Anna (35 page)

“Yes,” he decided, “I will stand firm and let him blaze away at me. It will serve to make him ridiculous.”

He looked at his watch again. Enough light was now filtering through the drawn blinds for him to be able to see the hands. It showed six o'clock. He turned towards Anna. She was still isolated in sleep. On her cheeks her dark lashes showed like a shadow.

He dressed hurriedly, and gave one final last examination to his pistols. It gave him a feeling of strangely sensuous pleasure to handle them. There was something about the cold smoothness of the steel and the way in which the hard wood butt blended with it that always excited him.

The pistols had been made by Defraisnes, and the trigger-catch worked as smoothly as if they had left the bench only yesterday. He released the catch once or twice, stopping the hammer with his
forefinger each time as it struck, so that the noise should not wake Anna. And as he stood there that odd feeling, half of guilt, half of pity, came back to him.

“I wonder,” he reflected, “if this man who is going to confront me has ever fired a pistol in his life. I wonder if he even knows the names of the parts.”

He was ready now. He slipped the pistols into their cases and threw his greatcoat over his shoulders. Then he went quickly over to the little table by the window and took up one of the pale, blue sheets of paper with the words Hotel de l'Empire at the top.

“My darling,”
he wrote.
“You were sleeping so beautifully that I hadn't the heart to disturb you. I shall be back almost before you know I have gone. You can order coffee and brioches for me at nine o'clock. I shall be hungry by then. God bless you, my love.”

He folded the note across and laid it on the pillow beside her, where his head had been lying. For a moment he bent forward as if to kiss her. But he checked himself. He knew that the one thing he must do was to escape from the room without waking her. And so he turned on his heel and went over to the door.

But in the doorway he turned and looked back again.

The corridor of the hotel was empty. Outside the doors an uneven row of footless boots stretched endlessly. There was a pattern of dust on the parquet, and on one of the occasional tables a faded flower, a relic of last night, drooped carelessly over the edge. Downstairs, the porters—old, slow-moving men, mostly; the young ones were still in the army—were sweeping and polishing. It was the hour when the hotel belonged to the staff and not to the guests.

But in the main salon two men were waiting. They were the Captain's seconds. In the empty expanse of gilt and marble there was something oddly sinister about them. In their dark clothes and carrying their tall hats they had the air of mutes. When they heard the Captain's footsteps descending the staircase they turned and greeted him solemnly.

The men were still strangers to Captain Picard. He could not even remember their names. Before last night he had never met them. It was simply that they had come forward after the challenge and offered to support him. He had accepted their offer politely, unthinkingly.

The taller of the two men—Captain Picard recalled now that he was a doctor—Dr. de something or other—smiled ingratiatingly.

“You've brought the pistols?” he asked.

Captain Picard nodded.

“Then permit me?” said the doctor.

He took hold of the case that the Captain was carrying and tucked it lovingly away under his arm.

There was a kind of false jocularity in his voice.

“Everything's ready,” said the shorter man. “We've got the carriage waiting outside.”

As Captain Picard stepped into the cabriolet, an odd feeling of foreboding came over him. All round him the city of Strasbourg was coming to life, ready to begin another day—and he was going out to fight a duel with a man whom he scarcely knew.

“Why?” he asked himself. “Why shouldn't I get out of this carriage and go back into the hotel and save myself the bordeom of the thing? It's no novelty to me to kill a man.”

But something kept him there, fixed in his seat, and he dismissed the thought. He recognised the duel as in some strange way inevitable. The feeling of foreboding remained, however; and he shivered. Then he remembered that he hadn't breakfasted, and his spirits cleared.

“I will stop the driver at the next café we come to and order some coffee,” he promised himself. “That's the only thing the matter with me—no coffee.”

He peered out of the window to see if there were any café in sight. And as he did so, the tall man—the doctor—caught his eye.

“We've got the coffee here,” he said, indicating a small flask wrapped round in blankets. “I brought some brandy too, just in case you'd care to take a nip before you go on the field. It steadies some people.”

There was nothing but friendliness and kind feeling in his voice. But as Captain Picard realised that the man had uttered his exact thoughts, he shivered again. The sense of being caught up in a plan of things that was not of his making came back ($$$) him.

“But this is absurd,” he told himself. And he dismissed the thought again.

All the same, his companions had too much the air of agreeable, well-intentioned jailers for his liking.

“Damn them,” he thought. “They're enjoying themselves. This is a treat for them. If it weren't, they wouldn't have volunteered.”

And to help forget about them, to shut them clean out of his thoughts, he closed his eyes and sat back. His head bumped rhythmically against the shabby paddings of the upholstery.

The horse, miserably thin after the long winter of war, went clopping on slowly through the deserted streets. Every minute of
so, evidently more from habit than from any hope of response, the driver would raise his whip and bring it down across the poor beast's haunches. But he could have saved himself the effort: the horse did not even turn its head. All that happened was that each time the whip descended the hide wrinkled for a moment under the lash, the creature's ears cocked back resentfully—and the carriage ambled on again as slowly as before.

It was only after he had been travelling for some ten minutes that the Captain realised that he had not the least idea of where he was being taken. He had left all the arrangements to his seconds.

He leant forward abruptly and touched the doctor on the knee.

“Where is it to take place?” he asked.

The doctor raised his two hands and made little pacifying gestures in the air as if to reassure a nervous patient.

“We have everything arranged,” he said. “We shall be there in another ten minutes.”

“But where is it?” Captain Picard persisted. “I must know where I am expected to fight.”

The doctor looked towards his neighbour and then back to the Captain again.

“I don't think the place has got a name,” he said. “It's up there in the pine woods.”

