“Mamsell always gives the same answer and says God will whisper to me what I ought to know. But God never whispers to me.”
“Mrs. Christina talked just like that. She too wanted to know everything. When the maids cast fortunes with candle drippings she was for ever listening to their talk. Then she blushed, laughed and sang and played the piano. Then the men in the timber yard stopped work.”
Anne drew her knees up to her chin.
“Could she sing too?”
Mrs. Füger made a sign of rapture. “Sing? That was her very life. She entered this place like a song, and left it like one. It rang through the house and before we could grasp it, it was gone.”
The little girl did not hear the old lady’s last words. She was gone and suddenly found herself in her mother’s room. She knelt down on the small couch. There hung on the wall the portrait, which she had always seen, but which she now examined for the first time.
The delicate water-colour represented a girl who seemed a mere child. She looked sweet and timid. Her auburn hair, parted by a shining line in the middle, was gathered by a large comb on the top of her head like a bow; ringlets fell on the side of her face. The childish outline of her shoulders emerged from a low-cut dress. Her hand held a rose gracefully in an uncomfortable position.
Anne felt that if she came back she could talk to her about many things of which Mamsell and all the others seemed ignorant. She thought of the daughters of Müller the apothecary, of the Jörgs and the Hosszu families, Gál the little hunchback, of the son of Walter the wholesale linen-draper, the Münster children. All had mothers. Everybody—only she had none.
And then, like a cry of distress, she spoke a word, but so gently that she did not hear it, just felt it shape itself between her lips. Nearer and nearer she bent to the picture and now she did hear in the silence her own faint, veiled voice say the word which one cannot pronounce without bestowing a repeated kiss on one’s lips in uttering it: “Mamma!”
She turned suddenly round. Something like a feeling of shame came over her for talking aloud when there was nobody in the room, nothing but a ray of the sun on the piano.