initial commit of ebook 9978HEADmain

11 files changed, 34384 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/9978-8.txt b/9978-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..67e597c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9978-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8608 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy Foreigner
+
+Author: Enid Bagnold
+
+Posting Date: November 23, 2011 [EBook #9978]
+Release Date: March, 2006
+First Posted: November 7, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY FOREIGNER
+
+by
+
+ENID BAGNOLD
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PROLOGUE: THE EVE
+
+
+PART I. THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+CHAPTER I. THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+PART II. LORRAINE
+
+CHAPTER II. METZ
+CHAPTER III. JULIEN
+CHAPTER IV. VERDUN
+CHAPTER V. VERDUN
+CHAPTER VI. THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+CHAPTER VII. THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+CHAPTER VIII. GERMANY
+CHAPTER IX. THE CRINOLINE
+CHAPTER X. FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+CHAPTER XI. THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+
+PART III. THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+CHAPTER XII. PRECY-SUR-OISE
+CHAPTER XIII. THE INN
+CHAPTER XIV. THE RIVER
+CHAPTER XV. ALLIES
+CHAPTER XVI. THE ARDENNES
+
+
+PART IV. SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE STUFFED OWL
+CHAPTER XVIII. PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+CHAPTER XIX. PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+CHAPTER XX. THE LAST DAY
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+THE EVE
+
+Between the grey walls of its bath--so like its cradle and its
+coffin--lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the
+surface of the earth for seventy years.
+
+As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was
+rising.
+
+The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the
+bath.
+
+"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The
+earth itself is moving.
+
+"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head,
+saying--'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that
+is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.
+
+"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing--how do I know
+if I am equipped for a larger horizon!..."
+
+And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:--
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+        The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill,--
+        They lie within the breast!"
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+The war had stopped.
+
+The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States
+was hourly expected.
+
+Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing
+city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed
+corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in
+a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes
+were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.
+
+She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the
+following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.
+
+Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for
+sale held a bunch to her face.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+He pursued her and held it against her chin.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"But I give it to you! I _give_ it to you!"
+
+As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table
+of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them.
+But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the
+platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.
+
+"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute..." he panted.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Haven't you heard ... haven't you heard! The war is over!"
+
+She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
+"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"
+
+And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt
+and the violets accompanied her.
+
+At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc.
+The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines
+of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met
+she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that
+hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything,
+expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into
+the rain.
+
+She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a
+deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick
+mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for
+a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her
+coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the
+clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no
+one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the
+travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the
+pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face;
+down her sleeves and on to her hands.
+
+A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking
+towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she
+could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."
+
+She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard
+these letters--with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach
+with greed.
+
+Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved
+with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many
+American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a
+stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining
+each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.
+
+The eye of a captain opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she
+should.
+
+The eye of a lieutenant opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."
+
+"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"
+
+"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."
+
+Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two
+boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American
+thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his
+pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard
+noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind,
+unanswering stupor.
+
+"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the
+slit grew larger. The light went out.
+
+"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent
+the destruction of the board.
+
+Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon
+the pavement.
+
+"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.
+
+"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.
+
+"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"
+
+"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved
+towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders,
+who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.
+
+"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room
+alone."
+
+"I've a room ... If you're not American!"
+
+"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American
+wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here,
+what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"
+
+"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added
+"Bandits!"
+
+Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of
+her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it
+is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man
+stooped to the bolts of the door.)
+
+"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now _they've_ gone.
+Follow me."
+
+She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground
+floor.
+
+"I've no light to give you."
+
+"Yet I must have a light."
+
+Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.
+
+"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."
+
+The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and
+musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as
+well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning,
+slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no
+jug, no basin, no bell to pull.
+
+As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by
+waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark
+coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black
+coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.
+
+Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous.
+I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so
+well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of
+least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off
+down the street to find her companions.
+
+A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood
+a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a
+garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic
+used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and
+clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned
+officers--the _brigadier_ and the two _maréchaux des logis_.
+
+A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream
+which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden
+bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon
+simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either
+hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper
+stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end was a
+small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
+
+This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one
+of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her
+intimate life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the
+eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny,
+in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then
+turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A
+bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
+
+"Food is in!"
+
+Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a
+tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread. The
+watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
+
+"Where is Stewart?"
+
+"She is not back yet."
+
+Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to
+read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the
+most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room
+remained empty.
+
+The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern
+in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.
+
+"Is there any food?"
+
+"It's on the stove."
+
+"Is it eatable?"
+
+"No."
+
+Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black
+mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the
+cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those
+who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept
+too well.
+
+"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are
+doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
+
+"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice through
+the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your
+hot-water bottle!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you
+will find the water has the chill off."
+
+Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with
+their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars
+in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of
+the battlefields.
+
+On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the
+test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car
+that had been assigned to her.
+
+Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain
+she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer.
+The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans
+did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a
+roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered
+down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the
+pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and
+hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
+
+"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her
+handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some
+desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them
+with respect.
+
+When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at
+his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day,
+calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she
+drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had
+need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop
+into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled
+himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went
+upon his way.
+
+She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its
+back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's
+eyes popping from his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When
+she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client
+cried to her: "Why do you wait?"
+
+Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys
+swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her
+like an egg-shell.
+
+Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced
+before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.
+
+In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a
+convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.
+
+Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of
+the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch
+the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she
+had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which
+she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator,
+striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from
+her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites
+who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.
+
+"What can I do?..." she said to them aloud, in distress.
+
+But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird
+language, "What can _we_ do ... what can _we_ do?..." ("And I..." she
+thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")
+
+But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended
+from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw
+the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching
+sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.
