Anna (28 page)

And as he read, Anna saw a change come over him. At first his face became flushed again as it had been while he was struggling. His fist, which rested on the table, clenched itself, and Anna grew frightened for herself.

“He cannot even now guess what he will come upon. Then he surely will strike me,” she thought.

But M. Duvivier did not strike her. The fingers of his clenched hand opened out again and he bent still lower over the page before him. Only his breathing continued quick and broken as before. And a moment later Anna saw that he was crying, actually crying. Large, shining tears, like a child's, were running down his cheeks, so that he was forced to take off his spectacles and wipe them. Still he said nothing.

Anna moved her head a little to one side and saw the words that
he was reading:
“His large, red hands were stretched out towards me as though he expected me to fling myself into them.”

And as she saw the words, and saw M. Duvivier reading them, his eyes still streaming, she felt suddenly ashamed.

M. Duvivier had now reached the end of the passage and closed the covers of the diary. For a moment he said nothing. He simply stood there regarding her. Finally he pushed the diary back towards her.

“I should never have let you read it,” Anna told him impulsively. “I should have destroyed it. I was angry when I wrote it. I am not angry now. Forgive me, please forgive me. Forget that you ever read those words.”

But M. Duvivier only shook his head.

“You wrote what you were feeling,” he said. “Nothing can alter that. And you were right. Our stations were too different. I should never have asked you to marry me.”

And he began weeping again.

In his misery his grossness seemed somehow to have departed. There was no trace of hatred in her mind now, only pity.

Opening the diary, she took hold of the offending pages and tore them from the cover. Then she shredded them into tiny pieces and scattered them on the counter.

“Look,” she said. “See what I've done. I'm sorry.”

But the remark was lost in the rumble of distant gunfire. A low reverberation seemed to move the very foundations of the building. M. Duvivier raised his head and sat back to listen. The noise continued—it was the enemy batteries on the heights of Châtillon checking their range for the day—and suddenly the air became filled with a different kind of sound. It was a shrill whistle, a shriek almost, like a driver's lash descending. It seemed to tear the air all round it into pieces. And it was followed almost immediately by an explosion. A shell had passed clean over their heads in its flight and had struck somewhere in Clichy. The Restaurant Duvivier gave a shudder. The bottles behind the bar clinked and rattled, and a little plaster fell from the ceiling.

Something bigger than a domestic quarrel was going on outside.

It was some days after that before M. Duvivier so much as spoke to his wife. They lived under the same roof, ate meals at the same table, even shared the same bedroom like any other husband and wife. And all in silence, in bitter, hostile silence.

Then quite suddenly the presents began again. One morning Anna found a little spray of artificial flowers and a bag of sweets upon her table; and, looking up in surprise, she saw the black, hungry eyes of M. Duvivier doting upon her. Only it was not quite the same M. Duvivier. During the anguish of the past five days and nights he had been drinking just a little too much, had been seeking the speediest and least glorious of all means of escape. Faced by the defeat of his country, and by the ruination of his business and of his so-hopeful marriage, he had sought oblivion. And found it. He had drawn one bottle after another. In the result, his outline as a man was now slightly blurred. He was a trifle out of touch with the world.

But he was more loving than ever.

It Was the nearness of the Germans that was spreading alarm in Paris. Imaginative ladies with opera glasses, standing in the Champs Elysées, reported that they could see Prussian soldiers on the skyline. But it was no imagination that in places the German cannon actually overshot the city.

