Anna (21 page)

Then she remembered the watch that she was wearing: it was a gold watch, set between two butterfly-wings of filigree. The Baron had given it to her on her last birthday, and she had worn it it on her bosom ever since.

“This must be worth more than M. Duvivier's rent,” she told herself. “This will keep me for weeks.”

The first jeweller whom she visited, however, was not impressed.

“It is not the fashionable pattern,” he explained. “Such a watch, if I bought it, would remain in my shop for years. I might arrange to exchange it for a bracelet or an ornament for the neck, but to buy it.…” The jeweller threw up his hands in despair.

And at the fourth and the fifth shop, it was the same. It was only the words of refusal that were different. When she had grown tired of hearing them, she turned away from the fashionable streets and searched in the back streets for the pawnbroker's and the moneylender's. She found such a shop at last. It stood at the corner of a
dark alley where people stared at her as she passed. And it was as busy as a bank.

She went inside and took her place at the end of a long queue of men and women clutching clocks, bundles of ostrich feathers, musical instruments, household china. The procession moved forward with mechanical efficiency. There was an agent who stood beside the little wicket ready to cut short any bargaining that seemed likely to last too long. They came away, these borrowers, having left behind what they cherished most, but with enough money to go on living a little longer without it.

The woman in front of her deposited two lurid china vases and a pair of high-heeled shoes on the counter. The whole procedure seemed so familiar that she did not even look up until the clerk had handed her the ticket. She was evidently one of his most regular customers. Then she pursed her lips as she saw the amount and went over, dragging her feet in their felt slippers, to receive her money.

Anna gave the clerk her watch.

He was a small, desiccated man who conducted a muttered conversation with himself as he worked.

“More watches, watches,” he was saying. “Everyone in Paris is mortgaging his watch. They will have to come to us soon when they want to know the time.”

He weighed Anna's watch in a small pair of scales and opened the back with his pen-knife.

“Twenty-five francs,” he said at last.

“But it is worth more than that, much more,” Anna began.

“Twenty-five francs.”

Anna was about to speak again but the agent beside her, touched her on the shoulder.

“There are others waiting behind you,” he said meaningly.

“Twenty-five francs,” the clerk repeated.

“Give it to me,” said Anna.

As she was going out of the building, she paused. Two places behind her in the queue stood the figure of an enormous woman. She was wearing a cloak but, beneath the cloak her shoes could be seen, with her shapleess feet spreading out over them like dough. She was resting some of her weight on a heavy ebony walking-stick.

But it was at the valuables she was carrying that Anna was looking. They were the most remarkable in the whole queue. They comprised a globe, a square of catskin, and a skull.

It was Madame Sapho, temporarily betrayed by the stars.

During the month of August there was still one man in France more unhappy than the Emperor—there was MacMahon. The supreme command had not been entrusted to him until the army was already in full retreat, and he was being swept along despite himself. To have demanded a coherent plan of MacMahon would have been as reasonable as to ask a hunted fox, closely followed by the hounds, to set down his future movements on paper.

And so much that was conflicting was expected of him. The War Ministry, for example, was insisting that he should march across France and unite with the army of Bazaine. But to do so, he told himself, would be to uncover the capital and risk losing the war in a few days' marches. On the other hand, to protect the capital meant presenting a front to an already victorious army far stronger than his own. Even to retreat on Paris—which was what the strategist within him kept telling him was right—would mean probably the collapse of the Third Empire, the overthrow of his Emperor, risings of the people, and God knows what.

In the end it was the National Assembly that made the decision for him. It told him to relieve Bazaine. So MacMahon turned his face towards Metz, put up his umbrella, and set out. It was the umbrella that hindered him. The weather with startling suddenness had broken. And the army, which previously had raised a dust-cloud as it marched, now trudged through rain and sleet and slush. It slipped and floundered with the weary desperation of men who have been marched in circles and have too late been given a point to make for. But if it was the rain that was dissolving the spirit of the men, it was the presence of the Germans on his flank that was dissolving MacMahon's. There was no umbrella that he could raise to protect him from the slanting menace from the side. Throughout the march—that his Marshal's instinct told him was wrong—he knew that at any moment the spearhead of the Germans might suddenly be driven into his ribs. And all the time the rain was pouring down, obscuring everything.

