The Lily Hand and Other Stories (12 page)

She had pegged out the last napkin from the bottom of the basket, and she dared not linger. She had hoped that he would appear at the window for a moment when the song ended, but he did not, and she had still to trim all the lamps, and clean the fish, and make dough for dumplings. She picked up the great basket, and crossed the cobbled yard to the arched door of the entrance, and the flagged passage which led to the kitchen.

There was a wild flurry of footsteps rushing down the staircase, and the swirl of coat-skirts at the foot. Hugo appeared panting in the dark passage, the flute still in his hand. His eyes were wide and bright, his lips parted as much with exultation, she thought, as breathlessness. He had quite gone out of his mind. He cried aloud, without a suspicion of caution:

‘Miss Nanynka, you must come to my room. There is someone there who would like to speak with you.' And he took the basket out of her hands very firmly, and put it down against the wall, and stood back to let her go before him, in the most absolute confidence that she would obey at once. When she hung back, staring at him in consternation, he put out his hand and took hold of her wrist, and urged her with great excitement towards the stairs, and she was certain that he did not fully realize what he had done.

‘But I must not – I have my work to do, I must not be seen above stairs. What can anyone want with me? Herr Meyer, I beg you – I shall get into trouble—'

‘The work must wait,' he said, the words tumbling out of him helter-skelter like the notes out of his flute. ‘You need not mind them, we shall see to that. They do not matter now. You will see! Only come, please come quickly!'

It was all quite mad, and of course would turn out badly, but she was dazed into obedience by his conviction, and she went with him wherever he chose to drag her, her thin little wrist gripped hard in his excited fingers. He towed her headlong up the three flights of stairs, and into his narrow and shabby little room. There was someone standing with his back to the window, so sharply outlined against the light that he was nothing but an outline: short, broad, hunched, with a head sunk into his shoulders, and a cloud of fine, long, straight grey hair that stirred with every motion of that head.

‘The lady is here,' said Hugo, his hand suddenly trembling upon her wrist and his voice so deferential that she stared again, in quickening fright, at this being who could inspire such awe in him. ‘This, sir, is Nanynka.'

The figure in the window moved a little nearer, peering intently at the girl; and gradually through the mists of her fright and bewilderment she saw him more clearly. An old man, in a long, old-fashioned, snuff-stained coat, his hands knit behind his back, his foot tapping testily, the features of his face squat, intelligent and irascible, his eyes, under down-drawn brows, large, lonely and distantly, resignedly kind. He gazed at her for a long time, and did not say a word.

In her uncertainty and apprehension she was dimly aware of Hugo's eager voice pouring into her ears explanations and encouragement of which she did not distinguish a single word. But the old man's foot tapped with increasing irritation, and this sound she heard very clearly.

‘Sing, indeed!' said the stranger, in a deep, abrupt, impatient voice which might well have belonged to a much younger man. ‘You have not left the girl breath enough to speak, much less sing! Did I bid you drag her up the stairs at a run? Sit down now and hold your tongue! She can very well speak up for herself, if you would but let her.'

Hugo subsided meekly upon his bed, and became instantly silent; but when she turned to cast one glance of dismayed sympathy in his direction, she observed by the bright, expectant eyes and the confident smile that he was not at all abashed. He was watching the terrifying old man with eagerness, and appeared to be encouraged rather than mortified by his own summary dismissal into the background.

‘And do you sit down, too, child,' said the old man, and watched her unsmilingly as she seated herself very uneasily upon the extreme edge of a chair. ‘What is your name?'

‘Anna Fiala, sir,' she said in a whisper. ‘They call me Nanynka.'

‘Speak up! Are you afraid of me? I do not bite. The worst I ever do is to rap the knuckles of young idiots who play sour notes.' She heard Hugo chuckle, and marvelled that he should dare. ‘But none of your notes were sour, child, and you are entirely safe with me. Do you know who I am?'

