baron was jealous of his society and did not squander it. With the exception of the Karlins there was no house in Rhinehausen that he visited. Apart from them, he lived severely alone in all the magnificence of his widowerhood.

  “If others could see us now,” Anna reflected, “they would know then how much at ease we are in the Baron’s company. They would see how differently we live from other people.”

  Then Berthe came into the room after her sister, and the Baron kissed her hand as well. But he paid less attention in doing so. He did not bend forward this time, but drew her hand up to his lips instead. In saluting Berthe he was merely being affable and condescending to a child. He even smiled in Anna’s direction while Berthe’s hand was still to his lips.

  Because Frau Karlin was dead, Anna occupied the seat at the end of the table opposite her father. Frau Karlin had been fair, too, like her daughter. Before her marriage she had been a Mademoiselle Latourette, pretty as only Frenchwomen can be. She had been high-spirited and difficult. And during the years in Rhinehausen she had talked incessantly and longingly of her native town of Alsace, and of the life that had always been so full there, so gay. It was Herr Karlin’s private grief that Anna should have taken after her so closely, that at heart she was more French in fact than German. On those evenings when she hunched her shoulders and pushed her wine-glass idly away from her and sighed, and asked if they were never going into Düsseldorf again, Herr Karlin could almost imagine that it was his Marie as a young bride who was still sitting there. Only, mercifully, Anna was without Marie’s accent. That playful, helpless fashion in which she struggled with even the most ordinary of German words had once seemed one of the most irresistible of her charms. But somehow that same accent on the tongue of a woman who had grown thin and weary and homesick for her country had eventually seemed less enchanting.

  The Baron ate boldly and a trifle noisily. There was a fine command about his performance. He was a rock of a man, who sat bolt upright upon his chair, and did not interrupt his diet by conversation. Simply and tremendously, he ate. And for some reason even Herr Karlin was silent to-night. Usually, at this time in the evening, after a second or third glass of hock, he opened and expanded: the Frankfürter Zeitung was quoted freely and with embellishment, and the air became thundering and dramatic with wars and policies and alliances. This evening, however, Herr Karlin sat back in his chair, crumbling his bread between his fingers. For a moment he looked fixedly at Anna. “How like the Marie I married, she is,” he thought. “She sits on a chair as though she had just alighted on it.” Then he looked away from her to the Baron, and back again to Anna. And finally he nodded his head as though thinking of other things, and went on crumbling his bread between his fingers.

  The meal at last was over. Herr Karlin and the Baron sat on at the table in silence as though oblivious of each other’s company. They had the air of men preoccupied with their own affairs. Occasionally the Baron would stir a little and shift his weight upon the chair; and every time he moved, Herr Karlin would look up as if half-expecting him to say something. But the Baron would only re-settle himself and remain as he had been before, his large hand toying with the stem of his wine-glass and his eyes fixed vacantly on the doorway of the conservatory opposite to him.

  From the drawing-room, where the girls had gone, there came the sounds of the piano. It was Anna who was playing. There were only a few pieces that she knew, all of them by Chopin. She played them slowly and with considerable emotion. Often she would keep her foot on the soft-pedal for entire movements on end, as though it was only in muted notes that she could express the unappeaseable anguish of her soul. When she mis-hit a note, or found that there was no one listening, she would sigh a little and allow her fingers to stray idly up and down the keys, not attempting to play anything. And finally she would close the piano, telling herself that she was in no mood for music. But to-night she played on, her eyes held by the pale image of herself in a mirror at the far end of the room.

  In the dini
ng-room Herr Karlin began to beat time with one finger.

  “She plays beautifully, my Anna,” he said.

  The Baron did not reply immediately: he bowed his head for a moment in acknowledgment and then, pushing his chair back from the table, he crossed his legs and loosened his waistcoat a little.

  “I cannot understand what you mean by suggesting that I am too old for her,” he said. “A man is only in his prime at fifty.”

  Herr Karlin drew at his cigar before answering. It was obvious that both men had now reached the topic which hitherto they had been avoiding.

