Good Old Anna

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

All the time she was writing this second letter she felt as if the Censors were standing by her, frowning, picking out a sentence here, a sentence there. She would have liked to say something of the time she had spent at Weimar, but she dared not do so; perhaps if she said anything of the kind her letter might not get through.

There was nothing Mrs. Otway desired to say which the sternest Censor could have found fault with in either country, but the poor soul did not know that. Still, even so, she wrote a very charming letter of gratitude—so charming, indeed, and so admirably expressed, that when the Medical Superintendent at last received it, he said to himself, “The gracious lady writer of this letter must be partly German. No Englishwoman could have written like this!”

There was one more letter to write, but Mrs. Otway found no difficulty in expressing in few sentences her warm gratitude to her new friend at Arlington Street.

She put the three letters in a large envelope—the one for the German hospital carefully addressed according to the direction at the top of the Medical Superintendent’s letter, but open as she had been told to leave it. On chance, for she was quite ignorant whether the postage should be prepaid, she put a twopenny-halfpenny stamp on the letter, and then, having done that, fastened down the big envelope and addressed it to Mrs. Gaunt, at 20, Arlington Street.

Then she took another envelope out of her drawer—that containing Major Guthrie’s bank-notes. There, in with them, was still the postcard he had written to her from France, immediately after the landing of the Expeditionary Force. She looked at the clearly-written French sentence—the sentence in which the writer maybe had tried to convey something of his yearning for her. Taking the india-rubber band off the notes, she put one into her purse. She was very sorry now that she hadn’t done as he had asked her—spent this money when, as had happened more than once during the last few weeks, she had been disagreeably short.

And then she went out, walking very quietly through the hall. She did not feel as if she wanted old Anna to know that she had heard from Germany. It would be hard enough to have to tell Rose the dreadful thing which, bringing such anguish to herself, could only give the girl, absorbed in her own painful ordeal, a passing pang of sympathy and regret.

Poor old Anna! Mrs. Otway was well aware that as the days went on Anna became less and less pleasant to live with.

Not for the first time of late, she wondered uneasily if Miss Forsyth had been right, on that August day which now seemed so very long ago. Would it not have been better, even from Anna’s point of view, to have sent her back to her own country, to Berlin, to that young couple who seemed to have so high an opinion of her, and with whom she had spent so successful a holiday three years ago? At the time it had seemed unthinkable, a preposterous notion, but now—Mrs. Otway sighed—now it was only too clear that old Anna was not happy, and that she bitterly resented the very slight changes the War had made in her own position.

Anna was even more discontented and unhappy than her mistress knew. True, both Mrs. Otway and Rose had given her their usual Christmas gifts, and one of these gifts had been far more costly than ever before. But there had been no heart for the pretty Tree which, as long as Rose could remember anything, had been the outstanding feature of each twenty-fifth of December in her young life.

Yes, it had indeed been a dull and dreary Christmas for Anna! Last year she had received a number of delightful presents from Berlin. These had included a marzipan sausage, a marzipan turnip, and a wonderful toy Zeppelin made of sausage—a real sausage fitted with a real screw, a rudder, and at each end a flag.