+
+"_Ne vous en faîtes pas, mademoiselle_! These poor devils sleep as they
+drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We
+were four when we met you--and now we are three!"
+
+On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no
+run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set
+to work on her car.
+
+"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.
+
+"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last
+night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of
+waste ground."
+
+She crossed to the wall with her bucket.
+
+Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine
+had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken,
+but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage,
+and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.
+
+The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed
+the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her.
+His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She
+stopped short with the bucket in her hand.
+
+"On est delivré de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she
+went a little nearer.
+
+"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into
+his coat.
+
+He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said
+clearly: "Je suis le président Wilson."
+
+"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and
+willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You
+must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me
+bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."
+
+Where have you come from?"
+
+"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for
+it's late, and ... I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.
+
+"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"
+
+"Only be quick."
+
+"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"
+
+"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."
+
+She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the
+box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into
+her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she
+approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked
+round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once,
+soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of
+voices and the smell of gravy.
+
+"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest
+her. The others looked up.
+
+"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning,"
+said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the
+brigadier, mademoiselle?"
+
+"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to
+telephone."
+
+"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"
+
+"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him
+by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the
+men stood up in groups.
+
+"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not
+use force if one can help it...."
+
+Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and
+wine?" called the man.
+
+"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."
+
+"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King
+waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the
+step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.
+
+"What's that you've got?"
+
+"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without
+letting it go from his hand.
+
+"Where did you find those?"
+
+"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.
+
+"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"
+
+"What's that? But I've no time...."
+
+"Do you know about cars?"
+
+"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.
+
+"I have trouble ... I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"
+
+"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."
+
+"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you
+go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.
+
+The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom
+one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."
+
+Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car,
+at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he
+grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The
+King expects me."
+
+He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate
+about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she
+called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.
+
+She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her
+collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her
+skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly
+into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them.
+At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he
+cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes
+that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened
+them when a man cried in triumph: "_We'll_ take you to the King!"
+
+"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.
+
+Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven
+upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day--interviewing mayors of
+ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French
+troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made
+offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts
+from the battlefields.
+
+The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long
+hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day
+after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read
+alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night
+after night.
+
+A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She
+found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men
+upon the road whom she would never see again became her social
+intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking
+whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise
+of a Chinese scavenger.
+
+Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could
+have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around
+her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of
+the earth.
+
+"Have you _got_ to be here?" asked an American.
+
+"No, I wanted to come."
+
+The eye of the American said "Fool!"
+
+"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.
+
+"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
+"Englishwoman!"
+
+Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after
+dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road
+by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and
+entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.
+
+But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character
+of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she
+could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain
+which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats;
+tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.
+
+The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but
+make it in the morning how different this room would look!"
+
+There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the
+stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew
+whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes
+the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it,
+and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no
+coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried:
+"Ask Madeleine!"
+
+And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with
+the men in the garage.
+
+Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling
+across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny,
+perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them
+to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her
+room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in
+comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never
+known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she
+prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not
+taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the
+branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.
+
+Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village,
+cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more
+picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one
+of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.
+
+Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude,
+she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the
+milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the
+lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.
+
+"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.
+
+"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of
+sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their
+stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom
+before them, unknown and bright.
+
+The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.
+
+"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting
+up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to
+make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been
+there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven
+the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and
+their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were
+tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better
+their condition.
+
+On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together
+and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in
+the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not
+even the night is sacred.
+
+On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made months, till all November
+was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in fresh torrents
+of rain.
+
+Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed on
+upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her "clients" left
+her for an hour while they inspected a barracks; sometimes it was an old
+woman who called from a doorway that she might come and warm her hands
+at the fire; sometimes an American who helped her to change a tyre.
+
+There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old
+women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends were
+mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.
+
+"My sister has a grand piano ..." said one American to her--opening
+thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.
+
+"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"
+
+He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to
+her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the
+pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.
+
+An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were
+busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.
+
+American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the
+daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and
+twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
+
+"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at
+their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of
+children."
+
+"They seem well-mannered."
+
+"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered.
+But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your
+house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in
+the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out
+of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the
+Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"
+
+"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure
+cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had
+fetched from his canteen.
+
+"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want
+other people's children always in one's life."
+
+"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village
+whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and
+ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of
+some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped
+open disclosing the rusting bones.
+
+"Pardon, madame?"
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I
+have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are
+discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
+
+"Then this is a park?"
+
+"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
+
+Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other,
+when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in
+Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor
+about her.
+
+She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she
+paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it
+travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it
+she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair
+escaped from her cap.
+
+A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as
+she entered.
+
+"Fanny...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.
+
+Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the
+Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen
+rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land
+like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had
+no inkling.
+
+Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned
+first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
+
+"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"There will be things to eat there?"
+
+"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed
+from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated
+land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that
+matter, never been there."
+
+"Then we are going for certain?"
+
+"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
+Headquarters Staff. Pétain is there. It might even be gay."
+
+Fanny laughed. "Gay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."
+
+"You have silk stockings with you!"
+
+"Yes, I ... I am equipped for anything."
+
+There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and
+Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the
+edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any
+one had lived there so long.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+LORRAINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+METZ
+
+With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the
+desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of
+Lorraine like the gate to a new world.
+
+The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the
+battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry
+away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed
+garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier's restaurant, and join the dancing
+in the hall below.
+
+Not a night passed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty
+air. It burst into the narrow streets from _estaminets_ where the
+soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German
+houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier Général" danced a triumph.
+Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in
+their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers
+danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because
+they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.
+
+It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a
+little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?
+
+In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Maréchal Pétain, and kept his
+eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the
+Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them balls--insufficiently
+fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France
+could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the
+cake-shops flowered with _éclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux à la
+crême_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.
