Anna (10 page)

Through a gap in the partly-drawn curtains, Charles could see a vivid slice of this scene of costly oblivion. He could not see more than a slice, as the broad back of a gentleman seated in the window obscured most of the view. But he could see enough to realise that here, less than a foot away on the other side of the thin sheet of glass, life was being lived at its most exquisite. Somehow, simply by being there, he was assisting in it. Assisting very cheaply too. For though, inside the restaurant, the scale of prices was alarming, out on the terrace five francs was the passport to a whole evening of pleasure. It was prodigious.

The group in which he was sitting was mostly of men of his own age. One of them was in uniform, and sat back as though conscious of his superior stature, stroking his pale blond moustache
and eyeing all the women who passed. He seemed disdainful of everything—of the gay life around him, of his companions, even of the women at whom he was staring.

It was apparent, however, that his boredom had to some extent been mitigated by the presence of one woman seated by herself at the corner of the terrace. She was dressed very fashionably in a black lace dress gathered provokingly into a bustle at the back, and she kept her small hands clasped on the table-top. Her face wore an amused, slightly incredulous expression, as though she were surprised that anyone should, even for a moment, imagine her calling to be what so obviously it was.

The officer moved his chair slightly forward so that the support of the awning should not interfere with his full line of vision …

As for Charles, he was suddenly disconsolate. A waiter had drawn the two edges of the curtain together and the brilliant battle of life inside had been obscured. He was no longer a young man with his eye to the keyhole of Paris. He was again the miserable young man at whom his father shouted, the clerk whom no one but M. Latourette would employ, the lover too timid to become a husband.

“Why cannot I be like Emile?” he asked himself. “For him everything is so easy. He finds a woman in a café and is happy for a space and forgets her again in the morning. He does not know the meaning of remorse. Perhaps it is his life in the army that has taught him to be so carefree. He is independent. I shall never know what freedom is. My father will never release me.”

And he fell to pondering over wild hysterical plans of borrowing the money, or pawning his violin or his overcoat, to pay the fare back to Rhinehausen.

“Anna will not turn me away because I come back to her poor,” he told himself. “She will not doubt me simply because I have not been able to convince my father. She loves me: she will help me. Perhaps she will persuade Herr Karlin himself to do something for me. All that I want is a start. With my talents I could support her handsomely once I have found a job. It is not the future, only my father, that I am afraid of.”

His eyes suddenly filled with tears as he saw Anna as she had been on the night when she had come to him, her white bosom showing through the loose robe that was about her.

“I love her,” he told himself. “I must go to her.”

It was while he was sitting there with his chin cupped on his hand that he became aware of a confused murmur of shouting from somewhere in the direction of the Madeleine. The noise rose above all the other sounds of the city. It was menacing. The idlers in the
café came suddenly to life and sat forward on their chairs. Their nerves had been all on edge for days.

“There is some late intelligence,” someone said. “I hear papers being called.”

While he was still speaking, a hatless man came running towards them, threading in and out of the traffic. He was pushing a small barrow loaded to the sills with bundles of papers. At the kiosk opposite the café he stopped long enough to throw a pile of journals on to the counter in front of the old woman, and then dash off again zigzagging down the street. Immediately the café emptied and the patrons crossed over to the kiosk. By the time they had returned to their places a street-pavement paper-seller had visited the café, and the waiters without having left their posts were already reading the news. They made an anxious, incredulous group in the centre of the red matting. The papers themselves were paltry affairs of only two sheets. But across the top of the front page ran the enormous heading in black smudged capitals, “MOBILISATION GENERALE.”

A woman, sitting in the corner with a young man, obviously her son, crossed herself and took hold of her companion's hand.

But already there was another disturbance in the street. A police cart, grey and ancient-looking and drawn by a pair of ugly, angular horses came rumbling up. Two officers dismounted, carrying a roll of bills and a pail of paste. They set to work energetically and with abandon. They posted their bills on any surface flat enough to take them. Soon the trunks of the plane trees, the blue sides of a urinal, the wooden doors across a gateway, and the plate-glass of a disused shop-front were plastered. The words MOBILISATION GENERALE appeared everywhere with the monotony of a refrain chanted by an idiot.

