“I shall tell Anna,” he said. “It would be better that she should know before you see her.”
But Madame Latourette reached out suddenly and gripped him by the arm. Her strength amazed him.
“Don’t go near her,” she said fiercely. “Why should she know? Charles was our son.”
M. Latourette paused.
“But she’ll have to know,” he said slowly. “We can’t keep it from her.”
“Then get rid of her,” Madame Latourette told him. “Turn her out. She’s an enemy, isn’t she? I hate the sight of her.”
M. Latourette was trying to disengage himself.
“She hasn’t got anywhere to go,” he said. “Not now.”
“Then let her go to the women’s prison,” Madame Latourette replied in a rush. “It’s where she belongs. Let her do anything she likes, so long as she doesn’t have to remain here with me.”
M. Latourette drew himself up—he was ridiculously short—and tried vainly to reassert his authority.
“Calm yourself, my dear,” he said. “Calm yourself. You’ll be having one of your attacks.”
But Madame Latourette was beyond calming. She had got up from the bed and was dragging her boudoir-wrap around her. She went shakily over to the door.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
For a moment, M. Latourette was actually afraid of his own wife. When he touched her arm she sprang away from him.
“I’m going to do what you wanted to do,” she replied. “I’m going to tell her myself in my own way.”
She paused, and gave him a look of cold, indifferent contempt.
“Anna,” she began shouting. “Anna.”
M. Latourette stepped forward and tried to stand in her way. But she wrenched the door open in spite of him.
“Anna,” she shouted again. “Anna. Come here, I want you.”
M. Latourette struggled with her and attempted to put his hand over her mouth.
But it was too late. The door of Anna’s room had opened and Anna, in her high-bosomed nightgown, her feet bare, stood before them in the corridor. She was wide-eyed and frightened.
“You called, Madame Latourette?” she asked.
And at the sight of her, Madame Latourette broke away entirely from her husband.
“He’s dead,” she screamed. “Dead, and you killed him. He’s been murdered by the Germans. I shall kill every German I see now. Charles is dead. He’s dead.”
She gave a little gasp, and seemed to sway. A moment later she had fallen forward.
M. Latourette glanced apprehensively at the large gilt clock in the hall. He had an important interview at the Ministry at nine-thirty.
IV
As Madame Latourette’s smelling salts and the dose of sal volatile which he poured down her throat failed to rouse her, M. Latourette sent for the doctor.
The doctor was slow and methodical. When he had stowed his gloves away in the crown of his tall hat, he followed M. Latourette into the bedroom and took his patient’s pulse. Then he raised her eyelids and tested her reflexes. He was as methodical as if he had been conducting a post-mortem. He even went down on his knees and placed his head over her heart. M.Latourette thought he had never seen any man slower.
“She must be bled,” the doctor announced at last.
“You have brought your instruments?” M. Latourette asked.
“They are in my bag,” the doctor replied.
He got up from his praying position, smoothed out the creases in his trousers and smiled consolingly at M. Latourette.
“We will do our best,” he said, and demanded a glass of hot water in which he could scald his instruments.
“At this rate,” M. Latourette thought despairingly, “it will be midday before he is through.”
The doctor next requested a large, clean towel and a bowl.
“Sixteen fluid ounces,” he said explanatorily. “It eases the pressure on the nervous centres.”
M. Latourette went over to the washstand. He brought back a china basin, with a design of flowers all over it, and one of his wife’s hand towels.
“You are a man of strong nerves?” the doctor inquired.
M. Latourette nodded.
“Then may I request you to hold the bowl?”
“Yes, yes,” M. Latourette replied impatiently.
The doctor undid his cuffs and rolled back his shirt-sleeves. Then he drew up the sleeve of Madame Latourette’s nightgown to the shoulder and dabbed a solution of carbolic on to the bare flesh above the elbow.
“Against infection,” he commented.
M. Latourette watched him rub the swab of cotton wool round and round like a polisher in a cabinetmaker’s. The doctor seemed entirely engrossed in his preliminary task.
“If only he would get on with it,” M. Latourette was thinking. “If only he would finish the job.”
But suddenly his mind shifted, and he found himself remembering Charles again.
“I wonder who it was he wanted to marry,” M. Latourette began thinking.
The doctor was now ready. He lifted his knife and made an incision in the artery as neatly as if he had been cutting into an orange.
M. Latourette started as he saw the first spurt of blood. He had expected it to be red. But this was scarlet. Tiny spots of it glittered on the face of the blade. It seemed incredible that blood of such a colour could flow from so pale and anæmic a woman.
And the sight of the blood as it spurted into the basin made him feel suddenly faint. His eyes followed it with a horrid fascination as it spattered on to the design of flowers and tendrils. It might have been his own heart that was being robbed. He held the basin in one hand and passed the other across his forehead.
“Mind the carpet,” the doctor warned him.…
When at last the doctor was satisfied—the basin by now had grown warm and heavy in M. Latourette’s hands—he motioned to him to move away, and nipped the place of the wound neatly between his thumb and forefinger.