She was not aware that she had heard Hugo utter a name or suggest an identity, but now she found that she had both clear in her mind. Wide-eyed, she whispered: ‘Yes, sir! You are the Herr Direktor Sommerhof, who teaches Herr Meyer the flute.' To her this was certainly the essential, as well as the only familiar part of his many functions and she wondered in some mortification why the old man laughed.

‘I have that honour. Do you think he does me any credit?'

With more confidence she said: ‘When he played “Green Woods” it sounded very pretty. I do not know about music … But I like to hear him play.'

‘That is only fair, for he likes to hear you sing. That is why he brought me here. He promised me a prodigy. I do not find that his ardour was
all
partiality. Do you know, Anna, that you have a very beautiful voice? Who taught you to sing?'

‘No one taught me, sir,' she said, astonished. ‘I have always sung – I like to sing.'

‘You do not belong here in Vienna? You have no parents or relatives here?'

‘No, sir, there is no one now. I lived with an aunt in Döbling, but she died last year and now I look after myself.'

‘And your home? You are country-bred, are you not?' And as she flushed and bit a trembling lip at the suggestion that her rustic origin betrayed itself so readily, he said quite gently: ‘It shows in the complexion, in the clearness of the eye and the candour of the glance – not in any want of grace. You should be glad of it.'

‘My father had a mill in a village in the Eagle Mountains. He was a widower, and had no son to help him, and it did not prosper. He died when I was seven years old, and the mill was sold, and I stayed for a time with my other aunt in Prague, and then I went to Döbling.'

He nodded his head weightily several times, and his long grey hair stood up on his head like thistledown. Then he asked abruptly: ‘Will you sing for me again? Whatever you please.'

She heard Hugo draw a deep breath of delight, but she herself felt for a moment nothing but fright and outrage and a longing to escape. ‘What shall I sing? I know nothing but our country songs. I have no training, I do not know music—'

The two pairs of eyes dwelt upon her intently, the old man's sceptical, patient, considering, the boy's shining with hope and anxiety and unguarded affection. That look of Hugo's dazzled and yet calmed her. She saw his fingers gripping the flute hard, and his lips quivering with the longing to speak, and an extraordinary protective tenderness flooded through her heart and left her washed clean of fear. She could not fail Hugo, who had believed in her and boasted of her. Everything she had was not too much to lay in Hugo's lap. She felt the other song, the secret song, bursting like a flower out of its hiding place. She closed her eyes, and let it well up out of her lips as a spring purls out of the earth. Until that moment only herself and its maker had ever heard it:

The linnet in the garden sings,

So small, so sweet a pipe she raises,

Shy as the fluttering of her wings

And tiny as the listening daisies.

If I should follow, she would fly,

But if I woo her, will she linger,

And stoop from yonder autumn sky

To be the linnet on my finger?

Its brevity, which had once displeased her, seemed now perfection. A pearl is even smaller. When she had shut her lips upon the last limpid note of the tiny, pure, playful melody, she sat for a moment with her eyes still closed, listening to the silence, not knowing if it meant pleasure or perplexity. When she opened her eyes she found she could not see for tears; and when these had slowly cleared, neither the young man nor the old had moved or spoken. Their two faces looked absurdly alike, wide-eyed, still, passionately attentive.

It was a full minute before the Herr Direktor asked in a low grave voice: ‘Where did you learn that song?'

‘You don't know it,' she said, instinctively jealous for her possession, the only thing she had in the world of her very own. ‘You can't know it! It is mine!'

‘No, I have never heard it in my life. That is what is marvellous about it. That is why I asked where you learned it. Yours, you say … very well, but where did you get it? Can one possess this song? And how … how? How is it possible?'

‘Did it please you?' she ventured, frightened by an intensity she could not understand.

‘It pleased me. Both the song and the singer. I would not have believed that such perfection of simplicity was possible except at the end of many subtleties, but you have it, it seems, by nature, or by some communication which I confess I do not understand.'

