Indeed, if it had not been for the steadily encroaching presence of the Germans—and it was common knowledge that they had now brought up their largest siege guns, the real big stuff, for the demolition of the city—it is doubtful whether Anna could have been sure of one moment to herself. As it was, M. Duvivier reckoned up the number of days that Paris could possibly hold out and the number of vintage bottles that remained in his cellar. There were sixty. About thirty days and sixty bottles. Roughly two a day.
M. Duvivier recognised that he would have to do some serious drinking. And he set about zealously and painstakingly to do it.
II
Now that the people of Paris had given up all hope of winning, had even, it seemed, given up all intention, a new kind of impatience had become visible—an impatience to make peace and be done with it.
It was no longer the whole of France that was at war, but only the south. In the provinces there was Gambetta with his civilian army. And the voice of Bordeaux was still as brave, as defiant, as intransigent as ever. But the voice of Bordeaux deceived no one. The Parisians all felt that if they were as far away from danger as Bordeaux they could speak as bravely. And they felt also that if some of the German howitzers that were now firing into Paris could have been trained for a moment on to Bordeaux the voice of courage might have been tempered with the accent of sanity.
On the other hand, the forts of the capital were still well supplied. If the Germans were to try a direct frontal attack they would undoubtedly be repulsed—as undoubtedly, in fact, as the Germans themselves would be able to repulse any kind of counter-attack that the French might make. There had been one attempt; the sortie of Mont Valérien. It had proved an entire fiasco, had served merely to emphasize to the people of Paris the degree of their present captivity. And so the Parisians went about what work there was left for them to do, praying that the politicians would give the Germans Alsace and whatever it was they wanted, and call the whole thing off.
M. Duvivier was still counting the days; counting the days and counting the bottles. But there was a change in him. With every day—and every bottle—that passed he was becoming more sanguinary and ferocious.
“The first German I see in the streets of Paris,” he said somewhat indistinctly, “I shall kill. I shall do this to him———” And M. Duvivier drew an imaginary knife through the air at the height of a man’s throat.
His patriotism even assumed other and more public forms. On one occasion, seeing from his window a procession passing down the street bearing a tricolour in front of it and carrying banners declaring that Frenchmen would die sooner than become German slaves, M. Duvivier suddenly left his wife and restaurant and joined in the procession.
It was composed mostly of men like himself, middle-aged and elderly men, who for one reason or another had been excused military service. There was a fair spattering of white beards among them, and one man hobbled patriotically along on two sticks. People cheered as they passed down the Avenue Montmartre and on in the direction of the Chambre.
M. Duvivier marched magnificently behind, feeling that after this he too would be able to say that he had done something to save France. He had taken exactly the right amount of drink, and felt a lord, a prince of creation. But opposite the Madeleine his legs gave out. His varicose veins began to taunt him. He therefore broke away from the procession as quietly and unostentatiously as possible, and sat down outside one of the cafes. It was only then that he was able to read the wording on the rest of the banners:
“Make peace and spare the women and children,” the one at the back said. And the one beside it was no less explicit.
“Rulers of France,” it ran, “whose blood are you shedding?”
M. Duvivier turned away, his enthusiasm for public demonstrations suddenly dissipated. He felt cheated. He looked at his watch and saw that it was already long past the hour at which he should have been preparing dinner.
He remembered also that he had left Anna and the Captain alone together.
When he was sober again next morning he saw clearly enough that processions were of no use. The bombardment had by now become continuous: there was no city in the world that could stand it. Between three and four hundred shells were being poured in every day, and the houses that were hit had an oddly discouraging look about them. It seemed that even the most solid of them required only one contact with the enemy to disintegrate into a mass of laths and plaster. And it was even worse by night. The shells that came screaming over in the black-out had a terrifying quality all of their own. Everyone in the badly-shelled areas now slept in the cellars. And as the Germans drew nearer, and their field of fire extended, more and more cellar bedrooms were being prepared. M. Duvivier had begun clearing a corner of his own wine cellar: he placed a mattress and most of the restaurant crockery down there.
It was the middle of January by now, and the last of the dogs and cats had disappeared. People had died, actually died, of hunger. And it was cold. A diplomat’s widow had been found frozen dead in bed.
Even the pigeons, one by one, had been snared and eaten: patriotic and conscientious housewives returning proudly from market with a pigeon—probably the first that they had managed to get for their families for weeks—would sometimes find a message attached to the middle quill of the tail feathers. By then, of course, there was nothing that could be done about it. It meant simply that a dispatch rider in the Third Republic, a patriot like themselves, was about to be eaten for dinner.
It was naturally difficult, even impossible, for the citizens inside the gates to know what the situation really was. The Military Governor, like most military governors, was untalkative; and there were no longer the little chattering groups of deputies giving away state secrets every night in the best cafes. The one thing that was reassuring was the behaviour of the forts. Those still blared out all day and all night; and though no one had any way of knowing the effects of the fire, the authentic roar of the French cannon served strikingly to keep up the public morale. There was clearly no shortage of metal at the disposal of the gunners. And there was always the possibility that some of the shells might hit something.
