Anna (33 page)

It was only sometimes that they had to break off and leave a sentence unfinished because it was taking the wrong turning in their minds. And then they would talk hurriedly of other things—of the badness of the coffee, of the cold, of the way the gas-lamps even now were only burning at about half-pressure.

When they returned to the Restaurant Duvivier, it was still as silent as when they had left it. Anna insisted that she should go in first and that Captain Picard should follow her some minutes afterwards. But the precaution was quite unnecessary. M. Duvivier had not moved. He was still sleeping as sweetly as a baby. A bottle which he had brought upstairs with him had evidently been kicked over as he had got into bed.

It now lay on its side in the centre of a blood-red stain that had spread around it.

The Germans meanwhile were seeking to tidy up the whole military position. They were busy taking possession of the Paris forts and of everything that was in them. In the state of the latter the junior officers were much surprised. It seemed incredible to them that forts so well-garrisoned and equipped should have surrendered without further struggle.

But that, of course, was only the superficial reading of the situation. People who really understood things, people like Bismarck, had long since realised that it is easier to make a fortress—or an army—surrender for political reasons than it is for military ones. They knew, Bismarck knew, that the forts of Paris had been given up so that a French government established in Bordeaux could prove the peacefulness of its intentions to a German government established in Versailles.

It was nevertheless all very puzzling to the Parisians themselves. First of all they had been told that they were safe. Then, when it was painfully obvious that they were not safe, they had been told that they would be relieved, and that Paris in any case could never fall. Next, the Government had left them and trekked south to Tours and Bordeaux. And now they had been told that any further resistance to German aggression would prejudice the peace terms of their conquerors.

As yet, only an armistice, and not a peace, had yet been talked about. And even the armistice depended on getting the excitable M. Gambetta to appreciate that further military efforts on his part were no longer in the interest of France. True patriotism now meant collaboration.

And so, out of the forts of Paris, the Germans took shells, guns, rifles, cartridges, range-finders and other equipment—a huge armsdump in fact, all in good condition and all ready to be used against the French if occasion demanded.

And in return for what they took out of Paris they allowed in what was most needed—food.

The Captain could not believe the words when he heard them: he had to ask the clerk in the guichet to say them all over again.

“The first train south goes out to-morrow evening at ten o'clock,” the clerk repeated impatiently. “Monsieur would be well-advised to be here early for it. All the reserved seats have been taken.”

Captain Picard moved away from the window and passed a handkerchief across his forehead. At the realisation that the moment had come, a shudder passed through him, and he began biting his nails. Then, hurriedly, he removed his notebook and wrote down the time of departure.

The absurdity of doing so struck him only after he had done it: it was like a man solemnly writing down his own wedding day. And a strange uncontrollable excitement now filled him. In thirty-six hours, if the train were punctual, he would be home again: he would be in Varaye. And he would see his son. It is only once in a lifetime, he reminded himself, that a man can see his first-born for the first time, and he excused his own emotion.

And Odette? At the thought of her he was suddenly unhappy. She was too young, too innocent, to understand. If he told her everything, she could never believe then that he still loved her, that he had never given up loving her. There was more than his military disgrace that he would have to hide from her.

Then the thought of saying good-bye to Anna, of actually parting from her, came to him; and he could think of nothing else.

“To-morrow I shall have gone,” he kept telling himself.

It was dark by the time he got back to the Restaurant. The whole place seemed more closed and tomb-like than ever: the shutters at the windows had been put up in mourning for the life that had gone into it. The Captain pushed open the door and went in.

As he did so, he was aware that there was someone standing there: it was Anna. And at the sight of him, she gave a little cry. He turned and looked at her. Her hair was dishevelled and her eyes were red from crying. On the white skin of her wrists were marks as though clumsy hands had grasped her there. He could see that she was trembling.

Anna did not move.

“He knows,” she said.

And having said it she did not add anything.

He stared back at her.

“He told you so himself?” he asked.

She nodded her head.

“Someone told him,” she said. “He accused me to my face and then he struck me. He had been drinking.”

The Captain paused. The whole forefront of his mind was occupied with something else. There was a train, a crowded, overloaded train drawing out of the Gare de Lyon, and it was to-morrow night, and he was on it. But the picture flickered and grew dim as he looked at it. And in its place he was standing in the murky corridor and the eyes of the girl that he was looking at were wild and terrified.

“Pack your things,” he said quietly, “I'll take you away from here.”

As he said it, he could see the train,
his
train, just as clearly once more—only it was drawing out of the station now, and he was nowhere in it.

It was nearly two hours later when M. Duvivier came to his senses. He was in the cellar, and the air all around him was dense and heady. The cellar itself was in darkness. The candle which he had mounted in a bottle had burnt out, and he was alone there, a fuddled middle-aged soul in his own private limbo.

He shook himself and began searching his pockets for a
fusee
. When he had struck it he surveyed the scene around him. There were too many bottles—empty ones—everywhere: it looked as if the Germans had already entered the place.

And then, dimly, threateningly, through the mists of his own
mind, the memory of what had occurred came back to him. He recalled how he had gone rushing up to the Captain's room with the chef's carving-knife—a great razor-edged sabre of a thing, ready in his hand. It was only because the room had been empty that he had gone down into the cellar and started drinking again.

“But I'll do it now,” he promised himself. “He shan't escape me.”

He searched about for a moment and found the knife where he had left it, stowed away behind one of the bins. The edge was so sharp that it made a slight pinging sound as he ran his thumb across it.

“I'll do it,” he repeated. “I'll stick him like a pig when I find him. I'll bleed him white.”

Then the unresolved problem of Anna suddenly presented itself, and he began to weep. It was clearly his duty—it was what any good Frenchman would do—to kill her too.