+
+France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine,
+that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the
+benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while
+the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that
+they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and
+silk were hiding.
+
+Fêtes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight
+processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town
+went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were
+sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously
+through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might
+sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the
+dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing
+white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in
+figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.
+
+The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand
+Quartier Général, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom,
+having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills,
+found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of
+Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.
+
+"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.
+
+"I have--eight."
+
+"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."
+
+"Is there work, sir?"
+
+"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance
+all night! Englishwomen do dance, don't they?"
+
+"I have never been to England."
+
+"Get them here. Send for them."
+
+So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of
+women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-à-Mousson as dusk was
+falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.
+
+They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets
+flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of butter, bars of
+chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
+
+"Can you see the price on the butter?"
+
+"Twenty-four...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I can't see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Ah, is it possible, éclairs?"
+
+"Eclairs!"
+
+And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
+
+German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper
+balls into the back of the ambulance.
+
+"I heard, I heard...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I heard German spoken."
+
+"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"
+
+"No," but Fanny felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language
+spoken in a vanished town.
+
+They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du
+Theâtre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for
+the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had
+waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.
+
+"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is
+and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"
+
+In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French
+tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they
+walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other
+side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth,
+with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited
+behind the chairs.
+
+"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...
+where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles,
+there's a jar left from yours."
+
+"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you,
+mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
+
+"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your
+responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey!
+For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is
+more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans
+yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
+
+"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You
+can't? Nor I either...."
+
+"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
+
+Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music
+stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
+
+A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in
+mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement.
+"To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had
+run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor
+lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without
+generosity, beauty, or privacy--in a hole, dirty and cold, plain
+and coarse.
+
+She glanced at her neighbour with wonder and appreciation, delight and
+envy. There was a light, clean scent upon his hair. She saw his hands,
+his nails. And her own.
+
+A young Jew opposite her had his hair curled, and a faint powdery bloom
+about his face.
+
+("But never mind! That is civilisation. There are people who turn from
+that and cry for nature, but I, since I've lived as a dog, when I see
+artifice, feel gay!")
+
+"You don't know with what interest you have been awaited."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Ah, yes! And were you pleased to come?"
+
+"We did not know to what we were coming!"
+
+"And now?..."
+
+She looked round the table peacefully, listened to the light voices
+talking a French she had never heard at Bar.
+
+"And now?..."
+
+"I could not make you understand how different...." (No, she would not
+tell him how they had lived at Bar. She was ashamed.) But as she was
+answering the servant gave him a message and he was called away. When he
+returned he said: "The Commandant Dormans is showing himself
+very anxious."
+
+The Jew laughed and said: "He wants to see these ladies this evening?"
+
+"No, he spares them that, knowing of their journey. He sends a message
+by the Capitaine Châtel to tell us that the _D.S.A._ gives a dance
+to-morrow night. The personal invitation will be sent by messenger in
+the morning. You dance, mademoiselle?"
+
+"There is a dance, and we are invited? Yes, yes, I dance! You asked if I
+was happy now that I am here. To us this might be Babylon, after
+the desert!"
+
+"Babylon, the wicked city?"
+
+"The gay, the light, beribboned city! What is the 'D.S.A.'?"
+
+"A power which governs our actions. We are but the C.R.A.... the
+regulating control. But they are the Direction. 'Direction Service
+Automobile.' They draw up all traffic rules for the Army, dispose of
+cars, withdraw them. On them you depend and I depend. But they are
+well-disposed towards you."
+
+"And the Commandant Dormans is the head?"
+
+"The head of all transport. He is a great man. Very peculiar."
+
+"The Capitaine Châtel?"
+
+"His aide, his right hand, the nearest to his ear."
+
+Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the
+garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars
+passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water
+gleam in the gulf below.
+
+"What river is that?"
+
+"The Moselle."
+
+A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in
+the outer town, the German quarter."
+
+In a narrow street whose houses overhung the river each of the section
+was put down at a different doorway, given a paper upon which was
+inscribed her right to billets, and introduced in Reherry's rapid German
+to her landlady.
+
+Fanny in her turn, following the young man through a dark doorway, found
+herself in a stone alley and climbed the windings of a stairway. A girl
+of twelve or thirteen received her on the upper landing, saying "Guten
+Abend," and looking at her with wonder.
+
+"Where is your mother?" said Reherry.
+
+"She is out with my eldest sister."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Elsa."
+
+"Then, Elsa, look after this lady. Take her to her room, the room I saw
+your mother about, give her hot water, and bring her breakfast in the
+morning. Take great care of her."
+
+"Jawohl, mein Herr."
+
+Reherry turned away and ran down the stairs. Elsa showed Fanny to a room
+prepared for her.
+
+"You are English?" said Elsa, and could not take her eyes off her.
+
+"Yes, I am English. And are you German?" (Question so impossible, so
+indiscreet in England...)
+
+"I am real German, from Coblentz. How did you come here, Fräulein?"
+
+"In a car."
+
+"But from England! Is there not water?"
+
+"I crossed the water in a ship, and afterwards I came here in a car."
+
+"You have a motor car? But every one is rich in England."
+
+"Oh, not very..."
+
+"Yes, every one. Mother says so."
+
+The girl went away, then brought her a jug of hot water.
+
+"I hope," said Fanny, venturing upon a sea of forgotten German, "I hope
+I haven't turned you or your sister out of this room."
+
+"This is the strangers' room," said Elsa. "I thank you."
