Anna (18 page)

She paused and glanced round the room again.

“Those are the hairbrushes I gave him,” she thought. “He wouldn't take them for fear that some harm should come to them.”

And then the same dread returned to her.

“But why haven't I heard from him? Why doesn't he write? Madame Dufour has had three letters. And I haven't had one. It isn't right. I shouldn't be expected to bear it. Her son's no more precious to her than mine is to me. It's this uncertainty that kills. I could bear it better if I heard even that …”

But at the thought of what it could be that she might hear the palpitations and giddinesses returned. She gripped the corner
of the bed, Charles's bed, to hold herself upright. But she had no strength in her arm, and the tips of her fingers were tingling. Her head felt huge suddenly, and a red mist swept up over her eyes. She slid on to the floor with a little moan.

It was the third time in a fortnight that she had fainted. Anna and the old servant picked her up—she seemed pathetically light: as light as a child—and placed her on the bed. As she was laid down she began to recover consciousness. Anna was aware that Madame Latourette was feebly trying to thrust her away from her.

And then, by a post that was so late that once again the postman had been despaired of, came the letter. The servant had given Madame Latourette the other half of one of her sleeping tablets, and she did not even hear the bell. After a month of suspense and agony, the letter for which she had been waiting was actually in the apartment, and she was unaware of it.

It was Anna who took the letter from the servant's hands. She knew even before she saw the heavy blackness of the Censor's markings that it was from Charles. Her heart bounded. Then turning it over she saw that it was addressed to Madame Latourette.

Something like anger swept over her as she read the name.

“How can she mean anything to him in comparison with what I mean?” she asked herself. “How could any one mean so much?”

But she merely handed the letter to the maid.

“You must wake Madame Latourette,” she said. “She is expecting this letter.”

She stood there watching the shapeless back of the old woman as she moved away down the passage, the magic letter in her grasp.

“But what do I care?” she asked herself at last, “if it is his mother that he writes to, so long as I know that he is safe?”

And in the sudden relief of the moment she began to cry. Returning to her room she threw herself down on the bed and wept as a child weeps, her whole body convulsed with the sobs.

“You're safe, you're safe,” she kept repeating. “Oh, my darling, you're safe.”

The letter had been nearly five weeks in the post.

The jubilation in the apartment that evening was unrestrained. Madame Latourette rose and did her hair, and put on jewellery that Anna had not seen her wear before. And M. Latourette put away his dispatch-case of forms and became a human being once more. He opened a bottle of champagne for dinner and drank Charles's health. It was the first evening since she had been in the rue d'Aubon that Anna sat down at table with a light heart.
It was as though in their common joy even Madame Latourette had accepted her.

And as he drank, M. Latourette became humorous and convival. He continued to pooh-pooh the whole idea of Charles's being in any kind of danger.

“At the rate at which they are retreating,” he said, “there is no bullet that could keep up with them. The only real danger to a soldier in this war is when the people of Paris get hold of him.”

The remark was uttered flippantly enough, but the words struck a pang through M. Latourette's heart as he spoke them. If this retreat continued, if Paris were really to undergo the ordeal of siege, what, he asked himself, would become of France? And what would become of his contracts? The hundred and thirty-five thousand belts had already been made. He had financed the making of them himself. And instead of profit, he now saw bankruptcy. The belts, if things went on as they were, would simply be that much more booty for the Germans. In any case, a beleaguered garrison is not usually greatly concerned about the correctness of its equipment.

But he concealed his feelings, his misgiving, and he was nicer to Madame Latourette than she remembered him to have been for years. Once during the evening he even came over and pinched her ear. Madame Latourette blushed like a schoolgirl.

To Anna, M. Latourette paid his most especial attentions. He directed all his old charm upon her.

“I hope that you will put in a good word for me with Count Bismarck,” he said. “Tell him that even if I am French I know how to behave towards a German lady. Ask him to spare my life.”

