Anna (29 page)

The mahout now appeared at her head again and busied himself with the chains. Mitsou accepted everything, even this curious indignity, without so much as a single moment of misgiving. When she had first been ordered down on to her knees she had expected this little man, her master, to climb upon her head and mount her; now that she was down in this position she told herself that it was her teeth that were going to be attended to. But the mahout made
no attempt to begin. Instead, he began searching in the pocket of his enormous greatcoat and produced some leaves of cabbage which he fed to her lovingly, handful by handful, as though it were the prisoner's last tot of rum on the gallows that he was administering.

It was now nearly eight o'clock, the hour fixed for the sentence to be carried out. The mahout paused and listened. There was the sound of voices on the air, and soon round the corner of the neighbouring building a little procession came into sight. It was headed by the director-general of the society. Behind him came a small group of Parisian journalists, a black-and-white artist, and a surgeon. Mitsou was drawing her last audience.

The journalists inspected the animal and inquired about her weight. The artist took out his note-book and began sketching in the background. And the surgeon tried ambitiously to find her heart. The director-general was chiefly concerned to see that the chains were secure: he was as nervous as the descendant of a long line of men who had all been trampled to death by such creatures. When he was finally satisfied, he withdrew to a suitable distance and shouted to the mahout to do his work.

The little man seemed almost painfully slow. He brought the step-ladder and placed it in front of Mitsou's forehead. Then he loaded the rifle and thrust a ball the size of a walnut down the long barrel. And at last, all concealment at an end, he mounted the ladder and placed the muzzle against the one weak spot in the armour of his beloved's forehead. There was absolute silence in the little group, and the director-general placed his hands over his ears in readiness.

The noise of the explosion was even louder than they had expected: the charge behind the massive ball had been a double one. But even so it was not enough. The skin had burst open, the bone had splintered and the bright little trickles of blood began to run down the grey cheeks. The bullet itself, however, was harmlessly embedded somewhere.

As for Mitsou, she had uttered a shrill, trumpeting roar of pain and astonishment. Nearly thirty years of faithful trust in humankind had exploded in her very face. And she was in agony. She rocked to and fro, and the massive posts quivered. The chains creaked and rattled but they held fast. Large tears began to fill Mitsou's eyes.

“Imbecile. Put another bullet into her,” the director-general was roaring.…

It was the third bullet that destroyed Mitsou. Through the gaping
hole that had been torn there it found its way into the brain, and she became no more than a profitable memory. This monumental daughter of Benares was now simply so much meat for enterprising butchers to bid for.

The little funeral party broke up and made its way to the main gate.

Only the black and white artist remained. He was pencilling in a quick sketch of the mahout, who was lying spread out on the snowy gravel, clasping Mitsou's trunk in his arms and sobbing over her.

M. Duvivier was still drinking.

There was another reason than his uncertain marriage for his prodigious consumption. The cellars under the restaurant were full—no one was ordering anything but the cheapest carafe stuff—and he could not bear to think of the real wine, the vintage cases, falling into German hands. In the result he brought up the tall bottles of
fine champagne
one by one, wiped off the dust, and settled down to empty them in the dual name of oblivion and anti-Prussianism.

The effect upon him was accumulative and deplorable: he grew slovenly in his dress and untidy in his habits. He allowed soiled tablecloths to go unchanged, and no longer examined the cutlery before it was put out. Within the restaurant the hand of precision was suddenly lifted.

Every morning at the usual hour he still set out for the market, but his journeys were now casual and perfunctory. Rival
restaurtateurs
brought up the last joint from under his very nose. He paid for things and did not get them. He took stall-holders at their word and bought vegetables on the evidence of the top ones in the sack. He was swindled. It was, in fact, no longer the original M. Duvivier who faced these rapacious provision men, but a M. Duvivier who was separated from reality by the mist of last night's alcohol. He greeted each new dawn with a coated tongue and a raging headache. And it was at dawn the markets opened.

A mood of defeat and surrender came over him. Standing in the half-light of the great produce halls he would pass his hands damply across his forehead as if brushing something tangible away, and say: “It's the end: I recognise it. Things can't go on much longer. The customers have all gone away, and the business is dying. I'm dying too: I can feel it in my bones. I shan't be
here in the Spring—I've nothing to live for now that I know that
she
doesn't love me. I'm just an old man waiting for a German shell to come and finish me off. It'll come, it'll come.”

The nature of the despair was not, of course, always so complete, so abject, as that. On his return to the restaurant, after he had made one or two dips into the bottle, he would begin to see things in a broader, less personal perspective. He would comfort himself with the thought that there were other businesses in Paris which had been ruined beside his own. And as the afternoon wore on, shy rays of sunshine would filter through into his landscape and he would begin congratulating himself once more upon those varicose veins of his that had kept him out of the army. But at night, as soon as the last of the few customers had departed and the lights in the restaurant had been turned down, and he was alone in his empty salon, his mood of despair would return again.

“Is there another man in Paris so miserable as I am?” he would ask himself. “Is there another man in all France who has made such a ruin of his life?”

And he would bury his head in his hands and let his thoughts take possession of him.

“If I go up to her now, she will be cold to me,” he would complain. “She will try to avoid me. She will pretend that she is sleeping; and perhaps she will have been crying again. Can't she realise? Can't she understand? Doesn't she know that a man must have some love from his wife?”

“And to eat?” M. Duvivier inquired.

The officer only glanced at the menu. He saw the cynical concealing names—the
entrecôte Gambetta, Tournedos des Essais des Ballons, Vol-au- Vent Mitrailleuse
, and handed it back again.

“Anything you like,” he said. “But I don't eat cat.”

Having given his order, he sat back and closed his eyes. He was clearly more dead than alive; and when the food came he ate it casually, even leaving some of it on his plate.