“We will now apply a tourniquet,” he observed.
But M. Latourette was past caring. He was standing over by the window with his collar gaping.
“Shall I be required any more?” he asked weakly.
The doctor raised his head. With his left hand he was uncoiling a roll of bandages like a conjurer.
“I’ll call you as soon as the patient can speak,” he promised. “Go and sit down quietly somewhere and don’t worry.”
Sit down quietly and don’t worry!
M. Latourette tottered out of the room, his head reeling.
As soon as he had steadied himself a little and rebuttoned his collar he went off again in search of Anna. He had not seen her since Madame Latourette’s outburst.
“Anna!” he called. “Anna, where are you? I want to talk to you.”
When he still received no answer, he pushed open the door of her room. In his heart he was already half-prepared for what it was that he saw. The room was deserted. The wardrobe stood half-open and the long panel of mirror reflected the emptiness within. The trinkets were gone from the dressing-table, and the big leather valise was no longer there. In front of the stove a heap of still glowing ashes stirred in the breeze from the corridor.
M. Latourette ran through the hall on to the landing and began calling Anna’s name down the well of the stairs.
There was no answer anywhere except the echo of his voice, which every moment sounded more silly and futile in his own ears.
Outside, a clock was striking eleven.
“Oh, my appointment. My appointment,” M. Latourette thought frantically.
Book III. The Red Hands Of M. Duvivier
Chapter XIV
I
The View from the window was of two kinds. To the west it was of an unbroken wall of grey brick so much sooted by the fumes of the restaurant chimney that the crevices had gown soft and velvety, as though black moss were clinging there. But to the north and east the room looked over a huddle of narrow, c
hasm-like streets, and, in the distance beyond, there rose the piled-up dwellings of Mont-martre, with the icy citadel of Sacre-Coeur set against the skyline.
The room itself was bare and uninviting, an attic room. The window cast only a thin shaft of cold, northern light that left the two side walls almost in darkness. And the ceiling that slanted down over the single bed was brown and discoloured. Even the furnishings contributed their own peculiar air of desolation. Beside the bed—a tarnished cage-like affair of brass and enamelled iron-work—was a round table covered by a cloth, a washstand built of wicker and bamboo, and an easy chair that had once been magnificent but now sagged forlornly. There was a cupboard built under the eaves, a gas-jet cupped in a lemon-coloured globe, and a portrait of the Empress Eugénie as a girl.
It was left to the ingenuity and capacity of the occupant to make the room agreeable, snug, domestic, according to taste. There was no fireplace.
It had been late in the evening, almost at nightfall, when Anna had found the room. It had seemed then to match her mood. Up there among the roofs and chimneys of Paris it had added its own atmosphere of misery to hers. It closed its door upon her and shut out the world.…
When she had first left the Latourette’s apartment and run down the stairs and out across the gravelled courtyard into the rue d’Aubon, she had not known where she was going.
“What do I care?” she had asked herself, “so long as I am away from Madame Latourette?”
And for a moment the sense of her loss—that loss which was to come back to her, so near and brooding in the silence of the lonely bedroom—had been forgotten.
She still had two hundred francs in her purse and whole streetsful of hotels and apartments seemed open to her. She had not realised then that this delicious sunny city, alive with people and fluttering with plane leaves, existed only on the surface, and that beneath it lay an underworld, a dark maze in which secret police with dossiers moved, in their numbers like ants. In the first hotel she visited, the woman behind the desk accused her to her face of being German, and said that she would have no spies in her house. As Anna drove away in a cab she peered out nervously over the back to see if she were being followed—a woman spy had been arrested only the week before in Maxim’s. And as she sat there, Anna realised that she was being driven away to nowhere—she merely told the driver the first place that had come into her head. When she stopped the cab again it was as near and as far from her destination as before.
Then she had left the big, suspicious hotels and had gone in search of rooms, cheaper rooms, rooms in a back-street, anywhere she could lock a door behind her. But the police had been to the apartment houses as well. They had searched one house she called at that very morning. And she was altogether too unusual a visitor to escape attention. As the landladies led her up their dubious staircases they demanded to know all about her. And when she said that she would give them her papers as soon as she had collected them—like all fugitives she had become wary and evasive—they shrugged their shoulders, and turned their backs on her. The secret police had intimidated the whole race of them.
One woman, more obliging than the others, gave her the address of a house in the Palais-Royal, where she said they would take her in without questioning: she said that it would suit her. Anna found the house after an hour’s searching. When the door was opened to her, she found that the place was a brothel.
After she had managed to get away—and the Madame had been so pressing, so anxious that she should stay with them—Anna found that she was trembling, and little waves of sickness kept passing through her. She wanted to stop and sit down somewhere. But she did not dare to do so. The fear that she was being followed, shadowed, hung over her again.
Across the street she saw the entrance to a church. She crossed over to it and passed out of the bright daylight into the gloom inside. There was a chair immediately inside the door and she sank into it, covering her eyes with her hand. For the first time since she had come to Paris she was aware that her courage had gone from her. She acknowledged that she was defeated.
