Anna (19 page)

“I must tell her to-night,” he decided. “I will tell her, and then insist that she takes one of her sleeping tablets. If only she can know, and then forget for a space, it will be better for her. I must steady her mind for what she has to hear.”

He took out his watch and held it out before him. It showed twenty minutes to one.

“I must go now,” he told himself. “Now, before she has had time to fall asleep.”

But when he opened the bedroom door the room was in darkness.
From the bed came the sound of low, regular breathing. Madame Latourette was asleep already.

“Then I must wake her,” he resolved. “The responsibility is terrible, but there is no other way.”

He lit the candle that stood on the dressing-table and went over to the bedside. But as he looked down at the sleeping woman he discovered within himself a tenderness that he had been unaware of. In sleep, Madame Latourette looked younger. The line of her forehead still melted in its unique way that had once been irresistible into the curve of her cheek. And her hair that the fashionable coiffeur had dressed was more like the hair of the woman that he had married. In the hour of Charles's death it was the hour of his birth that his father found himself remembering. He bent lower and saw that Madame Latourette's cheeks were damp and that on the eyelashes tears still glittered. Since Charles had gone away she had often cried herself to sleep.

“I
must
wake her,” he determined. “It will be kinder to-morrow to have been cruel now.”

But, as he thrust out his hand to touch her shoulder, he drew back. He saw what it was that she was clasping. In her two hands, held close under chin, as though she had been fondling it, was Charles's cap.

He turned away.

“In the morning will be time enough,” he told himself. “I will tell her in the morning.”

But Madame Latourette did not take the news in the least as M. Latourette had expected: she was calmer than he was.

“You are telling me nothing that I did not know already,” she said bitterly. “I felt it in my heart all day that Charles was dead.”

She was sitting up in bed, her nightgown fallen open at the neck and her thin hair, that had already lost its curl, straggling over her shoulders. She was very pale.

“Where is the letter?” she asked at last. “Give it to me. I want to see it.”

M. Latourette produced the letter from the pocket of his dressing gown. He felt strangely guilty as he did so, as though by the very fact of possessing such a document he were somehow an accomplice in killing Charles.

Madame Latourette took the letter in hands that scarcely shook. She read the lines slowly, nodding her head over them.

“Oh, my Charles. My little Charles,” was all she said.

There was a long silence, during which M. Latourette and his wife stared blankly at each other. Then she passed the letter back to him as though it were something precious.

“We must keep it always,” she said. “Charles would have wanted it.”

M. Latourette continued to stand there awkwardly. He was searching desperately within his mind for words of comfort that were not to be found. At last, to cover up his helplessness, he turned towards the door.

“I shall tell Anna,” he said. “It would be better that she should know before you see her.”

But Madame Latourette reached out suddenly and gripped him by the arm. Her strength amazed him.

“Don't go near her,” she said fiercely. “Why should she know? Charles was
our
son.”

M. Latourette paused.

“But she'll have to know,” he said slowly. “We can't keep it from her.”

“Then get rid of her,” Madame Latourette told him. “Turn her out. She's an enemy, isn't she? I hate the sight of her.”

M. Latourette was trying to disengage himself.

“She hasn't got anywhere to go,” he said. “Not now.”

“Then let her go to the women's prison,” Madame Latourette replied in a rush. “It's where she belongs. Let her do anything she likes, so long as she doesn't have to remain here with me.”

M. Latourette drew himself up—he was ridiculously short—and tried vainly to reassert his authority.

“Calm yourself, my dear,” he said. “Calm yourself. You'll be having one of your attacks.”

But Madame Latourette was beyond calming. She had got up from the bed and was dragging her boudoir-wrap around her. She went shakily over to the door.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

For a moment, M. Latourette was actually afraid of his own wife. When he touched her arm she sprang away from him.

“I'm going to do what you wanted to do,” she replied. “I'm going to tell her myself in my own way.”

She paused, and gave him a look of cold, indifferent contempt.

