Anna (11 page)

The soldiers left the train at Neufchâteau. They lined-up on a platform which was already loaded with their kind. So far as the eye could range were field-grey uniforms, the officers showing up among the massed ranks like gaily-coloured cocks in a farmyard. And in the martialling-yard beside the station were strange shapes on the wagons. Muzzles of guns appeared from under the tarpaulins. Out of one truck projected the points of lances belonging to the regiment of Uhlans. A field-kitchen, with its chimney-cowl removed to clear the low roofs of tunnels, rode high on its mounting like a piece of crude machinery in a circus that was moving on to a new fair-ground.

The passengers got gratefully out of the squalor of the rear coach and re-sorted themselves. Class became a distinction once more, and the fastidious came into their own. But the soldiers had left their mark on the train. The compartments which had held them retained the full sickly smell of male sweat. There were footmarks on the upholstery and words of a single obvious
meaning had been scribbled on the walls. The preliminary beastliness of war had begun already.

The train reached the frontier at breakfast time. Here the preparations for a campaign had reached their last stages. The station was under martial law, military police inspected the train as though they expected it to vomit spies: they marched up and down in pairs, clicking their heels together and peering into the faces of the passengers. Luggage was scrutinised for lethal weapons; letters were opened and perused for secret messages; wallets examined and their contents counted. Passengers were felt, too, and prodded for concealed packages, and the unlucky ones were taken away to a series of small cubicles for stripping. The unluckiest of all were detained.

On the French side of the barrier, the emotional atmosphere was perceptibly different. Six yards away, on the German side, there was an official reluctance to part with any human being whom Fate had placed there. On the French side there was a mounting antagonism towards any newcomer, and a desire, expressed volubly and with gesture, for the train to leave at once with those who were already in it.

One sentence, uttered casually, without any discernible note of panic in the speaker's voice, caused a sudden chill to pass through Anna's body, leaving her momentarily pale and a little faint.

“We're lucky,” was what the traveller observed to his companion. “We've got through. They're closing the Frontier some time to-morrow. I heard the stationmaster say so …”

The words as she heard them seemed to assume a new significance which she alone could understand: they might have been addressed to her.

“For me,” she reminded herself, “there can be no going back. When I started on this journey I knew there could be no return.”

And the feeling of faintness and of cold came over her again.

The train reached Paris as the light was going out of the sky. The air was grey and lifeless, and a thin rain was falling. Paris— the city of carnival and fashion, Charles's city—confronted her with a prospect of peeling stucco buildings, and cobbled streets, and tall tenements with mattresses spread out to air at the upper windows.

On the platform more soldiers, wearing a different uniform this time, were standing.

The Fiacre led her through twisting streets that gleamed dully under their film of wet. As the houses slid by her in variegated disorder she saw how faded they were, how shabby. The shutters slung across the windows sagged downwards, and the shop-fronts were of the meanest kind, small and dirty. Women dressed in cheap black hurried along the pavements with woollen shawls drawn over their heads, each dragging her load of shopping. The men looked, too, small and half-nourished; the children pale, neglected. And as the cab proceeded, opening fresh, identical vistas and closing the old ones, the whole maze of Paris seemed to spin round her, enfolding and trapping her.

“But there are always poor streets in every great city,” she reassured herself. “These must be the slums.”

She opened her bag and read the address in his handwriting:
123 bis, rue d'Aubon.
But she knew it by heart already: she had repeated it to herself so many times in the train. And then at the thought that she soon would be with him again, that she would ring a bell and that a servant would take her into a drawing-room where
he
would be sitting, her heart suddenly faltered, and she caught her breath.

“How can he ever doubt my love for him after this?” she asked: and then added: “As if he didn't know already.”

She had just rearranged her hair, peering in the half-light of the cab into the tiny mirror that she carried, when the driver pulled up his horse and got down.

They were in front of a tall block of grey buildings with a central archway that led into a paved courtyard. On an upright chair inside the archway an elderly grizzled woman, the guardian of this sombre fortress, was sitting, her darning spread out on her lap. There was a small dog beside her, tied by a cord to one of the legs of her chair. In either direction ran the
rue d'Aubon,
high and dark and narrow.

“Can this be where Charles lives?” she wondered. “Is this possible? I had expected something so much more splendid.”

Somewhere from an upper window, a few doors down the street, a woman emptied a vase of something over the heads of the passers-by into the gutter.

The concierge rose from her chair as Anna approached, and replied that the Latourettes were at home. They were to be found she said on the fifth story. She had not yet, she regretted, had time to light the gas on the landings but she would follow, carrying a taper. Anna thanked her, and was led upwards by an endless, twisting staircase to a front door that was painted the colour of clay.

“How different. How foreign it all is,” she told herself, trying to conceal her disappointment.

She paused, as though unwilling to break the spell of that moment, the moment of her arrival. And then, because the concierge behind her was puzzled and incredulous at her inaction, she raised her hand and pulled the brass bell-knob. She felt sick again from excitement, and her heart would not stop hammering.

The woman who answered the door was elderly and grizzled, too: she might have been a half-sister of the concierge. She was suspicious. At first she barred the way altogether, and then, in the face of Anna's insistence, admitted her reluctantly, as though doubtful about strange young ladies who wore velvet travelling capes and spoke with foreign accents. She left her standing in a dimcurtained ante-room crowded with furniture and rugs and small, bronze statues and unlighted lamps. Anna's heart was beating now with a furious rapidity that she could not control. From the next room there came the sound of someone playing the piano.

“Perhaps that is Charles,” Anna thought. “He plays as though it were Charles. I am sure it is Charles. I should know his playing anywhere.”

