Love Is My Reason

by Mary Burchell

  “David—” Lady Ranmere had not exactly ignored Anya, but she had certainly addressed her nephew—“I’m afraid Teresa refuses to let things rest until the morning. She insists on seeing Anya again tonight.”

  “Well—” David looked doubtfully at Anya—“if she feels she must—”

  “I will go and say goodnight to her,” Anya offered at once. “Perhaps that is all she wants.”

  David had come with her to the door of the Prestons’ suite, but at that point Celia had come out into the corridor, her lovely face a little pale, and her eyes so cold that Anya wondered if even David noticed them. On the whole, she thought not.

  “You had better stay outside, David,” Celia had said to him. “The fewer people there are, the less likelihood there is of a scene.” And she had glanced at Anya without any friendliness.

  So Anya had gone in alone with Celia, and found Mrs. Preston lying on the sofa in her sitting-room, which was more or less a replica of Lady Ranmere’s sitting-room. Like her daughter, she looked pale, but her eyes were not hard. They were bright and eager, and as her glance rested on Anya, she smiled and held out her hand.

  “I had to speak to you again, darling,” she exclaimed. “There were some questions I wanted to ask—”

  “Mother, you promised me not to get excited again.” Celia spoke as though her mother were a very tiresome, though of course well-loved, child.

  “It is difficult not to be excited when one’s heart is deeply stirred,” Anya said, and she came forward immediately and, taking the outstretched hand of the older woman, she sat down on a chair near the sofa. “Sometimes one is less excited if one is allowed to talk.”

  “Of course—that’s what I say,” Mrs. Preston agreed eagerly.

  Celia made no comment on this, but she drew back slightly, with an aloof expression which said plainly that it was not for Anya to advance any general opinion of that sort.

  “David has told me,” Anya explained gently, “what my father—what Beran—said to him before he died. How he was not really my father, but that I was the daughter of an Englishman.”

  “There is no proof of that,” Celia interjected coldly.

  “If my father—if Beran said it then it is true,” Anya replied, as coldly.

  “Naturally that is what you would wish us to believe.” Celia shrugged. “But he realized he was very ill—perhaps dying—and he saw David was an Englishman, with easily aroused sympathies. It would not be surprising if he made up this story in a moment of desperation. How are we to know that he didn’t even tell you what he had said, and advise you to continue the story on your own account?”

  “Invent what my mother said about the photograph, you mean?” Anya looked her full in the face.

  Celia looked away, but she only shrugged again in reply.

  “But if I had made the story up, I should say my mother identified your brother as my father. No one could disprove it, and it would be a much more effective story. But I am telling you the exact truth. I think one of them probably was my father—but I don’t know which.”

  “But I know,” cried Mrs. Preston, suddenly taking a hand—rather ill-advisedly—in this conversation. “I know you are my darling grandchild—all that is left to me of Martin. Do you suppose there could be anything more convincing to me than the certainty I feel here?” And she pressed her hand against her heart.

  “Mother, you’ve nothing to go on but your own wishes and your overcharged emotions,” Celia exclaimed. “And whatever this girl likes to tell us,” she added, with a glance at Anya which was suddenly one of naked and implacable enmity.

  Even now, as she lay there in the early morning sunshine and recalled the scene, Anya felt the chill of that stony dislike.

  “And yet she has everything on her side,” thought Anya wonderingly. “She is secure and happy and rich and beloved. Why should she hate and fear me, a stranger, with no country, no home, and even a father who is in doubt?”

  But perhaps that too had changed in a matter of hours. For if half the excited words which had fallen from Mrs. Preston in the scene which followed meant anything, they meant that she regarded Anya as her darling granddaughter, however much anyone else might choose to say that no case had been proved.

  It was all terribly exciting and puzzling, and rather frightening, Anya thought, as she got out of bed and began to dress. She wondered, as she had to wonder over each of the simplest processes of her new life, what she was supposed to do with the early part of the day. She could hear the maids outside in the passage, polishing endlessly in the German way, but the sound was reassuring rather than disturbing. To one who had been used to hear sounds of others in the very room in which she lived her life, it was strange to be alone in a room of one’s own, every sound muted by heavy doors and thick curtains.

  The church clock nearby struck eight, and, not knowing if this were considered late or early, Anya presently ventured forth and—since she was slightly afraid of the lift—went down the stairs.

  She remembered the way to the restaurant from the previous evening and, thinking that she might perhaps find David there, she made for it. Before she reached it, however, she came on a smaller room, open now for breakfast, and, looking in, she saw that David’s cousin, the man with the speculative eyes and the knowledgeable smile, was sitting there, pouring out coffee.

  “Hello.” He caught sight of her as she stood there m the doorway. “Come and join me for breakfast. How did you sleep?”

  She came in rather slowly and sat down opposite him at the table.

  “Thank you. Very well. Is David down yet?”

  “No. I’m usually the first. Though why I don’t know. I’m a lazy devil in the mornings when I am at home. But then I keep much later night hours when I’m working. Holidays are different.”

  She considered that and asked gravely, “What is your work?”

