Anna

by Norman Collins

  M. Duvivier had gone very pale. He was sweating so copiously that his tight, hard collar was damp and creased. He kept raising his arms as though about to enfold her, and then dropping them to his side again. There remained something in his attitude that was at once timorous and respectful.

  “Mademoiselle,” he said at length. “I have done it. I have secured your release. I have secured it on one condition.”

  The words reached her, but she did not comprehend them.

  “My release,” she repeated. “You have secured my release?”

  “Upon one condition.”

  She paused. “And what is the condition?”

  She knew before she asked the question what his answer would be. There was only one reason that could have driven this middle-aged restaurant proprietor into such an assault upon the stone walls and iron bars.

  But M. Duvivier seemed, in this, the moment of his victory, to be unable to express himself. He hesitated and apologised.

  “There was no other way,” he began. “It is the law. You must believe me when I say so.… It is only you, your life, that I am thinking of.…”

  He began to walk up and down the cell to quieten his nerves and regain control of himself. Then, with his eyes to the floor and his weight shifting nervously from one foot to the other, he made a fresh attempt.

  “If only you had French nationality,” he explained. “Then the authorities would regard the matter quite differently. It is because they know nothing about you that they are suspicious. I have done my utmost … believe me, my absolute utmost. Because of my efforts I have brought myself under suspicion too. I have been followed. There were agents behind me when I came here to-night …”

  M. Duvivier was losing the thread of his argument and he pulled himself up.

  “They wished to know why I was interested in you,” he explained, “and I lied to them. I told them—you must forgive me—that I had been your protector, that you were my …”

  Again M. Duvivier could not bring himself to say what was in his mind, and he turned towards her appealingly.

  “Say that you are not angry with me,” he entreated. “Say that you understand.”

  And before Anna could answer he had resumed.

  “A special licence from the Town Hall was the only way. There was so little time, so desperately little time.”

  He opened his coat and brought out a sheaf of papers, which he handed to her. His hand was trembling so much that he could scarcely hold them, and when he pointed to one of the lines, his finger, his fat red finger, strayed erratically across the page.

  “I have described you as my cousin,” he said. “It is the address of my cousins in Lorraine that I have given. There is nothing to fear, the authorities have no way of checking it.”

  He broke off and passed his handkerchief across his forehead.

  “Everything is ready,” he said. “All that is needed is your signature. As soon as you have signed it I can go back to the Town Hall and a clerk can attend here in the morning. Everything is arranged I tell you. Everything.”

  He stopped short again, and this time all reserve and concealment fell from him.

  “Tell me that you will marry me,” he said. Accept my love, my devotion, my entire life.”

  His little speech, his carefully rehearsed speech that somehow he had forgotten, was now over. He stood there waiting for her answer.

  For a moment Anna did not reply. She raised her eyes and saw the flat, suave face with the greased hair drawn backwards across the skull to conceal its baldness and brushed-up in front into a coif like a workman’s; the narrow inquisitive eyes; the hard mouth with the shining gold-topped teeth; the red agitated hands. She saw that; and she saw behind him the steel grille of the door with the mask of the wardress staring in at her. She saw the stones and the iron bars and the studded woodwork.

  Somewhere on another gallery a woman had started screaming. Anna winced and put her hands over her ears. When she removed them, M. Duvivier was speaking again.

  “Tell me you will,” he was saying. “Let me take you away from here.”

  He stretched both hands out to her and then started back in astonishment.

  “Your hair, Mademoiselle,” he said in a horrified voice. “Your beautiful hair.”

  And, putting his arms about her, he began weeping.

  Chapter XIX

  I

  The best bedroom—Madame’s room—at the Restaurant Duvivier, was a magnificent and imposing apartment. The bed, raised up on a little platform, was draped over like a catafalque. On the various occasional tables, on the shelf over the large porcelain stove, on the window sills, were innumerable objets d’art. There was even statuary in the corners. The windows apparently had never been open, and the atmosphere had the close, suffocating flavour of a zenana.

  Anna woke in the room and lay there without moving. It was early, and the thin morning light faltered uncertainly through the closed shutters of the blinds and the drawn curtains. Awakening brought with it its moment of confusion. Why was she there? Where was the chess-board of light shining through the steel grille of the door? Why had the mattress of packed straw grown suddenly so restful, so luxurious?

  And then she remembered. Remembered everything.

  M. Duvivier had been as good as his word. Dawn had scarcely broken after his departure before he was back at the prison again. This time he was accompanied by the clerk from the Mairie, an obscure, faded creature with a bulging dossier under his arm. The clerk had spread his papers on the floor around him—the table in the cell was too small for them—with as little emotion as if he had been seated at his own proper desk. It was evident that he was a man impervious to drama. This unusual marriage did not apparently raise his circulation by a single heart beat. And M. Duvivier had everything so perfectly prepared. The details, real and imaginary, were all there. There was nothing to be done but sign.