Hugo, quivering with excitement upon his bed, broke in eagerly: ‘Did I not tell you, sir, that she could sing Barbarina after no more than a month's study? And who knows—'

‘I told you to stop chattering, jackdaw,' said Herr Sommerhof tartly; but the hand he clapped upon Hugo's shoulder lit with the casual brusqueness of affection. It was that gesture, so nearly a caress, that won Nanynka. An old man who could be so moved by her song, and who stood in such a paternal relationship to Hugo, no matter how he chose to hide his partiality behind growls and grumbles, was a man to be trusted.

She jumped up from her chair, pale with resolution. ‘If you will wait a moment, sir, I will bring the song to you. I have it. It was given to me by the man who made it. If you would like to see it, I will show it to you.'

Once out of the room, she flew up the stairs to her attic bed and groped under the mattress for the wooden box. She brought it back to them gravely, held before her in both hands, as though she carried something holy; and before their eyes she took from it a half-sheet of manuscript paper with a roughly torn edge. Both the notation and the words that danced beneath were mysteries and magical to her. She put it into the old man's hand, and watched him carry it to the window, for the ink had faded to a purplish-brown in the ten years since it had been written, and the hand was so deft and tiny that for all its clarity it needed good eyes to decipher it.

He was silent a long while, staring at it, his back turned upon the boy and girl who instinctively drew close together as they waited for him to speak. There was something here which had outgrown the mere issue of Nanynka's voice, and the future uses to which that radiant little instrument might be put. They felt the strangeness of the moment, and watched the slip of paper warily, waiting for a miracle; and in a moment they perceived how reverently the old man held it and how far beyond their understanding was his stillness and silence.

He turned at last, and lifted his eyes from the skipping notes to Nanynka's face. ‘Do you not know, child, what you have here? Did you not realize that it might have a value? Surely when you read what is written here—'

Slow crimson welled out of the folded muslin collar of her dress, and mounted her fair face from chin to brow. She lowered her eyes, and confessed in a whisper: ‘Sir, I cannot read.'

‘Ah! I see! Then that, too, must be remedied. But, then, did you never show this to anyone else? In … how many years? – it cannot be less than six and I think it must be somewhat more!'

‘It is ten years since he gave it to me.'

‘And you never showed it to anyone?'

‘No,' she said almost inaudibly. ‘Never to anyone.'

‘But if you cannot read, how did you learn the words?'

‘From him,' she said, and the memory caused her to smile so suddenly and brilliantly that the little room seemed to shine.

‘Did you know who he was?'

‘No.' She lifted her head, and looked at him, still smiling, for it seemed to her that he would understand. ‘I did not want to know.'

‘Anna, my child, there is more to this than you know. Will you not sit down here, and tell us how this thing happened to you? And then, if you will, I will tell you what it is that you have kept for ten years. Do not be afraid – you will not suffer any loss!'

She sat down obediently, and folded her childish hands in her lap and told them; and now that she had made up her mind, the words came freely.

‘It was when I was seven years old, in the autumn after my father died. I told you they sent me to live with my aunt in Prague, but she had a big family of her own and she did not want me there, and was for ever writing to my other aunt in Döbling to see if she would not take me. I was feeling very strange, and missing my father a great deal. There was a big house near to us, with a beautiful garden like a little park and often I used to slip in there to play by myself. The gatekeeper let me in, but he told me not to go too near the house because the lady had important company staying there, and I must not trouble them. But one day I did go near. I kept in the trees, so that no one should see me, and I saw the house. It was not so big as I had expected, but very pretty, a pink house, with a long room with many windows looking out on the garden, and a laburnum tree just in front of it and a railed terrace. After that I often used to go as near as I dared, because there was almost always music in this garden room. Sometimes there would be the lady singing – she sang like an angel. She was very pretty, with curling dark hair, and she laughed a great deal, and wore soft silk turbans in the new fashion, as it was then, and slender dresses with high waists and little flat shoes. And often there were instruments: harpischord, and flute, and harp. I loved to listen, and especially to the lady. I used to notice everything I heard, and try to copy it, and so it happened that I was often singing to myself when there was no one else in the garden.