Anna

by Norman Collins

  Nevertheless, the day came when, for all he was ready to pay—and by then he was ready to pay anything—there was no meat of any kind in the market. The Halles were fleshless. And M. Duvivier, standing there in the half-morning light with his basket on his arm, was compelled to admit defeat, was compelled to go along to the Marché Chevaline and buy old horse flesh for double what he had been accustomed to pay for beef or mutton. That day the pepperings and seasonings in the kitchen were desperately increased and intensified. By the time the chef had finished, no one—least of all a horse—would have recognised it for what it was.

  And that day, too, M. Duvivier produced the first carte du jour of the siege. He lit a small, black cigar of the kind he usually liked to smoke after lunch, and sat down at his little table in the corner to invent the menu. It began with Potage Victoire, an affair of vegetables and a few chicken bones. There followed Vol-au-Vent Gambetta and Tournedos Septembre. There was not a trace of meat in either of them and their creation consumed almost his entire stock of mushrooms, on which the restaurant was depending. Then there was a bouillabaisse Seine founded upon a claw or two of lobster and a few fresh-water mussels.

  But sparse as that menu looked at the time, it would have seemed Gargantuan before two months were up. By then, cat—and worse—were appearing regularly on the carte du jour.

  While M. Duvivier was working, Anna came into the restaurant. He was so engrossed that he turned his back on her and did not look up again until she had gone. He was so much concerned with the anguish of losing his business that he could think of nothing else. Even his love, his infatuation, were temporarily eclipsed. Deep within his heart at that moment, deeper than even he could see, he resented her, resented the folly which at such a moment could have betrayed him into purchasing so outrageously expensive a plaything as a young wife.

  And the change in his behaviour had not gone unnoticed by Anna. The insult which she had just suffered magnified itself with departure. Up in her boudoir, she could not longer control her resentment, her indignation.

  “The humiliation of it,” she told herself. “The intolerable humiliation. To think that I should have to endure that from such a man.”

  It seemed in that instant as though the utmost degradation of her life lay in having minded that M. Duvivier of all men should have turned his back upon her.

  “I am being punished,” she thought, “for having agreed to so shameful a bargain. I am being punished for what I did in marrying him.”

  Downstairs in the restaurant M. Duvivier was equally concerned with his own feelings. But his were of a different kind. The early morning cigar which he had smoked on an empty stomach had upset him, and great waves of nausea were passing through his body.

  He left the restaurant abruptly.

  That night when M. Duvivier came up to their bedroom—he had overcome his sickness by now and was the most devoted of husbands again—Anna refused even the least personal of his advances. When he laid his hand—his large red one—upon hers, she removed her hand immediately. And later when M. Duvivier, by now changed into his long striped nightshirt, allowed himself the luxury of standing behind her and placing those hands of his about her bosom as she sat in front of her mirror, she sprang up and told him that she was not there to tolerate such indignities.

  M. Duvivier was at first amazed. In an attempt to pacify her he began apologising and explaining. He described the terrible state of the market and begged for some consideration. Anna heard the words “veal … tripe … lamb … onions … carrots …” on his lips.

  Then, when M. Duvivier found that his explanations, his excuses were making no impression upon her, his patience vanished. Her behaviour after all that he had done for her seemed nothing less than an outrage. He shouted at her. He called her a spy, an outcast, a woman of the streets. He goaded her with having sold her hair to pay her rent, and said that if she had not been arrested he would have turned her over to the authorities himself. He stripped off all reserve and told her that as a mistress she was cold and unsatisfying, that she did not know the first things about love-making. He jeered at her pretty manners, and accused her of having been a governess in some grand family, where she had picked up the tricks without learning the graces. He reminded her of the guillotine from which he had so brilliantly snatched her. He said that she was sickly, lazy, extravagant. And when Anna, her eyes red with crying and her lips quivering, told him how she hated him, how hideous he was, he struck her across the face with the flat of his hand almost without being aware in his rage of what it was that he was doing.

  As soon as he realised what had happened he was horrified. He burst into tears and went down on his knees, begging her to forgive him. He wept and entreated, prostrated himself and beseeched. His nightshirt spread itself out all round him like a confessional gown, and he debased himself.

  But Anna did not answer him. She did not even move. She remained there looking at him, very pale, and with the mark of his hand still visible upon her cheek.

  She slept that night upon the chaise longue at the foot of the bed, and covered herself with a rug that was lying there.

  That was how, without speaking, they spent the twenty-first night of their marriage.

  Chapter XX

  I

  Because of a sense of duty, of obligation, she continued to occupy the high stool behind the counter. But it was as a figurehead, nothing more, that she sat there. M. Duvivier’s pride over this lady who had become his wife had earlier made him resolved that she should be given no work to do. For her to have been seen working would, at a single stroke, have destroyed the whole glittering illusion. And now, of course, there was no work to do. With little enough to serve, there was no one left to whom to serve it. The restaurant was deserted and the lovely figurehead looked out over an empty sea.