+
+When she had gone, Fanny looked round the room. It was too German to be
+true. The walls were dark red, the curtains dark red, the carpet,
+eiderdown, rep cover of the armchair, plush on the photograph frames,
+embroidered mats upon the washstand, tiles upon the stove, everything a
+deep, dark red. Four mugs stood upon the mantelpiece, and ... she rubbed
+her eyes ... was it possible that one had an iron cross upon its
+porcelain, one the legend "Got mit uns," the third the head of the
+Kaiser, the fourth the head of the Kaiserin? "That is too much! The
+people I shall write to won't believe it!"
+
+Her bed was overhung by a large branch of stag's horn fixed upon the
+wall.
+
+She felt the bed, counted the blankets, found matches on the
+mantelpiece, a candle in the candlestick, room in the stove to boil a
+kettle or a saucepan. Hot water steamed from her jug, a hot brick had
+been placed to warm her bed, a plate of rye bread cut in slices and
+covered with a cloth was upon the table.
+
+Foreign to her own, the eyes which had rejoiced in this room ... yet the
+smile of German comfort was upon it.
+
+She lay down beneath the branching antlers, and smiled before she went
+to sleep: "One pair of silk stockings ... to dance in Babylon ..."
+
+ *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning a thin woman dressed in black brought her breakfast--jam,
+rye bread, coffee and sugar.
+
+"Guten Morgen," said the woman, and looked at her curiously. But Fanny
+couldn't remember which language she ought to talk, and fumbled in her
+head so long that the woman went away.
+
+She dressed and went out, meeting Stewart by her doorway. Together they
+crossed the bridge, the theatre square, and went towards the Cathedral
+with eager faces. They did not look up at the Cathedral, at the statute
+of old David upon which the Kaiser had had his own head carved, and upon
+whose crossed hands the people had now hung chains fastened with a
+padlock--they did not glance at the Hôtel de Ville in the square beyond,
+but, avoiding the tram which emerged from the narrow Serpenoise like a
+monster that had too long been oppressed, they hurried on up the street
+with a subdued and hungry gaiety.
+
+There was a Need to be satisfied before anything could be seen, done, or
+said. A Need four years old, now knocking at the doors of heaven,
+howling to be satisfied.
+
+Before the windows of a shop they paused, but Stewart, standing back and
+looking up the street, said: "There is a better further on!" and when
+they had gone on a few paces Fanny whispered, hurrying, "A better still
+beyond!" At the third shop, the Need, imperative, royal, would wait no
+longer, and drove them within.
+
+"How many?" asked the saleswoman at the end of ten minutes.
+
+"Seven _éclairs_ and a cream bun, said Stewart.
+
+"Just nine _éclairs_," said Fanny.
+
+"Seventeen francs," said the woman without moving an eyelash.
+
+This frenzy cooled, their pockets lighter, they walked for pleasure in
+the town. The narrow streets streamed with people--French soldiers and
+officers, Lorraine women in the costumes of pageantry, and German
+children who cried shrilly: "Amerikanerin, Amerikanerin!"
+
+An English major passed them. They recognised his flawless boots before
+they realised his nationality. And, following his, the worst boots in
+the world--worn by a couple of sauntering Italian officers, gay in olive
+and silver uniform. German men in black slouch hats hurried along
+the streets.
+
+It had been arranged that they should eat their meals in a room
+overlooking the canal, at the foot of the Cathedral--and there at eleven
+o'clock they went, to be a little dashed in spirit by the reappearance
+of the Bar-le-Duc crockery.
+
+The same yellow dish carried what seemed the same rationed jam; the
+square blocks of meat might have been cooked in the Bar cook-hut, and
+brought with them over the desert; two heavy loaves stood as usual on
+the wooden table. The French Army ration was the same in every town.
+
+"Mesdames," said the orderly assigned to them, "there are two
+sous-officers without who wish to speak with you."
+
+"Let them come in."
+
+Two blue figures appeared in the doorway and saluted. The first brought
+a card of invitation from the Commandant Dormans. The second was the
+brigadier from the garage with a list of the cars assigned to
+the drivers.
+
+"Perhaps these ladies would come down and try their cars after lunch?"
+he suggested, and lunch being over they walked with him through the
+winding streets. At the gates of a great yard he paused and a sentry
+swung them open. Behind the gates lay a sandy plain as large as a parade
+ground, which, except for gulleys or gangways crossing it at intervals,
+was packed from end to end with row after row of cars; cars in the worst
+possible condition, torn, twisted, wheelless, cars with less dramatic
+and yet fatal injuries; some squatting backwards upon their haunches,
+some inclined forwards upon their knees--one, lately fished up from a
+river, had slabs and crusts of ice still upon its seats--one, the last
+dragged in at the tail of a breakdown lorry, hung, fore-wheels in the
+air, helpless upon a crane. Here, in the yard, was nothing but broken
+iron and mouldering carriage work--the cemetery of the Transport of the
+Grand Quartier.
+
+Lining all one side of the yard ran a shed, closed and warmed and
+lighted, where living cars slept in long rows mudguard to mudguard, and
+bright lamps facing outward.
+
+As the Englishwomen walked in a soft rustle could be heard up and down
+the lighted shed, for each half-hidden driver working by his car turned
+and shot a glance, expectant and mocking, towards the door.
+
+"Ben quoi, i'paraît qu'c'esst vrai! Tu vois!"
+
+"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, c'ui-là?"
+
+"C'est les Anglaises, pardi!"
+
+"Tu comprends, j'suis contre tout ca. I'y a des fois ou les femmes c'est
+bien. Mais ici ..."
+
+"Tu grognes? On va r'devenir homme, c'est tres bien!"
+
+"C'est idiot! Qu'est-ce qu'elles vont faire ici!"
+
+"On dirait--c'est du militarisme francais!"
+
+"Le militarisme francais j'm'en f----! Tu verra, cela va faire encore du
+travail pour nous."
