Anna (12 page)

“A week perhaps,” Anna answered. “Long enough for me to see this lovely city. If that is not… not too long for you.”

She paused.

“I cannot understand how it is that he should ever have let me come if it was not all arranged,” she added. “Perhaps it was because I was so eager.”

“A week,” M. Latourette paused. “And was he not a little apprehensive about the situation?”

“The situation?” Anna repeated.

“The possibility of war, I mean,” M. Latourette explained. “The very grave possibility.”

Anna shrugged her shoulders. “He said that it would blow over,” she answered. “He attaches no importance to rumours.”

M. Latourette raised his eyebrows.

“It is not a rumour,” he said, “that our Ambassador has attempted all day to see Count Bismarck and was denied an interview.”

Anna spread her hands deprecatingly: they were small hands, very white, with little pointed fingers.

“That can be only because he is so busy,” she replied. “He has so much to think about. Besides, he is often very brusque even with his own staff.”

M. Latourette was perplexed. He could not understand this creature, who seemed to be so intelligent, yet spoke of war as though it were something frivolous and unimportant, something which existed only in the minds of old wives and journalists.

“But did you see nothing of the preparations?” he persisted.

“There were soldiers, yes,” Anna answered. “But in Germany there are always soldiers.”

“And did you not hear that at any moment the frontier may be closed?”

Anna caught her breath.

“No,” she said. “But that isn't possible. If it is closed how shall I be able to get back again? My father will be out of his mind about me. I must return to-night.”

M. Latourette took out his watch.

“There is the train at midnight,” he said gravely. “I will go with you. We will see whether it is still running.”

Anna removed the tiny lace handkerchief from her bag and passed it across her eyes.

“It is all my fault,” she said. “I should not have come. But I did want to see Paris so much. I begged my father to let me.”

She paused and seemed to brighten a little.

“Anyhow, it is not nearly midnight yet. I can still say that I have been in Paris.”

“Mad. Quite mad.” M. Latourette reflected. “Mad and headstrong. Just as Marie was.”

He took out his watch again and held it in front of her.

“You have two hours fifteen minutes,” he said. “Neither more nor less. If the train is running, people will be fighting for their places. I shall take you there an hour before the time.”

He turned to Charles and regarded him half humorously.

“So your devoted friend Yvette has left us,” he remarked. “That is her handbag on the piano. You must take it round to her tomorrow.”

Charles dropped his eyes and muttered something. He was very obviously ill at ease, and kept glancing in Anna's direction and away again.

“Can it be,” he was thinking, “that she has come to tell me that she is going to bear my child?”

But M. Latourette had already turned away from him. His ears were strained in the direction of the street. After a moment, he rose and opened the long windows. Then, intent upon something that was happening in the night outside, he went and stood out on the balcony.

With the opening of the window, the noises of the city filled the room. The Latourettes were no longer a little island, isolated in a high apartment in Clichy. They had become a part of the streets and the pavements again. And the sound outside had resolved itself into singing. It was the refrain of the Marsellaise that was reaching up to them.

M. Latourette looked grave.

They were all standing out on the little balcony now. The house opposite to them was small and meagre, and through the gap in the frontage they could see half Paris spread out below them. Its lights danced and flickered to the skyline. Down below, the street had grown suddenly crowded. People were issuing from every doorway. And without warning a man who had emerged from a Bistro at the corner removed his hat and began tossing it up into the air. Then others formed round and, as he began to move away, they followed him, singing. It was the same song that they all sang, the one song that was in the minds of all Frenchmen on that night. Elsewhere, farther up the street, other groups of singers, men and women with raucous, unlovely voices, joined in. Soon the whole of Paris—the very bricks themselves—seemed to be ringing with the tune.

Down among the crowds of people, two diminutive foreshortened paper-sellers could now be seen, and the words “Guerre” and “Déclaration” rose faintly to the spectators on the balcony. The papers were being snatched from the hands of the vendors.

M. Latourette buried his chin in his waistcoat and turned back into the room behind him. All the colour had gone out of his face. Madame Latourette, who followed him, had at last found her handkerchief and was crying into it.

For an instant Charles and Anna were left alone on the balcony. The curtains at the window obscured them both and she drew him to her.

“My darling,” she said in a whisper. “My darling, I love you. I had to come. I needed you.”

She dropped her voice still lower and pressed her face to his.

“Marry me,” she said. “Marry me so that I can stay here and never go away again.”

The calling up was not proceeding smoothly; there were unexpected, inexplicable delays. And it was the railway-system, rather than the Government, which was held to account for it. No railway system, people said, could be expected to be equal to the sudden gigantic demands that were being made upon it. At one and the same moment nearly half a million men were being shuttlecocked backwards and forwards across the country as they were sent home to their dépôts to equip and then forward again to the frontiers. It was generally agreed that a little time lost now could easily be recovered later.

But other and more serious difficulties were rapidly coming to light. The dépôts themselves were over-taxed. The equipment, or at least most of it, was there. But to issue it simultaneously to 500,000 men was a task beyond human ingenuity. In the result, reservists found themselves first being frantically assembled as though the Prussian army were already at the gates of Paris, then trundled across France as though time were of no importance, and finally being kept waiting for a fortnight or three weeks before they got so much as a rifle.

Soon all hope of being able to place the reservists in the field as an immediate fighting force was abandoned. The standing army was left to face the first shock, of battle alone, and the reserves, who existed so very convincingly on paper, had to cool their heels while the Quartermaster's department was still disentangling itself.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rhine more than a million men had already been assembled for action without the least trace of hurry or panic or confusion. The preparations over there had been going on, quietly and methodically, for years.