“But how can I?” he asked himself. “How can I destroy anything so beautiful as that?”

His head was aching, and he sat for a moment with it buried in his hands. He only wished that his brain was just a little clearer. Trying to think at the present moment was like attempting to undo a knot with gloves on. But, nevertheless, the uncomfortable realisation came to him that if he were to stick a knife into the Captain he would probably be guillotined for it. The law was very kind and understanding towards husbands who killed lovers detected in
flagrante delicto
. But it took a sterner view towards those who returned afterwards to revenge themselves; it showed no understanding.

M. Duvivier tried to argue the thing out, carefully and slowly, but he found that the task was beyond him. He wasn't in the least anxious to make himself into simply another chapter in the annals of Parisian homicide.

“There's nothing I can do,” he said at last. “I can't punish either of them without punishing myself as well.”

At the absurdity of the situation he began to laugh. And as he laughed a weight seemed lifted from his soul.

“Anna,” he began calling out. “Anna! I've decided to forgive you. You can unlock your door now. I love you.”

The train was moving at last: after the first abortive jerks and creakings it had been got going somehow. Not that it was anything to boast of. The carriage was unheated and in complete darkness. Like almost everything else in Paris after the siege, the nicer refinements of life were conspicuously missing from it. But its defects were forgiven in the single and cardinal fact that it moved.

The crowd was enormous; people had been collecting at the station for as much as twelve hours before the departure. And when at last the train had backed up to the platform the passengers for a moment had got completely out of hand. They surged forward, overturning barriers and ticket-boxes. Officials and inspectors were swept to the side, and there was hand-to-hand fighting on the platforms. The Captain had put his arm round Anna to protect her, and, using his shoulder as a ram, had forced her into one of the compartments. It was full already; and the occupants protested that there was room for no one else. That was more than an hour before the departure. They had no notion then of what the conditions were really to be like by the time the train actually steamed out.

Anna sat there in the corner without moving. Her arms were crushed and pinioned to her sides by the sheer weight of bodies all round her. She was merely one more of the individual parcels in this overloaded wagon of human freightage. Somewhere in the darkness opposite sat the Captain. And the simple knowledge that he was there made her happy.

“He is with me. He loves me, and he is with me,” she kept telling herself exultantly. “We have another whole day together.”

The fact that at the frontier he would leave her, that they would say good-bye for the last time, no longer seemed so real, so inevitable. She was too tired to imagine it.

It was at Strasbourg that they had agreed to separate. The city lay on the frontier, and the Captain could go on no further. As a Frenchman he was at last free to move about inside his own country.
But the Germans had no intention, for the moment, of giving this defeated people the freedom of the entire continent. Count Bismarck, indeed, was explicit about keeping the frontiers closed until the final terms of peace had been agreed upon.

And from Strasbourg Anna would be alone, quite alone. But once she was over the Rhine, she kept reminding herself, she would be back in the world to which she belonged, back among her people and her own kind. But she knew as she said it that it was not true. She knew that she was German no longer and that it was France, her mother's country, that had taken possession of her.

“Everything that I have ever loved is in France,” she told herself.

And through her tiredness the reality of the separation came filtering.

“He is going away,” she said bitterly. “I
know
that after tomorrow I shall never see him again. And after he has left me I shall think of him in the arms of that woman who has borne his child. If she loves him, really loves him, she will make him love her again too. He will forget me altogether. And he will be glad that he has forgotten.…”

She began crying, and because she could not move—could not move even enough to reach the handkerchief that was in her handbag—she sat there with the tears streaming down her cheek.

Then she remembered her father. And as she remembered him, a sudden feeling of peace came over her. He was loving and indulgent. To have her back, he would be ready to forgive everything. She could become his child again. As the train rumbled on through the night, even the spectre of her disastrous marriage grew less with distance.

The carriage, unheated at first, had now by the breath of a score of bodies been warmed to something more than normal temperature. The air was heavy and soporific. And the movement of the train became a ceaseless mechanical lullaby. Anna felt herself drowsing. As her eyes closed, her thoughts grew tenuous and confused. She found herself smelling again the hot scent of the apple orchard on the day when Charles had come to Rhinehausen; she recalled the first sight of Paris with its pavements glistening under rain; the sound of the Marseillaise carried up on the evening air to the balcony of the Latourette's apartment; the feel, the exact feel of Charles's face as it had been pressed against hers on that afternoon in the orchard; the ghostly mistiness of the Seine; the fat, red hands of M. Duvivier; the sound of the woman screaming in the prison; and the cafe in the Place Clichy where she and the Captain had sat together and talked of everything except the future.

When she awoke the rhythm of the train had changed perceptibly, and the wheels began a different metre. A faint, dawn-tinted light was shining in at the windows. There was the harsh grip of brakes.

Someone on the opposite side of the carriage said “Strasbourg.”

The Hotel de l'Empire presented the infinite confusion of one of the terminal points of a country in chaos. The foyer was full of luggage for which there were no apparent owners, and the guests who were standing about could not find theirs. They were a strange and variegated assortment, these guests. Conspicuous among them in their magnificent uniforms were the Prussian and Bavarian officers. These gentlemen occupied the best rooms on the first and second floors.

The upper storys were packed with their legitimate occupants, the French. They were of many kinds. There were business men waiting to pass over into Switzerland as soon as they could obtain a visa; rich families that had been driven out of their homes and were now returning to see what, if anything, was left to them; journalists from every European nation; spies, pathetically applying for the money that was due to them, or wondering what they could do for a living now that the war was over; members of military and disarmament commissions; bankers trying to restore their international connections; and unattached women.