Anna (23 page)

“My most faithful customer,” he said bowing. “My one patron who has not deserted me.”

As he recovered himself he stepped back and nearly overturned one of the brass pots of palms which stood in a bamboo tripod by the door.

His awkwardness surprised her. He was a man who in the ordinary way could manage four dishes at once without upsetting a single drop of gravy. And when she looked at him more closely she saw that he had been drinking. His eyes had a thin mist of alcohol spread over them.

He crossed the restaurant to open the private door for her, and as he did so his eyes fell upon a bunch of artificial flowers that she was wearing. He raised his large red hands respectfully to the petals.

“What chic,” he said. “What elegance! It is now nearly five years since I have had pretty things like that brought into my house.” He paused and uttered a deep sign. “Mademoiselle,” he added, “I am a very lonely man.”

“As soon as peace comes your restaurant will be full again,” Anna assured him. “It will not be long now.”

She began to mount the stairs. But M. Duvivier came after her and caught her by the hand.

“It is not the restaurant that I am thinking of,” he said. “In times of peace my restaurant would always be full. It is here”—M. Duvivier struck himself repeatedly above the heart—“that I am empty. It is here that there is something missing.”

She drew her hand away from him, and went on up the stairs, M. Duvivier following. He was overflowing with confidences.

“It is the flowers, the little bunch of flowers,” he was trying to explain. “But for them I should never have spoken. You might have gone away from here without ever having understood.… We might have remained strangers to the end.… It has been on my mind from the first moment when …”

They had reached the door of Anna's room by now, and she waited there reluctant to open it. M. Duvivier in his present mood was not the most pleasant of visitors. But he was unaware of her misgivings. He leant forward to turn the handle for her, forcing her against the wall as he did so.

“A thousand apologies,” he said, straightening himself. And he followed her inside the room.

She went over to the window and remained there.

“You have something that you wish to say to me?” she asked.

She was dressed as she had been for the street and she had not even attempted to remove her gloves. She made it clear that she did not intend to invite him to sit down.

“But I cannot afford to be rude to him,” she reflected, “this room is all I have now.”

M. Duvivier, however, remained oblivious to everything except his own emotions.

“It is this room that makes me unhappy,” he began. “I can't bear to think of you shut away here when you have been used to something so much better.”

He came over to her and spread out his two hands appealingly.

“Do not imagine, Mademoiselle, that I have been deceived. You are a lady. You have left a fine home. You are hiding from something or from somebody. I have tried to do everything that I can for you. I am ready to refurnish the room for you. But nothing that I can ever do will be enough. I am ready to give you anything you ask. Anything.”

“I am very grateful to you,” Anna told him. “I could not ask to have anything more done for me.”

M. Duvivier threw up his arms in despair.

“You do not realise what I am offering you,” he said. “I am not a poor man. This restaurant has been a gold mine, a veritable gold mine. And I have always lived carefully. I could give you again the carriage and horses that you have been used to. I could give you a fine house with servants. I could make you happy.”

The fact that M. Duvivier was proposing to her, that he was offering her his large, red hand in marriage, was at once ludicrous and unpleasant.

“I don't understand you, M. Duvivier,” she said. “Really, I don't.”

“Then how can I explain?” M. Duvivier beseeched her. “In a month perhaps, in three weeks, the Germans will be here. Then there will be bloodshed and horrors. Paris will be in flames, and no one's life will be safe. It may be your life that will go first or it may be mine: neither of us can tell. And instead of all this misery, I am offering you your escape. Make your life with me, Mademoiselle, and I will take you away to safety.”

“But this is absurd, M. Duvivier,” she told him. “How do you know that I am not married already?”

“If you are married, Mademoiselle, where is your husband? Why doesn't he come for you? Why does he allow you to live alone here in this garret?” He had suddenly become truculent and his voice had grown louder. But his mood changed again as quickly, and he became humble and devoted once more.

“You may choose where it shall be,” he said. “I will put my whole life's savings into your hands. It can be Bordeaux. Or Nice. Or Marseilles. Anywhere you say so long as the Germans cannot follow us.”

He had come very close to her again and Anna feared that at any moment he might attempt to embrace her.

It was the waiter who interrupted him. He came upstairs in a state of some agitation and asked if he could have a word with M. Duvivier. He kept his voice discreetly lowered, but Anna could overhear some of the words that he was saying. “… lobster … smell nothing wrong with it myself … perhaps it is the mayonnaise, the cream may have gone a little sour.… The customer is threatening to call the police.”

M. Duvivier turned wearily in Anna's direction: he had become the restaurant-keeper again.

“I must beg you to excuse me for a moment,” he said. “I have important business. In less than a minute I shall be with you again.”

But when he returned, he found the door of Anna's room locked. Through the closed door Anna told him that she was tired and was trying to sleep.

But sleep in any case would have been impossible. The mood of Paris would not allow of it. A hostile army was sweeping down upon the capital. There were on every side unpleasant reminders of the fact that, almost at any moment now, they might expect to become a target for German gunners. In the first place, there was the black-out order, forbidding the use of street lamps. It was now September, and the evenings were already drawing in to early night. On the first night of the order people blundered into each other in the gloom, and the police began arresting householders who showed lights. Spies were said to be signalling from upper windows, providing targets for the approaching artillery. There were warnings, moreover, against the storing of goods in attics, and the military were empowered to clear the upper stories of any buildings which presented any especial danger. Emergency pumping-stations were erected all along the Seine.

It was the mania about spying that was most serious. A rumour began circulating to the effect that the Germans had succeeded in introducing enormous numbers of their agents into the capital, and that this secret army was waiting ready to unsheath its knives. In the result, there was another wave of arrests. Spies were discovered everywhere—in the army, in the ministries, in the banks and public services, and on the newspapers. A fresh survey was made of the hotels and lodging-houses.