The news of an Armistice came, therefore, with something of a shock. And now that there was nothing that anyone could do about it, the very people who earlier had clamoured for it, suddenly became aloof and stoical: they declared that for their part they would have been ready to endure another six months. They said that the politicians had betrayed them.
It was only Jules Favre, who was still negotiating the final terms with Count Bismarck, who knew what it meant to have achieved an armistice at all. He knew how much he had been forced to give to secure that twenty-one days’ respite; what it meant that Belfort was still obstinately fighting its own battle; what would happen to Paris if Gambetta in the south refused to admit that France was beaten; what the Germans intended to make them pay.
As soon as M. Duvivier heard the news being shouted, he rushed out into the street and bought a paper. When he came back he was holding the thing at arm’s length in front of him, and weeping.
“An Armistice,” he said to Anna. “That means that the Hun will be allowed inside the gates. Somewhere in the Government there is a Judas. France has been sold.”
He seemed to have some difficulty in disentangling the words from his tongue. All the afternoon he had been drinking heavily, and he was swaying visibly as he stood there.
“There will be raping and pillaging everywhere,” he announced. “No woman under fifty will be safe, and our possessions will be snatched from us.”
Possessions! M. Duvivier remembered his cellar, and a wave of fresh terror broke over him. He had, he realised, miscalculated by approximately fourteen days: there were still twenty-eight bottles unbroken, and not an hour to be lost. He expected at any moment now to see the boulevards full of soldiers—all in field-grey, and all thirsty.
He paused. Then fumbling in the pocket of his waistcoat for the key, he began the uncertain journ
ey down the cellar steps. He was conscious only of this one thing as he did so, and did not even stop when he saw Captain Picard descending the stairs into the restaurant. Down below there was the heavy boom of the cellar door closing upon him.
The Captain stood there, passing his tongue across his lips.
“What are they calling?” he asked. “I heard them from my room.”
Before Anna could reply, the long syllables, “Ar-mis-tice,” reached them from the street outside.
The Captain passed his tongue across his lips again.
“So it’s come, has it?” he asked.
Anna nodded: each knew what the other was thinking.
He crossed over and held out his hand to her.
“Anna,” he said.
She took his hand for a moment and pressed it. Then she shook her head.
“No. You must go back to her,” she told him. “She’s waiting for you.”
Captain Picard avoided her gaze. There were no secrets between them now. He had told her of the wife who was waiting for him somewhere in the south, the young wife, and the child that he had never seen.
Anna found herself alone again. The Captain was out all the time visiting the railway station, the customs-posts, the chiefs of police. The time of the first train out of Paris: that was the one question on his lips—on his lips, and on the lips of some thousands of his fellow citizens.
He came back evening after evening, weary and dejected, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth hanging there, dead and half-smoked. His undisguisable air of failure had returned to him, and he sat alone at his table with his head supported on his hands, his eyes fixed unseeingly in front of him. Even when Anna spoke to him he did not always answer immediately. He merely shrugged his shoulders and gave a little smile that vanished again as soon as it had come.
But with M. Duvivier in the restaurant, there was little that they could actually say. At any moment he would come out of the door leading through into the kitchen, his apron rather dirtier than it should have been, and place in front of the Captain some new concoction that he had just mixed over the stove. For the past week, Captain Picard, not liking the look of the suspiciously small bones in the hash, had left most of his dinner uneaten. Like Anna, he now lived mostly on a diet of bread—the butter had given out long ago—and a little wine. M. Duvivier consumed the remnants of the dishes out of sight in the scullery afterwards.
But as the days went by, M. Duvivier, however, appeared less and less frequently. Sometimes whole evenings passed without his coming through into the restaurant at all. And when he did come he was not really in a condition to notice anything.
He still told himself that he was drinking to spite the Germans; and he had even grown to believe it. It was only somewhere at the back of his mind that he suspected that he was really drinking because he couldn’t stop. He went about with the startled, slightly incredulous expression of a man suddenly dragged back from drowning. There were circles under his eyes. His hands shook and his voice had gone. The fact that Anna and the Captain were left so much alone together no longer seemed to trouble him.
And one evening, when M. Duvivier was lying upstairs on his bed asleep and Anna was seated at the Captain’s table, something of Captain Picard’s old spirit returned. He was smiling again, and he suggested that they should go out together; anywhere, he said, so long as they got out of that suffocating atmosphere.
Anna shook her head at first.
“It’s too dangerous,” she said.
But Captain Picard only laughed at her.
“It’s our last chance,” he said. “The train may be running tomorrow.”
His voice was quite casual as he said it, and he began pulling his overcoat loosely across his shoulders. It seemed that somehow he had succeeded in putting himself at one remove from his own misery.