  “I’m a theatrical producer.”

  “You mean, you work in the theatre? On a stage?”

  “Yes. Does that sound to you more like playing than working?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I know it is very hard work if you do it well. There used to be a theatre director in the camp He was quite famous once, in Poland. But the Germans took him for slave labor during the war, and at the end of the war there was no place for him to go back to. All his family had been murdered—and, anyway, he had T.B.”

  Bertram looked slightly startled.

  “Where is he now?” he enquired rather gruffly, perhaps dismayed at the fate of even so remote a colleague.

  “I don’t know. He went to the sanatorium more than a year ago. Maybe he is dead.”

  “You’re a cheery little soul, aren’t you?” Bertram frowned. “Can’t you think of something gayer than that to tell me across the breakfast table?”

  She looked surprised. Then she smiled, as she might have done at a child who rebelled against some unpleasant restriction.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot. One always thinks other people know life in the same terms as oneself.”

  “I guess that’s right.” Bertram gave her a reflective grin, and ordered breakfast for her from the hovering waiter.

  “Tell me—” he turned back to her with genuine interest—“was anything settled last night? About your future, I mean.”

  “No. How could it be?” She looked surprised again. “There is nothing to settle. There are lots of human riddles to which there is no answer. Perhaps I am one of those.”

  “I don’t think Mrs. Preston will be satisfied to leave it at that,” Bertram replied drily. “She may insist on claiming you as the daughter of her long lost son. What then?”

  “I don’t know,” Anya said slowly.

  “You don’t know?” He looked at her curiously. “Do you mean you might refuse to accept that?” His tone was incredulous. “You might say ‘no’ to a home and security and comfort and heaven knows what else besides? Oh, no, my dear. No one ever really says ‘no’ to all of that, surely?”
r />   “Suppose it meant unhappiness all round?”

  “Why should it?”

  Anya did not reply immediately, and when she did, she spoke consideringly, as though she had not really marshalled her own ideas yet.

  “Celia does not like me,” she said without rancour. “In fact, she almost hates me. And I think that perhaps, if the positions were reversed, I should not like her either.”

  “Come, that’s handsome of you.” He looked amused. “But once her mother has established you in the household as her granddaughter, Celia would accept the position.”

  “I was thinking so much of that position,” Anya said. But, although he pressed her to tell him just what she meant by that, she refused to be drawn further. And presently he changed the subject and said,

  “Tell me some more about your Polish theatre director. Did he ever say he would have liked to have you in the theatre?”

  “Quite often.” Anya laughed. “Sometimes he even made me learn things and act them for him.”

  “You don’t say?” Bertram pushed away his coffee cup and leaned his elbows on the table, studying her with interest. “So he saw it too, did he?”

  “Saw what?”

  “Never mind. Tell me what he made you learn.”

  “Oh—some Shakespeare in a German version, and some Schiller. Monologues. Nearly always tragic. But then one day he said that I hadn’t really the stature for high tragedy—that was the way he used to talk—but that I had—”

  She stopped, smiled and said, “Are you really interested in this?”

  “Passionately.”

  She raised her eyebrows then, as though he amused her but must not be taken too seriously.

  “Well, then, he said I had a gift for simple pathos, something on the borderline between laughter and tears—”

  “Ah!” exclaimed Bertram, on a note of profound satisfaction.

  “—And he used to teach me odd little sketches, taken from—” she frowned consideringly—“I don’t know what you call it—something where there is a mixture of everything in the programme.”

  “High-class revue or vaudeville. Like Chauve Souris and The Blue Bird in the twenties,” he said almost impatiently. “Go on.”

  “That’s all.”

  “But what did he teach you? Can’t you do something for me?”

  “They are all in Polish or Russian or German. And some of them are not much more than songs.”

  “My God—you sing too?”

  “Not really. Not a good big voice, as in opera. I realize that because we had an opera singer in the camp once—”

  “Yes, I know. She died tragically or was never heard of again or something. Please don’t,” Bertram said firmly. “I’m terribly sorry about whatever happened to her, but I just can’t take any more unknown tragedies at the moment.”

  “On the contrary, she married an American officer,” Anya assured him with a mischievous smile, “and went to the United States and made a fortune.”

  “Come, that’s better! I’ll have another cup of coffee on the strength of that,” Bertram declared. “And you shall tell me what your voice is like.”

  “It’s nothing.” She laughed. “It’s small and rather husky, and I speak nearly as much as I sing.”

  “You do?” He stared at her, reflectively, as though he saw her on a stage, singing her husky songs and acting her little sketches. “Well, one of these days, you shall do something for me. Maybe—” He broke off and shook himself slightly, as though freed suddenly from some sort of spell. Then he muttered, “Let’s wait and see what plans Teresa Preston has.”

  Then David came in. And he too asked how Anya had slept. But not casually, as Bertram had done. More as though it really mattered.

  When he found that she was fully rested and had had her breakfast, he paused only for a cup of coffee himself and then said,

  “My aunt it having breakfast in her own room. She usually does. But she would very much like to speak to you. Would you care to come now?”