  It was during these long hours behind the counter while M. Duvivier’s back was turned on her as he stood in the doorway staring fixedly out into the street in search of customers that did not come, that Anna began once more to keep her diary. She brought the big, leather-covered volume surreptitiously down into the restaurant with her. And there, among the piles of plates and the fruit dishes that contained no fruit, she opened it and began to read.

  At once she was back in Rhinehausen again. She was seventeen and very sad.… She turned the pages and read of two new dresses and a pair of brocaded shoes that she had bought in Düsseldorf. Facing it was a brief note: “My father has said that our cousin is coming. This afternoon the Baron gave me a volume of Heine’s poems It is the second copy that he has given me, but it shows what is in his mind: they are love poems.”

  The Baron! As she read the words, she started: she had entirely forgotten the man. He no longer seemed a part of this world at all. It was as though on one planet there were Rhinehausen and the Baron and the apple orchard and the narrow bed beside Berthe’s; and on another Montmartre and M. Duvivier, and the prison and the double bed with the coloured rosettes.

  But at the sight of the mention of Charles, tears came into her eyes and she had to wipe them away before she could go on reading. If the Baron had become no more than a dim figure on a back-cloth, Charles had never been more close than at that moment. She could see him, his long elegant hands, his dark hair, his deep, sympathetic eyes. She could hear his voice, smell again the perfume that he had used. It was as though even in death he had remained one of the living. And the diary had suddenly become full of him: his name was there upon every page.

  “My cousin is very amusing,” she read. “He has met everyone of importance in Paris.”

  She turned over the leaf.

  “He dotes upon music. At the piano he is sublime.”

  She read on, rapidly brushing away the tears that had come back to her.

  “This afternoon Charles recited the poems of Lamartine to me: they are more beautiful than Heine’s. How moving his voice is.”

  And then.

  “At meals he eats practically nothing and doe
s not look strong. He should be watched over and taken care of.”

  She came next upon the entry for the third of July, and for the moment, she could read no farther.

  “This afternoon beneath the trees he told me that he loved me. Shall I ever know such happiness again? Can there ever be anything to equal it? He held my hands in his as he kissed me and I felt my whole body drawing towards him. I should have been ready to give myself to him on the spot if he had asked me …”

  She put down the diary and covered her face with her hands, She forgot where she was. Forgot her resolve never again to show any kind of emotion in M. Duvivier’s presence. Forgot that on her high stool she was a public spectacle.

  When she had recovered herself, she saw that M. Duvivier was regarding her. He had turned his back upon the street and was staring. When their eyes met for a second he took a half-step in her direction as though he was about to try and comfort her. But seeing no response he checked himself.

  Husband and wife remained as they were with the empty width of the restaurant between them.

  Anna found herself remembering that halting abortive movement of M. Duvivier’s. There had been something strangely pathetic about it. The successful restaurateur, the man of the world who broke open prisons and rescued pretty girls, was there no longer. And in place of him was a man without even enough confidence to address his own wife.

  She saw that expression on his face more than once during the next week. For the magic that the diary exercised over her had returned, once that she had reopened its covers. And M. Duvivier remained ignored.

  It now seemed to Anna that half her misery, her despair, could be dispelled by setting it down on paper. It somehow gave her power over her own feelings. So she sat up at the counter with the diary in front of her and filled its pages with her tiny writing.

  At first glance, her behaviour was not out of keeping with her office. To anyone entering the restaurant it would have seemed only that the young daughter of the house was busily engaged in adding up the day’s takings. But M. Duvivier knew better. He knew that there was nothing on earth that she had to write, nothing to justify her astonishing industry. They could not be letters that she was writing because she did not ask him for the money for postage. Besides, who was there to whom she could be writing? Yet there she was, writing, writing. Indubitably writing. Strange, alarming thoughts went flitting through his brain. Was it possible that, after all, the police had been right and that his innocentseeming Anna was in the German pay? He laughed at the thought, but still could not understand what all this writing could be about.

  Anna, however, remained oblivious of him. There were nearly two months’ entries to be made up.

  “To-day,” she recorded, “I was pounced upon in the street. Three policeman closed in on me suddenly as I was returning to my squalid attic. They seized me by the arm, and thrust me into a van that was waiting. I shall never forget, never, the roughness of these officers.”

  She pushed back a lock of hair that had fallen forwards over her forehead, and went on writing.

  “The prison is very dark and terrifying, the wardresses like men, the prisoners like animals.” she wrote. “Every hour brings forth some fresh agony for the mind and some fresh degradation for the body. I hear no word from the world outside the prison, and the uncertainty of my fate is a perpetual agony to me: I cannot forget the face of the woman from the next cell who was taken away to be guillotined. I am made to take a bath in an open room with the other prisoners, dirty, disgusting creatures that have been swept in from the streets and gutters.…”

  She closed the red morocco covers of the diary at last. For nearly two hours she had been writing, and her eyes and the hand that held the pen were tired.

  With a sigh sat sat back and saw M. Duvivier’s small eyes fixed upon her.

  On the following day her diary was again open before her. She had reached the point of M. Duvivier’s arrival in the prison, and she was seeking to turn the knife over in the wound.

