Anna (41 page)

It was the movement, the change of scene, in the carriage that distracted her. She would not let the driver rest for more than a moment. She ordered him to drive to the far end of the esplanade beside the Casino, sat for an instant looking out across the bay and then commanded to be taken up to the Castle. Her very life, it seemed, depended on constantly seeing something that was different.

When they reached the rue du Palais she made the driver stop at shop after shop down the whole length of the street. Admittedly the things that she bought were of the most trifling: a pair of paste ear-rings in one—despite the fact that M. Moritz had given her a diamond pair of practically the same pattern; a scarf in another; a pair of gloves at a third. She bought a bottle of scent that she did not care for, a folding mirror, a coloured handkerchief. But it was not the things themselves that she wanted, only that they should occupy her mind while she was buying them.

“For a whole hour,” she told herself afterwards. “I scarcely remembered.”

But inside the villa, in the quietness of the empty house, it was different. She remembered everything: those days of waiting for Charles's letter to arrive from Paris; the night before his departure when she had gone into his room; her father's face as she had last seen it.

She left her meal half eaten and rose from the table.

“I cannot stay here,” she began saying. “I shall go mad if I am so much alone.”

But as the words formed themselves in her brain she realised the folly of them.

“I have nowhere else to go,” she reminded herself. “Nowhere.”

And that afternoon she ordered the carriage again. It was to be ready now. At once. And she was to be driven from one end of the town to the other. She did not mind what streets the coachman took. All that she asked was that he should take her wherever the view was beautiful, or the buildings interesting, or there were people. People. It was people that she chiefly wanted. A lot of people. Crowds going about their business, and the sound of voices. She wanted to borrow a little of their life from others who had so much.

It was the thought of returning to the villa that frightened her. She knew that there the voices, the memories, would be waiting for
her. It was only out here among the crowds that she was free from them.

“I shall not go back yet,” she told herself. “I cannot go back.”

And leaning forward she told the coachman to stop.

The carriage drew up in front of a hotel which was hung brightly with pots of flowers. The terrace of the hotel was crowded. It hummed with conversation. And it was gay. The coloured sunshades over the tables sparkled in the sunlight.

The table which she chose was on the outside of the terrace. Beneath her, she could see the people passing and re-passing. There were now people all round her. The silence which had frightened her in the garden of the villa no longer existed.

“The terrace of the hotel is crowded,” she kept repeating to herself. “It is very fashionable, and everyone is laughing and smiling. In front of me is the most famous Casino in the world, and the most beautiful. At the foot of the steps a carriage, my carriage is waiting. There are many who would envy me, many who would be glad to share in such a life as this.”

But, even as she said it, she realised that it was not true. She was not sharing in this life. She was merely looking at it. And, as she admitted this fact to herself, the pleasure vanished. She realised that she was as lonely as she had ever been.

She called the waiter over, left unfinished the little cream cake that she had been eating, and returned to her carriage. It was not until she got back to the villa that she realised her mistake.

“I must
make
myself go to such places,” she told herself. “I will go again to the hotel to-morrow. And I will force myself to stop there. I may even go to the Casino. I will teach myself all the amusements of the place. There must be somehow that I can forget.”

But on the following afternoon as she was drawing on her gloves before getting into the carriage, she was stopped by Carlos. He emerged from the study where he had been industriously working, and held out a telegram in his hand.

The telegram was from M. Moritz. It was at once loving, admonitory and well-informed.

“I miss you always, I shall be happy only when I return. For reasons I will explain to you, do not take tea away from the villa. My affairs are successful. I will bring you presents.”

The telegram was addressed to Madame Moritz and was signed
“Votre Mari.”

“So he left the servants to spy on me,” Anna told herself for the hundredth time. “It is what I might have expected.”

And because of the humiliation of it, she shut herself in her room and wept. Then the mood passed, and she was angry again.

“Why should I care?” she asked. “I will defy him. I do not mind if all the staff are in league against me.”

And on the next day, and on the day after, she told the coachman to take her back to the hotel. She forced herself, even though by now it bored her, to sit there at her table on the terrace for a whole hour.

To show her authority in the house she even made the man drive her afterwards to see the view, so that dinner had to be kept waiting for her. And in a score of ways she became difficult. At the last moment she would change her mind and have meals sent up to her room. She had the furniture in her boudoir altered. She threw away the flowers that were in the drawing-room and arranged fresh bunches herself. She bought a puppy and said it should sleep in a basket at the foot of her bed. She ran up bills.

Having found a smart dressmaker, she ordered herself an evening gown and a new afternoon frock that she did not need. She visited a shoemaker's and bought a pair of fashionable shoes with four-inch heels that she was forever having to thrust off in the carriage because they were too painful. She bought more perfume. She left M. Moritz's letters unanswered.

They were very frequent, these letters. In his infatuation, he wrote to her daily, sometimes twice a day. The crisp blue envelopes that seemed always to be arriving.

But the last of these letters was different. It contained no compliments. In it, M. Moritz complained that since he had been away she had not troubled to write to him even once. And there was one sentence in particular in the letter that alarmed her. It remarked, pathetically, that he had been away for nearly two weeks, and evidently she had already forgotten him.

Nearly two weeks! The meaning of the words were not lost upon her. In another fortnight he would be back again and this little festival of freedom would be over.