It is not altogether surprising therefore that when a handful of German cavalry suddenly appeared before him on the road he should have thought that the whole German army was attacking. He saw that to reach Metz and the imprisoned Bazaine he would have to fight every inch of the way, and he did not feel strong enough. Because of a few Uhlans, as it turned out, the whole Seventh Corps of the French Army was halted and kept under arms for an entire night.

Only then did Marshal MacMahon give up. The Germans were closing in on him, and he told himself that very soon unless he were careful he would be cut off like Bazaine; a head without a body. So he ordered a new retreat, and told France what he was doing.

The error lay not in retreat, but in admitting it. The whole voice and will of France rose up and threatened him. His very command was in jeopardy. It was one of those moments in a man's life when people are ready to shake him by the hand only if he is prepared to commit what he alone can see is suicide. But command is harder to relinquish than life. And so, finally, MacMahon turned his men round once more and marched onwards to his destruction. Still obeying orders in which he did not believe, he led his army into a battleground with the enemy's guns encircling it. And before the battle was over there were Frenchmen swimming the Meuse, trying to escape.

For a moment, when the extent of the defeat had been brought home to him, MacMahon rejoiced.

“Perhaps this will persuade the politicians that Metz is lost already,” he told himself. “Perhaps they will see now that France is of more importance than Bazaine.”

Indeed, the impact of this fresh, this terrible reverse overturned the Assembly. Bazaine was temporarily forgotten, and MacMahon, the man on whom all eyes fixed again, was ordered to retire immediately to Sedan.

Once more he obeyed his instructions. Turning his exhausted, hopeless men, he ordered the retreat. But the soldiers had had enough. In the darkness these bewildered men told the gods what they thought of their Marshal and of their Emperor. They laughed at the idea of further orders. Making their own plans, they collided with other columns of men as desperate as themselves. There was fighting. They assaulted officers. In the recklessness of their despair they lit torches to find their way. And it was the light of these brands that lit their way to final annihilation as certainly as if they had pointed out their position to the enemy on a map.

That night Marshal MacMahon finished his prayer with an unusual plea.

“Oh God,” he prayed bitterly, “in your mercy allow me one more victory, even a small one, and then let me be killed. Let me be killed before what I see has come to pass.”

The Waters of the Seine ran shiftingly, sliding under the bridges like folded silk. They were sinister, dark waters that concealed the secrets that were in them; so heavy and opaque that the floats of the old men fishing from the banks seemed to rest on their surface without penetrating. When the mists rose up in spirals in the morning and the other shore receded, Paris became, like Venice, a city that is scarcely of the land at all. And at night when the lights shone up from the river there was another city buried there. It was only by day that the Seine betrayed itself. Then it became a creeping odorous flood that has seeped in from the gutters and found its way through a thousand sewers. And all the time, while it was passing, passing, it was bearing away on its little waves everything of the pomp and glory that the third Napoleon had tried to stay there.

Anna walked nearly every day along the quayside. Whenever she set out, her footsteps somehow led her there. And once she had reached it she was among others of her kind. It seemed the natural, the inevitable, meeting-place of people whose very lives had become superfluous even to themselves. It was a wasteland.

Her mind itself was a wasteland, too: as grey and comfortless as the stone parapet that confronted her. The feeling and colour had gone out of everything. She no longer cried herself to sleep now in M. Duvivier's attic bedroom. She could remember Charles, even remember how his hands had touched her, without weeping. It was not that she missed him any less bitterly: simply that his death was now part of her as his life once had been. Already the memory of those days when arm-in-arm they had planned together for the future seemed too unreal to have been true. There was the vague unfulfilled quality of a dream about them. Even her days in Rhinehausen now had a half-seen, dreamlike mistiness hanging over them. It was as though she were living in a dream within a dream, as though life were a Chinese cube with a human-being shut up somehow in the middle.