“Only for half an hour,” he urged. “No one will see us.”
They found a café in the Place Clichy. The lights in the streets had been put on again and people were beginning to emerge from their hiding-places. There was a human, inhabited look about the pavements. It was as though, after being a fortress, the city had become Paris again. It seemed, too, as though miraculously their lives had come together in a simple pattern at last. They sat beside each other and forgot the future, and were happy.
It was only sometimes that they had to break off and leave a sentence unfinished because it was taking the wrong turning in their minds. And then they would talk hurriedly of other things—of the badness of the coffee, of the cold, of the way the gas-lamps even now were only burning at about half-pressure.
When they returned to the Restaurant Duvivier, it was still as silent as when they had left it. Anna insisted that she should go in first and that Captain Picard should follow her some minutes afterwards. But the precaution was quite unnecessary. M. Duvivier had not moved. He was still sleeping as sweetly as a baby. A bottle which he had brought upstairs with him had evidently been kicked over as he had got into bed.
It now lay on its side in the centre of a blood-red stain that had spread around it.
III
The Germans meanwhile were seeking to tidy up the whole military position. They were busy taking possession of the Paris forts and of everything that was in them. In the state of the latter the junior officers were much surprised. It seemed incredible to them that forts so well-garrisoned and equipped should have surrendered without further struggle.
But that, of course, was only the superficial reading of the situation. People who really understood things, people like Bismarck, had long since realised that it is easier to make a fortress—or an army—surrender for political reasons than it is for military ones. They knew, Bismarck knew, that the forts of Paris had been given up so that a French government established in Bordeaux could prove the peacefulness of its intentions to a German government established in Versailles.
It was nevertheless all very puzzling to the Parisians themselves. First of all they had been told that they were safe. Then, when it was painfully obvious that they were not safe, they had been told that they would be relieved, and that Paris in any case could never fall. Next, the Government had left them and trekked south to Tours and Bordeaux. And now they had been told that any further resistance to German aggression would prejudice the peace terms of their conquerors.
As yet, only an armistice, and not a peace, had yet been talked about. And even the armistice depended on getting the excitable M. Gambetta to appreciate that further military efforts on his part were no longer in the interest of France. True patriotism now meant collaboration.
And so, out of the forts of Paris, the Germans took shells, guns, rifles, cartridges, range-finders and other equipment—a huge armsdump in fact, all in good condition and all ready to be used against the French if occasion demanded.
And in return for what they took out of Paris they allowed in what was most needed—food.
Chapter XXIV
I
The Captain could not believe the words when he heard them: he had to ask the clerk in the guichet to say them all over again.
“The first train south goes out to-morrow evening at ten o’clock,” the clerk repeated impatiently. “Monsieur would be well-advised to be here early for it. All the reserved seats have been taken.”
Captain Picard moved away from the window and passed a handkerchief across his forehead. At the realisation that the moment had come, a shudder passed through him, and he began biting his nails. Then, hurriedly, he removed his notebook and wrote down the time of departure.
The absurdity of doing so struck him only after he had done it: it was like a man solemnly writing down his own wedding day. And a strange uncontrollable excitement now filled him. In thirty-six hours, if the train were punctual, he would be home again: he would be in Varaye. And he would see his son. It is only once in a lifetime, he reminded himself, that a man can see his first-born for the first time, and he excused his own emotion.
And
Odette? At the thought of her he was suddenly unhappy. She was too young, too innocent, to understand. If he told her everything, she could never believe then that he still loved her, that he had never given up loving her. There was more than his military disgrace that he would have to hide from her.
Then the thought of saying good-bye to Anna, of actually parting from her, came to him; and he could think of nothing else.
“To-morrow I shall have gone,” he kept telling himself.
It was dark by the time he got back to the Restaurant. The whole place seemed more closed and tomb-like than ever: the shutters at the windows had been put up in mourning for the life that had gone into it. The Captain pushed open the door and went in.
As he did so, he was aware that there was someone standing there: it was Anna. And at the sight of him, she gave a little cry. He turned and looked at her. Her hair was dishevelled and her eyes were red from crying. On the white skin of her wrists were marks as though clumsy hands had grasped her there. He could see that she was trembling.
Anna did not move.
“He knows,” she said.
And having said it she did not add anything.
He stared back at her.
“He told you so himself?” he asked.
She nodded her head.
“Someone told him,” she said. “He accused me to my face and then he struck me. He had been drinking.”
The Captain paused. The whole forefront of his mind was occupied with something else. There was a train, a crowded, overloaded train drawing out of the Gare de Lyon, and it was to-morrow night, and he was on it. But the picture flickered and grew dim as he looked at it. And in its place he was standing in the murky corridor and the eyes of the girl that he was looking at were wild and terrified.
“Pack your things,” he said quietly, “I’ll take you away from here.”
As he said it, he could see the train, his train, just as clearly once more—only it was drawing out of the station now, and he was nowhere in it.
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