+
+"Attends un peu!"... And murmurs filled the shed--glances threaded the
+shadows, chilling the spirit of the foreign women adventuring upon the
+threshold.
+
+"Four Rochets," said the _brigadier_, consulting his paper, "two
+Delages, two FIATS ... Mademoiselle, here is yours, and yours. The
+Lieutenant Denis will be here in a moment. He fears the Rochets will be
+too heavy for you, but we must see."
+
+The lieutenant who had been at dinner the night before entered the shed,
+greeted them, and turned to Stewart. "That car is too heavy for your
+strength, mademoiselle. It is not a car for a lady."
+
+"I like the make," she said stiffly, conscious of the ears which
+listened in the shed.
+
+"See if you can start her now, mademoiselle," said the _brigadier_,
+arranging the levers.
+
+There was a still hush in the shed as Stewart bent to the handle. Fanny,
+standing by the Rochet which had been assigned to her, felt her
+heart thumping.
+
+("Tu vas voir!" whispered the little soldiers watching brightly from
+behind the cars. "Attends, attends un peu! Pour les mettre en marche,
+les tacots, c'est autre chose!")
+
+Stewart, seizing the handle, could not turn it. In the false night of
+the shed the lights shone on polished lamps, on glass and brass, on
+French eyes which said: "That's what comes of it!"--which were ready to
+say--"March out again, Englishwomen, ridiculous and eager and defeated!"
+
+Fanny, looking neither to right nor left, prayed under her breath
+--"Stewart, Stewart we can never live in this shed if you can't start
+her. And if you can't, nobody else can...."
+
+There was a spurt of life from the engine as it back-fired, and Stewart
+sprang away holding her wrist with the other hand. The lieutenant, the
+brigadier, and a driver from a car near by crowded round her with
+exclamations.
+
+"You advanced the spark too much," said the driver to the _brigadier_.
+"_Tenez_! I will retard it."
+
+"She shan't touch the car again." said the lieutenant. "It is too
+heavy."
+
+"Leave the controls alone," said Stewart, scowling at the driver. "Give
+me room ..." She caught the handle with her injured hand, and with a
+gasp, swung the Rochet into throbbing life.
+
+There was a murmur of voices down the shed, and each man with a slight
+movement returned to the work he had been doing; the polishers polished,
+the cleaners swept, and a little chink of metal on metal filled the
+garage. The women were accepted.
+
+The day had vanished. Cars, yard and garage sank out of sight. Out in
+the streets the lamps woke one by one, and from the town came shouts and
+the stamp of feet marching. It was Saturday night and a torchlight
+procession of soldier and civilians wound down the street. The band
+passed first, and after it men carried fire-glares fastened upon sticks.
+
+The garage gates turned to rods and bars of gold till the light left
+them, and the glare upon the house-fronts opposite travelled slowly down
+the street.
+
+Fanny slipped out of the yard and crept along behind the flares like a
+shadow on the pavement. At the street corner she passed out on to the
+bridge over the Moselle, and leant against the stonework to watch the
+plumes of fire as they glittered up the riverside upon the tow-path. The
+lights vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that she could only
+feel her way over the bridge by holding to the stonework with her hand.
+A sentry challenged her and when she had passed him she had arrived at
+the door of her German lodging.
+
+Climbing the stairs a slow breeze of excitement filled out the sails of
+her spirit. "My silk stockings ... my gold links, and my benzene
+bottle!" she murmured happily. Now that of all her life she had the
+slenderest toilet to make--three hours was the time she had set
+aside for it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JULIEN
+
+Earth has her usual delights--which can be met with six days out of the
+seven. But here and there upon grey earth there exist, like the flying
+of sunlight, celestial pleasures also--and one of these is the heaven of
+success. When, puffed-up and glorious, the successful creature struts
+like a peacock, gilded in a passing radiance. And in a radiance, in a
+magic illumination, the newcomers danced in the drawing-room of the
+Commandant Dormans, and tasted that which cannot be found when sought,
+nor held when tasted.
+
+Old tapestries of tropical foliage hung around the walls, dusk upon one
+wall, dawn upon another. Trees climbed from floor to ceiling laden with
+lime-coloured flowers, with birds instead of fruits upon the branches.
+
+When at a touch the yellow dust flew out under the lamplight it seemed
+to the mazy eye of the dancer that the trees sent up a mist of
+pollen and song.
+
+In this happy summer, Fanny, turning her vain ear to spoken flattery,
+her vain eye to mute, danced like a golden gnat in fine weather.
+
+The Commandant Dormans spoke to her. If he was not young he had a quick
+voice that was not old. He said: "We welcome you. We have been waiting
+for you. We are glad you have come."
+
+Faces surrounded her which to her fresh eyes were not easy to read.
+Names which she had heard last night became young and old men to her
+--skins red and pale and dark-white--eyes blue and olive and black--gay,
+audacious and mocking features. She was dazzled, she did not hurry to
+understand. One could not choose, one floated free of preference, all
+men were strangers.
+
+"One day I shall know what they are, how they live, how they think." But
+she did not want that day to come.
+
+The Commandant Dormans said: "You do not regret Bar-le-Duc?"
+
+"No, no, no."
+
+"I hear you are all voracious for work. I hear that if you do not drive
+from morning to night we cannot hope to keep you with us!"
+
+Denis said to her: "Be careful of him! He believes there is no end to
+the human strength."
+
+She replied joyously: "There is no end to our strength!"
+
+When she had eyes to see, to watch, to choose, she found that there was
+in the room a man who was graceful and young, whose eyes were a peculiar
+shape, who laughed all the time gently as he danced. He never looked at
+her, never came near her. This young man was indifferent to her, he was
+indifferent to her ... Soon he became a trouble and a pleasure to her.
+With whom was he dancing now ... and now? Who was it that amused him?