After a moment a door at the far end of the corridor opened and Anna heard footsteps approaching. The curtains of the ante-room were pulled back, and Madame Latourette was standing there. Her hair stood out from her head in heedless, untidy wisps, and the black dress that she was wearing was cut without distinction. Anna thought how faded, how unfashionable she looked. Moreover, she seemed agitated.

“You wanted to see my son,” she asked.

Anna held out her hand: she spoke like an actress not yet familiar with her part, carefully remembering the speech that she had rehearsed upon the journey.

“Are you Madame Latourette?” she asked, smiling at Madame Latourette as though to put her at her ease. “I am Charles's cousin, Anna. I asked for him only because I had not yet had the pleasure of meeting you.”

“Charles's cousin,” Madame Latoruette repeated. “From …Germany?”

“From Rhinehausen,” Anna replied. “Where Charles has been staying.”

Madame Latourette's hands fluttered across her bosom for a moment. “Then you are Anna Karlin,” she said.

She spoke as though her whole mind were filled with some kind of vague alarm, and it was noticeable that she made no move to lead the visitor in the direction of her son.

“You didn't get my letter?” Anna asked. “The one that I wrote to say that I was coming.”

The words seemed easier, more natural, once she had said them: after all, an untruth was no more difficult to utter than the truth. For all that Madame Latourette knew, she
might
have written such a letter.

“No, there wasn't any letter,” Madame Latourette answered. “The postman brought nothing. Perhaps it has been held up because of … of the situation.”

Madame Latourette broke off in confusion, and Anna realised that it was because she, Anna Karlin, by having crossed the frontier, was now a foreigner, that Madame Latourette was so alarmed. In a sense Madame Latourette's confusion and the soldiers on the train were all a part of one embracing whole.

“But you must be tired,” Madame Latourette was saying. “Take off your cloak.”

Anna raised her hand to her forehead.

“It is all so strange,” she said. “I cannot think what can have happened to my letter. I had no idea that you were not expecting me. I must go to an hotel.”

She paused.

“Perhaps my uncle has heard,” she added. “My father wrote to him by the same post.”

At the knowledge that this was something of which M. Latourette was supposed to know, Madame Latourette's anxiety visibly diminished. She came over and put her arm round Anna's shoulders.

“Come with me, my dear,” she said. “We will take you to your uncle straightaway. He will be very pleased to meet his niece.”

She took Anna along the corridor—this, too, was crowded with little pieces of furniture set in any angle that the walls provided— and led her in the direction of the room from which the playing was coming.

“It
is
Charles whom I can hear,” Anna was telling herself. “In a moment I shall see him.”

At the thought her whole body seemed to be charged with expectation.

“My dear,” she heard Madame Latourette saying, “you're so tired you're trembling. You must rest until we have got you something.”

She threw the door open, and disclosed a room lit by two table-lamps obscured by rose-pink shades. The walls of the room were papered in crimson-damask, and in the centre stood a round, satinwood table littered with daguerrotypes in silver frames. At the table the diminutive figure of M. Latourette was sitting, a smoking-cap on his head and a heavy pipe like her father's in his hand. He rose to his feet politely, but completely at a loss. Then Madame Latourette shut the door and disclosed the piano. Seated at the keyboard was a young lady with a complicated coiffure of black hair and a long, aristocratic nose. And bending over her, to control the music, was Charles.

He started up when he saw Anna, and stood there staring stupidly. The piece of music that he had been arranging slid off its rack and fluttered to the floor.

“But how wrong about him Charles was,” Anna was thinking. “M. Latourette is charming.”

His small eyes were fixed upon her, and he was nodding his head approvingly. It was not Anna at all that he was seeing but his half-sister Marie. He had gone back thirty years, and he was seeing again a young girl in a poke bonnet and an enormous bustle standing on the platform at Alsace ready to set out to marry her German husband. She had been fair-haired as Anna was; and her eyes had slanted upwards at the corners in exactly the same fashion.

M. Latourette reached down for the bottle of wine that he had opened, and filled Anna's glass again.

“And how did my son behave while he was with you?” he asked. “If I had known what company he was enjoying I should have been there myself.”

He folded his hands together in his lap, and sat there beaming at her. Madame Latourette was watching him. The expression on his face and his obvious delight in his rôle as an irresistible fascinator of pretty women distressed her. She had seen those bright eyes turned on her once; and she was hurt to find that for someone else they could still sparkle.

But it was Charles who was showing the most obvious distress. He had gone very pale when Anna had entered and had left Mlle. Yvette d'Enbois in the middle of one of her most ravishing arpeggios. The room seemed suddenly to revolve about him, and he was aware that now, after the first moment, when his heart had seemed
to stop altogether, he was blushing. He had come forward as though he were ready in front of every one to take her in his arms.

But Anna had stopped him: she had been ready for such a piece of folly on his part. She had merely held out her hand to him as though he were the most casual of acquaintances, and had asked if his journey home had been an easy one. Then, when the meal was ready in the dining-room—Mlle d'Enbois had left early, pleading a headache, and she carried her music away with her—Charles had followed Anna, trying to keep as near to her as possible, to snatch a moment to speak to her alone, to explain.

But there was no such moment. M. Latourette would not allow himself to be denied a second of his niece's company. And Madame Latourette, jealous herself, would not leave either of them.

As Charles sat there he remembered again his first evening in Rhinehausen, when he could only sit and look.

“But why has she come?” he kept asking himself. “Is it true that her father really wrote a letter that we have not received? Or is this only some story that she has invented to cover up her arrival? What is behind it all?”

When Anna had finished her meal, M. Latourette gave her his arm and led her back into the drawing-room. He drew his chair up so close to her that it was useless for Charles to attempt to sit anywhere in the vicinity.

“And how long did your father's letter say that we might have this privilege?” he asked. “How long was he ready to confide his beautiful daughter?”