Edward Oppenheim - Anna the Adventuress

There was a moment’s silence. Drummond took up a cigarette and lit it.

“The young lady, I presume, told you that her name was Anna,” he remarked.

“It was not necessary,” Sir John answered stiffly. “I was already aware of the fact. I may add that the family is well known to me. The two aunts of these young ladies lived for many years in the dower house upon my estate in Hampshire. Under the circumstances you must permit me to be the best judge of the identity of the young lady who did me the honour, as an old family friend, of dining with me.”

Like most men who lie but seldom, he lied well. Drummond smoked his cigarette meditatively. He remembered that he had heard stories about the wonderful likeness between these two sisters, one of whom was an artist and a recluse, whilst the other had attached herself to a very gay and a very brilliant little coterie of pleasure-seekers. There was a bare chance that he had been mistaken. He thought it best to let the matter drop. A few minutes later Sir John left the room.

He walked out into the Champs Elysées and sat down. His cigar burnt out between his fingers, and he threw it impatiently away. He had seldom been more perturbed. He sat with folded arms and knitted brows, thinking intently. The girl had told him distinctly that her name was Anna. Her whole conduct and tone had been modest and ladylike. He went over his interview with her again, their conversation at dinner-time. She had behaved in every way perfectly. His spirits began to rise. Drummond had made an abominable mistake. It was not possible for him to have been deceived. He drew a little sigh of relief.

Sir John, by instinct and training, was an unimaginative person. He was a business man, pure and simple, his eyes were fastened always upon the practical side of life. Such ambitions as he had were stereotyped and material. Yet in some hidden corner was a vein of sentiment, of which for the first time in his later life he was now unexpectedly aware. He was conscious of a peculiar pleasure in sitting there and thinking of those few hours which already were becoming to assume a definite importance in his mind – a place curiously apart from those dry-as-dust images which had become the gods of his prosaic life. Somehow or other his reputation as a hardened and unassailable bachelor had won for him during the last few years a comparative immunity from attentions on the part of those women with whom he had been brought into contact. It was a reputation by no means deserved. A wife formed part of his scheme of life, for several years he had been secretly but assiduously looking for her. In his way he was critical. The young ladies in the somewhat mixed society amongst which he moved neither satisfied his taste nor appealed in any way to his affections. This girl whom he had met by chance and befriended had done both. She possessed what he affected to despise, but secretly worshipped – the innate charm of breeding. The Pellissiers had been an old family in Hampshire, while his grandfather had driven a van.

As in all things, so his thoughts came to him deliberately. He pictured himself visiting the girl in this shabby little home of her aunt’s – she had told him that it was shabby – and he recalled that delicious little smile with which she would surely greet him, a smile which seemed to be a matter of the eyes as well as the lips. She was poor. He was heartily thankful for it. He thought of his wealth for once from a different point of view. How much he would be able to do for her. Flowers, theatre boxes, carriages, the “open sesame” to the whole world of pleasure. He himself, middle-aged, steeped in traditions of the City and money-making, very ill-skilled in all the lighter graces of life, as he himself well knew, could yet come to her invested with something of the halo of romance by the almost magical powers of an unlimited banking account. She should be lifted out of her narrow little life, and it should be all owing to him. And afterwards! Sir John drew his cigar from his lips, and looked upwards where the white-lights flashed strangely amongst the deep cool green of the lime-trees. His lips parted in a rare smile. Afterwards was the most delightful part of all!..

If only there had not been this single torturing thought – a mere pin-prick, but still curiously persistent. Suddenly he stopped short. He was in front of one of the more imposing of the cafés chantants – opposite, illuminated with a whole row of lights, was the wonderful poster which had helped to make ‘Alcide’ famous. He had looked at it before without comprehension. To-night the subtle suggestiveness of those few daring lines, fascinating in their very simplicity, the head thrown back, the half-closed eyes – the inner meaning of the great artist seemed to come to him with a rush. He stood still, almost breathless. A slow anger burned in the man. It was debauching, this – a devilish art which drew such strange allurements from a face and figure almost Madonna-like in their simplicity. Unwillingly he drew a little nearer, and became one of the group of loiterers about the entrance. A woman touched him lightly on the arm, and smiled into his face.

“Monsieur admires the poster?”

As a rule Sir John treated such advances with cold silence. This woman, contrary to his custom, he answered.

“It is hateful – diabolical!” he exclaimed.

The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“It is a great art,” she said in broken English. “The little English girl is very fortunate. For what indeed does she do? A simple song, no gesture, no acting, nothing. And they pay her. Monsieur is going inside perhaps?”

But Sir John’s eyes were still riveted upon the poster, and his heart was beating with unaccustomed force. For just as though a vague likeness is sometimes borne swiftly in upon one, so a vague dissimilarity between the face on the poster and the heroine of his thoughts had slowly crept into his consciousness. He drew a little breath and stepped back. After all, he had the means of setting this tormenting doubt at rest. She had mentioned the address where she and her sister had lived. He would go there. He would see this sister. He would know the truth then once and for all. He walked hastily to the side of the broad pavement and summoned a fiacre .

“You may sit there and smoke, and look out upon your wonderful Paris,” Anna said lightly. “You may talk – if you can talk cheerfully, not unless.”

“And you?” asked David Courtlaw.

“Well, if I find your conversation interesting I shall listen. If not, I have plenty to think about,” she answered, leaning back in her chair, and watching the smoke from her own cigarette curl upwards.

“For instance?”

She smiled.

“How I am to earn enough sous for my dinner to-morrow – or failing that, what I can sell.”

His face darkened.

“And yet,” he said, “you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all.”

“Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow.”

He turned upon her almost fiercely.

“You know,” he muttered, “you know quite well that your troubles are far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am utterly selfish?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Troubles, my friend,” she exclaimed lightly. “But I have no troubles.”

He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly.

“What a gloomy person you are!” she murmured. “You call yourself an artist – but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little abandon , so little real joyousness.”