Good Old Anna

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

The days went on, and to Mrs. Otway’s surprise and bitter disappointment, there came no answer to the letter she had written to the German surgeon. She had felt so sure that he would write again very soon—if not exactly by return, then within a week or ten days.

The only people she told were Major Guthrie’s solicitor, Robert Allen, and her daughter. But though both, in their different ways, sympathised with her deeply, neither of them could do anything to help her. Rather against her will, Mr. Allen wrote and informed his client of Mrs. Guthrie’s death, asking for instructions concerning certain urgent business matters. But even that letter did not draw any answer from the Field Lazarette.

As for Rose, she soon gave up asking if another letter had come, and to Mrs. Otway’s sore heart it was as if the girl, increasingly absorbed in her own not always easy problem of keeping Jervis happy under the painful handicap of his present invalid condition, had no time to spare for that of anyone else. Poor Rose often felt that she would give, as runs the old saying, anything in the world to have her man to herself, as a cottage wife would have had hers by now—with no nurses, no friends, no doctor even, save perhaps for a very occasional visit.

But Mrs. Otway was not fair to Rose; in never mentioning Major Guthrie and the terrible misfortune which had befallen him, she was treating her mother as she herself would have wished to be treated in a like case.

A great trouble overshadows all little troubles. One disagreeable incident which, had life been normal with her then, would have much irritated and annoyed the mistress of the Trellis House, was the arrival of a curt notice stating that her telephone was to be disconnected, owing to the fact that there resided in her house an enemy alien in the person of one Anna Bauer.

Now the telephone had never been as necessary to Mrs. Otway as it was to many of her acquaintances, but lately, since her life had become so lonely, she had fallen into the way of talking over it each morning with Miss Forsyth.

Miss Forsyth, whom the people of Witanbury thought so absurdly old-fashioned, had been one of the very first telephone subscribers in Witanbury. But she had sternly set her face against its frivolous and extravagant use. This being so, it was a little strange that she so willingly spent five minutes or more of her morning work-time in talking over it to Mrs. Otway. But Miss Forsyth had become aware that all was not well with her friend, and this seemed the only way she was able to help in a trouble or state of mental distress to which she had no clue—though sometimes a suspicion which touched on the fringe of the truth came into her mind.

During these morning talks they would sometimes discuss the War. Mrs. Otway never spoke of the War to anyone else, for even now she could not bring herself to share the growing horror and, yes, contempt, all those about her felt for Germany. Miss Forsyth was an intelligent woman, and, as her friend knew, had sources of information denied to the amateur strategists and gossips of Witanbury Close. So it was that the forced discontinuance of the little morning talk, which so often brought comfort to Mrs. Otway’s sore heart, was a real pain and loss.

She had made a spirited protest, pointing out that all her neighbours had the telephone, and that by merely asking any of them to allow her servant to send a message, she could circumvent this, to her, absurd and unnecessary rule. But her protest had only brought a formal acknowledgment, and that very day her telephone had been disconnected.

She would have been astonished, even now, had she known with what ever-swelling suspicion some of her neighbours and acquaintances regarded her.