Anna (44 page)

The waiting-room at the Presbytery had the extraordinary lifelessness, the deathliness even, of all ecclesiastical parlours. The walls were distempered in blue—Mary's colour—and the flooring was of bare boards. There was a tall deal cupboard; a deal table and four chairs—one, a larger one than the others and with arms, obviously for the priest; and an oleograph of the crucifixion; and the Pope's flag stuck into a bracket on the wall. Apart from that, the room was unfurnished: there was not even a stove or fireplace in it.

While she was sitting there, she questioned herself a score of times as to why she had come. Twice, she rose and went over to the door intending to escape before the priest came to her. But there was always something that restrained her, something that compelled her to remain. She wondered what it was, was mystified by it.

“Perhaps it is the finger of God pointing,” she told herself.

But it was at once more than that; and less. It was the simple authority of those cheerless walls and that bleak furniture that were the replica, of the waiting-room of the convent where she had been brought up. In such an atmosphere, she was a child again: she was not brave enough to disobey altogether.

There was the sound of footsteps. Anna could hear the noise of flat heels on the bare corridors.

“I must prepare myself,” she began saying, “I must be ready to listen to what he is about to say to me.”

Then the door opened and she rose. The priest who stood there was a tall lean man with a blue, unshaven face. His hair was cropped so close that he looked like a peasant.

“It was you who came to me last night?” he asked. Anna nodded.

“I spent last night in prayer,” the priest said. “I asked God to shed some of his light on your darkness, and He made my way clear to me. You have prepared yourself?”

Anna kept her face averted and, when he saw that she did not intend to answer, he continued.

“By giving you a child,” he said, “God has opened your eyes to His mercy. Now, with this other soul that He has placed in your keeping, the door has been opened for you.”

He paused, and Anna raised her head for an instant. Her eyes caught his, and she saw that his were deep-set and piercing.

“You mean?” she asked.

“I mean,” the priest continued, “that you cannot allow this child to be born in the wilderness without the blessing of God upon it. You must do everything in your power to persuade the father to marry you.”

He stopped and stood watching the effects of the words upon her. It seemed he expected her to speak; and, when again she made no attempt to answer him, his earnestness, his anxiety increased.

“You have already asked him to marry you?” he inquired.

Anna shook her head.

“Then you were content with your position?”

“I had no choice,” she said. “He did not ever speak of marriage.”

The priest raised his eyebrows.

“I can hardly believe that I have heard a Catholic make such an answer,” he said.

He paused and drummed with his fingers on the table.

“But my own marriage?” Anna asked. “The marriage that I made in Paris?”

“The lawyers can attend to that,” the priest answered. “It is no concern of the Church. If your present protector was content to take you in such circumstances, it should make no difference to his feelings now.”

“But I did not ever tell him,” Anna answered. “He knows nothing of such a marriage.”

For a moment the priest covered his face with his hands and placed his elbows on the table. Then he rose and stood with his back to the window, facing her.

“When I began listening to your story,” he said. “I was ready to believe that you, a young girl of good family, had been seduced and led astray by someone who was ready to take advantage of your inexperience. I cannot believe that any longer.”

He paused, and Anna rose. She felt ill. She was shaking. His words reached her only dully now. She began to move towards the door.

But the priest had left his position by the window and stood in front of her, blocking the way.

“It is not enough that you should be warned,” he said. “You must be watched and guarded because you are not able to take care of yourself.”

“Let me pass,” she said. “I want to go away.”

The priest stood staring at her.

“Then I can trust you to tell him—everything?” he asked. He emphasised the last word ever so slightly as he spoke.

“I swear it,” Anna told him weakly.

All that she wanted was to get away from him, to return to the safety, the security, of the villa. She wanted to be alone again.

But the priest took no count of her impatience. He ignored it.

“Swear it on this,” he commanded.

He held out a crucifix in front of her: it was a beautiful thing of silver and enamel. She took it in hands that still trembled and kissed the cold surface of the little figure.

“Remember the feel of those wounds upon your lips when you go back,” he said. “Remember it, and keep your heart pure when you confess to him. Come back here to me within a week and tell me what he said to you.”

But Anna was not listening. She had pressed past him and gone out into the empty corridor. She pulled open the heavy door and ran down the steps to the carriage.

As she drove away she turned and glanced behind her. At the top of the steps the priest was standing. The glow of the sunset in the opposite windows dazzled him and he shaded his eyes with his hand as he stood watching her. He did not move until the carriage had reached the end of the street and disappeared around the corner.

She slept little that night. Sleep, when it came to her, was fragmentary and broken: it had the voice, the words, of Father Ignatius in it. She woke up crying. And when, even for a moment, she drifted off, her mind was full of strange, terrible dreams. During the night, too, her fears increased. It was now over a week since M. Moritz had gone and she had not heard from him.

“He is going to leave me,” she kept telling herself. “Now, at this time of all others, he will write and tell me so. I can feel it. Something tells me that he has written already.”

And lying there, she prayed that there would be no letter.

The dawn when it broke into the room seemed at first a relief from all these terrors; and then, as the room grew lighter, it seemed nothing more than the beginning of another day that she dreaded. The figure of Father Ignatius dominated everything. He accused and threatened. But somehow now that she was no longer in that bleak presbytery he seemed less powerful. It was as though, outside the shadow of those walls, his authority stopped suddenly. And then she remembered the crucifix that he had placed before her: she could still feel the hard kiss of the metal under her lips. And she realised that Father Ignatius's power in fact extended beyond the presbytery, beyond the confessional; it stretched out, subtle and penetrating, finding its way into the very centre of her heart.

“Why did I ever go to him?” she asked herself.