+His eyes and his hair were bright ... but there were many around her
+whose eyes and hair were as bright. Before she had seen that young man
+laugh her pleasure had been more complete.
+
+While she was talking to Denis a voice said to her: "Won't you dance
+with me?"
+
+Looking up she saw who it was. His mouth smiled, his eyes were clever
+and gay.
+
+The moment she danced with him she began to grow proud, she began to
+find herself. Someone whispered to her: "The section must leave at such
+and such an hour...."
+
+She thought in a flash: "For me the section is dissolved ... I am I, and
+the others are the others!"
+
+The evening wore on. The musicians flagged and took up their courage
+again. It was late when Stewart, touching Fanny's arm, showed her that
+they were almost the only two women in the room.
+
+"Where are the others?"
+
+"In the hall, putting on their coats. We are all going."
+
+"Aren't they in a hurry?"
+
+"They have had orders, which were brought up just now, for runs early
+to-morrow morning. But you and I have nothing, and Denis has asked
+us ... if you are quick you can slip away ... to have supper with him
+at Moitriers."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"We can. The others go home in two cars which have been sent for us. No
+one will know that we are not in the other car. I'm so hungry."
+
+"So am I, starving. Very well."
+
+They joined the others, put on their coats, hunted ostentatiously for
+their gloves, then slipped ahead down the dark stairway into the square
+below. Denis joined them.
+
+"Splendid. I have my car round that corner. It will be only a matter of
+half an hour, but if you are both as hungry as I you will welcome it.
+Everything was finished upstairs, every crumb and cake. We must get a
+fourth. Who shall I get?"
+
+"Any one whom you would like to bring," said Stewart. "I don't think I
+have mastered the names yet. I really don't mind."
+
+"And you, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Nor I either," said Fanny, sniffing at the frosty air, at the fresh
+night.
+
+"Whom you like!"
+
+"Then I won't be a moment. I'll bring whom I can."
+
+"Monsieur!"... as he reached the corner. He turned back.
+
+"There is an artillery captain ... in a black uniform with silver."
+
+"An artillery captain ..." he paused enquiringly.
+
+"In black and silver. There was no other in the room."
+
+"Oh, yes, there were two in black and silver!"
+
+"Tall, with ..."
+
+"Ah, tall! The other is very short ... The tall one is the Commandant's
+aide, Captain Chatêl. He may not be able.... But I will see!" He
+disappeared again.
+
+When he returned he had the young man beside him.
+
+"One moment," said Châtel, as they walked towards the car; "who asked
+for me, the girl with the fair hair, or with the dark?"
+
+"With the fair."
+
+Moitriers was closed when they reached it, and they drove on to the only
+other place where food could be bought past the hour of midnight--the
+station buffet.
+
+Pushing past the barriers at the entrance to the station they entered a
+long corridor filled with heavy civilian life. Men and women lay, slept
+and snored upon the stone ledges which lined the side of the tunnel,
+their bags and packets stacked around them. Small children lay asleep
+like cut corn, heads hanging and nodding in all directions, or propped
+against each other in such an intricate combination that if one should
+move the whole sheaf of tired heads slipped lower to the floor.
+
+Further on, swing doors of glass led to a waiting-room, and here the
+sleeping men and women were so packed upon the ground and around the
+little tables that it was difficult to walk between them. Men sat in
+groups of nine or ten around a table meant for four each with his head
+sunk down between his hands upon the marble surface. On one table a
+small child wrapped in shawls lay among the circle of heads, curled like
+a snail, its toe in its father's ear. At each end of the room stood
+soldiers with fixed bayonets.
+
+Denis paused at the entrance. "Walk round here," he said, "there is a
+gangway for the sentry."
+
+"If we talk too loud," said Fanny, "we shall wake them."
+
+"They must soon wake in any case. It must be near the time for the
+train. You know who they are?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Germans. Expelled from Metz. They leave in batches for Germany every
+night--by a train that comes in and goes out at some horrible hour."
+
+Passing through more glass doors they came to an inner room where,
+behind a buffet, a lady in black silk served them with beer and slices
+of raw ham and bread.
+
+The four sat down for a moment at a little table--Denis talking of the
+system by which the outgoing Germans were nightly weeded from those who
+had permission to remain behind in Metz. Julien Châtel joined in the
+conversation. He spoke with the others but he glanced at Fanny. For the
+briefest of seconds he thought as he looked at her face that he saw a
+new interest smile upon it. He did not know that his own face wore the
+same look. His look said as he looked at her: "You, you, you!" At one
+moment she thought: "Am I pretty?" At the next she was content only to
+breathe, and thought no more of herself. She took in now his eyes which
+seldom rested on her, now a movement of his lips which made her feel
+both happy and miserable, and suddenly she learnt how often his finger
+traced some letter upon his cheek.
+
+These things were important. They were like the opening sentences of a
+great play to which one must listen, absorbed, for fear of
+misunderstanding all the story.
+
+It was not long before they rose, threaded their way back between the
+sleeping Germans, regained the car, and drove down the silent streets
+towards the Cathedral.
+
+"Have you seen it?" said Julien in a low voice, addressing her directly.
+
+"The Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes. I want to show it to you. Will you meet me there to-morrow at
+three?"
+
+(The others talked and smiled and knew nothing. Whoever has a secret is
+stronger than they who know nothing. Fanny thought: "My companions, to
+be as you are is not to exist! Whatever you feel, you are feeling
+nothing ...")
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, and joined her hands tightly, for this was where
+the play really began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun shone gaily. Here was no mud, no unhappiness, here were no
+puzzled women, and touching mayors of ruined villages, but instead gay
+goblin houses, pointed churches like sugar cake, the old French theatre
+with its stone garlands glittering in the sun; sun everywhere, streaming
+over the Place du Théâtre, over women shaking coloured rags from the
+windows, women washing linen by the river; everything that had been wet
+was drying, everything that had savoured of tears and age and sadness
+was burning up under the sun, and what moisture remained was brighter
+than jewels.