  “To-day, “she wrote, “M. Duvivier, the restaurant-keeper who, having buried his first wife is already looking for another bedfellow, came to see me at the prison. I was astonished, so deeply astonished at his arrival that for a moment I could say nothing. But the reason for his coming was not long concealed. (And in my heart I knew it already. Had he not on one occasion, while I was lodging there under his roof, tried to force his attention upon me?) How can I describe him so that you will see him as I saw him standing in front of me? His face was very flushed and shining, as if he were blushing, and his large red hands were stretched out towards me as though he expected me to fling myself into them.

  She raised her pen again to continue. But as she did so she noticed again that she was observed. M. Duvivier was looking at her fixedly. And because of the expression on his face and because of what she had just written she covered the page of writing with her hand. The gesture was fatal. As soon as he observed the movement, M. Duvivier came forward. His nerves were all on edge.

  “I demand to know what it is that you are writing,” he said. “I demand it.”

  His voice was shrill and excited.

  Anna turned upon her high stool and faced him.

  “I won’t show you,” she said. “This book belongs to me.”

  “I demand it, I tell you,” M. Duvivier asserted.

  “And I refuse.”

  A little shiver passed through M. Duvivier at the words. His hands began to tremble.

  Anna did not move.

  “Are you going to strike me again?” she asked.

  “Give me that book,” M. Duvivier continued. “Give it me, I say.”

  “I refuse,” Anna told him for the second time.

  For a moment M. Duvivier stood there. Then he tried to snatch the maddening volume from her. They wrestled together over the little book. In the struggle its covers became bent and twisted. Then Anna released her hold. She sat back and placed her hands upon her lap.

  “Very well, then,” she said. “Read it.”

  M. Duvivier’s hands were still trembling and his breathing had become rapid. But he was exultant.

  “So at last I have it,” he said. “I shall be able to see what it is that you have been writing.”

  Anna made no answer, and M. Duvivier began turning over the pages with his short, blunt fingers.

  “He will read of Charles,” she told herself suddenly. “That is something that I cannot endure.”

  She started forward. But immediately she drew back again.

  “What do I care?” she asked herself. “It is nothing to me, no matter what he reads. I do not care for him enough to mind.”

  M. Duvivier, however, was searching desperately for the part where the ink was still black upon the pages. He fixed his spectacles firmly upon his nose and began to read. He was still close beside her, so close that his elbow was almost touching hers.

  And as he read, Anna saw a change come over him. At first his face became flushed again as it had been while he was struggling. His fist, which rested on the table, clenched itself, and Anna grew frightened for herself.

  “He cannot even now guess what he will come upon. Then he surely will strike me,” she thought.

  But M. Duvivier did not strike her. The fingers of his clenched hand opened out again and he bent still lower over the page before him. Only his breathing continued quick and broken as before. And a moment later Anna saw that he was crying, actually crying. Large, shining tears, like a child’s, were running down his cheeks, so that he was forced to take off his spectacles and wipe them. Still he said nothing.

  Anna moved her head a little to one side and saw the words that he was reading: “His large, red hands were stretched out towards me as though he expected me to fling myself into them.”

  And as she saw the words, and saw M. Duvivier reading them, his eyes still streaming, she felt suddenly ashamed.

  M. Duvivier had now reached the end of the passage and closed the covers of the
diary. For a moment he said nothing. He simply stood there regarding her. Finally he pushed the diary back towards her.

  “I should never have let you read it,” Anna told him impulsively. “I should have destroyed it. I was angry when I wrote it. I am not angry now. Forgive me, please forgive me. Forget that you ever read those words.”

  But M. Duvivier only shook his head.

  “You wrote what you were feeling,” he said. “Nothing can alter that. And you were right. Our stations were too different. I should never have asked you to marry me.”

  And he began weeping again.

  In his misery his grossness seemed somehow to have departed. There was no trace of hatred in her mind now, only pity.

  Opening the diary, she took hold of the offending pages and tore them from the cover. Then she shredded them into tiny pieces and scattered them on the counter.

  “Look,” she said. “See what I’ve done. I’m sorry.”

  But the remark was lost in the rumble of distant gunfire. A low reverberation seemed to move the very foundations of the building. M. Duvivier raised his head and sat back to listen. The noise continued—it was the enemy batteries on the heights of Châtillon checking their range for the day—and suddenly the air became filled with a different kind of sound. It was a shrill whistle, a shriek almost, like a driver’s lash descending. It seemed to tear the air all round it into pieces. And it was followed almost immediately by an explosion. A shell had passed clean over their heads in its flight and had struck somewhere in Clichy. The Restaurant Duvivier gave a shudder. The bottles behind the bar clinked and rattled, and a little plaster fell from the ceiling.

  Something bigger than a domestic quarrel was going on outside.

  II

  It was some days after that before M. Duvivier so much as spoke to his wife. They lived under the same roof, ate meals at the same table, even shared the same bedroom like any other husband and wife. And all in silence, in bitter, hostile silence.