Anna (20 page)

One woman, more obliging than the others, gave her the address of a house in the Palais-Royal, where she said they would take her in without questioning: she said that it would suit her. Anna found the house after an hour's searching. When the door was opened to her, she found that the place was a brothel.

After she had managed to get away—and the Madame had been so pressing, so anxious that she should stay with them—Anna found that she was trembling, and little waves of sickness kept passing through her. She wanted to stop and sit down somewhere. But she did not dare to do so. The fear that she was being followed, shadowed, hung over her again.

Across the street she saw the entrance to a church. She crossed over to it and passed out of the bright daylight into the gloom inside. There was a chair immediately inside the door and she sank into it, covering her eyes with her hand. For the first time since she had come to Paris she was aware that her courage had gone from her. She acknowledged that she was defeated.

She could not remember how long she had sat there. But gradually she became aware of the smell of stale incense and the
tallowy reek of candles. The odour seemed friendly and familiar. It was a part of that other life, her real life, that she had left behind. For a moment she was in Rhinehausen again. Opening her purse, she took out a fifty-centime piece and went over to the rail. She lit a candle and began to pray.

It was a passionate, rambling prayer, quite different from the orderly, accustomed forms which they had taught her in her convent. She was crying as she prayed, and she asked God's Son to forgive Charles his sin with her, and to place the sin on her shoulders. She asked that in the hour of his death he might have been found in a state of grace. She prayed that her father might be comforted, and that Madame Latourette would recover. She prayed that France and Germany might be at peace again and that more lives would not be wasted. She prayed for the souls of the killed. She prayed, too, for herself. For the fear of life was still there.

“Oh, God,” she asked, “take care of me. Don't let me lose faith again. Don't let me think of killing myself. The thought keeps coming back to me. It seems so easy. Drive it away. Oh God, drive it away.”

While she prayed, the world outside receded farther and still farther. And when she opened her eyes and saw the guttering stub of the candle on the bracket she felt like a child roughly awakened from a dream that was sweeter than the morning light could ever be.

She got up and found that her head was swimming. She had eaten nothing that morning, and her whole body was weak. But within her mind she felt less frightened. The panic that had descended upon her had departed somehow with her prayers.

“I must go on searching,” she told herself. “I must find a room somewhere before night-time.”

At the corner of the street stood a one-franc café. She went inside and sat down among the cheap clerks and shabby women. They seemed to stare at her, pointing her out among themselves because she was different, because her clothes were not the same as theirs. To Anna the whole roomful of them seemed suddenly to grow hostile. There were eyes all round her. She ate quickly, drinking the raw wine that was in the carafe on the table, and escaped into the street once more.

“If any one follows me I shall go back into the church and hide,” she thought. “There I shall be safe.…”

It was nearly nine o'clock and the light was going out of the sky when she found the Hotel and Restaurant Duvivier. By then she had grown used to failure.

“There is nowhere,” she had told herself a hundred times. “I shall have to give myself up to the police in the end. I shall sleep to-night in prison.”

She sat down at one of the end tables of the terrace and ordered coffee. She was too weary to eat, but the coffee gave her strength, and she sipped it gratefully. When she had finished it, she remained where she was, watching the procession of life that was going on in the lamp-lit dusk outside, trying to delay the inevitable moment of her departure.

It was an unfashionable street that the Restaurant Duvivier stood in, and the faces of the passers-by, tired, stooping men and drooping womenfolk, were drawn and pale, like the faces of ghosts.

“But they are free,” she told herself enviously. “They can go wherever they choose. They have nothing to fear.”

Because the waiter was standing at her elbow, looking down at her, she ordered another glass of coffee.

“I shall drink it slowly,” she reflected. “I will make it last and then I shall go to the police station and tell them who I am. They can arrest me if they choose.”

She was so tired that all terror in the idea seemed slowly to have departed.

It was while she was sitting in the café that she became aware—how, she did not know—that there was someone watching her. She turned her head nervously and saw that a man was standing behind her in the doorway of the restaurant. She looked away again hurriedly and her mind held the image of a large, florid form—a form that half-filled the doorway—and a broad, shining face. Over one arm a folded napkin was hanging.

“It's only one of the waiters,” she told herself.

But ten minutes later when she looked again, the man was still standing there regarding her. He had moved out of the way for diners to leave and enter, and each time had moved back into his position.

“I must go now, at once,” she told herself. “He suspects something.”

Her fear had returned to her. She rose to beckon the waiter. But it was the man in the doorway who come forward. He was smiling.

“Your bill, Mademoiselle?” he asked bowing.

Anna nodded.

“You were expecting someone?” he suggested.

Anna ignored the question.

“I drank two coffees,” Anna told him.

Now that she could see him more closely, she noticed that of his kind he was magnificent. His frock coat was drawn tightly over his massive figure, and a heavy watch chain from which a fob dangled ran across his waistcoat. His shoes shone with an extravagant lustre and his shirt cuffs, drawn down low over his wrists, had evidently been assumed after the business of serving dinners was over: they were glacial and immaculate. From under them his large hands showed red and hot-looking. He wore a small imperial like the Emperor and a high coif of carefully-oiled hair. It was the face of a man who confronted the world suavely and betrayed nothing.

He counted out the change and placed the coins politely in a saucer. Then his eyes dropped to the valise that Anna was carrying.

“Mademoiselle is a visitor?” he asked.

“I am staying in Paris,” Anna told him.

He gave another little bow.

“So long as Mademoiselle has made her own arrangements …” he said, and left the rest of the sentence unfinished.

Then, as if the idea had just come to him, he spoke again.

“There
is
a private apartment above the restaurant if Mademoiselle would care to inspect it,” he said. “It is the favourite room in my house, so high, so secluded.”

