He turned to Anna, and said rapidly in German: “The man who wrote these letters is a sergeant. He’s a very intelligent fellow. As you see, he writes quite long letters, and there are a lot of little things that I find it well worth my while to make a note of. In fact, as I told you before, Frau Bauer, I am willing to pay for the sight of any good long letter from the British Front. I should much like to see some from officers, and I prefer those that are censored—I mean blacked out like these. The military censors so far are simple folk.” He laughed, and Anna laughed too, without quite knowing why. “I should have expected that Major whose mother died just after the war broke out, to be writing to your ladies. Has he not done so yet?”
“The news has just come this very day, that he is a prisoner; but they do not yet know where he is imprisoned,” said Anna eagerly.
“That is good news,” observed her host genially. “In spite of all my efforts, I could never obtain that dratted Major’s custom. But do not any of the younger officers write to your young lady, in that strange English way?” and he fixed his prominent eyes on her face, as if he would fain look Anna through and through. “I had hoped that we should be able to do so much business together,” he said.
“I have told you of the postcards——” She spoke in an embarrassed tone.
“Ach! Yes. And I did pay you a trifle for a sight of them. But that was really politeness, for, as you know, there was nothing in the postcards of the slightest use to me.”
Anna remained silent. She was of course well aware that her young lady often received letters, short, censored letters, from Mr. Jervis Blake. But Rose kept them in some secret place; also nothing would have tempted good old Anna to show one of her darling nursling’s love-letters to unsympathetic eyes.
Alfred Head turned to his wife. “Now, Polly,” he said conciliatingly, “you asked me for what I am paying.” He took up the longest of the letters off the table. “See here, my dear. This man gives a list of what he would like his mother to send him every ten days. As a matter of fact that is how I first knew Mrs. Tippins had these letters. She brought one along to show me, to see if I could get her something special. Part of the letter has been blacked out, but of course I found it very easy to take that blacking out,” he chuckled. “And what had been blacked out was as a matter of fact very useful to me!”
Seeing that his wife still looked very angry and lowering, he took a big five-shilling piece out of his pocket and threw it across at her. “There!” he cried good-naturedly—“catch! Perhaps I will make it up to the ten shillings in a day or two—if, thanks to these letters, I am able to do a good stroke of business!”
Anna looked at him with fascinated eyes. The man seemed made of money. He was always jingling silver in his pocket. Gold was rather scarce just then in Witanbury, but whenever Anna saw a half-sovereign, she always managed somehow to get hold of it. In fact she kept a store of silver and of paper money for that purpose, for she knew that Mr. Head, as he was now universally called, would give her threepence over its face value if it was ten shillings, and fivepence if it was a sovereign. She had already made several shillings in this very easy way.
As she walked home, after having enjoyed a frugal supper, she told herself that it was indeed unfortunate that Major Guthrie was wounded and missing. Had he still been with his regiment, he would certainly have written to Mrs. Otway frequently. Anna, in the past, had occasionally found long letters from him torn up in the waste-paper basket, and she had also seen, in the days that now seemed so long ago, letters in the same hand lying about on Mrs. Otway’s writing-table.