Madame Sapho wrote anonymously to the police giving Anna's exact description.

The Restaurant Duvivier, however, was visited merely in accordance with the official schedule. Anna found the police already installed there when she returned one evening. M. Duvivier was standing with his back to the private door which led to the upper rooms, gesticulating angrily.

“So you suspect me of harbouring spies,” he was saying. “You accuse me of being in the pay of Count Bismarck. I tell you there is no one here. No one.”

At the sight of Anna, his confidence momentarily left him, he gaped. But, excusing himself to the officers, he hurried forward and showed Anna to one of the farther tables by the door. Handing her the menu, he took down the particulars of a lavish and imaginary meal.

“I beg you, Mademoiselle,” he said under his breath, “to make no attempt to go upstairs until these vermin have departed.”

And to cover up the remark, he said in a loud and reassuring voice: “No longer than it will take to cook, Mademoiselle. I will attend to it personally.”

On his way through to the kitchen one of the officers stopped him. He jostled his thumb in Anna's direction and asked casually. “Does
she
live here?”

The question, innocent enough in itself, threw M. Duvivier into a frenzy.

“Does every one who comes into a restaurant have to live there?” he demanded. “Here I am with two sons dead on the battlefield and my restaurant ruined for lack of trade, and you begin insulting my patrons. I tell you that this restaurant holds a hundred and twenty-six customers. It can serve six hundred dinners on one night. Do you imagine that the whole six hundred sleep here? Do you think that this is a barracks?”

Without waiting for the officer's reply, he slammed through into the kitchen and shouted his orders to the chef.

Then, because he was exhausted by his own vehemence, M. Duvivier returned to the restaurant and sat down at one of the tables. After wiping his forehead he signalled to the waiter to bring him over the
fine champagne
. He looked for a moment pointedly at the officers, and in particular at the one who had questioned him, and then demanded four glasses. There was by now a certain magnificence about his behaviour. And when the glasses were empty he filled them up again. Over her shoulder, Anna saw that M. Duvivier and the police-officers were playing dominoes. She sat there expecting at any moment to feel a hand laid upon her shoulder.

Then, when she demanded her bill and, opening her bag that contained so little, actually paid for her meal, the suspicions of the police-officers were finally allayed. She got up, conscious of her escape, and went out into the street again.

M. Duvivier rose and bowed her to the door, saying that he hoped the meal had been to her liking.

When she returned to the restaurant it was nearly midnight. The officers had gone, and M. Duvivier was reading the news of the day's fighting. He put the paper away at the sight of her.

“Such poise! Such assurance,” he said admiringly. “I could not believe myself that you were not a casual diner.”

And when she began to thank him he silenced her.

“Not a word, not a single word, I beg of you,” he exclaimed. “It is the least of the services that I would render to you.”

He opened the door and stood back for her to pass.

Neither of them had ever referred to the evening when he had forced his way into her bedroom and laid his life at her feet.

It now seemed suddenly that Bazaine, enclosed within the fortress of Metz, was not another of the traitors after all, but a master tactician. People suddenly began realising that with his army of a hundred and sixty thousand men, still fresh and unimpaired, he was in a position at any moment to sally forth. Breaking through the meagre lines that invested him, he could launch an irresistible attack into the rear of the advancing Germans. The name of Bazaine was Judas no longer.

But the position of Paris remained highly alarming. The arrival of General Vinoy's troops, it is true, added some twenty thousand more men to the garrison. But their presence was somehow not altogether reassuring. They were after all only another remnant of the tattered French Army, something else that had been swept back like leaves by the wind of advance along the roads that led to Paris. And twenty thousand men meant twenty thousand more to feed. Pleased as they were to welcome these tired warriors, the people of Paris realised on second thoughts that they would have preferred to see them meeting the enemy in the field—and dying there if necessary.

With each fresh edition of the papers, the fear, the terror of encirclement, increased. It ceased to be a military question at all, and became something personal. Business men who lived in the suburbs began sleeping in their offices, even though trade of all
kinds was practically at a standstill. Shutters were put up along the boulevards. And life stopped. This creeping, advancing menace outside the walls seemed to be throwing out long invisible tentacles which were already probing and throttling, before the brute weight of the thing itself had actually fallen upon the city and throttled it.

The murmurs of foreboding had grown, until all Paris seemed to be pulsating in them. Crowds met suddenly and for no reason, and then, as suddenly and with as little reason, dispersed again. Prophets, political and revolutionary, sprang up at every corner. Sermons took on a new complexion and the churches were full. Any one with the train fare in his pocket tried to leave. Altogether it was as though some indifferent hand, breaking through the clouds, had raised the stone that had covered up the city for so long and had abruptly revealed the little creatures underneath it, scuttling about in full panic.

And to Anna as she went among the people there came the revelation of a change within her. She no longer felt an alien at all, a foreigner, waiting for the armies of her countrymen to release her. She was now a part of the life that was going on around her, a part of what was being threatened.

Looking up at the façades of the buildings, she found herself praying that they would escape destruction.

“Oh God,” she asked, “don't let Paris be destroyed.…”

Her prayers were interrupted by the sight of a huge cannon being dragged into position in the Tuileries Gardens. In the excitement of the spectacle she forgot altogether that she was praying. She remained fascinated, wondering when they proposed to fire-off the monster.

It was night-time. The last train from Paris had just felt the Gare d'Orléans. There were now military sentries posted at all the gates. Notices saying that the service had been discontinued were stuck up over every guichet. Around these notices large crowds were standing. Not content in reading the words in front of them, people would force their way to the edge of the crowd and begin abusing the porters and then fight their way back into the front row again.