He drew back and spread his hands as expressively as a mother bird might describe her nest to a fledgling.

“Show me the room,” Anna said.

And she followed him up the endless avenue of stairs that led steeper and steeper into the darkness.

It was now her third week in the Restaurant Duvivier. She had grown used to its endless smell of garlic and cooking-oil. And she had in a fashion grown used to M. Duvivier.

He was a widower, without children. The chair where Madame Duvivier had sat still stood there empty. He did not himself work at the tables. He merely presided over everything, his small eyes peering this way and that, trying to detect mistakes. When he did detect something he would disappear for a moment from the view of the public and the sound of shouting would come through from the kitchen.

He was, so far as Anna could detect, a man without any other interest than his restaurant. The sixteen tables with their red-check cloths comprised his whole universe. And having created it,
he reigned there, despotically, rubbing his red hands over the scene around him.

At first Anna had taken her meals down in the restaurant with the other diners. M. Duvivier had suggested a
tarif fixe
of thirty francs a week as more satisfactory for both of them. He had reserved a table for her in the corner, and used to place a rose or a carnation across her plate as a little nightly tribute. And there were other small courtesies that he used to pay her—fingering the peaches himself to find ripe ones to send over to her, pouring in more brandy than the waiters were allowed to use when making
crêpes suzettes
. Even sometimes, for no apparent reason, presenting her with a glass of champagne from the bottle that stood in its screwframe on the counter.

Because of the misery that was inside her, because Charles died again every time that she was alone, Anna spent little time in the room which M. Duvivier had so generously, so unquestioningly, offered her. She spent the day in the streets, eager now to be among people again, and frightened when she was not. It was only in the heart of crowds that she could forget about Charles. But then only for a moment. The figure of Charles, dressed as he had been on that first day when he had come to her father's house, was never more than a pace or two behind.

“My darling,” she would say suddenly as she sat on one of the seats of the Luxembourg Gardens, or in the Trocadéro in the sunlight, “I knew that they would kill you. I
knew
it, my darling, before you went away.”

And she would find herself crying again, and hope that none of the passers-by had noticed it.

As she paid her third week's bill at the Restaurant, carefully counting out the money from her purse, she realised that in coming there she had only postponed the eventual moment of her arrest. She had not actually avoided it.

“I have enough left to pay M. Duvivier for one more week, perhaps two,” she told herself. “And then …”

But it was because her mind could not face what would happen afterwards that she turned away from the thought of it.

“There will be something,
something
, that will save me,” she kept repeating. “Something will turn up.”

But in her heart she did not believe it. Instead, she saw the future steadily and remorselessly closing on her.

“By the end of the month it will have crushed me,” she thought.

To cease eating in M. Duvivier's restaurant: that, of course, was
the solution! It would lengthen everything. The twelve francs for the room alone would go—how many times it would go into what she had left in her purse, she was too excited to calculate. But at least it would go further than 30 francs. And by the time her money was exhausted anything might have happened. The Germans might have arrived in Paris, and she would be free to cross the frontier again. Then she would return to Rhinehausen, could throw herself on her father's neck and ask him to forgive her. She might even marry the Baron if his pride had not been too much hurt by what had happened.

She told M. Duvivier that night of her decision to rent only the room.

His face showed no sign of astonishment or dismay.

“The food has been to Mademoiselle's liking?” he asked.

“Oh yes, yes,” Anna assured him. “It is simply that … that I have friends who have invited me to take my meals with them.”

He gave his little bow.

“The restaurant is ready for Mademoiselle whenever she cares to return to it.”

For a moment a doubt struck her.

“It is all right about the room,” she asked. “You will not be wanting it?”

M. Duvivier bowed again.

“The room is Mademoiselle's,” he said, “so long as she chooses to remain there.”

At the end of the meal the waiter brought her a sweet liqueur on a tray. He said that M. Duvivier had sent it with his compliments. And when she turned her head she saw that M. Duvivier was standing behind the counter smiling at her.

Her money, however, continued to dwindle and disappear. She looked into the future, and a panic that soon she would be left destitute took possession of her again. She became terrified of spending even a single
sou
. The whole business of living seemed suddenly transformed into a monstrous extravagance, and she made desperate, frightened plans to protect herself from it. Before she set out from her room in the mornings she spread on the table what remained of her money. She selected only the smallest coins, locking the rest away in her valise so that the temptation to spend it would be removed from her. And she ate now in none but the cheapest restaurants, places with sand upon the floor. But it still,
she kept reminding herself, cost
something
. Even the tiny tips that she left behind for the waiters were helping gradually to absorb the remnants of her fortune.

She began telling herself that so many meals were unnecessary, that for anyone not actually doing manual labour one meal a day should be sufficient. For a week she tried the experiment. She existed miserably from one lunch-time to the next. But when at last the meal came round she was almost fainting, and she could scarcely eat it. It was after she had actually been forced to rise from the table and leave the plateful of soup that had been set in front of her, going out into the street again in search of air, that she realised that she could not live in that way, that she was not strong enough. And for the succeeding week she fed as often as other people—but only on rolls and coffee. They sustained her without satisfying, and she seemed to be perpetually hungry. The rich smells that greeted her from the kitchens of the Restaurant Duvivier whenever she returned to her room made her want to cry. She dreamed of food when she slept.

The moment which she had been dreading arrived just the same. Her self-denials, her privations, had delayed it only by a little more than a week. When she counted out her money she realised that already she was short of M. Duvivier's rent by fifty centimes. She recounted the money, searching in the corners of her purse for odd pieces that she knew she would not find there. She emptied the valise, looked through her little writing-cabinet to see if there were a coin that she had thrust away there when money had not seemed so rare, so precious. But there was nothing.