  “I have told you before, Baron, that it was only an observation,” he said. “You have my full permission. So far as I am concerned, I should be proud. I should be happy.”

  “And Anna?”

  “It is for her to decide. Entirely for her. She has always been free. Quite free.”

  Herr Karlin closed his eyes for a moment. Since the Baron had first spoken of the matter his feelings had undergone many changes. At first he had felt angry and resentful. He could not help remembering the way the Baron’s hands, sooner or later in the evening, usually strayed across the fair sheen of Anna’s hair—an innocent avuncular hand up to that moment it had always seemed—and he was shocked. It was unthinkable that this man who had known Anna from infancy should now actually be thinking of marrying her. But the mood had gradually passed. The Baron had always been his friend. And even now, with this testing of the friendship, he remained so. Slowly, the solid worth of the man reimposed itself—his wealth, his title, his position. And his character. Above all things his character. Men were not born like that nowadays, Herr Karlin consoled himself; men who would mourn one woman for thirty years and then turn instinctively to the household of their oldest friend when the idea of remarriage came upon them. Besides, the more one looked into it, the more suitable the match appeared. The Baron was rich enough to indulge her. Anna could have at once all those things that Marie had hankered after—and had never ceased talking about. Perhaps the difference in age would mean no more than that Anna would accept his authority, simply and without question. If she were to marry a young man, Herr Karlin trembled to think what would happen: within a year or two at the outside she would be ruling him.… But the decision, he reminded himself, lay entirely with Anna: he would make no attempt to coerce her. And if she chose to throw away a title, a house almost large enough to be called a Schloss, and a husband whose family name was in the history books, it was her own affair and no one else’s.

  But the Baron was speaking again.

  “I should like it to be soon,” he was saying. “While the weather keeps good for the honeymoon. I do not like being kept waiting.”

  Herr Karlin spread out his hands.

  “That also is for Anna to decide,” he said.

  The Baron thrust out his underlip and blew a cloud of smoke into the air above his head.

  “We shall go to Italy,” he said. “To Florence. It was to Florence that I went with my poor Hermione.”

  Herr Karlin nodded.

  “Anna is a very sensible girl. She will understand,” he said.

  The Baron was already pulling at the bow of his cravate, and his face was a little flushed. He uncrossed his legs and placed his hands on the edge of the table to push himself up.

  “I think I shall speak to her now. This very night. My mood is right. All women are very susceptible to mood.”

  Herr Karlin rose obediently.

  “I shall take my little Berthe into the conservatory,” he said. “Then you can speak to Anna alone.”

  But the Baron shook his head emphatically.

  “No,” he said. “It is in the conservatory that I shall speak to Anna. It is more suitable. The flowers will make it more romantic. Besides”—here the Baron abruptly threw away the butt of his cigar and brushed the specks of ash off his waistcoat—“it was in a conservatory that I made my first proposal.”

  In the drawing-room, Herr Karlin was seated in his large chair, his feet resting upon a footstool. On the rug at his feet Berthe was sitting, her head against his knee. Herr Karlin’s arm lay lightly upon her shoulders. He held a fold of her muslin dress in his fingers and teased it with the same idle motion with which he had crumbled bread between his fingers at dinner. Now that it had actually happened, now that the Baron was out there in the dusk of the conservatory with Anna beside him, he found himself disliking the idea again. She was altogether too like the young Marie whom he had married for it to be tolerable. Herr Karlin, in fact, was jealous.

  Berthe turned for a moment and looked up at her father. He had lit his large china pipe again and was sucking at it absorbedly. Seeing him above her, remote somehow and aloof, she felt like a child again.

  “I think our Anna is unhappy,” she remarked at last. “She is pining.”

  Herr Karlin removed his pipe for a moment and sat tapping the stem against his teeth.

  “pining?” he asked. “For what?”

  “It is change that she wants,” Berthe told him. “She doesn’t see enough people.”

  She paused, wondering whether she had said too much, wondering whether her father would relapse into one of his sullen moods in which he found refuge when the household worried him. But Herr Karlin was still smoking steadily, the same absent look in his eyes. And she resumed.