In the Latourette household complete pandemonium was reigning. M. Latourette
père
had suddenly become stricken by a feeling of remorse which coincided with expediency. He paid visit after visit to the Ministry to secure his son's exemption. And he even sought the aid of highly-placed acquaintances in Masonic circles. But in vain. The Ministry was already overwhelmed with such requests, and could entertain no more.

The only consolation which remained to M. Latourette was an
exiguous and dwindling one. On the day when Charles had reported for duty he had been told that, for the moment, no more men could be accepted, and he had been informed that as soon as they were ready for him his class would be posted. He had thus been forced to return to the apartment which he had left only two hours before. His mother wept on his shoulder for ten minutes: she reaffirmed that separation would kill her.

M. Latourette had other reasons for being inconsolable. He saw his business halved, quartered, decimated, entirely obliterated even, by the universal disaster of war. His German market had vanished at a single stroke, and the Dutch and Belgian ones would be in jeopardy until the tide of fighting had settled down in some sort of orderly direction. In France itself business was already at a standstill.

The one star of hope shining over the gloomy landscape of the future was an army contract: his whole life now centred on it. Leaving Charles to perform the routine work of the office, he put on his most fashionable suit, with his rosette in his buttonhole, and began desperately to mix. He entertained. He renewed friendships which had never been close, and made new ones with a gambler's abandon. He inspected boot factories and clothing establishments and tanner's yards. He brought manufacturers and financiers together at the same table. He sweated. He groaned. He paid.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Anna herself was left neglected. Madame Latourette tried in the confusion of her own despair to drop some small crumbs of comfort when she remembered. But there was one unpleasant fact that was gradually dominating everything within her: Anna was, after all, a
German.
She tried to remind herself that the poor child was really half French, that she was a relation of her husband's, that she was alone and friendless. But no matter what resolutions she made, she saw her still as an enemy, as one of the detested nation that her son would soon be sent to fight. She hated her.

She became, moreover, insanely jealous. She would dart from one room to another, suspicious of what she might find. And it was not only a mother's jealousy. Not for Charles alone that she was afraid. To find Anna in private conversation with M. Latourette was sufficient to throw her into agonies of apprehension lest somehow they were conspiring against her under the roof of her own house.

Towards Charles her attitude remained one of fierce maternal protection. Only when he was seated at his desk, answering one of the few business letters that still came, was she completely at her ease. Then she knew where he was, what he was doing. At other
times she would have to sit with her ears strained for the opening of a door, a footstep in the passage. She listened at keyholes. She even began starting up at night thinking that she heard the low sound of voices from Charles's room.

Whenever she was actually with Anna, however, her fears, her worst fears, were abated. The child—she is no more than a child, Madame Latourette kept telling herself—seemed so crushed and silent. And Anna's deep eyes would fill with tears whenever a kind word was addressed to her by the other woman. It was obvious that her whole spirit had been very nearly broken by the colossal incubus of war.

She seemed, however, to have retained something of the innocent curiosity of her youth. Paris lay at her feet and she was still, despite the tragedy that had encompassed her, eager to explore it. Madame Latourette found that fact strangely touching, and told her the numbers of the buses that clattered down from Clichy to the Madeleine, to the Opéra, to Notre Dame.

It was in the afternoon that Anna ventured out. In the mornings she sat, writing letters to her father, assuring him that she was safe; that he was not to worry; that she would soon be home again; how kind the Latourettes were. The fact that these letters would in all probability never be delivered seemed secondary to the irresistible necessity of writing them. And then, after lunch, still in the manner of a child, she would put these sorrows behind her and set off with a little guide book concealed in her handbag.

This afternoon Anna listened carefully to Madame Latourette's instructions for finding the Sainte-Chapelle. She had read and re-read the page in the guide book until she knew it by heart. “
To stand in the centre of the Sainte-Chapelle looking up at the stained-glass windows,” it said, “is to stand in the centre of a living jewel.”

She was wearing the simplest of the frocks that she had brought, and looked scarcely more than a child as she left the apartment.

“She might be French,” Madame Latourette admitted. “She carries herself so well.”

When Anna reached the pavement she glanced at her watch and started to walk rapidly in the direction of the Place Clichy. The street through which she was passing suddenly seemed squalid no longer. She was young, she was beautiful, she was in Paris. And it was summer. She held her head high, and dangled her parasol like a toy. The bus that Madame Latourette had told her to take went by ignored, and she made her way to the rank where the fiacres were standing.

“To the Bois,” she said. “Porte Dauphine.”

Because the driver was so slow, she called out to him to hurry, But when they reached the Porte Dauphine and she got down she realised how foolish she had been. It was scarcely three o'clock; and Charles at the earliest could not be there until four.

But the day was warm and very pleasant. There were idlers in the Bois whose one object, it seemed, was to admire. Anna felt herself appraised from all sides. Two officers, walking arm in arm towards her, paused as they passed and stood, for a moment glancing backwards over their shoulders.

“Charming,” the first remarked.

“A trifle provincial,” his companion answered.

“Yes, perhaps.”

And with this they both dismissed her, passing on in their search for other pretty women who were both charming and Parisian, and thus eligible for more whole-hearted admiration. But for Anna the incident was satisfying and sufficient. She had walked alone in the Bois, and two officers had stopped and gazed after her. It was like living in the climax of a dream.

When Charles arrived, breathless and in agitation over his lateness—it was five minutes past four when he arrived—he found her cold and distant. In the interval of waiting, the episode of the officers had become a little magnified and enlarged within her mind.