Good Old Anna

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

And he had answered rather quickly, “You needn’t speak so loud. I hear you perfectly. How long? Oh, I think it’ll be over by October—may be a little before, but I should say October.”

“Mother thinks there’ll be a sort of Trafalgar!”

And then he had answered, speaking a little impatiently for he was very overworked just then, “Nothing of the sort! The people who will win this war, and will win it quickly, are the Russians. We have information that they will mobilise quickly—much more quickly than most people think. You see, my dear Rose,”—he was generally rather old-fashioned in his phraseology—“the Russians are like a steam roller”; she always remembered that she had heard that phrase from him first. “We have reason to believe that they can put ten million men into their fighting line every year for fifty years!”

Rose, in answer, said the first silly thing she had said that day: “Oh, I do hope the war won’t last as long as that!”

And then she had heard, uttered in a strange voice, the words, “Another three minutes, sir?” and the hasty answer at the other end, “No, certainly not! I’ve quite done.” And she had hung up the receiver with a smile.

And yet Rose, if well aware of his little foibles, liked her cousin well enough to be generally glad of his company. During the last three months he had spent almost every week-end at Witanbury. And though it was true, as her mother often observed, that James was both narrow-minded and self-opinionated, yet even so he brought with him a breath of larger air, and he often told the ladies at the Trellis House interesting things.

While Rose Otway sat musing over her beautiful work in the garden, good old Anna came and went in her kitchen. She too still felt restless and anxious, she too wondered how long this unexpected war would last. But whereas Rose couldn’t have told why she was restless and anxious, her one-time nurse knew quite well what ailed herself this afternoon.

Anna had a very good reason for feeling worried and depressed, but it was one she preferred to keep to herself. For the last two days she had been expecting some money from Germany, and since this morning she had been wondering, with keen anxiety, whether that money would be stopped in the post.

What made this possibility very real to her was the fact that an uncle of Anna’s, just forty-four years ago, that is, in the August of 1870, had been ruined owing to the very simple fact that a sum of money owing him from France had not been able to get through! It was true that she, Anna, would not be ruined if the sum due to her, which in English money came to fifty shillings exactly, were not to arrive. Still, it would be very disagreeable, and the more disagreeable because she had foolishly given her son-in-law five pounds a month ago. She knew it would have to be a gift, though he had pretended at the time that it was only a loan.

Anna wondered how she could find out whether money orders were still likely to come through from Germany. She did not like to ask at the Post Office, for her Berlin nephew, who transmitted the money to her half-yearly, always had the order made out to some neighbouring town or village, not to Witanbury. In vain Anna had pointed out that this was quite unnecessary, and indeed very inconvenient; and that when she had said she did not wish her mistress to know, she had not meant that. In spite of her protests Willi had persisted in so sending it.