+
+"Suppose he never came!"
+
+"Why, then, be ready for that. Very likely he wouldn't come. Very likely
+he would think in daylight--' She is not a woman, but an English
+Amazon...'" Fanny glanced down at her clothes regretfully. She was
+ill-equipped for an assignation.
+
+"At least I might have better gloves," she thought, and walked into a
+small shop which advertised men's clothes in German across the window.
+She bought yellow washing-leather gloves at twenty-eight francs a pair,
+and would have paid a hundred had the salesman insisted.
+
+And now with yellow gloves, silk stockings, shining shoes and a heart
+as light as a leaf upon a wind she walked towards the Cathedral.
+
+"He won't come. He won't be there...." She pushed at the east door.
+
+He was under a Madonna, his black and silver hat in his hand, his eyes
+critical and pleased as he walked to meet her. They sat down together
+on a seat, without speaking. Then, each longing for the other to speak
+--"You have come...." he said first. (His face was oval and his hair
+was shining.)
+
+"Yes," she nodded, and noticed a peculiar glory in the Cathedral. The
+dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of
+a mourner.
+
+They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at
+each other's call.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't come."
+
+"Why, why did you think that?"
+
+Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their
+lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and
+answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.
+
+Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little
+words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled
+at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll
+go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her
+among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown
+her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except
+the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold
+light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of
+the carved fingers which prayed around them.
+
+They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very
+edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks
+buried in shrubberies of green.
+
+Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill
+in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon
+floated indefinitely like a cloud.
+
+A young doctor lounged beside them, putty-coloured under his red plush
+cap. "Why are all doctors plain in France?" she laughed.
+
+"Hush!" He wound his hand round and round like the player of a barrel
+-organ. "I have to stop you when you say silly things like a phonograph,
+at so much a metre."
+
+So he believed he might tease her.... Delighted, she stopped by the bank
+of the river and stared into the water. The sun ran over her shoulders
+and warmed her hands. The still shine of the river held both their eyes
+as movement in a train holds the mind.
+
+"I am enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a
+compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was
+sorry. "What a pity!"
+
+But she was not critical because she was looking for living happiness,
+and every moment she was more and more convinced that she would get it.
+But when he asked her her name and she repeated it, it sounded so much
+like an avowal that they both turned together down the tow-path with a
+quick movement and spoke of other things, for they were old enough to be
+afraid that the vague happiness that fluttered before them down the path
+would not be so beautiful when it was caught. And at this fear she said
+distinctly to herself: "In love!" and wondered that she had not said
+it before.
+
+Coming back to him with her words, she then began to wound and to delay
+him. "You mustn't be late for your office...."
+
+"When shall I see you again?"
+
+They dropped into a long silence. She summoned her coquetry that she
+called pride. The blue, blue forest at the edge of her sight tilted a
+little like a ship, the watery hill-country rolled towards it in
+mysterious kilometres.
+
+"It is beautiful," she said clumsily, avoiding his question, ignoring
+it. "Yet when I go there it is always more beautiful on the next hill.'
+
+"I must hurry," he said at once, "I shall be late at my office."
+
+"Where is your office?"
+
+He looked round vaguely. "There in that group of pines." They walked
+towards it, they were almost at the door, but he would not repeat his
+question. Would he not at the last moment? No. Had it not then been
+clear that the living happiness was at her lips? No. Could he let her
+go, could it have been a failure? He was holding out one of the stone
+hands. He was going.
+
+She looked up and the sun was streaming in his eyes, blinding him, and
+without seeing her he stared into the darkness that was her face. "I
+have so enjoyed my walk," he said. "Thank you for coming."
+
+All her face said "Oh!" in a hurt, frightened stare, but the sun only
+came round the edges of her hair and cap and left the panic in a
+shifting darkness. He was gone.
+
+She went back to her street. Reaching the big, populous house she
+followed the corridor that led from the stone courtyard, climbed to the
+first floor and opened the door of her own room. A bitter disillusion
+ran through her. The close-packed furniture seemed to say indifferently,
+"There's not much room for you!" and she knew quite well as she sat down
+on the bed that it was not her room at all, but had been as public to
+the birds of passage as the branch of a tree to the birds of the air.
+
+"I did so little. I did so little. It was such a little mistake!"
+Self-pity flooded her.
+
+"And why did he ask me to come to the Cathedral if such a little thing,
+such a little thing...." Indignation rose.
+
+"Things don't crumble like that, don't vanish like that!" She stared,
+astonished, at the scenes she had left behind her, the shining of the
+dark Cathedral, the ripple on the Moselle. "But they do, they do,
+they do...."
+
+Down in the street her own name caught her ear, and she went to the
+window.
+
+"Are you there, are you there?" cried the voice.
+
+Hanging waist-deep out of the window she received her orders for the
+next day.
+
+"I came down to tell you now," said the girl below on the pavement. "I
+thought you might have things to do to the car. You must be at the Hôtel
+Royal, near the station, at half-past six to-morrow morning."
+
+"Have you any idea whom I'm to take? Or where?"
+
+"I don't know where, but the man is a Russian colonel."
+
+She drew her head back through the window, and the gay tumble of the
+street gave way to the impersonal, heavy room. Cramming her oil-stained
+overall into her haversack, she put on her leather coat and went up to
+the garage.
+
+The sun had disappeared. A cold wind struck the silk-clad ankles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+"Come in," she said in English, lifting her head and all her mind and
+spirit out of the pit of the pillow.
