The Devourers Part 50

"Yes," said Anne-Marie, and took the violin-case in her arms. The Professor looked at her a long time. Then he said:

"See that you put on warm gloves to go out; it is snowing." He turned away quickly and left the room.

Nancy put her arm round Anne-Marie.

"Oh, darling, you forgot to thank him!" she said.

Anne-Marie raised her eyes. She held the violin-case tightly in both her arms. "How can one thank him? What is the good of thanking him?" she said. And Nancy felt that she was right.

"Where are my gloves?" said Anne-Marie. "He told me to put them on. And where is Fraulein?"

Fraulein had gone. She had been sent home in a cab after the second piece, for she had not a strong heart. Bemolle, who had been weeping copiously in a corner, stepped forward with the other violin-case in his hand.

Now they were ready. Anne-Marie was carrying the Guarnerius and the flowers, so Nancy could not take her hand. The men in uniform saluted and unlocked the doors, throwing them wide open. Then Anne-Marie, who had started forward, stopped. Before her the huge pa.s.sage was lined with people, crowded and crushed in serried ranks, with a narrow s.p.a.ce through the middle. At the end of the pa.s.sage near the doors they could be seen pus.h.i.+ng and surging, like a troubled sea. Anne-Marie turned to her mother.

"Mother, what are the people waiting for?" she asked.

Nancy smiled with quivering lips. "Come, darling," she said.

"No," said Anne-Marie; "I will not come. I am sure they are waiting to see something, and I want to wait, too."

As the crowd caught sight of her and rushed forward, she was lifted up by a large policeman, who carried her on his shoulder and pushed his way through the tumult. Anne-Marie clutched her flowers and the violin-case, which knocked against the policeman's head with every step he took.

Nancy followed in the crush, laughing and sobbing, feeling hands grasping her hands, hearing voices saying: "Gebenedeite Mutter!

gluckliche Mutter!" And she could only say: "Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!"

Then they were in the carriage. The door was shut with a bang. Many faces surged round the windows.

"Wave your hand," said Nancy. And Anne-Marie waved her hand. Cheers and shouts frightened the plunging horses, and they started off at a gallop through the nocturnal streets. Nancy put her arm round Anne-Marie, and the child's head lay on her shoulder. The Guarnerius was at their feet.

The flowers fell from Anne-Marie's hand on to the Professor's old black case, that was like a shabby little coffin. So they drove away out of the noise and the lights into the dark and silent streets, holding each other without speaking. Then Anne-Marie said softly:

"Did you like my concert, Liebstes?"

She had learned the tender German appellative from Fraulein.

"Yes," whispered Nancy.

"Did I play well, Liebstes?"

"Yes, my dear little girl."

A long pause. "Are you happy, Liebstes?"

"Oh yes, yes, yes! I am happy," said Nancy.

XXI

Before a week had pa.s.sed Nancy had discovered how difficult a thing it was to be the mother of a wonderchild, and had grown thin and hara.s.sed by the stream of visitors and the deluge of letters that overwhelmed their modest apartment in the Vinohrady. As early as eight o'clock in the morning rival violinists walked beneath the windows to hear if Anne-Marie was practising, and how she was practising, and what she was practising. As they did not hear her, they concluded that she practised on a mute fiddle, and were wrathful and disappointed. By ten o'clock Lori, the smiling maid, had introduced a reporter or two, an impresario or two, a mother or two with a child or two, and none of them seemed to need to go home to luncheon. Questions were asked, and advice was tendered. "How long did the child practise every day?" "Two or three hours," said Nancy. "Too much," cried the mothers. "Too little," said the impresarios. "At what age did she begin?" "When she was between seven and eight." "Too young," said the mothers. "Too old," said the impresarios. "How does she sleep?" asked the mothers. "What fees do you expect?" asked the impresarios. "Why do you dress her in blue?" asked the mothers. "Why not in white or in black velvet?" "Why don't you cut her hair quite short and dress her in boy's clothes, and say she is five years old?" asked the impresarios. "How old is she _really_?" "Does her father beat her?" There seemed to be no restraint to the kind and the quant.i.ty of questions people were prepared to ask.

Meanwhile the fame of Anne-Marie had flashed to Vienna, and she was invited to play in the Musikverein Saal. They said good-bye to the Professor with tears of grat.i.tude, and left--taking away with them his best violin and his only a.s.sistant, for Bemolle was to go with them and carry the violin, and run the messages, and see after the luggage, and attend to the business arrangements. This last duty neither Fraulein nor Anne-Marie, and least of all Nancy, was capable of undertaking. Bemolle himself was nervous about it, but the Professor (who knew as much about business as Anne-Marie) had coached him.

"All you have to do is to count the tickets they give you, and the money they give you. And there must be no discrepancy. Do you see?"