  Anya got up at once. But Bertram grinned at her and said,

  “Don’t let my rather dominating Mama talk you into doing anything you don’t want to do. You stick to your guns, whatever they are.”

  “I shouldn’t let her be talked into doing anything she didn’t want to do, in any case,” David observed drily. And then they went away together, and Anya was glad that, whatever the proposed discussion was going to cover, David would be there to help her.

  Lady Ranmere was sitting by the table in her room, fully dressed, but with an air of enjoying the relaxation of breakfast in her room on holiday. She greeted Anya quite pleasantly, but with that slight air of reserve which told Anya, as plainly as if she had said it in words, that she wished the complication of her existence had never arisen.

  Lady Ranmere was far too just a woman to blame Anya for a situation beyond her control. But she did not disguise from herself or anyone else that Anya’s coming had disturbed rather than increased the agreeable contentment of an excellent holiday.

  “Come and sit down, my dear.” She indicated a chair near her, and while Anya sat down, David went and leaned against the side of the window, sometimes looking down into the street, but at no time withdrawing his real attention from what was happening in the room.

  “I know it is much too early to force crises and decisions upon you, when you’re still confused by the tremendous change in your life,” Lady Ranmere said, regarding the still, young figure before her. “But I’m afraid events are rather out of our hands. As you have seen for yourself, my friend Mrs. Preston—” she paused, as though choosing her words carefully—“is both impulsive and emotional. Before she hurries you into something we might all—” she cleared her throat slightly—“regret, I thought you and I had better have a quiet and sensible talk.”

  She looked at Anya, as though inviting her to display all the calm and sense of which she was capable. So Anya said, “Yes, Lady Ranmere,” and tried to look helpful, though she did not really think it at all likely that she would be called on to do anything but endorse whatever course Lady Ranmere already considered to be the best one.

  “It seems there is at least a fifty per cent chance that you are Mrs. Preston’s grandchild.” Lady Ranmere made the statement as she might have pronounced on the weather prospects for the coming week.

  “Yes, Lady Ranmere,” said Anya again, but very softly this time, because, for some inexplicable reason, she wanted to cry at the complete realization that she could be anyone’s grandchild.

  “I must tell you at once that Mrs. Preston refuses to entertain any other possibility. And, unless you yourself choose otherwise, she will probably claim you as her son’s child, and you will find yourself part of a well-to-do household, with a secure background and an indulgent grandmother.”

  Lady Ranmere paused again, but Anya made no comment on this splendid picture.

  “On the other hand, Anya, no one else entirely shares Mrs. Preston’s confidence. And undoubtedly there will be renewed attempts to trace what really happened to Martin Preston.” Carefully she avoided any mention of names in connection with these attempts. “If at some future date it were finally established that you were not Mrs. Preston’s grandchild, after all—”

  She did not complete the sentence, and Anya shivered slightly, as though the cold wind of an alien, indifferent world already blew upon her again.

  “Aunt Mary, don’t frighten her with gloomy prophecies,” David broke in impatiently at this moment. “Tell her right away what our proposition is.”

  “Allow me to take my own time, David,” his aunt replied drily. “I want you to see, Anya, that, tempting though it may seem, the impulsive acceptance of an impulsive offer might not be the happiest answer to your problem.”

  “Yes, I see that, Lady Ranmere,” whispered Anya rather desolately, and she wondered why it was necessary to emphasize how unsuited she really was to accept the infinitely acceptable.

  “On the other hand—�
� said Lady Ranmere, who seemed rather fond of this expression which so admirably saved one from inclining too much to one view or another—“on the other hand, we are all returning to England in less than a week’s time—”

  Anya’s heart was suddenly leaden. But though she gave a startled glance at Lady Ranmere, she somehow managed not to look dismayedly in David’s direction.

  “Obviously we cannot leave you here. Ideally, you should not decide at this early stage to go to live with Mrs. Preston. In the circumstances, David and I are going to suggest that you come back to England with us, as our guest. He will see the British Consul and find out what can be done about a visitor’s visa for you. Now what have you to say to this compromise suggestion?”

  “But—Lady Ranmere—“ Anya knew there were tears in her eyes, and she could only hope they did something to disguise the light of rapture which she felt must be shining there. “What can I say to such generosity? I who have nothing—I am nothing—” She stopped, and this time she did let herself turn to David, with a timid little gesture of appeal and gratitude.

  He came over to her immediately and, smiling, took one of her hands.

  “That isn’t quite an accurate description of you now, Anya.”

  “You may have a full claim to a place in Mrs. Preston’s household,” Lady Ranmere added, with an air of looking facts full in the face. “And I don’t doubt you would be more petted and indulged there than you will be in my house. But I think you would be wise not to take that place until fuller enquiries have been made.”

  “Yes—yes—I am sure you are right. I can’t thank you enough—I don’t know what to say—”

  She stammered out her incoherent gratitude, trying hard to make it sound as though she thought only of the kindness and the secure future. No one—least of all the two people to whom she was speaking—must guess for one moment the real source of her frantic joy.