A small crowd had by now gathered round each of the notices, reading the tightly-packed paragraphs of small ill-printed type which appeared below the appalling headline. Charles, however, remained sitting at the little marble table. He had not moved.

“My darling Anna,” he was thinking. “When shall I ever see you again? When shall we meet next?”

And, because his heart inside him was cold and sick at the prospect of the impending terror, he closed his eyes for a moment and sat back. As he did so he saw the quiet main street at Rhinehausen filled with French soldiery and the houses along it, one after another, battered by the mitrailleuses, bursting into flames.

“Oh Anna,” he said. “God take care of you. Don't let them kill you.”

He was aware as he spoke the words that he had uttered them
aloud. The realisation shamed him. He sat up abruptly and gave a short, nervous cough. But no one had noticed him: the whole café was too much preoccupied with the one thought that was in its mind.

The young officer had risen and was now standing at the table of the solitary lady. There was an air of perfect courtesy about his attitude. When the lady rose he called the waiter over and paid her bill. Then, giving her his arm, they passed out of the café together, their two bodies seeming to mingle as they passed down the pavement under the gas lamps and so out of sight.

The Lights were coming on in Rhinehausen as Anna left the house. Down the street the windows were so many shining placards set along the dusk.

She made a dim, mysterious figure as she stood there in her velvet travelling cloak: the garment was held closely around her, and she had drawn the hood forward so that it obscured her face. On the top step she paused and, inserting her key into the lock, she drew the heavy door towards her and closed it silently. Then carefully—stealthily almost—she made her way on tiptoe down the rest of the flight and so out into the street.

Once she had left the house she took one quick glance at it over her shoulder—still in the same furtive manner, as though she half expected to see one of the dense curtains drawn back and a face appear at the window—and walked rapidly into the gathering darkness.

Her path led her away from the centre of the town, and she was now approaching a row of poor cottages lying on the western outskirts. She had gathered her cloak about her, and her steps were faster now; she was almost running. When she reached a narrow turning beside the furthermost cottage she turned abruptly and began to cross the rough, unmade surface. In front, against the gloom, there stood out the two pale, daffodil-coloured oil lamps of a phaeton.

The driver had evidently been awaiting her. At the sound of Anna's footsteps he dismounted and began gathering up a travellingrug that he was holding.

“Have you got the bag?” she asked.

The driver nodded, and gave her his hand so that she could mount,
There seemed to be something sullen and faintly resentful in his manner, as if he had been kept waiting longer than he cared for.

“Is there still time?” she asked.

The driver drew out his watch—it was as large as a saucer and hung on what might have been a length of dog-chain—and consulted it under one of the lamps.

“Are you ready?” was all he asked.

“Yes, yes,” Anna told him. “Everything depends upon it.”

The night, though it was still summer, was cold. Anna sat huddled in the rug without speaking. She was filled with a sick, delirious excitement that made her tremble.

“I am going to him,” she kept repeating to herself exultingly. “I shall see him again.”

Crossing her hands under her cloak, she stared into the darkness. Ahead of her, like a palace in a fairy-tale, she saw the skyline of Paris with its spires and windmills; the whole carnival of pleasure, with its streets of glittering shops and rich, fashionable people. But when the moon broke suddenly through the clouds there was nothing in front of her but the white endless road, banded by the regular shadows of the trees. The driver reached out for his whip and the monotonous rhythm of the hoofs quickened.

During the ride Anna twice fell into a rough, uneasy slumber. The motion of the phaeton confused her sleep, and her mind became filled with confused, bewildering dreams. She dreamed once that Charles had already returned to her and that they were on their honeymoon, together on a ship far out at sea; and once that she had gone to a strange house, only to find it empty and the road crowded with people running somewhere from she knew not what. But each time, on waking, the excitement of the journey swept the memory of the dreams from her.