“Anna,” she began shouting. “Anna.”

M. Latourette stepped forward and tried to stand in her way. But she wrenched the door open in spite of him.

“Anna,” she shouted again. “Anna. Come here, I want you.”

M. Latourette struggled with her and attempted to put his hand over her mouth.

But it was too late. The door of Anna's room had opened and Anna, in her high-bosomed nightgown, her feet bare, stood before them in the corridor. She was wide-eyed and frightened.

“You called, Madame Latourette?” she asked.

And at the sight of her, Madame Latourette broke away entirely from her husband.

“He's dead,” she screamed. “Dead, and you killed him. He's been murdered by the Germans. I shall kill every German I see now. Charles is dead. He's dead.”

She gave a little gasp, and seemed to sway. A moment later she had fallen forward.

M. Latourette glanced apprehensively at the large gilt clock in the hall. He had an important interview at the Ministry at nine-thirty.

As Madame Latourette's smelling salts and the dose of sal volatile which he poured down her throat failed to rouse her, M. Latourette sent for the doctor.

The doctor was slow and methodical. When he had stowed his gloves away in the crown of his tall hat, he followed M. Latourette into the bedroom and took his patient's pulse. Then he raised her eyelids and tested her reflexes. He was as methodical as if he had been conducting a post-mortem. He even went down on his knees and placed his head over her heart. M.Latourette thought he had never seen any man slower.

“She must be bled,” the doctor announced at last.

“You have brought your instruments?” M. Latourette asked.

“They are in my bag,” the doctor replied.

He got up from his praying position, smoothed out the creases in his trousers and smiled consolingly at M. Latourette.

“We will do our best,” he said, and demanded a glass of hot water in which he could scald his instruments.

“At this rate,” M. Latourette thought despairingly, “it will be midday before he is through.”

The doctor next requested a large, clean towel and a bowl.

“Sixteen fluid ounces,” he said explanatorily. “It eases the pressure on the nervous centres.”

M. Latourette went over to the washstand. He brought back
a china basin, with a design of flowers all over it, and one of his wife's hand towels.

“You are a man of strong nerves?” the doctor inquired.

M. Latourette nodded.

“Then may I request you to hold the bowl?”

“Yes, yes,” M. Latourette replied impatiently.

The doctor undid his cuffs and rolled back his shirt-sleeves. Then he drew up the sleeve of Madame Latourette's nightgown to the shoulder and dabbed a solution of carbolic on to the bare flesh above the elbow.

“Against infection,” he commented.

M. Latourette watched him rub the swab of cotton wool round and round like a polisher in a cabinetmaker's. The doctor seemed entirely engrossed in his preliminary task.

“If only he would get on with it,” M. Latourette was thinking. “If only he would finish the job.”

But suddenly his mind shifted, and he found himself remembering Charles again.

“I wonder who it was he wanted to marry,” M. Latourette began thinking.

The doctor was now ready. He lifted his knife and made an incision in the artery as neatly as if he had been cutting into an orange.

M. Latourette started as he saw the first spurt of blood. He had expected it to be red. But this was scarlet. Tiny spots of it glittered on the face of the blade. It seemed incredible that blood of such a colour could flow from so pale and anæmic a woman.

And the sight of the blood as it spurted into the basin made him feel suddenly faint. His eyes followed it with a horrid fascination as it spattered on to the design of flowers and tendrils. It might have been his own heart that was being robbed. He held the basin in one hand and passed the other across his forehead.

“Mind the carpet,” the doctor warned him.…

When at last the doctor was satisfied—the basin by now had grown warm and heavy in M. Latourette's hands—he motioned to him to move away, and nipped the place of the wound neatly between his thumb and forefinger.

“We will now apply a tourniquet,” he observed.

But M. Latourette was past caring. He was standing over by the window with his collar gaping.

“Shall I be required any more?” he asked weakly.

The doctor raised his head. With his left hand he was uncoiling a roll of bandages like a conjurer.

