II
It was nearly two hours later when M. Duvivier came to his senses. He was in the cellar, and the air all around him was dense and heady. The cellar itself was in darkness. The candle which he had mounted in a bottle had burnt out, and he was alone there, a fuddled middle-aged soul in his own private limbo.
He shook himself and began searching his pockets for a fusee. When he had struck it he surveyed the scene around him. There were too many bottles—empty ones—everywhere: it looked as if the Germans had already entered the place.
And then, dimly, threateningly, through the mists of his own mind, the memory of what had occurred came back to him. He recalled how he had gone rushing up to the Captain’s room with the chef’s carving-knife—a great razor-edged sabre of a thing, ready in his hand. It was only because the room had been empty that he had gone down into the cellar and started drinking again.
“But I’ll do it now,” he promised himself. “He shan’t escape me.”
He searched about for a moment and found the knife where he had left it, stowed away behind one of the bins. The edge was so sharp that it made a slight pinging sound as he ran his thumb across it.
“I’ll do it,” he repeated. “I’ll stick him like a pig when I find him. I’ll bleed him white.”
Then the unresolved problem of Anna suddenly presented itself, and he began to weep. It was clearly his duty—it was what any good Frenchman would do—to kill her too.
“But how can I?” he asked himself. “How can I destroy anything so beautiful as that?”
His head was aching, and he sat for a moment with it buried in his hands. He only wished that his brain was just a little clearer. Trying to think at the present moment was like attempting to undo a knot with gloves on. But, nevertheless, the uncomfortable realisation came to him that if he were to stick a knife into the Captain he would probably be guillotined for it. The law was very kind and understanding towards husbands who killed lovers detected in flagrante delicto. But it took a sterner view towards those who returned afterwards to revenge themselves; it showed no understanding.
M. Duvivier tried to argue the thing out, carefully and slowly, but he found that the task was beyond him. He wasn’t in the least anxious to make himself into simply another chapter in the annals of Parisian homicide.
“There’s nothing I can do,” he said at last. “I can’t punish either of them without punishing myself as well.”
At the absurdity of the situation he began to laugh. And as he laughed a weight seemed lifted from his soul.
“Anna,” he began calling out. “Anna! I’ve decided to forgive you. You can unlock your door now. I love you.”
Book V. The Duel At The Frontier
Chapter XXV
I
The train was moving at last: after the first abortive jerks and creakings it had been got going somehow. Not that it was anything to boast of. The carriage was unheated and in complete darkness. Like almost everything else in Paris after the siege, the nicer refinements of life were conspicuously missing from it. But its defects were forgiven in the single and cardinal fact that it moved.
The crowd was enormous; people had been collecting at the station for as much as twelve hours before the departure. And when at last the train had backed up to the platform the passengers for a moment had got completely out of hand. They surged forward, overturning barriers and ticket-boxes. Officials and inspectors were swept to the side, and there was hand-to-hand fighting on the platforms. The Captain had put his arm round Anna to protect her, and, using his shoulder as a ram, had forced her into one of the compartments. It was full already; and the occupants protested that there was room for no one else. That was more than an hour before the departure. They had no notion then of what the conditions were really to be like by the time the train actually steamed out.
Anna sat there in the corner without moving. Her arms were crushed and pinioned to her sides by the sheer weight of bodies all round her. She was merely one more of the individual parcels in this overloaded wagon of human freightage. Somewhere in the darkness opposite sat the Captain. And the simple knowledge that he was there made her happy.
“He is with me. He loves me, and he is with me,” she kept telling herself exultantly. “We have another whole day together.”
The fact that at the frontier he would leave her, that they would say good-bye for the last time, no longer seemed so real, so inevitable. She was too tired to imagine it.
It was at Strasbourg that they had agreed to separate. The city lay on the frontier, and the Captain could go on no further. As a Frenchman he was at last free to move about inside his own country. But the Germans had no intention, for the moment, of giving this defeated people the freedom of the entire continent. Count Bismarck, indeed, was explicit about keeping the frontiers closed until the final terms of peace had been agreed upon.
And from Strasbourg Anna would be alone, quite alone. But once she was over the Rhine, she kept reminding herself, she would be back in the world to which she belonged, back among her people and her own kind. But she knew as she said it that it was not true. She knew that she was German no longer and that it was France, her mother’s country, that had taken possession of her.
“Everything that I have ever loved is in France,” she told herself.
And through her tiredness the reality of the separation came filtering.
“He is going away,” she said bitterly. “I know that after tomorrow I shall never see him again. And after he has left me I shall think of him in the arms of that woman who has borne his child. If she loves him, really loves him, she will make him love her again too. He will forget me altogether. And he will be glad that he has forgotten.…”
She began crying, and because she could not move—could not move even enough to reach the handkerchief that was in her handbag—she sat there with the tears streaming down her cheek.