Madame Sapho was growing exasperated. She had written Anna no fewer than four letters and she had received no answer. Madame Sapho had gone to no particular pains in writing these letters: she had not used either her cards or her crystal. She had simply sat down and invented the kind of things that she had imagined that her client would most want to hear. There were whole paragraphs depicting a soldier leading a sudden and victorious
sortie;
a soldier in ambush ; a soldier sitting round a camp fire with his fellows; a soldier in a wayside inn; and—this was when her imagination grew tired, and she still had the last page of her letter to fill—simply a soldier marching.

Her last letter had been the most carefully conceived of all.
She had allowed herself to become romantic. She had drawn a picture of a soldier lying under the stars dreaming of a beautiful, golden-haired girl: his lips moved from time to time, she said, as he uttered her name.

And Anna, receiving these letters, destroyed them after a single glance and threw the pieces into the fire.

“What does she take me for?” she asked herself. “Does she think that I am a servant girl to be bemused by such foolishness about her lover?”

Madame Sapho made one final effort, wrote one more letter. The whole tone of it was different. Instead of asking for money for her revelations as something that Anna might care to give, she now demanded it. She wrote as though these psychic disclosures were parts of a contract which Anna on her side had dishonoured. “
Unless you send me one hundred francs—I am a poor woman and cannot afford to exhaust myself for others for no reward—I shall cease to be your friend,”
she wrote.
“I can be very dangerous as your enemy.”

But Anna destroyed this letter, like its predecessors.

“She can tell me nothing,” she assured herself. “So she seeks to frighten me. She is a charlatan and a blackmailer. She will grow tired of writing if I ignore her altogether. There will be some new customer whom she can threaten.”

She dismissed Madame Sapho from her mind and sat down to write her thirtieth letter to Charles.

“Even if you should not dare to send a message,”
she wrote,
“I shall not mind so long as these words reach you. It is the thought that I can do something to comfort you, my darling, that keeps me alive. If it were not for you, I would rather a thousand times that I were dead.”

It Was a tribute to the foresight of M. Latourette that in the high blaze of summer he should have sent Madame Latourette to buy more heavy winter dresses. It was as though amid the dust and glare of that grilling August he saw, through a peep-hole in the future, the frozen Seine, the coal-less stoves, the hungry crowds standing around the charcoal braziers, the pale cadaverous faces, the funerals.

And to celebrate the fact that Charles was safe, Madame Latourette bought dresses in the brightest colours. She had worn black for years. But suddenly she became a fashionable lady. In her
happiness she bought toques trimmed with fur and skirts that had pipings of gay silk. Her wardrobe had never been so full. And M. Latourette encouraged her. If things went badly for France, he told himself, the dresses would be needed—in any case they would be twice as expensive in a few months' time. And, if things went well, the wife of an important Government contractor would need to be dressed properly.

In the result, Madame Latourette blossomed. There were evenings when M. Latourette, wearing a small gold star—it was his only decoration, and had some connection with the voluntary fire-service—would take his wife to receptions at one or other of the Ministries. There were invitations, too, from the wives of other business men engaged with equal cheerfulness in robbing the coffers of the dying Empire. And there were services in Notre Dame to be attended in company with high officials and obscure members of the Diplomatic Corps.

On this wave of society Madame Latourette rode high. She had her hair dressed by a smart coiffeur. She rouged. And she tried to conceal from herself that the letter from her son had been more than a month old when she had received it. She would return from these festivities on M. Latourette's arm, basking in a kind of after-glow of married happiness. And then suddenly she would remember this other, this younger, woman who was in the apartment—and all her happiness would vanish. Secretly, she prayed that Anna might be arrested and thrown into jail. Openly, she begged M. Latourette to use his influence so that the foreigner in their midst might be passed over the frontier into Switzerland.

