Anna

by Norman Collins

  Seen in that instant, the huge envelope no longer gave the impression of lightness. It seemed instead to be something too bulky and ponderous to remain aloft. And as it was swept towards her Anna could see the dark shape of two men outlined above the edge of the basket. A jet of what looked like black spray now streamed behind—one of the aeronauts had cut the cord of a bag containing sand ballast. A moment later the whole drama of the scene mounted swiftly as she saw things falling from the balloon. These were the ballast bags themselves, which were now being jettisoned in desperation without any attempt being made to open them. They fell intact, each weighing nearly a hundredweight, smashing roofs, chimneys, windows. There were seven such bags.

  The balloon for a moment appeared to soar, as though it were being jerked upwards on a string. But, as quickly, it lost height again, and Anna could see that the envelope was now more distorted than ever. It had assumed the shape of a pear, and the skin was visibly flapping. The wind was now driving it straight towards her.

  “It will strike this building,” she thought. “The men in it will be killed.”

  In the excitement of the occasion she had lost all sense of personal danger.

  The moon was shining full on it, and the balloon was near enough for Anna to see every detail. Of all that she saw, there was only one thing that she clearly remembered—and that was a four-pronged anchor that was dangling underneath. The incongruity of it, this anchor in the clouds, riveted the image in her mind.

  Then in a swirl of wind the balloon mounted again a little and was carried over the roof-tops. For a second the sky was blotted out, and then the balloon passed over. The night became normal again.

  Anna remained at the window motionless. All other details now seemed insignificant beside a new one which she was hugging in her memory.

  “I heard the basket creak,” she told herself exultantly. “It was as near as that.”

  The balloon itself descended, with a rent envelope, in the Bois de Boulogne, less than three miles from its starting-point. One of the occupants was thrown out and killed at once by the impact; the other became entangled in branches and was rescued at daybreak, like a kitten that had climbed too far up an apple tree.

  He came down protesting loudly that his vessel had been tampered with.

  III

  Because she did not dare to spend any of the remaining fifteen francs which she had set aside for M. Duvivier’s rent, and because only four francs remained in her handbag, Anna had not eaten properly for the last two days. The price of food had already gone rocketing, and for forty-eight hours she had fed only on rolls and a little coffee. In the result she was hungry and a little lightheaded.

  Fantastic schemes, all directed to the sole end of making money, filled her mind. She saw herself as the mistress of one of the innumberable officers who populated the capital. But the danger of allowing anyone else except M. Duvivier—who unquestionably suspected it—to know that she had no papers was too great. That particular scheme seemed too inevitably to end in prison.

  She grew more desperate.

  “Or I could take a different rich lover every night,” she told herself. “They need know nothing of me then; and in the morning should be free again.”

  But she realised she had nowhere to take them, these imaginary lovers. The grand courtesans lived, like a race of Duchesses, in costly apartments with beds of silk and swansdown, not in an attic in a side street.

  “Besides,” she reflected innocently, “I do not know any wealthy lovers. I do not even know how to begin finding them.”

  Then she remembered the house in the Palais Royal, the house where she had once sought lodgings, and she shuddered. Between the fantasy and the reality there lay a chasm that she knew she could never bring herself to cross.

  “No,” she told herself, “There must be some other way. It cannot be for long now.”

  These thoughts, and a score of others all as frantic, as hopeless, were passing through her mind as she walked. The walk had been aimless, purposeless. She had gone out simply because indoors the sense of imprisonment seemed stronger, more unendurable. And now she was turning down the rue Cigale. On the way she passed the shop of M. Adrianopolis, coiffeur and wig-maker. It was a small shop, less imposing than its neighbours, but it still, despite the war, had an air of prosperity and well-being about it. Its sign of a tail of horse-hair suspended from above the door was freshly painted and new-looking. The shop recalled a hairdresser’s which she had often visited in Düsseldorf.

  But what caught her eye was the side-window full of examples of M. Adrianopolis’s art. There were wigs of every pattern and colour. Behind them were ranged row upon row of postiches. Small curls and love-locks decorated the floor of the window.

  Anna stood there staring. Her heart had suddenly begun to beat faster. After a moment she turned away and walked on. But at the top of the street she stopped and came hurriedly back again. She went in through the doorway of the little shop without pausing. The colour had gone from her cheeks.

  It was M. Adrianopolis himself who confronted her. A small and smiling man, he came forward bowing from the hips like a dancer. With his custom suddenly fallen away to nothing, he was enchanted at the sight of a customer.

  “Good-evening, Mademoiselle,” he began. “You wish …”

  But Anna interrupted him. “I was looking at your windowful of postiches,” she said. “You buy the hair?”

  M. Adrianopolis appeared surprised at the question.

  “Why, yes, Mademoiselle,” he replied. “I can guarantee it is all real human hair. I cut most of it myself.”

  “Would mine be the right colour?” Anna asked. “Would you buy mine?”

  As she spoke, she turned her head a little for the hairdresser to see.

  But M. Adrianopolis scarcely even glanced at her.