After the meal was over, the officer raised his free hand and beckoned M. Duvivier over.

“You have a bedroom here?” he asked.

M. Duvivier scrutinised him carefully; there was something
shabby about him, and he had not yet paid for the meal he had just eaten.

“There is one room,” he said cautiously. “My favourite room. Very quiet and secluded. It was never empty before the war.”

“How much?” the officer asked.

M. Duvivier paused.

“It's the demand,” he apologised. “So many people wish to stay in this quarter of Paris. They feel it's safer.”

He broke off and began calculating.

“With board,” he said at last, “I could let you have it for sixty francs a week. Wine of course in these days would be extra.”

But the officer did not appear to be listening.

“Have my bag taken up,” he said wearily. “I shall be turning in early.” He spoke as though it were the most natural thing to engage a room without seeing it.

M. Duvivier, however, was still suspicious. The officer saw him hesitate.

“Do you wish me to pay in advance?” he asked.

The effect on M. Duvivier at the mention of ready money was profound and immediate.

“We are not that kind of hotel,” he said proudly.

And, stooping down, he picked up the officer's bag and began carrying it upstairs himself. Up and up and up he went until he reached the little landing with the slanting skylight and only a layer of slates between anyone and the bombardment. Outside, the German guns could be heard pounding.

It promised to be quite a lively night.

So the officer was installed. He went straight up to his room immediately after his meal, and remained there. He was tired, very tired. You could see that from the way he pushed his képi on to the back of his head, the way he sat at the table staring in front of him at nothing, the way he dragged his feet up the steep staircase, the way his cigarette-ash had fallen on his sleeve and not been brushed away. And once inside the room he threw himself upon the bed and, without troubling to undo his jacket, lay there, his legs crossed upon the counterpane and his head up against the bedrail. He had not even removed his boots.

When he had finished his cigarette, he lit another. And a third. He smoked far into the night, until the bedroom was blue and hazy. Tired as he was, he made no attempt to sleep. And when at last he turned out the lamp that burned above him he was still as far away from sleep as ever.

“It would have been suicide to go on,” he began saying. “There were hundreds of them and only twenty of us. There was nothing else to do but go back.…”

The trouble with the man was that he had just been court-martialled. And his superior officer, a major, the man to whom he had been accustomed to look for guidance in all things, was now in prison.

The facts had been quite simple. Major Noales, a man of no particular cowardice or courage, had been sent ahead with his captain and some thirty men to hold an advanced post against possible attack. It was the kind of advanced post which is recognisable as an infantry position only on the sort of map that hangs on the walls of brigade headquarters. It was in actual life a flat, windswept field, exposed on three sides and dominated by high ground on the fourth. The major, however, had obediently taken all the known steps to defend it.

And then, when the attack came—it began with an artillery bombardment from the high ground—and he saw his thirty men reduced to twenty in ten minutes, he had lost his nerve. Or, as he put it, had used his discretion. In defiance of his general's orders, he retreated—not an orderly retreat, but a mad scrambling affair which left those unesteemed and uninhabitable acres of arable open to the grey soldiers, who began to swarm down upon them.

The result of it all was that he had been brought up, with an armed guard on either side of him, before the military Buddhas at the base. He, of course, was finished, utterly finished. He was marched off to the cells, a ruined man with two years' sentence before him. And his Captain, Captain Edouard Picard, his uniform similarly stripped of the stars of rank, was turned out on the streets of Paris. He was now a civilian gentleman, a non-combatant of thirty-four, a man with two hundred francs to his name, and no occupation. He had been dismissed the army.

It was on the day after his dismissal that he had found his way to the Restaurant Duvivier. He chose it for what it was. He surveyed the cheaply painted front, the
prix-fixe
card stuck on to the window, the yellowing palms in their brass pots, and decided that it was the sort of eating-place where he would meet no one whom he knew. He was still not sure what he was going to do with his own life, and wanted somewhere quiet where he could think. He kept reminding himself that he had been allowed to keep his service revolver, and cherished thoughts of ending things in a dignified, soldierly fashion. The Restaurant Duvivier seemed just the sort
of place where he could sort things out in his own mind—and pull the trigger, if necessary.

At first he was content simply to sleep. How tired he was he had realised only after he had come there. All that he wanted was not to wake up again.

On any count he was the most awkward of guests. He was sullen and difficult; he scarcely answered when spoken to. He occupied the same table in the restaurant, and seemed to create his own little circle of silence around it. At the end of a meal his food was often still there on the plate, half-eaten. And because he never went out, because the world outside had seemed to have lost all interest for him, his room was never empty at the proper times for cleaning. The maid would knock on his door half a dozen times in the morning, and each time be sent away again. When at last she was able to get in, it would always be the same—the stubs of cigarettes on the carpet, his clothes thrown down anywhere, and the coverlet crumpled and crushed by the weight of someone who had not troubled to fold it up. Altogether, it was the room of a man from whom civilising influences—not of a wife, as it happened, but of a batman—had suddenly been removed.

He had been at the hotel for more than a fortnight now. He spoke to no one, saw no one, apparently missed no one. His pale, expressionless face with its cold blue eyes and firm, uncompromising jaw, gave no indication even of needing anyone but himself.

There had been only one occasion when the rhythm of his solitariness had been interrupted. About three days ago he had suddenly asked for writing-paper and a pen, and had spent nearly an hour either writing, or simply sitting there, the pen in his hand, staring out blankly into the room in front of him. Then he had addressed the envelope and called out for a stamp. And finally, having pondered over the envelope for some minutes, he had torn it abruptly into pieces; torn it and retorn, leaving there bits that were too small for anyone to read or put together, on the table behind him. That incident was the sole indication that there was anyone in the outside world to whom he might address a letter at all.