  During the whole transaction—it could scarcely be called a ceremony—Anna had carefully avoided M. Duvivier’s eyes. But she was aware all the time the clerk was reading out the form of marriage of the Third Empire (the provisional government had not yet had time to make its reforms felt in this quarter) that his eyes were fixed upon her. And, when the clerk handed her the pen, with M. Duvivier’s signature wet upon the paper, she signed her name still without looking at M. Duvivier.

  Her actual release did not take place until later—so much later in fact that she had begun condemning herself for her folly, her credulity. She saw herself married to M. Duvivier and still a prisoner in peril of her life.

  And then, just as she had thrown herself back down upon the bed and had given herself up to weeping—it was evening by then—the Governor arrived. The old soldier was as stern as ever. He stood himself to attention in front of her and, reading in a cold impersonal voice from the document in his hand, informed her that the charges against her had been dropped from lack of evidence. There were neither congratulation nor regret in his voice as he addressed her.

  When the Governor had withdrawn, the cell door opened again and one of the wardresses appeared. She was carrying a bundle. As she dropped it on the floor it burst open, and Anna saw that it contained her clothes.

  The wardress was not so reticent as the Governor had been. She leant up against the door, and placing her hands on her hips, allowed herself free comment upon the situation.

  “You must have a good friend somewhere,” she observed. “You won’t be sleeping in that sort of bed to-night.…”

  Anna changed rapidly, excitedly, into the clothes that had been brought her—the high-waisted bodice, the piqué skirt, the pointed, fashionable shoes. The brown sackcloth that was the dress of the prison slid down around her feet and she stepped out of it. The wardress stood where she was, watching her. The sight of Anna’s white body seemed to hold a fascination for her. And when Anna had smoothed her hair—there was no mirror by which to do it—and had placed the little hat upon her head, the wardress clicked her
tongue approvingly.

  “You’ll do,” she said. “You’ll give him his money’s worth.”

  She told Anna to fold up the prison clothes and put them on the bed. Then she led the way down the low arched corridor, past the other grated cells—they stretched, sombre and silent and identical like a street in a nightmare—and through the steel door at the end.

  It boomed after her as it swung back on its hinges; and the sound started up a bombardment of echoes from all sides as though guns were firing over her departure.

  Down in the little bare stone waiting-room M. Duvivier was waiting. He had evidently been walking up and down in his agitation, for his back was turned to her when she entered. But he turned sharply and, at the sight of her, he rushed over and began kissing her.

  She turned her head away so that his kisses fell upon her neck.

  The return to Montmartre had been planned by M. Duvivier in terms of triumph. He had kept a fiacre waiting at the door of the prison. And the restaurant itself had been decorated for their return. Over the high stool behind the counter where the first Madame Duvivier had sat, and where her ghost still seemed to linger, he had erected a paper design of his initials laced with Anna’s. White bows had been attached to the flickering chandeliers.

  It was towards midnight when they reached the restaurant. The diners—if there had been any—had departed. Through the hatchway in the corner, the chef—his white hat folded and crumpled—and his galley boy, a Negro, could be seen. The waiters rose hurriedly from the seats where they had been resting, and the entire kitchen staff came forward smiling and bowing. They got themselves into ceremonial formation and the chef produced a sheaf of flowers from behind one of the curtains. There was a presentation.

  But M. Duvivier was impatient to be alone with his bride. He gave them a curt good-night, thrust Anna in front of him up the narrow staircase and followed, squaring his shoulders importantly.

  On the first landing he paused and smiled contentedly.

  “No need to go up any farther,” he said. “This will be your bedroom now.…”

  But that had all been last night. And this was morning. She raised herself on one elbow and gazed down at M. Duvivier as he lay beside her. His mouth was open and the tip of his tongue protruded over the gold-filled teeth. His great red hands were claspe under his chin in the attitude of a child praying.

  “I must have been mad,” she told herself, “to imagine that could endure him. How could I have persuaded myself that I could ($$$) consent to be his wife?”

  And, sliding silently out of bed, she went over to the long couch where her clothes were lying and began to dress.

  II

  M. Duvivier’s generosity embarrassed her. He was so touchingly, so pathetically, anxious to please. He spent his time inventing little occasions for fresh gifts. He brought out the casket of his first wife’s jewellery, and asked Anna to make her choice of anything that she wanted. And his face fell when he saw how little she had chosen.

  Then the keys of Madame Duvivier’s wardrobe were handed over, and Anna was invited to take her pick—her pick of dresses that had been made for a woman of twice her size. There were little presents of flowers as well—which meant that M. Duvivier must have searched Paris to find a florist’s that was still open. And there were special dishes prepared for her in the kitchen, pigeon stewed in wine, and tarts swimming in syrup that was precious already…

  It was only in the actual parting with money that M. Duvivier showed himself not merely reluctant, but adamant. He could not bring himself to hand over a single penny. It was evident that he recognised and delighted in the fact that Anna, penniless, was his entirely. She could not set foot outside the restaurant without his compliance. And when she told him that she needed a new hat, new gloves, stockings—anything in fact that a young woman needs, and Paris could still supply—he would accompany her, leaning over the counter in happy infatuation, fingering the stuff and telling her to choose something better, something more chic, more costly.

