The Devourers Part 52

XXII

"Anne-marie, the King wants to hear you play!"

"The King? The real King?"

"Yes."

"Not a fairy-tale king?"

"No."

"The King who was ill when I had a birthday-cake long ago?"

"Yes."

"And that I made get well again?"

"Oh, did you, dear?" laughed Nancy. "I did not know that."

"I did it," said Anne-Marie, with deep and serious mien. "I made him get well. Do you remember the seven candles round my cake?"

"I heard of them. You were seven when you were at the _Gartenhaus_; and I was away from you." And Nancy sighed.

"And you know about the birthday wishes?" asked the eager Anne-Marie.

"The Poetry says:

"The heart must be pure, The Wish must be sure, The blow must be one-- The magic is done!"

"What terrible lines!" said Nancy.

"Fraulein did them, from the German," said Anne-Marie.

"What is the blow?"

"The blowing-out of the candles. You may only blow once. And 'the Wish must be sure.' You must not change about, and regret, and wish you hadn't. Fraulein told me it would be safest to make a list of all my wishes beforehand. So I made a list days and days before my birthday.

They were to be seven things--one for each candle. There was a white pony, and a kennel for Schopenhauer, and a steamer to go and fetch you home in, and a lovely dress for Fraulein, and a gold watch for you, and something else for Elisabeth, and another dog for me, and to go to the theatre every day, and--"

"There seem to be more than seven things already," said Nancy.

"Well, they were most beautiful. Especially the pony and the steamer....

And then you wrote about the King."

"I remember," said Nancy.

"You said he was ill, and that he was your papa's King, and that he was good and forgave everybody: whole countries-full of bad people! And you wrote that I was to say a prayer, and ask G.o.d to make him well."

"I remember."

"Well, I didn't, I said to G.o.d: 'Wait a minute!' because next day was my birthday, and I had the cake with the seven Wishes. I thought first I would just give up the kennel, and wish _once_ for the King to get well.

So I did it, and blew out one candle; then I gave up the present for Elisabeth, and wished for the King again. Then I thought I could do without the dress for Fraulein. And without the theatre.... And then I let the steamer and the pony go too. And I blew out all seven candles for the King!" Anne-Marie folded her hands in her lap. "So that's how I made him get well."

"How nice," said Nancy.

"And now I am going to see him, and to play to him," said Anne-Marie dreamily. "It is very strange." She raised her simple eyes to her mother. "Do you think I ought to tell him about my having saved him?"

"I think not," said Nancy. "It is much nicer to have saved him without his knowing it."

So Anne-Marie did not tell him.

... But he knew. "I know that he knew!" sobbed Anne-Marie in the evening of the great day, trembling with emotion in her mother's arms. "I saw it in the kindness of his eyes. And mother! mother! I think that was why he kissed me."

XXIII

The Piper piped tunes into Anne-Marie's ear, tunes that she had to hum, and to sing, and to play; tunes that enraptured her when she created them, and hurt her when she forgot them. So Bemolle had to write them down. Everything she heard wandered off into melodies, melted into harmonies, divided itself up into rhythms. Mother Goose rhymes and Struwwelpeter were put to music, and all the favourites in Andersen's Marchen--the Princess and the Mermaid, the Swineherd and the Goblins--corresponded to some special bars of music in Anne-Marie's mind. "She has the sense of the Leitmotiv," said Bemolle, with awestruck eyes and oracular forefinger.

It had been arranged that Bemolle should have his mornings to himself for his own compositions. He had, two years before, by dint of much sc.r.a.ping, paid five hundred francs to secure a good libretto for his much-dreamed-of opera, of which he had already composed the princ.i.p.al themes when he first went with the Professor to play for Anne-Marie; he was also half-way through a tone-poem on Edgar Allan Poe's "Eldorado."

He played it occasionally to Anne-Marie; frequently to Nancy:

"Gaily bedight, a gallant Knight, In sunshine and in shadow----"

"Do you hear?" he would say, playing with much pedal, while his rough black head bounced and dipped. "Do you hear the canter and gallop and thump? It is the Horse, and the Heart, and the Hope of the Knight!"

Yes; Nancy could hear the Horse, and the Heart, and the Hope quite clearly.

"Now!" Bemolle's curly black mat would swoop over the keys and stay there quite near to his fingers, "Now--the Hag appears! Do you hear the Hag murmur and mumble? This is the Hag murmuring and mumbling."

"I should make her mumble in D flat," said Anne-Marie airily. And then she trotted out of the room, leaving in Bemolle's heart a vague sense of dissatisfaction with his Hag, because she was mumbling in A natural.

Soon, as there was much to do, programmes to prepare, letters to answer, engagements to accept, tours to refuse, and they were all four rather unbusiness-like and confusionary, Bemolle had to put aside his opera and his tone-poem, and dedicate himself exclusively to the business arrangements of the party.

They frequently got confused in their dates. "The Costanzi in Rome has telegraphed, asking for three concerts in February, and I have accepted!" cried Bemolle triumphantly, when Nancy and Anne-Marie returned from one of the dreaded and inevitable afternoon receptions given in their honour.

"I thought we had accepted Stockholm for February," said Nancy, with troubled brow.

"So we had!" exclaimed Bemolle. "Oh dear! Now we must cancel it."

"Oh, don't cancel Rome! Cancel Stockholm," said Nancy.

And so they cancelled Stockholm with great difficulty, promising Stockholm a date in March, immediately after Rome, and immediately before Berlin, where Anne-Marie was to play for the Kaiserfest the Max Bruch Concerto, accompanied by the great composer himself.