Then she remembered her father. And as she remembered him, a sudden feeling of peace came over her. He was loving and indulgent. To have her back, he would be ready to forgive everything. She could become his child again. As the train rumbled on through the night, even the spectre of her disastrous marriage grew less with distance.
The carriage, unheated at first, had now by the breath of a score of bodies been warmed to something more than normal temperature. The air was heavy and soporific. And the movement of the train became a ceaseless mechanical lullaby. Anna felt herself drowsing. As her eyes closed, her thoughts grew tenuous and confused. She found herself smelling again the hot scent of the apple orchard on the day when Charles had come to Rhinehausen; she recalled the first sight of Paris with its pavements glistening under rain; the sound of the Marseillaise carried up on the evening air to the balcony of the Latourette’s apartment; the feel, the exact feel of Charles’s face as it had been pressed against hers on that afternoon in the orchard; the ghostly mistiness of the Seine; the fat, red hands of M. Duvivier; the sound of the woman screaming in the prison; and the cafe in the Place Clichy where she and the Captain had sat together and talked of everything except the future.
When she awoke the rhythm of the train had changed perceptibly, and the wheels began a different metre. A faint, dawn-tinted light was shining in at the windows. There was the harsh grip of brakes.
Someone on the opposite side of the carriage said “Strasbourg.”
II
The Hotel de l’Empire presented the infinite confusion of one of the terminal points of a country in chaos. The foyer was full of luggage for which there were no apparent owners, and the guests who were standing about could not find theirs. They were a strange and variegated assortment, these guests. Conspicuous among them in their magnificent uniforms were the Prussian and Bavarian officers. These gentlemen occupied the best rooms on the first and second floors.
The upper storys were packed with their legitimate occupants, the French. They were of many kinds. There were business men waiting to pass over into Switzerland as soon as th
ey could obtain a visa; rich families that had been driven out of their homes and were now returning to see what, if anything, was left to them; journalists from every European nation; spies, pathetically applying for the money that was due to them, or wondering what they could do for a living now that the war was over; members of military and disarmament commissions; bankers trying to restore their international connections; and unattached women.
These last were not only a sex, but almost a race, apart. They were the demi-mondaines and filles-de-joie of a great garrison town. The odour of their patchouli and frangipani filled the air around them; and the sound of their laughter, forced and meaningless, could be heard above the general uproar. Those who had not yet secured a man for themselves sat at the various small tables scattered about the room and were visible to the world as a pair of seductive, mascaraed eyes seen over the edge of a glass of grenadine or mandarin.
The train for Germany did not leave until nearly midnight. Anna and Captain Picard still had the rest of the day before them. But the moment of departure was now too near; it saddened everything. The Captain was morose and moody. And when dinnertime came he sat through the meal scarcely speaking.
“This is the end,” he kept telling himself. “You’re filling her glass for the last time. Those lips will be gone to-morrow. Try to remember the scent she’s using: it will haunt you even after you’ve forgotten it. But it’s too late to do more than remember. The wine’s spilt now: the last bubbles have risen. This is the end.”
And once or twice during the meal Anna had turned away from him so that he shouldn’t see that she was crying.
The big dining-salon itself was crowded, absurdly crowded. Guests stood about in the hall and gathered near the doorways ready to snatch at the first table that fell vacant. And even those who were already eating were chivied and hustled by the waiters, and asked to take their coffees and liqueurs in the vestibule instead of in the dining-room.
There was one man, however, with whom the waiters did not attempt any interference. He sat alone at a table by the window, a bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket by his side. When he raised his glass he did so as though the whole world could wait whilst he drank. And with each mouthful he turned the wine over tenderly on his tongue and sat back in his chair regarding the other diners. He had pale, very pale, inquisitive blue eyes, and when Anna entered the room he set down his glass for a moment and followed her with his gaze across the room. He even shifted his chair a little so that he could still observe her.
It was not long before Anna became aware of him. She turned, and her eyes caught his. What she saw was a small, neat man, in a suit with dapper padded shoulders, and a large single diamond in his cravat. His little hands, as pink and delicate looking as a marmoset’s, were clasped in front of him. She dismissed him from her thoughts.
Or tried to do so. For his face obstinately remained. It was a smooth, bland face, that betrayed nothing. Not that it seemed that behind such a face there could be anything in particular to be concealed. Indeed, at first sight, the effect was simply that of someone who was smiling; the whole countenance seemed to be covered with a spacious smile, like the smile on a green jade God. But that perhaps was no more than a trick of the light on the large glasses in their glittering gold frames. For the mouth did not appear to be smiling at all. It was a thin, hard line of a mouth, with the lips drawn tightly back against the teeth. And the eyes, those pale, almost colourless eyes behind the round lenses were not smiling either. They were merely unnaturally wide open and observant.