It was Anna's apparent indifference, her resignation to her present state, that so baffled and bewildered Madame Latourette. She rarely spoke to her. On some days they ate lunch at the same table without exchanging even a single word.

But M. Latourette, for his part, was in excellent spirits. He had a new contract in his pocket—this time for the supply of nearly two hundred thousand water-flasks. He knew as little about the manufacture of them as a month before he had known of leather belts. But it seemed nevertheless that, somehow, among the hurlyburly of war he had found the sunny side of the wall and had settled down there.

The clerk in the Ministry of War evinced no emotion whatsoever when the fresh pile of Dead and Missing notices was placed in the tray on his desk. It was no larger than the pile which the messenger had placed there yesterday, and no smaller. From the point of view of the routine of the office there was a beautiful and reassuring regularity about this daily sheaf of slaughter. So many before lunch, so many after lunch, and then an hour or so of overtime (paid at full rate and a half), and the clerk was a free man again, with the rest of his evening before him. He was an elderly man, the clerk, and he disliked sudden rushes. If there were a full engagement on the whole front he was sometimes unable to get home at all.

No. 637248, Gaston Edouard Ducrois; No. 247396, Henri Mabet; No. 328746, Francois de Fons—the clerk wrote them all out in his beautiful handwriting. There were seven operations to be completed on each form, and he did not falter on one of them. His entries had the unfailing accuracy of the Recording Angel's. No. 237854, Charles Henri Etienne Latourette, his pen sped on. Running his thumb nail down the edge of the pile, he calculated that he would be able to do another thirty before lunch-time. And, pulling the thirtieth slip a little farther out of the pile than the others, he went on writing. All round him, down the entire length of the long gallery in which his department was housed, were other elderly clerks like himself writing, writing. The documentation of death was proceeding smoothly.

And while yet another elderly clerk, a senior one this time, was collecting the little chits that were to be sent off to widows and next-of-kin, and was subjecting them to a final scrutiny before posting, Madame Latourette was trying on a new head-dress of ostrich feathers for the reception at the house of the Sub-Minister of Posts and Telegraphs. She was not quite sure why she was going. So far as she knew her husband and the Sub-Minister were total strangers. She did not even know the Sub-Minister's name. But she acknowledge the fact of M. Latourette's undoubted advancement, and she was proud for his sake.

If only, she kept telling herself, her heart would stop fluttering and steady itself. But how, with Charles away, could it? The terrible uncertainty about him kept coming back into her mind, blotting out and extinguishing everything else around it. Even the splendour of a Sub-Ministerial reception could not make her forget it entirely.

Ever since she had been a young girl she had wanted a head-dress of ostrich feathers, and it seemed a cruel trick on the part of Fate that, when at last she had one, half the pleasure should have been taken from her because there was a war on.

The notification of Charles's death was delivered to the Latourettes by special service. It was there waiting for them when they got back from the reception.

M. Latourette saw it first, and realised instantly what it was. He placed his hat over it and advised Madame Latourette, as it was late already, that she should go to bed. She was tired with so much standing, and went off gratefully down the corridor, her ostrich-plumes sagging. M. Latourette picked up his hat and retrieved the letter.

Then, with a hand that was shaking already, he lit the gas in his bureau, and tore open the envelope. For a moment he could not bring himself to read. When he had forced himself to do so, he sat down in his revolving chair and covered his face with his hand.

“Now he will never know how much I loved him. He will never know,” he kept repeating. “It was only because he was so weak and gentle that I was so stern with him. God will bear me witness that I tried to make a business man of him.”

In retrospect, all Charles's faults, his carelessness with important letters, his negligences, his shortcomings, his vanities seemed somehow endearing and lovable. It was as though by the simple act of dying his very vices had become virtues.

“He was my only son,” M. Latourette told himself. “My only son. The name will die out and my agencies will vanish.”

But at the thought of Madame Latourette, and how she would take this news, all other thoughts seemed unimportant. He was sweating.