She could not remember how long she had sat there. But gradually she became aware of the smell of stale incense and the tallowy reek of candles. The odour seemed friendly and familiar. It was a part of that other life, her real life, that she had left behind. For a moment she was in Rhinehausen again. Opening her purse, she took out a fifty-centime piece and went over to the rail. She lit a candle and began to pray.
It was a passionate, rambling prayer, quite different from the orderly, accustomed forms which they had taught her in her convent. She was crying as she prayed, and she asked God’s Son to forgive Charles his sin with her, and to place the sin on her shoulders. She asked that in the hour of his death he might have been found in a state of grace. She prayed that her father might be comforted, and that Madame Latourette would recover. She prayed that France and Germany might be at peace again and that more lives would not be wasted. She prayed for the souls of the killed. She prayed, too, for herself. For the fear of life was still there.
“Oh, God,” she asked, “take care of me. Don’t let me lose faith again. Don’t let me think of killing myself. The thought keeps coming back to me. It seems so easy. Drive it away. Oh God, drive it away.”
While she prayed, the world outside receded farther and still farther. And when she opened her eyes and saw the guttering stub of the candle on the bracket she felt like a child roughly awakened from a dream that was sweeter than the morning light could ever be.
She got up and found that her head was swimming. She had eaten nothing that morning, and her whole body was weak. But within her mind she felt less frightened. The panic that had descended upon her had departed somehow with her prayers.
“I must go on searching,” she told herself. “I must find a room somewhere before night-time.”
At the corner of the street stood a one-franc café. She went inside and sat down among the cheap clerks and shabby women. They seemed to stare at her, pointing her out among themselves because she was different, because her clothes were not the same as theirs. To Anna the whole roomful of them seemed suddenly to grow hostile. There were eyes all round her. She ate quickly, drinking the raw wine that was in the carafe on the table, and escaped into the street once more.
“If any one follows me I shall go back into the church and hide,” she thought. “There I shall be safe.…”
It was nearly nine o’clock and the light was going out of the sky when she found the Hotel and Restaurant Duvivier. By then she had grown used to failure.
“There is nowhere,” she had told herself a hundred times. “I shall have to give myself up to the police in the end. I shall sleep to-night in prison.”
She sat down at one of the end tables of the terrace and ordered coffee. She was too weary to eat, but the coffee gave her strength, and she sipped it gratefully. When she had finished it, she remained where she was, watching the procession of life that was going on in the lamp-lit dusk outside, trying to delay the inevitable moment of her departure.
It was an unfashionable street that the Restaurant Duvivier stood in, and the faces of the passers-by, tired, stooping men and drooping womenfolk, were drawn and pale, like the faces of ghosts.
“But they are free,” she told herself enviously. “They can go wherever they choose. They have nothing to fear.”
Because the waiter was standing at her elbow, looking down at her, she ordered another glass of coffee.
“I shall drink it slowly,” she reflected. “I will make it last and then I shall go to the police station and tell them who I am. They can arrest me if they choose.”
She was so tired that all terror in the idea seemed slowly to have departed.
It was while she was sitting in the café that she became aware—how, she did not know—that there was someone watching her. She turned her head nervously and saw that a man was standing behind her in the doorway of the restaurant. She looked away again hurriedly and her mind held the
image of a large, florid form—a form that half-filled the doorway—and a broad, shining face. Over one arm a folded napkin was hanging.
“It’s only one of the waiters,” she told herself.
But ten minutes later when she looked again, the man was still standing there regarding her. He had moved out of the way for diners to leave and enter, and each time had moved back into his position.
“I must go now, at once,” she told herself. “He suspects something.”
Her fear had returned to her. She rose to beckon the waiter. But it was the man in the doorway who come forward. He was smiling.
“Your bill, Mademoiselle?” he asked bowing.
Anna nodded.
“You were expecting someone?” he suggested.
Anna ignored the question.
“I drank two coffees,” Anna told him.
Now that she could see him more closely, she noticed that of his kind he was magnificent. His frock coat was drawn tightly over his massive figure, and a heavy watch chain from which a fob dangled ran across his waistcoat. His shoes shone with an extravagant lustre and his shirt cuffs, drawn down low over his wrists, had evidently been assumed after the business of serving dinners was over: they were glacial and immaculate. From under them his large hands showed red and hot-looking. He wore a small imperial like the Emperor and a high coif of carefully-oiled hair. It was the face of a man who confronted the world suavely and betrayed nothing.
He counted out the change and placed the coins politely in a saucer. Then his eyes dropped to the valise that Anna was carrying.
“Mademoiselle is a visitor?” he asked.
“I am staying in Paris,” Anna told him.
He gave another little bow.
“So long as Mademoiselle has made her own arrangements …” he said, and left the rest of the sentence unfinished.
Then, as if the idea had just come to him, he spoke again.
“There is a private apartment above the restaurant if Mademoiselle would care to inspect it,” he said. “It is the favourite room in my house, so high, so secluded.”
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