  “At any other time I should have been delighted to discuss it, Mademoiselle,” he replied. “But at the present moment …”

  “It is very thick,” Anna told him. “It reaches below my waist.”

  There was something in her voice that made him pause and consider. His customer was obviously a lady, and she was as obviously hard up or she would never consider doing such a thing. In the circumstances she would probably accept a fraction of what such hair was worth. And out of the corner of his eye he was already sizing up the mass of it. He could see the great golden coil that it made. Besides, as a Greek, he would have nothing to fear. If Paris fell into German hands, his consul was there to protect him. It was even possible that he might with a little manœuvring be able to secure a most agreeable bargain. Golden hair was, at the moment, probably as good an investment as any other kind of gold.

  “I have such stocks of hair,” he said.

  He opened one of the drawers with which the shop was lined, and tilted it towards her.

  “I have pounds of it stowed away here,” he added. “I wonder shall I ever sell any of it?”

  “Then you don’t want to buy any more?”

  “I am sorry, Mademoiselle.…”

  He allowed her to go almost to the door of the shop. Then he stopped her.

  “But just in case times should improve,” he said, “perhaps Mademoiselle would permit me to look at it.”

  As he spoke he opened the door of a little cubicle and stood back for Anna to enter. She came so readily that he knew that he would have no difficulty about settling a price, and she took off her hat as if actually eager for the sacrifice. As he removed the pins and then began unplaiting, his fingers worked deftly, tenderly. He talked all the time.…

  “Thirty francs is a great deal of money,” he was saying. “And the work that has to be put in on it costs so much. But I said thirty francs, so thirty francs it shall be.”

  And as he talked he cut. The scissors made a faint squeaking sound as they sheared, and the pile of hair on the table beside him was growing larger every minute. There was a pair of scales ready there for him to weigh it.

  In the mi
rror in front of her Anna could see each tress as he lifted it carefully and laid it by him. She began crying.

  But thirty francs! It meant another two weeks’ rent. She did not any longer regret what she had done.

  “It will grow again,” she told herself. “I am still young: there is plenty of time.”

  She raised her hand to her head: M. Adrianopolis as a part of his bargain, his excellent bargain, had used his curling tongs. Her whole head was now covered in close, bewildering curls.

  “He tells me that it suits me,” she reflected; and she turned to catch her profile in the mirror at the side.

  IV

  There were a police-sergeant and two constables waiting behind the awning of the Restaurant Duvivier as she returned. They had been there for upwards of an hour already, and their feet were getting cold. With his eye close up to the canvas, the sergeant was keeping careful watch on the street. As Anna came into view, he raised his hand warningly.

  Then, as she reached the restaurant and turned to enter it, he stepped forward and the constables closed in behind her. It was all very neatly and efficiently done. Before Anna had realised that the sergeant even intended to speak to her, she was surrounded as effectively as if she had been a murderer or an assassin caught red-handed.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said, “I hold a warrant for your arrest.”

  He waved the paper which was in his hand and a driver a little farther down the street understood the signal. He whipped up his horse, and the small sky-blue van without any windows and only a barred door at the back came clopping down the street in their direction.

  Chapter XVIII

  The Cell in which she was confined was no larger than an ordinary pantry. The window, high up in a corner, and criss-crossed with a meshwork of iron that would have defeated a cat, was ingeniously arranged so that not one particle of direct light entered this model dungeon. The door had no handle on the inside. There was only a steel flap which could be opened from without so that the occupants could be studied and examined. The furniture, too, was of the simplest: it comprised a chair chained to the wall opposite the window, a bed made of two planks let into the stone, a straw mattress and a pail.

  An injunction against shouting, stamping, knocking, hammering, spitting and stripping had been pasted over the bed by Order of Napoleon III. No one had seen fit to bring it up to date.

  It was now Anna’s third day in the prison. Quite how much of the day had passed she did not know, had no means of knowing. The midday meal of bread and weak soup had already been passed through the grille. And another meal, a duplicate of the first one, would be handed in to her in the same way at six o’clock. She judged some two hours to have passed since she had eaten. But she knew from the experience of the other days that it might have been as little as an hour, even as little as half an hour. Inside these four walls the ordinary passage of time seemed somehow to have been suspended; the cell was a little time-proof pocket in creation. A clock in the wall would simply have been untrue to itself.

  It was the night that she dreaded; the lights were turned off then. At their best they provided only a dim uncertain haze, too faint to cast a shadow. But when they were extinguished the imagination remembered them as something glowing and human. The real darkness was as oppressive as evil.

  And with the coming on of the darkness the noises began. Under cover of night the injunction against shouting went ignored, the wardresses had to go along the corridors banging on the doors with their fists; but they had very little that they could threaten, these wardresses, to people who already had the threat of death hanging over them. In the result, the hammering of their fists only added to the bedlam of the place. There were curses and obscenities from both sides of the little grated doors.