“I'll call you as soon as the patient can speak,” he promised. “Go and sit down quietly somewhere and don't worry.”

Sit down quietly and don't worry!

M. Latourette tottered out of the room, his head reeling.

As soon as he had steadied himself a little and rebuttoned his collar he went off again in search of Anna. He had not seen her since Madame Latourette's outburst.

“Anna!” he called. “Anna, where are you? I want to talk to you.”

When he still received no answer, he pushed open the door of her room. In his heart he was already half-prepared for what it was that he saw. The room was deserted. The wardrobe stood half-open and the long panel of mirror reflected the emptiness within. The trinkets were gone from the dressing-table, and the big leather valise was no longer there. In front of the stove a heap of still glowing ashes stirred in the breeze from the corridor.

M. Latourette ran through the hall on to the landing and began calling Anna's name down the well of the stairs.

There was no answer anywhere except the echo of his voice, which every moment sounded more silly and futile in his own ears.

Outside, a clock was striking eleven.

“Oh, my appointment. My appointment,” M. Latourette thought frantically.

The View from the window was of two kinds. To the west it was of an unbroken wall of grey brick so much sooted by the fumes of the restaurant chimney that the crevices had gown soft and velvety, as though black moss were clinging there. But to the north and east the room looked over a huddle of narrow, chasm-like streets, and, in the distance beyond, there rose the piled-up dwellings of Mont-martre, with the icy citadel of Sacre-Coeur set against the skyline.

The room itself was bare and uninviting, an attic room. The window cast only a thin shaft of cold, northern light that left the two side walls almost in darkness. And the ceiling that slanted down over the single bed was brown and discoloured. Even the furnishings contributed their own peculiar air of desolation. Beside the bed—a tarnished cage-like affair of brass and enamelled iron-work—was a round table covered by a cloth, a washstand built of wicker and bamboo, and an easy chair that had once been magnificent but now sagged forlornly. There was a cupboard built under the eaves, a gas-jet cupped in a lemon-coloured globe, and a portrait of the Empress Eugénie as a girl.

It was left to the ingenuity and capacity of the occupant to make the room agreeable, snug, domestic, according to taste. There was no fireplace.

It had been late in the evening, almost at nightfall, when Anna had found the room. It had seemed then to match her mood. Up there among the roofs and chimneys of Paris it had added its own atmosphere of misery to hers. It closed its door upon her and shut out the world.…

When she had first left the Latourette's apartment and run down the stairs and out across the gravelled courtyard into the rue d'Aubon, she had not known where she was going.

“What do I care?” she had asked herself, “so long as I am away from Madame Latourette?”

And for a moment the sense of her loss—that loss which was to come back to her, so near and brooding in the silence of the lonely bedroom—had been forgotten.

She still had two hundred francs in her purse and whole streetsful
of hotels and apartments seemed open to her. She had not realised then that this delicious sunny city, alive with people and fluttering with plane leaves, existed only on the surface, and that beneath it lay an underworld, a dark maze in which secret police with dossiers moved, in their numbers like ants. In the first hotel she visited, the woman behind the desk accused her to her face of being German, and said that she would have no spies in her house. As Anna drove away in a cab she peered out nervously over the back to see if she were being followed—a woman spy
had
been arrested only the week before in Maxim's. And as she sat there, Anna realised that she was being driven away to nowhere—she merely told the driver the first place that had come into her head. When she stopped the cab again it was as near and as far from her destination as before.

Then she had left the big, suspicious hotels and had gone in search of rooms, cheaper rooms, rooms in a back-street, anywhere she could lock a door behind her. But the police had been to the apartment houses as well. They had searched one house she called at that very morning. And she was altogether too unusual a visitor to escape attention. As the landladies led her up their dubious staircases they demanded to know all about her. And when she said that she would give them her papers as soon as she had collected them—like all fugitives she had become wary and evasive—they shrugged their shoulders, and turned their backs on her. The secret police had intimidated the whole race of them.