The morale of the people, however, remained the admiration of the civilised world. Down in the slums of Belleville and La Villette, where food, always scarce, was now almost unobtainable, there were already murmurs of the rising that was to come. But the slums are never the whole of a city. And on the boulevards and in the big cafes the extraordinary belief lingered that France was not only holding her own, but was actually winning. The carrier-pigeons which Gambetta had released—the Germans were now using falcons in an attempt to interrupt this aerial mail—had come safely home to roost; and the knowledge that this Hercules among statesmen had descended safely from the clouds and was now raising an army in the provinces was taken as nothing less than a token of victory. There was also the belief that the solution of the whole thing still lay in the power of money; that Favre,
on behalf of the French nation, would get Bismarck to accept a lump sum to stop molesting them, and that the war would then be over. Moreover, the defences of the city had been transformed into something pretty formidable. Soldiers were camped by the Arc de Triomphe; the Gare du Nord was an aerodrome for balloons. And new forts had been erected. These forts gradually came to occupy the place in the popular imagaination which famous battleships do in the mind of a sea-loving nation. Streets and boroughs “adopted” them.

There were other indications, too, that General Trochu was taking his task seriously. The woods to the North and East of Paris had all been fired, and fresh rows of houses were demolished to give a clear field to the gunners.

In this atmosphere of furious energy and improvisation the natural lunacy of inventors bloomed and flourished. One man came forward with proposals for an incendiary gas which would cover an advancing enemy with an all-enfolding blanket of naked flame. And another inventor proposed nothing less than the induced combustion of explosive elements in the soil, so that the Germans would find the very ground that they were marching on suddenly disappearing under their feet in a titanic upheaval of fire and smoke and dissolving fragments. In the sheer pressure of his task, the inventor had not yet had time to work out the actual details of his scheme. But the idea was there just the same.

Most important of all, however, in supporting the public morale were two fundamental feelings that united everyone. These were hatred of the deposed Emperor and resentment of the English. Crude caricatures of the abdicated and despised Badinguet were still on sale in the streets. And the figure of John Bull, irritatingly fat and well-fed, appeared in the cartoons.

The double-facedness of this nation just across the Channel seemed to the French to surpass all existing levels in hypocrisy. The English papers were full of condemnations of Prussianism in general and Bismarck in particular. They talked about the Huns and quoted Tacitus. They published articles on the art and culture of France—and they did precisely nothing to assist this neighbourly, exalted nation in its misery. Perfidious seemed the least of adjectives to characterise such behaviour.

And, in the result, the position of English journalists in Paris was more than a little invidious. They came over, these gentlemen, Mr. Frederick Hardman of the
Times
, Mr. Labouchere of the
Telegraph
, Sir Archibald Forbes of
the
Daily News
, and the rest, and the French did not quite know what to make of them. For all the good-
will of these correspondents—and every one of them had the educated Englishmen's fervent love of Paris—they seemed to the Parisians to be taking a rather box-office view of things. That they were risking their lives was in a sense a token of their sincerity. But it is one thing to risk one's own life because it is one's job. And it is quite another to sit by and see one's wife and children being blown to bits by bombs.

The position of the British Embassy was the cause of further puzzlement. Lord Clarendon sat there in the Faubourg St. Honoré issuing passports right up into December, as though the siege of Paris were a kind of game in which the French happened to hold all the low cards, the Prussians the trumps, and the English the joker.

But there was one trick which even the joker could not win. And that was a square meal. The rationing of food had been vigorously stiffened, and a severe control imposed. But the control had come too late. Those herds of sheep and oxen in the Bois had already been consumed. The Parisians had quietly and almost unthinkingly eaten their way through the whole lot of them. And there had been no control at all over the supplies of horse-meat. As many as five hundred horses a day were being slaughtered, and the horse-market in the rue d'Enfer did a roaring and sanguinary trade. But not for long. The horses, like the sheep and cows that had gone before them, were gradually exterminated; and the people of Paris were forced to turn to stranger meats.

At first no one admitted the origin of the new dishes that appeared at table. But the rate at which poodles disappeared from the parks the moment their owners' backs were turned, the way cats, particularly the cream-fed kind, vanished from the streets and courtyards, gave sufficient indication. And by the middle of December all concealment was at an end: dogs at ten francs a piece and cats, plump ones, at eight francs, were being eagerly bid for, even by people who happened to have lost their own domestic pets in mysterious circumstances.

