Anna (25 page)

Then, as she reached the restaurant and turned to enter it, he stepped forward and the constables closed in behind her. It was all very neatly and efficiently done. Before Anna had realised that the sergeant even intended to speak to her, she was surrounded as effectively as if she had been a murderer or an assassin caught red-handed.

“Mademoiselle,” he said, “I hold a warrant for your arrest.”

He waved the paper which was in his hand and a driver a little farther down the street understood the signal. He whipped up his horse, and the small sky-blue van without any windows and only a barred door at the back came clopping down the street in their direction.

The Cell in which she was confined was no larger than an ordinary pantry. The window, high up in a corner, and criss-crossed with a meshwork of iron that would have defeated a cat, was ingeniously arranged so that not one particle of direct light entered this model dungeon. The door had no handle on the inside. There was only a steel flap which could be opened from without so that the occupants could be studied and examined. The furniture, too, was of the simplest: it comprised a chair chained to the wall opposite the window, a bed made of two planks let into the stone, a straw mattress and a pail.

An injunction against shouting, stamping, knocking, hammering, spitting and stripping had been pasted over the bed by Order of Napoleon III. No one had seen fit to bring it up to date.

It was now Anna's third day in the prison. Quite how much of the day had passed she did not know, had no means of knowing. The midday meal of bread and weak soup had already been passed through the grille. And another meal, a duplicate of the first one, would be handed in to her in the same way at six o'clock. She judged some two hours to have passed since she had eaten. But she knew from the experience of the other days that it might have been as little as an hour, even as little as half an hour. Inside these four walls the ordinary passage of time seemed somehow to have been suspended; the cell was a little time-proof pocket in creation. A clock in the wall would simply have been untrue to itself.

It was the night that she dreaded; the lights were turned off then. At their best they provided only a dim uncertain haze, too faint to cast a shadow. But when they were extinguished the imagination remembered them as something glowing and human. The real darkness was as oppressive as evil.

And with the coming on of the darkness the noises began. Under cover of night the injunction against shouting went ignored, the wardresses had to go along the corridors banging on the doors with their fists; but they had very little that they could threaten, these wardresses, to people who already had the threat of death hanging over them. In the result, the hammering of their fists only added to the bedlam of the place. There were curses and obscenities from both sides of the little grated doors.

The woman in the cell next to Anna's was the most clamorous of the shouters. It was she who started it regularly. She began every evening with a kind of noisy, vulgar sobbing which gave
place in time to sharp, hysterical cries. There was purpose as well as pattern in these outbursts. She, poor woman, was under sentence of death. The day for the execution was drawing near, and she was unable to make her case understood. In her extremity she appealed to everyone. She mentioned lovers whom she had had in the various Ministries, even mentioned one of the Ministers himself. Her whole amorous background had apparently been political, and she begged and entreated the wardress to get in touch with these phantoms from her past. She offered bribes—all of them pathetically dependent upon the success of these negotiations. And all to no purpose: the wardress remained deaf to her.

The last scene of this little nightly tragedy was as unalterable as the first. It consisted of a prayer—a prayer for poison. She implored her tormentors to give her laudanum, morphia, prussic acid; anything so long as the dose was lethal. When she found them adamant about this too, she would relapse once more into a low moaning that ceased only with sleep.

And for all the reprieve these protestations secured her she might have remained silent. On the appointed day she was duly led out. And Anna, her face pressed against the grille of the cell door, saw a fat, elderly woman with grey hair, half-fainting, supported in the arms of a couple of stalwart warders.

It was only for these supreme occasions that male warders were admitted. For the most part, the nuns who had tended the place in time of peace still ruled there. But with her establishment suddenly grown so large, the Reverend Mother in charge had been forced to accept many changes. She had recruited lay-helpers—old grizzled women who were unaffected by suffering. She even had a Military Governor over her.

The hammering in the other cells broke out again as the melancholy procession passed along, and the air was filled with every kind of cat-calling. But when one of the warders, a jovial, cheerful kind of man, shouted back over his shoulder that the woman was German, the shouting ceased immediately, and boos and hisses were released instead.

In that moment a new fear sprung up within Anna's mind.

“When I go, they will still be ignorant about me,” she pledged herself. “I shall tell them nothing. I will not even speak.”

And when, on the following day, the door of her cell was opened and the Governor of the prison himself entered, she remained silent. She heard the charge of espionage, of plotting against the security of the French nation, preferred against her, and she kept her eyes to the ground. She stood there as though she had not
heard. She did not even move when he told her that the day of her trial had been fixed for the following week.

His tone of voice, his bearing, the unruffled serenity with which he withdrew again, as though tears or silence were of no material difference to him, made it abundantly clear that in the Governor's view the verdict was established already.

But the day of the trial never came. It drew near, very near. At the last moment, however, a new force, something outside the prison, shattered everything. Justice, surprised a little, drew back.

Anna had been lying face downwards on the wretched bed, her face resting on her hands. The prison was quieter now at nights. Since the unfortunate woman from the next cell had departed there was often nothing to break the unnatural silence of the place. The felt slippers of the wardresses brushed along the corridors as softly as wings.

“To-morrow,” Anna had told herself, “I shall know. There will come an end to all this. I shall hear the sentence. I shall be … be executed.”

She was not afraid any longer: she was too numb and dazed for that. But the final word came only with difficulty. She could not bring herself to utter it. Then, having uttered it, she could not forget it.

“You are German and you are in Paris,” she told herself. “You have adopted a false name and you have lived in hiding from the authorities. Someone has denounced you. In time of war that is sufficient. There is only one sentence for spying.”

And then in the midst of these doubts and terrors there landed the bombshell from without. The bombshell was M. Duvivier.

His voice reached her while he was still in the stone entrancehall. It carried, high-pitched and petulant, through the succession of iron-grated doors between them. It was the voice of a man clamorously asserting the rights of a good citizen.

At first, Anna failed to recognise the voice. And then her mind refused to believe it. The voice of M. Duvivier belonged to another and different world. But, as it drew nearer, there was no mistaking it. The voice by now was opposite the door.

“Isn't a letter from the Minister of Justice enough?” M. Duvivier was saying. “Must I be followed about by a lot of wardresses? I wish to see the lady alone, I tell you. Alone.”

There was the sound of a heavy key turning in the lock. The door swung open—and there stood M. Duvivier before her.

But the sight, the actual sight of him, shocked her. His black
suit was spruce no longer. It was crumpled and unpressed. And the face had sunk into haggard, unnatural lines. Only the hands, red and heavy-fingered, were the same. He came forward; and, as he did so, Anna saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

“So at last I have found you,” he said. “At last.”

He took up her hand and began kissing it.

The wardress—she was one of the temporary sisters—who had entered with him, took her place at the door. She proceeded to relock it, and passed the key through the grille to another wardress, who was waiting in the corridor.

M. Duvivier turned and regarded her for a moment. Then he removed a five franc piece from his pocket and went over to her. He said something under his breath, but the woman, tight-lipped as ever, only shook her head. M. Duvivier hesitated for a moment, and then removed another five franc piece. The woman took it, and finally pushed open the flap in the grille once more. The key was handed back to her, and she proceeded to let herself out. The lock grated for a second time, and Anna and M. Duvivier were alone together.

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.

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?