She forgot the misery that had driven her there, and thought only of the peace, the security, which she had so violently discarded.

Her only comfort was that the priest knew nothing beyond the fact that she was in trouble. He did not even know her name.

That afternoon, as she walked alone in the garden at the cliff's edge, her feeling of loneliness, her need for someone became intolerable. As she looked about her at the flowers, the little ships in the bay, at a sun-awning on a distant terrace, she seemed the one miserable object on that happy, glowing coast. She admitted to herself that she wanted M. Moritz to return.

And gradually a new idea took possession of her. At first she dismissed it because it seemed unworthy of her.

“I could not bring myself to do such a thing,” she told herself. “It would be too humiliating.”

But it was there, the idea, all the time; and she felt herself gradually succumbing to it.

When at last she had decided, she turned and went hurriedly indoors. She rang the bell and ordered the carriage to be brought round for her. The day was still hot but, when they reached the cliff road, there was a faint breeze blowing. And she found, as she always did when she was out driving, that here among other people she was able for a moment to forget.

She stopped the carriage outside the post office. The place was almost deserted, and her business did not take her long. In five minutes she was back in the carriage again.

To avoid turning the horses, the groom drove straight up the rue Bonaparte and past the station. As she went by the Church of Ste. Véronique she kept her eyes averted. But because of the telegram that she had just sent, she now felt that she was safe from Father Ignatius for ever: she had decided.

And to reassure herself she kept repeating the words that she had just written, “RETURN AT ONCE, I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU,” was the message that she had sent.

The telegram reached M. Moritz the same evening. He was in the best possible spirits at the time. At four-thirty that day he had at last formally obtained possession of the bank that he had so nearly ruined in the process. He was seated in the room of his hotel, an apéritif in front of him; and as he drank, he kept saying to himself: “I am a banker. I am a banker.” The words glided over his mind
like velvet: it was the proudest of all his ambitions that he had now realised. And because of the feeling of well-being that attends success, and because of the pleasant effects of the apéritif, he was for the moment a man at peace with the world.

But Anna's telegram put all the thoughts of his success out of his mind. He stared at the small sheet of inferior paper from the telegraph office spread out across his knees, and his eyes were moist. During the twelve months that they had been together, it was the first utterly spontaneous thing that he had known Anna do.

The meaning of the telegram was obvious. Even though it said nothing, there was only one thing that it possibly could mean. And at the realisation, M. Moritz experienced a sensation which was rare to him: he felt ashamed. He saw Anna's coldness, her unwillingness to be with him, in a new light. He invented explanations flattering to himself. He understood.

“The poor child,” he began saying, “I see it all now. It isn't that she is really cold with me: it is simply that she has been waiting for this moment that she feared would never come. And now that she knows that it is true, naturally she sends for me. Of course, I shall go at once to her. I shall leave to-night.”

On the way to the station he stopped the carriage at the best jewellers he could find; and as he went inside he recalled the
collier
of pearls on the previous trip—the trip to Paris. It had been the peculiar whiteness of her throat that he had been thinking of then, and he had wanted to see the pearls against it. She had scarcely thanked him, he remembered; and it was as much because of the change of heart that her telegram revealed, as because her skin was still as white, that his new purchase pleased him now. But the lavishness of his present—it was a gold and diamond bracelet that might have been made for a doting banker—put all further doubts out of his mind.

“This will surely please her,” he told himself. “It's a collector's piece. It's unique.”

On the journey back to Monte Carlo, however, M. Moritz was moody and distrait.

“How strange it all is,” he began saying. “I see this girl in a crowded hotel, and my heart stops suddenly. I have to speak to her. Then, before I know it, I am entangled. And what is the consequence? Because she is beautiful, I desire a child by her. Something drives me to inflict all the disfigurement of child-bearing upon someone whose duty it is to be beautiful for all time. I do not attempt to understand.”

And because M. Moritz found himself unable for the moment to
lay his finger on the hidden meaning of life, he closed his eyes and slept.

The Church of Ste. Véronique was in darkness, except for the red flicker of the sanctuary lamp. Everything was silent; and in the darkness there was a sense of great space. Before the altar a man was praying.

“Oh, Heavenly Father,” he was saying, “help me to find this woman. Show me where she is hiding that I can go to her. Lead me to her in Thy name. Let me strike the cup of wickedness from her hands, let me remove her from all evil society. Grant that even now it may not be too late.”

He paused, aware that he had spoken the last sentence aloud. The words had sounded hollow and unnatural in the empty church. And now that he had stopped praying he recognised how tired he was; how tired and how hungry. He had not eaten the evening meal that the housekeeper had prepared for him. Instead he had gone straight into the chapel and begun praying. From the way the last gleam of light had gone out of the sky so that only the faint outline of the windows now showed, he knew that he must have been there for a long time.

His head swam a little as he straightened himself, and he was forced to sit there quietly for a moment, his shoulders bent forward, before moving. When at last he got up, his legs, stiff from kneeling, ached under him.

Groping his way across the dark church, Father Ignatius found the little door that led into the Presbytery and closed it behind him. He remembered his bed gratefully and immediately rebuked himself for his self-indulgence when his mind should have been full only of other things.

“She must be somewhere,” he told himself. “Somewhere quite near. And she has need of me. Her soul is in danger, and I must find her.”

He was still repeating the same thoughts as he climbed the stairs towards his high, bare bedroom. “I must sleep only enough to be ready in the morning.”

He was a young priest—under forty; and in his earnestness he was a credit to his college, to his father and to himself. It was only in discretion, in patience and in a willingness to let things flower in their own good time that Father Ignatius was perhaps a trifle short provided.