But, perhaps, it was only the rain—the same rain that had made MacMahon put up his umbrella and had drowned the courage of his troops—which was now slanting down into the Paris streets which had affected her spirits too. There had been two utterly blank days in succession when she had to remain in her room for the whole twenty-four hours on end for fear of destroying her shoes.

“I cannot afford another pair,” she told herself. “I am too poor now.”

The two jugs of coffee and the
croissants
which she had ordered each day had been the only relief to her imprisonment.

When at last the rain abated, and she could go out once more, she resumed her walks along the embankment. They were slow walks now, because her body like her mind seemed weary. She stood sometimes for minutes on end looking down at the waters that ran below her.

“That is how I shall end,” she told herself. The thought did not seem frightening any longer, only merciful.

One day, as she was walking, she found herself in the centre of a crowd staring at something which lay on the ground at their feet. It was the body of a woman. And as she looked she saw that the woman was scarcely more than a girl. Her clothes, sodden and rank with the water which clung to her, revealed the small breasts, the flatness of the hips. Her long hair, reduced almost to the texture of a reed, lay trailing on the ground beside her. Over her face a mask of mud had been fitted by the river, but through her open mouth, her white perfect teeth were smiling. Her hands, blue and unfleshlike, were tightly closed, as if grasping something precious that still rested there.

As Anna looked down, a sudden sickness seized her, and she broke through the crowd, walking as rapidly as she could to separate herself from this poor creature who lay there not minding being gaped at.

At first it was pity for her that filled her mind. She tried to imagine the story that was hidden there. “She probably had lovers once,” she told herself. “She may have been beautiful.” And she remembered those teeth smiling from the mask. But it was not only pity that the sight had stirred up in her. There was something else as well. In the presence of death, her own desire for life returned to her, obstinate, unsuspected, powerful. As she walked, the primitive desire for survival mounted up within her.

“There must be some other way,” she kept saying. “The war can't last for ever, and then I shall be free again.”

It was on the following day that she saw another sight that filled her with a yet fiercer, more uncontrollable desire for life. The sight itself was trivial and familiar enough. In an open carriage two officers were riding. Beside them sat two girls dressed in the fashion of the moment with tiny hats perched upon their silky heads, and their pretty faces smiling and dimpling. The carriage passed by with the clip of hooves and the sound of laughter.

“They are being driven somewhere magnificent,” she told herself. “The girls in that carriage will soon be drinking champagne while the officers caress them with their eyes across the table. They will be given presents and made much of. The officers will say that they love them—and perhaps mean it even. And what are they, those girls? Haven't I seen them, night after night, sitting in the cafes on the boulevard waiting for men—other men. Aren't the walls of Paris ready to fall to any woman who is pretty and desperate enough? Couldn't I, by stretching out my hand …”

She paused, frightened by the course that her own thoughts were leading her.

Because his restaurant was half-empty—it was being ruined over his head, M. Duvivier declared—he invited Anna to dine in the restaurant as his guest. It would help to furnish the room, he said. If people saw a beautiful lady already sitting there, they might come inside instead of spending their time under the awning on the terrace vehemently deploring the progress of the war.

Anna despised herself for even thinking of accepting his offer. But it was the first square meal that she had eaten for nearly a month. M. Duvivier stood beside her as she ate.

The experiment failed, nevertheless. The war could not so easily be forgotten. The consciousness of it hung over every one, increasing their thirst and taking away their appetites. M. Duvivier was forced to waste twelve whole breasts of chicken still moderately fresh, for no other reason than that of public apprehension and anxiety.