But there was something else about that face that worried her. She turned and looked again; and she saw that she was right. The face was almost hairless. Across the high-domed skull a layer of pale unhairlike hair, fine as silk, had been skilfully brushed. But of eyebrows there was no trace; the forehead simply merged, gently and without interruption, into the line of the cheek-bones. In the result it was not a pretty face; it was too much of a mask, too much something that was smooth and polished and inscrutable.
The Captain touched her hand.
“The train,” he said, “we must get ready for it.”
Anna started: for the moment she had been conscious only of the pale eyes that were still fixed upon her. And as she turned away she shuddered; for some reason that she could not explain a sudden wave of coldness ran through her. She was frightened.
She passed her hand across her forehead.
“The train,” she repeated. “Yes, the train. We must be there early for it.”
They got up and passed out of the dining-room together. And, as they went, Anna was conscious of the same unwavering gaze from the other table still fixed upon her.
“In another few hours,” she was telling herself, “I shall be out of France. I shall have gone for ever. I shall be leaving behind everything I love, everything that could have made my life happy.”
She glanced up at the clock again: it was the third time she had looked at it during the last ten minutes. And she was afraid each time of what she saw. For the moment she was alone in the overpeopled foyer: the Captain was over at the hotel desk, lost somewhere in the mob of people who were demanding their bills, their luggage, a cab, the hotel porter, the manager.
She took out her handkerchief and rolling it into a ball she pressed it secretly to her eyes; and as she removed it she was aware that there was someone near her, someone standing so close that he was almost touching her. She looked up, and saw that it was the smiling stranger from the other room. Only he was really smiling at her this time.
“You’re in trouble?” he asked. “You need help. Can I do anything for you?”
His voice was low and very smooth. There did not seem to be a single rough feature to the man anywhere.
“It is nothing,” she said.
It was clear that she resented him, that she had nothing else to say.
But the stranger did not move away. He remained there smiling down at her. And then, calmly, possessively, as if he were not accustomed to being checked in anything that he set out to do, he drew up a chair from another table. There was an easy and experienced insolence about the man.
“A beautiful woman,” he said, “does not cry for nothing. She cries only when there is something to make her sad.”
He was still smiling, and he bent forward as if he were going to speak to her again.
“I have said that there is nothing,” Anna told him. “I do not want your help.”
He gave a little bow, and raised those small, pink hands of his self-depreciatingly. But the smile remained.
“I would not for a moment intrude if I am not wanted,” he said. “Nothing could be further from my wishes. It is simply”—he drew a wallet from his pocket and removed a card from one of the pockets—“that if Mademoiselle should find that she has any need of me.…”
He placed the card on the table in front of her, and gave a little bow. The same insolence was there, the same assumption that his offer would not be rejected.
Anna glanced at the card, saw the words FERDINAND MORITZ, and brushed it on to the floor.
M. Moritz’s smile did not waver: he stooped down and replaced the card on the table before her.
“If I may advise you,” he said, “in times like these, it is unwise to reject any offer of assistance. I see that already you are alone again.…”
This time Anna picked up the card and tore it across.
“Please go away,” she said. “You are bothering me …”
M. Moritz rose.
“No doubt we shall meet again,” he said.
He turned away and, as he did so, found himself face to face with the Captain. Captain Picard was standing there, his heels together, his eyes narrowed down like a fencer’s. M. Moritz’s smile vanished for a moment, and then reappeared again.
“I was inquiring if I could be of any use to the lady,” he began.
Anna had gone very white, the Captain noticed.
“Please ask him to go away,” she said.
“I don’t want him here.”
Her voice rose a little as she said it: she was surprised at her own nervousness.
M. Moritz drew back, his fingers playing with one of the buttons on his coat.
“I was already about to go,” he said. “I am afraid that my offer has been misunderstood.”
But the Captain had clenched his hands: he was trembling.
“You have been impertinent,” he said.
M. Moritz’s smile had disappeared entirely by now. The line of his mouth had grown even thinner and more hard. He was being dangerously polite.
“You must forgive me,” he said. “I had failed to realise that the lady was”—here M. Moritz paused for a moment—”your wife.”
He had hardly spoken the words before Captain Picard had struck him. Anna closed her eyes. She was aware only that the Captain had taken up his gloves from the table where they were lying, and had swung them across M. Moritz’s face. It was the frip that the gloves made as they cut across the bare cheek that roused her.
“I demand an apology,” M. Moritz said. “An immediate apology.”
His voice was shrill as he spoke; it rose and wavered a little. It was only this waver in it that betrayed that he was not quite so brave as he appeared to be.
But Captain Picard was brave; that had been the original trouble with the man.
“I give you that apology,” he said.
And he struck M. Moritz across the face a second time.
The uproar in the foyer was now complete. The guests at the neighbouring tables had risen and formed a circle about the two men. Those less well placed for the spectacle were standing on their chairs, even on the table tops. They all wore the staring, dropjawed expressions of people regaled by a spectacle beyond their hopes.
Anna ran forward: she began trying frantically to push her way into the group.
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