In the face of hunger, squeamishness had already been extinguished. By the first weeks of January, dogs and cats seemed the daintiest of diet. Rats had by now become luxuries; anything and everything in fact that had flesh on its bones was greedily and hungrily picked clean. One man—a banker—boasted of having dined off a crow and a dahlia-root.

The decision to slaughter the animals in the Jardin Zoologique was therefore a natural and perfectly logical one. It would have been too much for human nature to endure to expect the keepers of the great cats to go on thrusting huge joints of meat through the bars when they were in need of it themselves. And the joints in any case were no longer obtainable.

But the death sentences of these unfortunate beasts was a particularly hard one to pronounce. The keepers had grown up with their animals and had come to love them like their own children; they could not bring themselves to cut the throats of creatures that put their heads up against the cage-door ready to be tickled. And for a time the same humane feelings permeated the minds of the committee of management; it was even proposed that, as a compromise, the smaller animals should be slaughtered first to provide food for the larger, so that at the end of the war one or two sleek and well-fed lions might still be able to sit back importantly on their haunches and survey all round them the waste of empty cages whose occupants they had methodically devoured.

There were, however, other and hungrier eyes already fixed on those same smaller animals; and it was the demand for antelope steak in the restaurants that in the end decided down which throats they should go. The order for this new massacre, this slaughter of the dumb innocents, was given, and the grim work began.

It was early morning when Mitsou, the big elephant, was brought out into the daylight.

There was a bright film of snow spread out over the ground and she stopped and examined it incredulously for a moment, first drawing a little up into her trunk and then blowing it out again in a tiny blizzard. The game evidently delighted her, for she repeated it. Standing at the door of her house, she played with the snow like a child. Then, because the point of the mahout's whip was sticking into the soft part of the flesh behind her ears, she began reluctantly to move forward, still sniffing suspiciously at the keen winter air. So far she had suffered nothing from the cold. The large charcoal stove in the elephant-house had been kept fed with the painted woodwork of the chopped-up pleasure kiosks.

The mahout who followed her was weeping. He was a small,
fleshless Oriental, muffled up in a. greatcoat so large that his feet appeared immediately beneath the hem, where his knees should have been. The spongy jute slippers which he was wearing seemed to suck up the snow and absorb it; in consequence he walked slowly, padding insignificantly along in the rear of his enormous pet. He would raise his eyes occasionally to take another look at her. And, each time, at the sight of those prodigious hauches, those legs like gutta-percha tree trunks, the absurd trivial tail, he would weep again. He was in love with her.

In love with her, and he had been ordered to be her executioner. The gun with which the sentence was to be carried out was under his left arm. It was a formidable weapon, nearly six feet long, and with a commendable show of nice feeling he had concealed it from her when he had unlocked her cell door that morning. As it was, she for her part was frisking ponderously down the main avenue in a mood of happy unconcern. She pulled little twigs off the bare overhanging branches, overturned a wooden bench, and scattered a pile of leaves that had been swept industriously into a corner. Altogether, she was in the mahout's eyes at her most adorable; as gay and skittish as a young actress. And the act that he was about to perform seemed more like murder every moment.

At the end of the avenue he steered her into a wide gravel enclosure at the back of the lion-house. It was the slaughter-pen. Two massive wooden posts had been fixed in the ground, and there were hooks and rings for chains let into them. On the far side stood a pair of steps. Mitsou ambled amiably up to the posts and began rubbing herself against one of them. Then her quick little eyes saw the gun, and with the natural curiosity of her sex and kind she stretched forth her trunk as if to take it from him. The mahout stepped back and put it down well out of her reach. Then he came back to the execution block. He told the elephant to kneel and she did so with the easy grace of long training; in this attitude she had the appearance of a house that has collapsed suddenly into its front area. He went round behind and began gently prodding her in the back of the knees with his spike. She took the hint as prettily as before, and folded herself up like a kitten.