The Benefactress. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ only money that is truly pleasant." Then he added suddenly, "Tell me, how comes it that you are not married?"

      Anna frowned. "Now you are growing like Susie," she said.

      "Ach—she asks you that often?"

      "Yes—no, not quite like that. She says she knows why I am not married."

      "And what knows she?"

      "She says that I frighten everybody away," said Anna, digging the point of her sunshade into the ground. Then she looked at Uncle Joachim, and laughed.

      "What?" he said incredulously. This pretty creature standing before him, so soft and young—for that she was twenty-four was hardly credible—could not by any possibility be anything but lovable.

      "She says that I am disagreeable to people—that I look cross—that I don't encourage them enough. Now isn't it simply terrible to be expected to encourage any wretched man who has money? I don't want anybody to marry me. I don't want to buy my independence that way. Besides, it isn't really independence."

      "For a woman it is the one life," said Uncle Joachim with great decision. "Talk not to me of independence. Such words are not for the lips of girls. It is a woman's pride to lean on a good husband. It is her happiness to be shielded and protected by him. Outside the narrow circle of her home, for her happiness is not. The woman who never marries has missed all things."

      "I don't believe it," said Anna.

      "It is nevertheless true."

      "Look at Susie—is she so happy?"

      "I said a good husband; not a Duselfritz."

      "And as for narrow circles, why, how happy, how gloriously happy, I could be outside them, if only I were independent!"

      "Independent—independent," repeated Uncle Joachim testily, "always this same foolish word. What hast thou in thy head, child, thy pretty woman's head, made, if ever head was, to lean on a good man's shoulder?"

      "Oh—good men's shoulders," said Anna, shrugging her own, "I don't want to lean on anybody's shoulder. I want to hold my head up straight, all by itself. Do you then admire limp women, dear uncle, whose heads roll about all loose till a good man comes along and props them up?"

      "These are English ideas. I like them not," said Uncle Joachim, looking stony.

      Anna sat down on the seat by his side, and laid her cheek for a moment against his sleeve. "This is the only good man's shoulder it will ever lean on," she said. "If I were a preacher, do you know what I would preach?"

      "Thou art not, and never wilt be, a preacher."

      "But if I were? Do you know what I would preach? Early and late? In season and out of it?"

      "Much nonsense, I doubt not."

      "I would preach independence. Only that. Always that. They would be sermons for women only; and they would be warnings against props."

      She sat up and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, but he continued to stare stonily into space.

      "I would thump the cushions, and cry out, 'Be independent, independent, independent! Don't talk so much, and do more. Go your own way, and let your neighbour go his. Don't meddle with other people when you have all your own work cut out for you being good yourself. Shake off all the props–'"

      "Anna, thou art talking folly."

      "'—shake them off, the props tradition and authority offer you, and go alone—crawl, stumble, stagger, but go alone. You won't learn to walk without tumbles, and knocks, and bruises, but you'll never learn to walk at all so long as there are props.' Oh," she said fervently, casting up her eyes, "there is nothing, nothing like getting rid of one's props!"

      "I never yet," observed Uncle Joachim, in his turn casting up his eyes, "saw a girl who so greatly needs the guidance of a good man. Hast thou never loved, then?" he added, turning on her suddenly.

      "Yes," replied Anna promptly. If Uncle Joachim chose to ask such direct questions she would give him straight answers.

      "But–?"

      "He went away and married somebody else. I had no money, and she had a great deal. So you see he was a very sensible young man." And she laughed, for she had long ago ceased to be anything but amused by the remembrance of her one excursion into the rocky regions of love.

      "That," said Uncle Joachim, "was not true love."

      "Oh, but it was."

      "Nay. One does not laugh at love."

      "It was all I had, anyhow. There isn't any more left. It was very bad while it lasted, and it took at least two years to get over it. What things I did to please that young man and appear lovely in his eyes! The hours it took to dress, and get my hair done just right. I endured tortures if I didn't look as beautiful as I thought I could look, and was always giving my poor maid notice. And plots—the way I plotted to get taken to the places where he would be! I never was so artful before or since. Poor Susie was quite helpless. It is a mercy it all ended as it did."

      "That," repeated Uncle Joachim, "was not true love."

      "Yes, it was."

      "No, my child."

      "Yes, my uncle. I laugh now, but it was very dreadful at the time."

      "Thou art but a goose," he said, shrugging his shoulders; but immediately patted her hand lest her feelings should have been hurt. And, declining further argument, he demanded to be taken to the Great Vine.

      It was in this fashion, Anna talking and Uncle Joachim making brief comments, that he came to know her as thoroughly as though he had lived with her all his life.

      Soon after the excursion to Hampton Court a letter came that hurried his departure, to Susie's ill-concealed relief.

      "My swines are ill," he informed her, greatly agitated, his fragile English going altogether to pieces in his perturbation; "my inspector writes they perpetually die. God keep thee, Anna," and he embraced her very tenderly, and bending hastily over Susie's hand muttered some conventionalities, and then disappeared into his four-wheeler and out of their lives.

      They never saw him again.

      "My swines are ill," mimicked Susie, when Anna, feeling that she had lost her one friend, came slowly back into the room, "my swines perpetually die—"

      Anna was obliged to go and pray very hard at St. Paul's before she could forgive her.

      CHAPTER III

      The old man died at Christmas, and in the following March, when Anna was going about more sad and listless than ever, the news came that, though his inherited estates had gone to his sons, he had bought a little place some years before with the intention of retiring to it in his extreme old age, and this little place he had left to his dear and only niece Anna.

      She was alone when the letters bringing the news arrived, sitting in the drawing-room with a book in her hands at which she did not look, feeling utterly downcast, indifferent, too hopeless to want anything or mind anything, accepting her destiny of years of days like this, with herself going through them lonely, useless, and always older, and telling herself that she did not after СКАЧАТЬ