  “She was wondering,” Berthe continued, “if perhaps you would send her to Paris for a change?”

  “Paris!”

  Herr Karlin spoke with the contemptuous emphasis of a man forced by circumstances to utter a word which otherwise would not have been heard upon his lips.

  “Why should she want to spend her time in Paris?” he asked.

  “Or Italy,” Berthe added apologetically. “It is only that she wants to travel. We thought of Paris because our cousins are there.”

  Herr Karlin continued to play with the ruffles of muslin between his fingers. His expression of vexation had vanished. He was smiling.

  “She is too impatient,” he said. “She is only seventeen, remember. Soon she will be able to travel all she wishes if she chooses.”

  “If she chooses what?”

  Berthe’s eyes were very bright now: she was watching him closely. Herr Karlin noticed suddenly how like Anna she had become.

  “How much do these children know,” he wondered; “how much have they noticed?”

  And he became cautious and guarded with her, as he so often was when he was speaking with her sister.

  “We shall see,” he said slowly. “We shall see.

  “But I do not understand,” Anna was saying. “I simply do not understand.”

  The Baron passed his handkerchief across his forehead. It was very hot in the conservatory and the musky scent of the flowers was overpowering. It made him feel faint and a little sick.

  “It is because I have known you for so long that I now ask you,” he said. “It is your beautiful nature that makes me. I have watched it grow before my eyes.”

  “And you really mean …?”

  “That I wish to marry you.” The Baron interrupted her. “Yes, I mean that. I give you half of everything in return for your hand.”

  This was a moment, Anna recollected, at which many women, young girls especially, lost their heads. In one way or another they betrayed themselves, revealed, helplessly and shamefully their youth and their inexperience. She drew back a little so that her face was concealed. In her own mind she was perfectly assured and self-possessed.

  “But you cannot expect that I should give you an answer now,” she said softly. “I had never really thought of marriage: it had not entered my head.” She paused. “Give me time to think, and you shall have my answer. Next week perhaps or the week after. I cannot say at the moment. I shall need to pray over it.”

  “There is nothing to wait for,” the Baron protested. “I am ready, I tell you. Quite ready. We could get married next month.”

  He came forward as he was speaking and held out his arms towards h
er. “You know me already, Anna,” he said. “I am your friend.”

  “He is going to kiss me,” Anna reflected. “At all costs, I must stop him. It would be horrible, quite horrible to allow his lips on mine.”

  She drew back a little, and shrunk from him.

  “But it would also be very interesting,” she reconsidered. “I should know then what it would be like.”

  The Baron, however, did not approach any nearer. He stood there, his arms still spread out appealingly towards her.

  “I am ready, Anna,” he repeated. “Quite ready.”

  Anna opened her eyes the merest trifle. Through her long lashes she regarded him.

  “He is frightened of me,” she thought deliciously.

  But the thought alarmed her.

  “Perhaps he has no intention of kissing me,” she realised, “and then I shall never know.”

  Watching him carefully, she swayed for a moment, and then with a little gasp, she slid forward into his arms.

  The Baron was quite unprepared for what had happened. Half-fainting himself from the heat and from the scent of the flowers, he was not quick enough to save her. Before he could stretch out his arms, she was already slipping out of his grasp. He went down on to one knee to support her, and she remained resting there. Her eyes were closed and her breathing seemed for the moment to have stopped. But her colour, her lovely youthful colour, had departed hardly at all.

  The Baron looked down at her and then gently, very gently, he kissed her on the brow. She did not stir. The Baron looked round him again, cautiously; guiltily this time. Then, seeing that he was still not observed, he kissed her again—on the lips, on the closed eyelids, on the hair. First peering furtively in the direction of the drawing-room, he kissed her on the throat, on the neck, on the smooth, white bosom which showed through the opening of the pretty dress. It seemed to him as he did so that a slight tremor, a passing shudder, ran through her almost as if she were conscious. But when he looked down at her, he saw that her eyes were still fast closed, and her breathing was imperceptible. His heart was hammering. He realised that, in a moment, what self-control was still left to him would be gone. Placing one more frantic kiss upon her lips, he turned away.