She began desperately to make plans for the few vanishing days that were left to her. In the meantime, however, there was the matter of the letter to be settled. She sat at the large escritoire
overlooking the bay and, in a single morning, wasted a dozen sheets of paper. The sight of the basket beside the desk filled her with confusion when she saw it. Fragments of the letters stared up at her. She was ashamed at what the servants would think, afraid that they would begin piecing them together, and in a moment of sudden panic she emptied the basket herself, gathering up the torn sheets and thrusting them into a large envelope. That afternoon she threw the envelope into a bonfire which the gardener had lit and sat watching the thick wad of paper which for some reason refused obstinately to burn.

But the letter meanwhile remained unanswered.

It was not finally until she was seated again on the terrace of the Hotel de Casino that she made any fresh attempt; and then it was only because she realised in a moment of alarm that the day was two-thirds past already, and the letter still not written.

She called for pen and ink-well and paper, and began to write.

“you ask what I have been doing?”
she wrote. “
What is there that I should do? I rise late. I visit the shops. I sit in the garden. Sometimes I drive in the carriage and I admire the view from the terrace of this hotel. I read a little, and I have bought a few new dresses …”

M. Moritz received the letter in Paris. Its arrival agitated him. He read it greedily, hungrily. And when he had finished it, his face fell.

“It is obvious that she does not love me,” he told himself. “But at least she is honest: a foolish woman would have denied that she had ever visited the hotel, and a loose one would have filled up a whole letter with her kisses.”

He paused and re-read the letter carefully, diligently as if it were one of the contracts that he had been negotiating. Then he turned to the desk beside him and his fingers touched the daily telegrams which Carlos had been sending.

“Even these tell me more,” he admitted sadly.

Anna lay there facing the open window looking at the pattern which the leaves made across the morning sky.

“At last my mind is made up,” she told herself. “I will go away. [shall not be here when he gets back.”

With a little shiver she realised that the month of M. Moritz's absence was now almost over. There were only two days left till his return. The realisation alarmed her and she became filled with
Tegrets for the wasted hours that lay behind. She blamed-herself for the missed opportunities.

“I must have money,” she told herself. “I cannot live on what I have. But one reads every day of people who have made a fortune at the tables. How do I know that I might not be one of the lucky ones?”

The idea excited her. She could not lie there any longer, and even though it was still only early morning, she raised herself on one elbow and rang for the maid to tell her that the carriage would be wanted that evening for nine o'clock.

Then, having done so, the excitement, the confidence subsided. But the carriage had been ordered and she could not turn back now: it would be taken by the servants as an admission of defeat. And that evening she dressed carefully.

“I shall wear black,” she told herself. “It will make me look older.”

It was a clear pearly evening as she drove to the Casino. Inside, business was in full swing. The croupier, his rake held aloft, was like some presiding deity of insane finance. The worshippers obeyed him. He had only to raise the rake and tell them to give up their gold—and, behold, a pile of little offerings was symbolically rendered up.

She looked at the large clock on the wall: it showed nine-thirty. She decided that she would play at once. She would become one of them.

The first time she went over to the bank she spent only five hundred francs of her money.

“I will not risk more,” she told herself. “And if I lose I shall go home again.”

The five hundred francs was lost promptly and without trouble. When the last of them had gone, Anna left her place at the table. She felt vaguely ashamed but she did not, as she had promised, go home at once. She continued to watch. There was one woman in particular who attracted her. She was an ancient, desiccated husk of a creature on whose shrivelled arms her bracelets rattled and jingled. Despite the jewel in her hair and the bright circular patch of rouge on each cheek, there was an unprepossessing air of the coffin and the tomb about her. But the old witch was enjoying herself. She was oblivious to everything except the steadily mounting accumulation of counters in front of her. And as she sat there she seemed to be working some abstruse black magic of her own. Her lips were moving and, with a tiny pencil on a chain, she was carefully writing down a complicated abracadabra.

Anna saw her play, and win; play, and win; play, and win. She did this three times. Then she sat back and consulted her book again. When she returned to the game, her system had not betrayed her. She won again, twice in succession, and then returned to her necromancies once more. In less than half an hour she had won nearly four thousand francs, and lost nothing.

It was as she drew the last pile of counters towards her, that Anna decided that she would follow her. She went quickly over to the bank and invested another five hundred francs. But when she returned to the table, the old lady was not playing. She was engrossed in some new and even more abstruse calculation. Suddenly the intuition came to her again. She quickly thrust out a thousand francs of her wealth and placed it on the seven. Anna had been waiting for this moment: she did not hesitate. She placed her own five hundred francs beside it. And there were others who copied her. They had been observing what was happening and were prepared to take their lead from someone so magnificently successful. The croupier obligingly waited for even the slowest of them.

Then he set the wheel spinning. There was the ten seconds of expensive suspense and the ball ignored the seven. The old lady had lost. Those who had lost with her clearly blamed her for their losses: they glared at her. And she was angry too, very angry. It was not for nearly half an hour that she played again. But, when she played, she won. This time, she had no followers; they had deserted after the first disaster.

As Anna rose from the table she was aware of a faint chill of apprehension.

“I have squandered a thousand francs,” she told herself. “In the space of an hour it has gone forever.”

The feeling of shame returned to her.

Her bag was lighter now, much lighter. The thousand francs which she had lost already had been weighing it down. And when she took out the last five hundred and paid it to the banker there seemed nothing left. She was trembling a little as she gathered up the counters.

The old lady, moreover, appeared in no mood for risking anything. She was merely observing. Her small eyes took note of all that was happening but she seemed in some way to have relaxed. Her hands were not clenched now every time the ball began spinning. And when she glanced down at the diminished pile of counters in front of her, she had the manner of a retired conqueror surveying the remains of his once splendid empire. Then she swooped. The
muscles tautened, the glitter in the eye returned, and she placed a thousand francs upon the seven again.