  This mood of happy indulgence would probably have continued indefinitely if it had not been for the war. But even the most doting of husbands cannot continue to bestow for ever if his income is first declining, then dwindling, and finally crashing.

  And under the pressure of so much and such constant anxiety, M. Duvivier’s natural preoccupation with money revealed itself. He thought of nothing else, and his lips muttered figures even when he was resting. He snatched time off from love-making to raise the prices on his carte du jour. He went earlier and earlier to the market, jumping out of bed almost as soon as he had got there, and returned to the restaurant to study desperately the little sums which he had scribbled down in pencil-stump on the backs of envelopes while bargaining with the stall-holders. He halved portions. He invented a new system of fines among the waiters—ten centimes if they spilt the gravy on the tablecloth in serving; fifteen centimes if they broke a glass or a plate; and so on; and then, finding the system not remunerative enough to compensate for the collapse of the Third Empire, he dismissed the lot of them and went back himself into the white apron of service.

  It was this act of personal sacrifice which most profoundly affected him. It damaged his pride. For the last twenty years he had been a master. He had employed people and enjoyed the luxury of having someone to shout at when things went wrong. And now all this was gone. He was a waiter again, a waiter with sixteen empty tables to look after. He wrung his red hands over the disaster.

  And Anna was aware that in his manner to her he was changing perceptibly. At first he had sought to keep her out of sight in the handsome upstairs drawing-room. He was so insistent upon her privacy, taking over at the door itself any tray that the waiter brought up to their room, that it was obvious that the idea of a lovely prisoner to whom he alone had access was not without its attractions for him. But his attitude was slowly altering. And finally he suggested that she should come downstairs and occupy her rightful place on Madame Duvuvier’s high chair behind the counter. There was no apparent reason for the change.

  The reason was there, however. Its roots lay buried deep in M. Duvivier’s instinctive insistence on his rights in any bargain. He had married the girl to satisfy an insane, unseemly longing inside himself—and what was he getting out of it? Nothing. The girl was more of a distraction than ever, shut away up there where he couldn’t see her. She merely kept his mind off the real things—the meatless stews and trifles without cream—which he should have been thinking about. And so Anna was installed, enthroned rather, behind the counter. She gazed out upon a world of tablecloths and cutlery, from across a neatly arranged display of cruets and liqueurs and empty fruit baskets.

  And M. Duvivier, going about his work at all hours, could pause for a moment and gloat over the vision of prettiness that he had placed there. There was a large mirror with a stencilled design of birds and flowers upon it behind Anna’s head. And from where he sat to write out the ornamental daily menu, M. Duvivier could see her enchantingly in profile. She still seemed worth the price. The knowledge that as soon as he had closed the restaurant for the night he could lead Anna upstairs to their own private apartment helped to obliterate the unpleasant fact that all the while he was there playing at restaurant-keeping and love-making in the French capital he was in reality a German prisoner.

  But with Anna in his arms this, and everything else, was forgotten. For that one moment there were no Germans anywhere.

  III

  The Germans meanwhile were highly pleased at the situation. They were investing Paris with all the pomp of a victorious army.

  Admittedly, the troops that they had so far brought up could not for a single moment have withstood a sortie from the capital if anything of that kind had been attempted. But none was attempted. No counter-attack was tried, even though the ranks of field-grey that had straddled themselves out in a rough circle round the capital were so thin that there was a yard or so between each man. The fact was that the people of Paris we
re in no mood for assault. The speed of the advancing army had dazed them. By the time of the Sedan disaster the French troops in the field were no longer fighting an army composed of men like themselves. They were fighting a mirage that confronted them at unexpected places, a spectre of invincibility, a legend. And in the face of this mirage, this spectre, this legend, they preferred to shut themselves away within four walls, and have something solid between themselves and it.

  The Germans, a trifle incredulous but as efficient as ever, used this period of partial peace—there was certainly no fighting to speak of—to bring up their biggest guns, their heaviest siege pieces, and prepare for the total reduction of the city. There it lay in front of them, a fair prize in war. Not to destroy it would have offended all recognised Prussian standards. It would have been un-German.

  The King of Prussia and Count Bismarck were both, therefore, a little resentful and aggrieved by the fact that they should be criticised abroad for wanting to smash Paris to pieces to their hearts’ content. Anglo-German relations, already more than a little strained by the size of Germany’s pretensions in Europe, were not improved when the entire English press aligned itself, naturally and without hesitation, upon the side of the French. For a while The Times and the Daily Telegraph were not any longer officially read in the Wilhemstrasse.

  Meanwhile, the state of affairs inside the city was rapidly becoming worse. It was no longer in terms of ultimate victory or defeat that people thought, but in terms of food. The next meal, or the substitute for it, was the one waking thought of over two million people.

  It was M. Duvivier and his kind who faced the situation with a dual trepidation. They saw their stomachs and their incomes being ruined simultaneously. For the past week, M. Duvivier had been reducing his portions further and still further, inventing mysterious goulashes in which what meat there was could not be identified, and raising his prices higher and still higher in a vain endeavour to catch up with the will-of-the-wisp of his trade. In one single day the price of mutton and veal went up by two hundred per cent.