Anna (2 page)

“You are otherwise satisfied as to your state of grace,” the priest persisted.

There was a weary conscientiousness in his voice as he addressed her: it was as though he were driving himself in the execution of a duty which no longer charmed him.

Anna grew suddenly alarmed.

“What can he suspect” she wondered. “What is it that he knows about me?”

But Father Julian was as always, without any individual or
personal enlightenment. He was merely being obedient. On the previous afternoon, just as he had spread his red, snuff-stained handkerchief over his face in readiness for his siesta, he had been forced to rouse himself to receive his Bishop. This alarming visitor, a lean, bitter man in his early fifties, had stepped down from his carriage and had proceeded to put him through his paces. Like a Colonel come up to the front line, he had cross-examined his curate on every phase of his administration. But it was the confession that had exercised him most deeply: the idea of a desultory or un-discriminating confession was deeply shocking to him. “Probe!” his last words had been. “Probe deeper and yet deeper until the truth is revealed. Probe!” It was this probing that Father Julian was now engaged on.

“What you have confessed,” he said accusingly, “are no more than scruples. They are trivial and unworthy of God's attention. Have you no deeper faults—thoughts or desires that you would hide from the Virgin?”

For a moment Anna raised her hand to her face in alarm. It appeared that this old man of a sudden had grown marvellously percipient. He might have been walking about inside her mind. But to confess now was unthinkable.

“Nothing I can name, Father,” she replied quietly. “Nothing that troubles me.”

The Saints, it seemed, must have made just that sort of confession.

Father Julian was silent again for a space. Then he continued in the same husky tone of accusation.

“Charity, my child,” he said. “Do you remember charity?”

Her heart leapt at the words. To ask her on this of all days, when she had just given alms to the beggar!

“Oh yes,” she replied lightly. “I'm very charitable. I am really.”

The answer suggested a method to Father Julian by which the whole tedious interrogation could be ended. This was evidently a moment at which to administer what the Bishop at his most bitter had described as a “salutary shock to the frivolous.” He folded his clasped hands still tighter and began to pronounce.

“My child,” he said. “Your vanity is evidently not limited to the dresses that you wear. It goes deeper. Into the very soul itself. Vanity of the soul is evil and must be corrected. When I command you in the name of your Saviour to declare your imperfections, you can find none. Accordingly I must impose an onerous holy duty upon you. You will say ten Hail Marys nightly and will repeat slowly and aloud an act of contrition. At your next confession I shall examine you again.”

And Anna, kneeling there in the half dusk of the dusty confessional, bowed her head and whispered the words, “I will be obedient, Father.”

Outside, evening had already begun to fall. It had still been late afternoon when she had entered the Church but, by now, the light had changed. The sun, setting somewhere over France beyond the Rhine, was filling the air with a pale, tenuous gold and the shadows were lengthening. Anna began to feel sad. The moment of evening always affected her in this way—it was a relic of childhood that she had never entirely discarded.

And the sadness served to revive her other sorrows. The forlorn uneventfulness of her whole existence suddenly descended upon her. Not until next week was anything due to happen. And even then it was only tea with the daughter of a retired Major at Kirchen, a plain, dull girl of twice her age. There would be the ride there, admittedly. For half an hour, once they were beyond the outskirts of the town, she would be able to take the reins in her own hands. But it was something that would have to be done secretly. Her father disapproved of it. She enjoyed driving. It stimulated her, released all her thoughts, so that for a space at least she could be free and become someone different—someone who had lived, and known strange men and seen foreign capitals. Someone whose name was on other people's lips.

Then, quite suddenly, she remembered Father Julian's severity, and the penance that he had imposed on her, and she became miserable again.

Her father's house was large and dark-looking. Even at midday, nightfall seemed already to have come inside. Flush on to the street, it rose sheer from the narrow pavement to its sharp, gabled roof, three storys above. Only a porch of Gothic stone and iron-work broke the monotony of the front. But the porch was notable. It was one of the glories of Rhinehausen. Of no special antiquity, but obviously extremely costly, it promoted the house at a single move into a gentleman's residence. It had class.

As Anna entered the hall, the stillness of the house seemed to choke her; it was like going into a tomb, a spacious, well-ordered tomb.

“I shall suffocate,” she told herself. “I shall die, I cannot breathe in my own home. …”

The thick carpet, with its soft moss-like texture, that swallowed up one's footsteps, the brown velvet hangings on the walls, like perpetual autumn merging into winter, the dense curtains, the fragment of tapestry suspended on the stairs—all these combined ingeniously together to deaden every sound of life.

But it was not these alone that made the house so silent. It was Herr Karlin. He was a nurseryman, a seed-merchant. By day he worked in the bare barracks that was his office, surrounded by the huge wooden bins of his precious seeds. And the din in the office was colossal. One floor below a dryer thundered with the intoxicated clatter of old cog-wheels and loose bearings; overhead a pulley-shaft that drove the sifter whipped and thundered as soon as it was set in motion, and in a small building outside the great wheel of the water-mill added the confused uproar of angry, thrashed-up water.

When he returned home in the evenings, Herr Karlin therefore demanded quiet. With his feet up on a high stool, and with his favourite pipe—an enormous pot-bellied china thing with a view of the Matterhorn painted on it and an ornate silver hood—he read his paper. He ceased to be a seed-merchant and became a man of the world instead. He universalised himself. The paper that he read was the
Frankfurter Zeitung,
and it was as full of foreign policy as a Chancellery.

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.