Yes, Bemolle saw. And so that was what he did, everywhere and after each concert. He counted the tickets, and he counted the money that was given him very carefully and lengthily, while the smiling manager stood about and smoked, or went out and refreshed himself; and it was always all right, and there was never any discrepancy anywhere. So _that_ was all right.

The great hall of the Musikverein was filled for Anne-Marie's first concert. It was crowded and packed for her second, and third, and fourth. A blond Archd.u.c.h.ess asked her to play to her children, and Anne-Marie's lips were taught to frame phrases to Royal Highnesses, and her little black legs were trained to obeisance and curtsey. Then Berlin telegraphed for the Wonderchild, and the Wonderchild went to Berlin and played Bach and Beethoven in the Saal der Philharmonic. Two tall, white-haired gentlemen came into the artists' room at the end of the concert. Solemnly they kissed the child's forehead, and invoked G.o.d's blessing upon her. When they had left, Nancy saw Bemolle running after them and shaking their hands. Nancy said: "What are you doing, Bemolle?"

The emotional Bemolle, who, since Anne-Marie's debut, pa.s.sed his days turning pale and red, and always seemed on the verge of tears, exclaimed: "I have shaken hands with Max Bruch and with Joachim. I do not care if now I die."

And always at the end of the concerts crowds waited at the doors for the child to appear. Anne-Marie pa.s.sed through the cheering people with her arms full of flowers, nodding to the right, nodding to the left, smiling and thanking and nodding again, with Nancy nodding and smiling and thanking close behind her. Sometimes the crowd was so great that they could not pa.s.s, and Anne-Marie had to be lifted up and carried to the carriage buoyantly, laughing down at everybody and waving her hands.

Then there was a rush round the carriage door. Nancy, crushed and breathless, tearful and laughing, managed to get in after her, the door banged, and off they were, Anne-Marie still nodding first at one window then at the other, and rapping her fingers against the gla.s.s in farewell.... At last the running, cheering crowds were left behind, and she would drop her head with a little sigh of happiness against Nancy's arm.

"Did you like my concert, mother dear? Did I play well, Liebstes?"

That was the hour of joy for Nancy's heart. The concerts themselves turned her into a statue of terror, enveloped her with fear as with a sheet of ice. While Anne-Marie played, swaying slightly like a flower in a breeze, her spirit carried away on the wing of her own music, Nancy sat in the audience petrified and blenched, her hands tightly interlaced, her heart thumping dull and fast in her throat and in her ears. If the blue dream-light of Anne-Marie's eyes wandered round and found her, and rested on her face, Nancy would try to smile--a strained, panic-stricken smile, which made Anne-Marie, even while she was playing, feel inclined to laugh. Especially if she were at that moment performing something very difficult, spluttering fireworks by Bazzini, or a romping, breakneck bravura by Vieuxtemps, she would look fixedly at her mother, while an impish smile crept into her eyes, and her fingers rushed and scampered up and down the strings, and her bow swept and skimmed with the darting flight of a swallow.

Nancy, watching her and trying, with ashen lips, to respond to her smile, would say to herself: "She will stop suddenly! She will forget.

She cannot possibly remember all those thousands and thousands of notes.

She will let her bow drop. The string will break. Something will happen!

And if my heart goes on hammering like this, I shall fall down and die."

But nothing happened, and she did not die, and the piece ended. And the applause crackled and crashed around them. And the concert ended, and soon they were alone together in the flower-filled, fragrant penumbra of the moving carriage.

"Are you happy, mother dear?"

"Yes, yes, yes! I am so happy, my own little girl!"

In the gentle month of May they went to London.

London! Nancy's father's home! London! Close to Hertfords.h.i.+re, where Nancy had lived the first eight years of her life.

On board the Channel steamer Nancy, with beating heart, full of tenderness and awe, pointed out the white cliffs to Anne-Marie. "That is England."

"Yes," said Anne-Marie, "I know."

"You must love England, darling," said Nancy.

"We shall see," said the Wonderchild, who was not prepared to love by command. Fraulein was bubbling over with reminiscences. It was in Dover that Nancy's mother had come to meet her twenty-four years ago. They had had tea and sponge-cakes in the train. They had bought an umbrella somewhere, because she had left hers on the boat, and it was raining.

So it was to-day, raining drearily, heavily on the sad green landscapes as the train ran through Kent and towards London.

They went to a hotel, close to the hall where Anne-Marie was to play.

And all the way driving to it Bemolle wept, with emotion at being in London, and with emotion at not being in Italy; for in a little village at the foot of the Appenines, his old mother still lived, following him with anxious letters while he rushed across Europe carrying the violin for Anne-Marie.

The first London concert was to be the week after their arrival. The manager, pink-faced and blue-eyed, came to the hotel to talk about the programme.