He pointed out of the window as he spoke, and the Captain bent his head to see where he was pointing. Ahead of them the road ran upwards—the horse had already scented the hill, and was moving more slowly than ever—and across the skyline ran a barrier of dark pines. They stretched across the hills, black and forbidding, shutting out everything that lay beyond.

“Is that the usual spot where such affairs are settled?” the Captain inquired.

The doctor nodded.

“It's very convenient,” he replied laconically. “It's not too far out and it's nicely secluded. There's a perfect little duelling ground up there among the trees.”

The Captain paused. “You've been in attendance at this kind of function before?” he asked.

The little man in the corner seemed about to say something, but the doctor waved him into silence.

“It isn't my first,” he said. “I know what's expected of me.”

And, sliding forward in his seat, he put his mouth up close to the Captain's ear.

“My friend here,” he explained, “is only a novice. When it comes to the time we may have to excuse him.”

He gave a little chuckle as he said it, as though the thought of minding about blood—somebody else's blood—amused him. And then, as if apologising for the tone of his conversation, he tried to pat Captain Picard on the shoulder.

“Not that you've got anything to worry about,” he said. “I'm always on the winning side.”

But Captain Picard was not listening: he had taken out his watch and was looking at it. Back at the Hotel de l'Empire, Anna would be awake by now; she would be reading his note. She would be frightened.

The carriage drew up beside the road without a word from any of the occupants—evidently the driver knew the spot well—and the doctor gathered up the case of pistols that was on his knee. He sprang to the ground and helped the Captain to alight.

“Just over there,” he said with a flourish of his hand. “Beyond those bushes. I told you how convenient it was.”

He turned and addressed his unimportant companion.

“The coffee!” he said. “Don't forget the coffee.”

They started to walk across the track of scrubby moorland. The frost during the night had been heavy, and Captain Picard's teeth chattered for a moment as the keen air caught him.

The doctor looked at him anxiously.

“Not nervous, are you?” he asked.

Captain Picard ignored the question.

Then they topped a small rise, and as they did so another carriage drawn up at the roadside came into sight. It rested there snugly in a slight hollow a hundred yards below them.

An expression of relief crossed the doctor's face as he saw it.

“Ah, there he is,” he said. “I was afraid that he was going to be late. We can start punctually now.”

His voice had in it the note of satisfaction of an impresario: he spoke as though the whole affair were being staged for his amusement.

The path that they were following led now into a little clearing. The ground here was sandy and the gorse bushes, still rimed with thin ice, stood back from a sunken arena some fifty yards across. On the far side another group of men were standing. And even at that distance Captain Picard recognised the plump, stocky figure of the little gentleman that he was to fight. He was standing a trifle apart from the others, his hands thrust nonchalantly into his pockets. Above his head there hung the frozen vapour of his breath.

His seconds, dressed funereally in black like the Captain's, stood like a pair of crows behind him.

But now that the moment had almost come—it was ten minutes
to eight by his watch—the Captain found that he was thinking not of the duel at all, but of Anna.

“I should have wakened her,” he told himself. “I should have given her a chance to say good-bye to me. The note wasn't enough. It will only have hurt her. Why didn't I …”

His thoughts of Anna were interrupted by the doctor. The man was holding a steaming cup of coffee in his hand.

“This'll put life into you,” he said.

And taking his flask from his pocket he proceeded to lace up the coffee with his brandy.

But already one of the other men from the far side of the field had begun to advance towards them. He seemed a strangely isolated figure, and he walked daintily, lifting his feet high at each step to avoid getting sand on his boots. The doctor regarded him suspiciously for a moment and then excused himself.

“I'll leave you to our friend,” he said. “He's got the pistols all ready.”

It was not until the Captain actually had his own pistol in his hand that his complete self-confidence returned to him. But with the pistol in his grip he forgot everything but the task that he expected of it; forgot the cold; forgot that his thin boots were soaked through already from the walk; for the moment, forgot Anna even.

He was now, for the first time in months the soldier again; he began balancing his weight on his heels and aiming at imaginary targets among the trees. His pity for M. Moritz returned to him, and he regretted the necessity of the occasion.

“At any rate,” he reassured himself, “it will be over now in ten minutes, and by to-morrow I shall have forgotten about it.”

And whether it was the imminence of action, or the coffee with the brandy in it that the doctor had given him, he began walking up and down, drinking in great gulps of the frosty pineladen air. He was fully prepared when the doctor came back across the arena towards him and announced that the other side was ready as soon as he was.

The smaller man, the unimportant one, remained behind, and Captain Picard and the doctor advanced together. M. Moritz and his second entered the arena at the same moment. The Captain noted everything about M. Moritz as he walked, his height, how he carried himself, the length of his arm, even the steadiness with which he held his head. It was with a feeling of relief rather than of anxiety that he noticed that M. Moritz's air of confidence seemed no less striking than his own.

“Perhaps, after all, he is an old hand at this,” he told himself. “He may have fought a score of duels.”

And he registered the determination to shoot at the gay handkerchief which M. Moritz had left impudently sticking out of his breast pocket.

“One bullet,” he told himself. “One bullet through the centre of that handkerchief and I am free to go back to Anna.”

But they were actually facing each other now—at no more than a few feet distance. The opposing forces had, so to speak, joined issue. And Captain Picard noticed that, on M. Moritz's face the smile was there again; that same smile that had vanished only for a moment in the foyer the preceding evening.

The doctor and his opposite number stepped forward and shook hands with the cordiality of old friends—a trifle embarrassed perhaps by the peculiar circumstances of the meeting. Then they stepped back and somewhat diffidently led their principals forward. The introduction that followed was as formal as if the two men had never met before. Captain Picard shook hands, bowing politely forward from the hip as he did so—and found that the hand that met his was as firm and untrembling as his own.