Anna (6 page)

“And the balls,” M. Latourette continued. “The balls in Paris are magnificent.”

Anna raised her arms half-way above her head, so that the delicious line of her shoulders was visible.

“After music I love dancing best,” she said. “At my first ballet I thought I should expire, it was so blissful.”

“The Paris ballet is the best in the world after St. Petersburg,” M. Latourette remarked, with the air of a man who knows both.

“I wonder if I shall ever see the Paris ballet.” She sighed. “Perhaps all my life the only ballet I shall ever see will be in Wiesbaden at Christmas.”

M. Latourette allowed his hand to rest on hers for a moment.

“When you are older, when you have come out, then you will see Paris,” he told her. “Everyone there will worship you. You will know what it is to be admired.”

Never, he reflected, had he seen anyone so fresh, so entrancing: she was unlike all the other girls whom he had met. The difference in their ages—he was, he supposed, some six or seven years her senior—allowed him to patronise her a little. It made it easier for him.

But Anna was resentful.

“He too thinks of me as a child,” she told herself. “How can I convince him that I am not?”

She sat there for a moment without speaking, her head thrown back so that she could peer up into the branches. She was aware that he was watching her.

“I doubt if I shall ever see Paris,” she said sadly. “If I marry someone in Rhinehausen, I shall probably remain here all my life. Rhinehausen and Wiesbaden will be all that I shall ever know.”

She cast down her eyes a little under their long lashes so that she could see his face. Her words, however, seemed to have had no effect.

“Do you want to marry someone in Rhinehausen?” he asked lightly.

Anna did not move. She did not immediately attempt to answer the question. Instead she heaved a long, deep sigh.

“It is not what
I
want,” she said at last.

The words as she spoke them were scarcely more than a whisper. She was still regarding him closely, keeping her eyes fixed upon his face. But there was still no sign that he cared, no indication that he was in the least concerned.

“You mean there is someone your father wants you to marry?” he asked.

He had taken up one of the windfalls in the orchard and was turning it idly in his hand.

“Not that exactly,” she said. “It is someone who wants to marry me.”

“Someone who wants to marry you,” he repeated slowly. “And are you in love with him?”

He had dropped his plaything now. His voice—or did she only imagine it had changed?—was light no longer.

“I do not know,” she answered. “He is so … so much older than I am.”

This time the effect of her words was discernible. Charles Latourette drew in his lips a little. She tried hard to imagine that, under the shade of the branches, he had grown pale.

“Why should you marry then?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“There is no one else,” she said. She paused for a moment and added simply: “Besides, he is very kind.”

Charles Latourette had got up. He was standing in front of her now.

“What manner of man is he?” he asked.

“It is the Baron,” she said. “The one you met at dinner.”

Anna liked afterwards to remember that moment as one in which Charles. Latourette gave a little cry—half-despair, half-anguish, and game forward and took her in his arms. Uncoloured by memory, it was, however, less sudden, less spontnaeous.

“No,” he said firmly. “You must not marry him.”

“You …you didn't like him?” she asked.

“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.

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.

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 opened, 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.