And at the same time her life was violently torn up by the roots. She was dragged like a seedling from the earth where the young, sensitive tendrils of her life had taken root, and flung down harshly in a strange place which seemed barren and uncongenial. She was unhappy at school. How should it not be so? All the memories, the influences of the preceding years protested against this abrupt immersion in an unfriendly element, this caging and chaining of rules and repressions.
She felt herself alone, lost like a stranger in some fantastic country whose language and mode of life were alike incomprehensible, surrounded by enemies in an atmosphere of suspicion and perpetually lurking, unimaginable dangers.
She felt that the whole world was against her. An immense gulf separated her from her laughing, chattering companions. She was cut off from them as completely and irrevocably as from the strange, pale mistresses who moved, ghost-like, in a chilly aura of authority. Anna was alone; she stood among the crowd in a small black circle of isolation: she was different.
And now into her life there came creeping an intangible depression, a spiritual malaise, a sort of day-time nightmare, very vague and unacknowledged, but threatening at any moment to overwhelm her. She resisted it with stoicism, with the unchildlike hardness that was in her character; but still it left its mark. Something frank and free and gracious in her was lost for ever. Some inner flame that might have burned up strong and vivid as the sunshine, was damped back to a weak flickering gleam. Her independence, the good, firm independence of her youth, began to waver. A sullen look came often to her face.
She did not know what had happened to her. She only knew, obscurely, as children know these things, that outside forces, destructive and uncontrollable, had driven her life out of its proper course: that things had gone wrong with her. And she could only submit. She submitted with the profound, stoical resignation of the very young who must submit to no matter what torment or injustice; because they are in the power of others, because the forces ranged against them are too strong. But her daily life was like an uneasy dream, threatening from moment to moment to become a nightmare in good earnest; at once stupid and dangerous, meaningless and menacing. She was lonely and she was afraid.
In England, where the convalescent home, now a long time in full-swing, was losing some of its novelty, Lauretta conscientiously read through the reports which the headmistress in Lausanne made out for her benefit. They were not very satisfactory. Anna, it appeared, was difficult and inclined to resent authority. She was not a good ‘mixer.’ All the complaints came from the disciplinary side; she was perfectly satisfactory as far as scholarship went.
Lauretta sighed as she read these reports.
‘I’m afraid the child is taking after her father,’ she said. She could not make a more derogatory criticism.
And then, as such things happen, by the purest accident, Anna’s fate was altered.
Lauretta, spending a day in London, encountered an old friend, a certain Rachel Fielding, whom she had not seen for some time. The two women lunched together, and in the course of conversation Miss Fielding mentioned that she had recently started a school of her own on somewhat original lines.
Anna was spoken of, and the trials and difficulties of her education. The ladies of Lausanne, it seemed, were not being very successful. Would Rachel take her? Rachel, intrigued by the fragments of the story which Lauretta poured out over the coffee, her imagination caught by the curious picture of Anna’s lonely, unpropitious childhood, quite emphatically would. So it was arranged.
Rachel Fielding was a big woman of about forty, not at all beautiful, but with a certain vividness. It was a gift she had of intense, absorbing interest in whatever concerned her, a vital, eager enthusiasm glowing in her short-sighted hazel eyes. It made her seem youthful and attractive. Even her walk was eager. She walked quickly, with her head thrust forward a little, and her big, bright, hazel eyes gleaming and questing; and she kept moving her head very slightly from side to side as she walked, as if questing for something.
When Anna-Marie first saw her, she thought that she was like a friendly, Homeric goddess. That was another gift of Rachel’s, of looking like a minor deity in some benevolent pantheon. She dressed richly and with good taste in an unconventional, highly-coloured way, very far from smartness.
An amiable, interested goddess, with a quick intelligence and a vivid intuition, she came forward and took Anna by the hand.
‘You’re going to be happy here; very happy,’ she said, in her clear, quick, musical voice that beat an eager rhythm of its own; rather assertive. There was a strong personal will lurking behind the deistic benevolence.
From the first moment when her bright, questing eyes had leapt upon Anna as upon a quarry, Rachel’s abounding interest had centred in her. She saw at once that here was a worthy object upon which to pour out the ever-brimming vials of her enthusiastic spirit. An object of unusual interest, this tall, grave, slender girl who stood unsmiling in her curious aura of isolation. She saw that Anna was not only aware of her isolation, but proud of it in a slightly defiant way. And she admired her for her dauntlessness.
But at the same time, her large, short-sighted eyes that were so discerning, had taken note of something else in the face of the silent girl. A hard look that covered up a certain blankness; a bitter, hopeless blankness underneath, a blankness of the spirit.
‘There’s something wrong here,’ she said to herself. And indeed it would have been surprising had there not been. Rachel thought of Lauretta, whom she knew fairly well, and looking at the strange, aloof young figure before her, she sighed a little despairingly.
‘I must do what I can for her,’ she thought.
It did not seem easy to do anything for Anna. She was so unapproachable, so shyly arrogant. To all tentative advances she replied so coldly, with a frigid, quiet courtesy that seemed perfectly impassable. And all the time she carried about with her an aura of isolation that was like something tangible, like a black cloak that covered her entirely and which she never took off.
But Rachel, biding her time, ceaselessly watching from a distance, observed two things: first that Anna had an unusual intelligence, and second that she was afraid. For all her pride and independence and her hard-closed mouth, there was fear in her life, a certain wanness in her face, the result of fear and bitterness and helpless bewilderment. Rachel yearned to destroy that look; to restore the beauty of confidence that should have been there by right. But she had to bide her time.
Her opportunity came finally on a bleak February day when the sky was grey and ugly and a scattering of snow powdered the empty flower-beds. Anna was recovering from a mild attack of influenza, and Rachel sent her into her private room to keep warm.
The room was fairly large, and not in the least suggestive of school or school-life. It was the room of a woman of the world, a woman of taste who was not bound by the ordinary shibboleths. Rachel had arranged the room as she wanted it, for her own self. And the result was in keeping with her personality. It was richly coloured and not too tidy: pleasantly warm, and smelling faintly of cigarettes and flowers. There were hyacinths growing in a bowl on the table, and on the floor, standing about three feet high, a scarlet azalea in full blow, a solid mass of blossom.
Anna lay on the sofa, reading and looking about her. Outside the day was cold and dreary beyond words. But she did not look out of doors. Instead, she looked at the room, at the cheerfully blazing fire, and the pure, vivid scarlet of the azalea. She saw the shelves of inviting books, the scattered cushions, the soft-toned Persian rugs, the handsome tapestry hung behind the door, the huge twisted candlestick of white and vermilion lacquer, standing on the floor and holding a candle as thick as a man’s arm, the delicate, sophisticated grace of the Queen Anne bureau, the barbaric-looking gold embroidery flung over a chair, the haphazard sprinkling of semi-precious objects, bowls and ornaments and carvings of carnelian and agate and onyx and ivory and jade.