Anna

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Anna Page 9

by Norman Collins


  The woman who answered the door was elderly and grizzled, too: she might have been a half-sister of the concierge. She was suspicious. At first she barred the way altogether, and then, in the face of Anna’s insistence, admitted her reluctantly, as though doubtful about strange young ladies who wore velvet travelling capes and spoke with foreign accents. She left her standing in a dimcurtained ante-room crowded with furniture and rugs and small, bronze statues and unlighted lamps. Anna’s heart was beating now with a furious rapidity that she could not control. From the next room there came the sound of someone playing the piano.

  “Perhaps that is Charles,” Anna thought. “He plays as though it were Charles. I am sure it is Charles. I should know his playing anywhere.”

  After a moment a door at the far end of the corridor opened and Anna heard footsteps approaching. The curtains of the ante-room were pulled back, and Madame Latourette was standing there. Her hair stood out from her head in heedless, untidy wisps, and the black dress that she was wearing was cut without distinction. Anna thought how faded, how unfashionable she looked. Moreover, she seemed agitated.

  “You wanted to see my son,” she asked.

  Anna held out her hand: she spoke like an actress not yet familiar with her part, carefully remembering the speech that she had rehearsed upon the journey.

  “Are you Madame Latourette?” she asked, smiling at Madame Latourette as though to put her at her ease. “I am Charles’s cousin, Anna. I asked for him only because I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting you.”

  “Charles’s cousin,” Madame Latoruette repeated. “From …Germany?”

  “From Rhinehausen,” Anna replied. “Where Charles has been staying.”

  Madame Latourette’s hands fluttered across her bosom for a moment. “Then you are Anna Karlin,” she said.

  She spoke as though her whole mind were filled with some kind of vague alarm, and it was noticeable that she made no move to lead the visitor in the direction of her son.

  “You didn’t get my letter?” Anna asked. “The one that I wrote to say that I was coming.”

  The words seemed easier, more natural, once she had said them: after all, an untruth was no more difficult to utter than the truth. For all that Madame Latourette knew, she might have written such a letter.

  “No, there wasn’t any letter,” Madame Latourette answered. “The postman brought nothing. Perhaps it has been held up because of … of the situation.”

  Madame Latourette broke off in confusion, and Anna realised that it was because she, Anna Karlin, by having crossed the frontier, was now a foreigner, that Madame Latourette was so alarmed. In a sense Madame Latourette’s confusion and the soldiers on the train were all a part of one embracing whole.

  “But you must be tired,” Madame Latourette was saying. “Take off your cloak.”

  Anna raised her hand to her forehead.

  “It is all so strange,” she said. “I cannot think what can have happened to my letter. I had no idea that you were not expecting me. I must go to an hotel.”

  She paused.

  “Perhaps my uncle has heard,” she added. “My father wrote to him by the same post.”

  At the knowledge that this was something of which M. Latourette was supposed to know, Madame Latourette’s anxiety visibly diminished. She came over and put her arm round Anna’s shoulders.

  “Come with me, my dear,” she said. “We will take you to your uncle straightaway. He will be very pleased to meet his niece.”

  She took Anna along the corridor—this, too, was crowded with little pieces of furniture set in any angle that the walls provided— and led her in the direction of the room from which the playing was coming.

  “It is Charles whom I can hear,” Anna was telling herself. “In a moment I shall see him.”

  At the thought her whole body seemed to be charged with expectation.

  “My dear,” she heard Madame Latourette saying, “you’re so tired you’re trembling. You must rest until we have got you something.”

  She threw the door open, and disclosed a room lit by two table-lamps obscured by rose-pink shades. The walls of the room were papered in crimson-damask, and in the centre stood a round, satinwood table littered with daguerrotypes in silver frames. At the table the diminutive figure of M. Latourette was sitting, a smoking-cap on his head and a heavy pipe like her father’s in his hand. He rose to his feet politely, but completely at a loss. Then Madame Latourette shut the door and disclosed the piano. Seated at the keyboard was a young lady with a complicated coiffure of black hair and a long, aristocratic nose. And bending over her, to control the music, was Charles.

  He started up when he saw Anna, and stood there staring stupidly. The piece of music that he had been arranging slid off its rack and fluttered to the floor.

  “But how wrong about him Charles was,” Anna was thinking. “M. Latourette is charming.”

  His small eyes were fixed upon her, and he was nodding his head approvingly. It was not Anna at all that he was seeing but his half-sister Marie. He had gone back thirty years, and he was seeing again a young girl in a poke bonnet and an enormous bustle standing on the platform at Alsace ready to set out to marry her German husband. She had been fair-haired as Anna was; and her eyes had slanted upwards at the corners in exactly the same fashion.

  M. Latourette reached down for the bottle of wine that he had opened, and filled Anna’s glass again.

  “And how did my son behave while he was with you?” he asked. “If I had known what company he was enjoying I should have been there myself.”

  He folded his hands together in his lap, and sat there beaming at her. Madame Latourette was watching him. The expression on his face and his obvious delight in his rôle as an irresistible fascinator of pretty women distressed her. She had seen those bright eyes turned on her once; and she was hurt to find that for someone else they could still sparkle.

  But it was Charles who was showing the most obvious distress. He had gone very pale when Anna had entered and had left Mlle. Yvette d’Enbois in the middle of one of her most ravishing arpeggios. The room seemed suddenly to revolve about him, and he was aware that now, after the first moment, when his heart had seemed to stop altogether, he was blushing. He had come forward as though he were ready in front of every one to take her in his arms.

  But Anna had stopped him: she had been ready for such a piece of folly on his part. She had merely held out her hand to him as though he were the most casual of acquaintances, and had asked if his journey home had been an easy one. Then, when the meal was ready in the dining-room—Mlle d’Enbois had left early, pleading a headache, and she carried her music away with her—Charles had followed Anna, trying to keep as near to her as possible, to snatch a moment to speak to her alone, to explain.

  But there was no such moment. M. Latourette would not allow himself to be denied a second of his niece’s company. And Madame Latourette, jealous herself, would not leave either of them.

  As Charles sat there he remembered again his first evening in Rhinehausen, when he could only sit and look.

  “But why has she come?” he kept asking himself. “Is it true that her father really wrote a letter that we have not received? Or is this only some story that she has invented to cover up her arrival? What is behind it all?”

  When Anna had finished her meal, M. Latourette gave her his arm and led her back into the drawing-room. He drew his chair up so close to her that it was useless for Charles to attempt to sit anywhere in the vicinity.

  “And how long did your father’s letter say that we might have this privilege?” he asked. “How long was he ready to confide his beautiful daughter?”

  “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.”

  Chapter X

  I

  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.

  II

  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.

 

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