  The woman in the cell next to Anna’s was the most clamorous of the shouters. It was she who started it regularly. She began every evening with a kind of noisy, vulgar sobbing which gave place in time to sharp, hysterical cries. There was purpose as well as pattern in these outbursts. She, poor woman, was under sentence of death. The day for the execution was drawing near, and she was unable to make her case understood. In her extremity she appealed to everyone. She mentioned lovers whom she had had in the various Ministries, even mentioned one of the Ministers himself. Her whole amorous background had apparently been political, and she begged and entreated the wardress to get in touch with these phantoms from her past. She offered bribes—all of them pathetically dependent upon the success of these negotiations. And all to no purpose: the wardress remained deaf to her.

  The last scene of this little nightly tragedy was as unalterable as the first. It consisted of a prayer—a prayer for poison. She implored her tormentors to give her laudanum, morphia, prussic acid; anything so long as the dose was lethal. When she found them adamant about this too, she would relapse once more into a low moaning that ceased only with sleep.

  And for all the reprieve these protestations secured her she might have remained silent. On the appointed day she was duly led out. And Anna, her face pressed against the grille of the cell door, saw a fat, elderly woman with grey hair, half-fainting, supported in the arms of a couple of stalwart warders.

  It was only for these supreme occasions that male warders were admitted. For the most part, the nuns who had tended the place in time of peace still ruled there. But with her establishment suddenly grown so large, the Reverend Mother in charge had been forced to accept many changes. She had recruited lay-helpers—old grizzled women who were unaffected by suffering. She even had a Military Governor over her.

  The hammering in the other cells broke out again as the melancholy procession passed along, and the air was filled with every kind of cat-calling. But when one of the warders, a jovial, cheerful kind of man, shouted back over his shoulder that the woman was German, the shouting ceased immediately, and boos and hisses were released instead.

  In that moment a new fear sprung up within Anna’s mind.

  “When I go, they will still be ignorant about me,” she pledged herself. “I shall tell them nothing. I will not even speak.”

  And when, on the following day, the door of her cell was opened and the Governor of the prison himself entered, she remained silent. She heard the charge of espionage, of plotting against the security of the French nation, preferred against her, and she kept her eyes to the ground. She stood there as though she had not heard. She did not even move when he told her that the day of her trial had been fixed for the following week.

  His tone of voice, his bearing, the unruffled serenity with which he withdrew again, as though tears or silence were of no material difference to him, made it abundantly clear that in the Governor’s view the verdict was established already.

  But the day of the trial never came. It drew near, very near. At the last moment, however, a new force, something outside the prison, shattered everything. Justice, surprised a little, drew back.

  Anna had been lying face downwards on the wretched bed, her face resting on her hands. The prison was quieter now at nights. Since the unfortunate woman from the next cell had departed there was often nothing to break the unnatural silence of the place. The felt slippers of the wardresses brushed along the corridors as softly as wings.

  “To-morrow,” Anna had told herself, “I shall know. There will come an end to all this. I shall hear the sentence. I shall be … be executed.”

  She was not afraid any longer: she was too numb and dazed for that. But the final word came only with difficulty. She could not bring herself to utter it. Then, having uttered it, she could not forget it.

  “You are German and you are in Paris,” she told herself. “You have adopted a false name and you have lived in hiding from the authorities. Someone has denounced you. In time of war that is sufficient. There is only one sentence for spying.”

  And then in the midst of these doubts and terrors there landed the bombshell from without. The bombshell was M. Duvivier.

  His voice reached her while he w
as still in the stone entrancehall. It carried, high-pitched and petulant, through the succession of iron-grated doors between them. It was the voice of a man clamorously asserting the rights of a good citizen.

  At first, Anna failed to recognise the voice. And then her mind refused to believe it. The voice of M. Duvivier belonged to another and different world. But, as it drew nearer, there was no mistaking it. The voice by now was opposite the door.

  “Isn’t a letter from the Minister of Justice enough?” M. Duvivier was saying. “Must I be followed about by a lot of wardresses? I wish to see the lady alone, I tell you. Alone.”

  There was the sound of a heavy key turning in the lock. The door swung open—and there stood M. Duvivier before her.

  But the sight, the actual sight of him, shocked her. His black suit was spruce no longer. It was crumpled and unpressed. And the face had sunk into haggard, unnatural lines. Only the hands, red and heavy-fingered, were the same. He came forward; and, as he did so, Anna saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

  “So at last I have found you,” he said. “At last.”

  He took up her hand and began kissing it.

  The wardress—she was one of the temporary sisters—who had entered with him, took her place at the door. She proceeded to relock it, and passed the key through the grille to another wardress, who was waiting in the corridor.

  M. Duvivier turned and regarded her for a moment. Then he removed a five franc piece from his pocket and went over to her. He said something under his breath, but the woman, tight-lipped as ever, only shook her head. M. Duvivier hesitated for a moment, and then removed another five franc piece. The woman took it, and finally pushed open the flap in the grille once more. The key was handed back to her, and she proceeded to let herself out. The lock grated for a second time, and Anna and M. Duvivier were alone together.