“I am going to him,” she told herself again. “Soon I shall be with him in Paris.”

The train was already in the station as the carriage drew up in the courtyard. The glow from the firebox of the engine shone warningly into the night. Anna called out something over her shoulder to the coachman and ran on ahead of him to the ticket grille. As she ran, she opened the purse that she was carrying and drew out a twenty mark piece.

But at the entrance to the booking hall she stopped. There was a sentry posted in front of the doorway and, inside, the narrow space was filled with soldiers.

The train finally drew out of the station at one-twenty in the
morning; an hour and a half after time. During the wait it had become miraculously converted into a troop train. Crammed in the first eight coaches were the soldiers. They sat seven-a-side, with half a dozen more standing between them; sat—where there was room—on the floor with their companions' feet in their stomachs. In the ninth and last coach the civilian portion of the passengers were packed. These too were grotesquely crowded. They rode fourteen to a compartment, irrespective of age and sex and class. They had come a long way most of them, some from as far as Berlin—the train had been ambling all day across the breadth of the Continent. In the result, they wore the irritable, puffy expressions of people who have sat for hours in one position without air or rest or proper meals. When Anna entered they resented her.

The atmosphere of the carriage was sour and choking. It was lit by two fumy oil lamps clamped high on the walls; and in the space below the lamps the faces of the occupants could be seen dimly, like masks. In the half-light, the bare wooden walls, the wooden backs of the benches, the stained and discoloured boarding of the ceiling—it was a carriage for workmen and labourers: the officers were riding in the upholstered carriages higher up in the train—shone with a peculiar drabness. The whole carriage was as inviting as a stable.

A young man in the corner studied Anna closely for some time and then, still with a show of reluctance, rose and offered her his seat. Every one else in the compartment was half-asleep. They were mainly men. One by one they woke and scrutinised her. In their experence, it seemed, young women did not habitually travel alone on night trains. They sized-up and silently debated her. They looked from her to the fat woman two places away, and then back again at Anna, without attempting to conceal from either of them the frank and primitive purpose of their comparison.

The greater part of the travellers appeared to be French; they were all evidently fleeing from this wrath of nations which threatened at any moment to break forth. When they spoke, the war was the one topic of their conversation. Would it blow over? Or would it be to-morrow? Or had the unthinkable already happened, and were they even now trapped on the wrong side of the frontier of a hostile nation? The whole carriage was charged and vibrating with this one anxiety. It permeated even the sleep of those who tried vainly to rest.

From the front carriages, where the soldiers were riding, there came the sound of rowdy singing. The presence of these soldiers
seemed to dominate the whole train, transforming it. When they drew up during the ride at other halts, other junctions, the platforms were filled with bulky, mysterious shapes, and the shadows of helmets fell across the windows. Through the night there came the clatter of boots heavier than civilian and the crash of rifle butts clumsily lowered. It was as though these peaceful passengers had been suddenly transported to a scene of war in which only the fighting was absent.

It was as she sat there in the half-darkness that the first real fears, the first misgivings, began to spring in Anna's mind. What had begun as an adventure had now become an ordeal. Paris seemed not to be drawing nearer, but actually to be receding. Doubts suddenly began to clamour inside her.

“Oh God,” she prayed, “let me be in time to find him. Don't let him be sent away before I get there.”

The dawn when it broke into the carriage seemed to add a fresh note of desolation to the scene: the oil lamps faded, and the faces of the passengers assumed a new pallor. The landscape—melancholy like all landscapes seen at the hour of daybreak—came into view, and Anna sat gazing at a world of flat beet fields and steaming cattle, and isolated, dejected-looking cottages. It might have been the landscape of her native Rhinehausen. But as she looked out of the misted window she was aware that what she was seeing had somehow become the landscape of her future. During those hours in the jolting train her old life had already closed behind her.