+
+Feet came further into the room and a shivering child held a candle in
+her face. "Halb sechs, Fräulein," it said. But the Fräulein continued to
+stare at him. He thought she was not yet awake--he could not tell that
+she was counting countries in her head to find which one she was in--or
+that she was inclining towards the theory that she was at school in
+Germany. He was very cold in his shirt and little trousers, and he
+pulled at her sheets. "Fräulein!" he said again with chattering teeth,
+and when she nodded more collectedly the little ghost slipped out
+relieved by the door. "Russian colonel ... I must get up. Fancy making
+that boy call me! Why couldn't someone older ... I must get up."
+
+He had left the electric light burning in her room, but out in the
+corridor all was black and hushed as she had left it the night before
+when she had gone to bed. Behind the kitchen door there was a noise of
+water running in the sink. She opened the door, and there was the
+wretched child again, still in his shirt, rinsing out her coffee-pot by
+the light of one candle. Well, since he was doing it ... Poor child! But
+she must have her coffee. By the time she was dressed he tapped again
+and brought in the tray with coffee, bread and jam on it. Setting it
+down, he looked it over with an anxious face. "Zucker," he said, and
+disappeared to fetch it. She filled her thermos bottle with the rest of
+the coffee which she could not finish, and put two of the slices of grey
+bread into the haversack, then crept downstairs and out into the black
+street where the gas lamps still burnt and the night sentry still paced
+up and down in the spectral gloom. Over the river hung a woolly fog,
+imprisoning the water; but as she crossed the bridge she noticed where
+its solidity was incomplete and torn, and into the dark water which lay
+at the bottom of such crevasses a lamp upon the bridge struck its
+arrowed likeness. It was a good seven minutes' walk to the garage, and
+she tried to get warm by running, but the ice crackling in the gutters
+and between the cobble stones defied her, and her hands ached with cold
+though she put them in turn right through her blouse against her heart
+to warm them as she ran. Fetching her car she drove to the Hôtel Royal,
+and settled down to wait.
+
+A porter came out and swept the steps of the hotel, and a puff of his
+dust caught her in the face. He laid a fibre mat on each stone step, and
+clipped them with little metal clips.
+
+"Are you for us?" asked a _sous-lieutenant_, looking first up and down
+the empty street and then at the car. He had blue eyes and a long, sad
+moustache that swept down the lower half of his face and even below his
+chin, making him look older than he should.
+
+"I am for a Russian colonel," she said, liking his mild face.
+
+"That's right. Yes, a Russian colonel. Colonel Dellahousse. But can you
+manage by yourself? Can you really? I will tell him...."
+
+He disappeared up the steps and through the swing door of the hotel. A
+moment later he was out again.
+
+"He will come to you himself, he will see you. But we want to go to
+Verdun! Could you drive so far? You could? Yes, yes, perhaps. Yet here
+he comes...."
+
+In dark civilian clothes the Russian came down the hotel steps. He was
+tall, serious, upright, rich. His face beneath his wide, black hat was
+grave and well cared for. The sombre glitter of his eye was grave, his
+small dark beard shone in the well-controlled prime of its growth. From
+the narrow line of white collar to the narrower thread of French
+watchchain--from the lean, long feet to the lean, white hands she took
+him in, and braced herself, adjusted herself, to meet his stately
+gravity. If there was something of the Mephistopheles in fancy dress
+about him, it was corrected by his considerate expression.
+
+"Have you had breakfast?" he began, speaking French with a softly nasal
+accent.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it! Yes, thank you, monsieur."
+
+"I have to go to Verdun," he put it to her. "I have business there." It
+was as though he expected that she would let him off without difficult
+explanations, would exclaim: "There is some mistake! Some other car,
+some other driver is intended for your work!"
+
+But she remained silent except for a smile of acknowledgment, and with a
+sigh he summoned the lieutenant and went back into the hotel. In a few
+minutes the Frenchman came out again. "Monsieur Dellahousse would like
+to know if you know the way?" he inquired.
+
+"He doesn't want to take me? Isn't that it?" asked Fanny, smiling but
+anxious.
+
+"He is a little doubtful," admitted the lieutenant. "You must
+excuse...."
+
+"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and
+I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know
+the way to Verdun."
+
+He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and
+Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care
+under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort
+of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure,
+too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their
+women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."
+
+She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
+met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
+drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
+apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
+bewilderment.
+
+She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
+and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
+and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
+of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
+at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
+crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
+gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
+of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
+ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out
+moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large
+upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's
+side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree
+across the road.
+
+"Halt--Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards
+which swung and creaked in the wind.
+
+"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone,
+pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the
+German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach
+Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one
+might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the
+arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."
+
+For miles and miles nothing living was to be seen, neither animal, nor
+motor, nor living man; only the stray fires of the Chinese fluttered
+here and there like blue and red marsh fires a mile or so back from the
+main road. Once as she flew along she shied like a horse and twisted the
+wheel as a wild screaming and twittering rose at the side of the car,
+and glancing back she saw three figures wriggle and laugh in mockery and
+astonishment. They had risen round the embers of a dead fire, and stood
+swaying on their feet and showing white teeth in orange faces. One had
+the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.
+
+They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with
+hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an
+arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first
+pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.
+
+Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the
+brow of a hill.
+
+"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it
+is a town!"
+
+"Wait, wait till you get nearer...."
+
+Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the
+suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful
+frailty--its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood
+upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry--not one house
+was whole.
+
+"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill
+which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was
+poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let
+out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still
+upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it
+should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet.
+Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the
+palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky. The
+Russian, who had stood up in the car, sat down. "Now go on...."
+
+The streets which circled the base of the hill had been partially
+cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way
+between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers,
+manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon
+fingers of stone already touched by moss.
+
+Here and there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But
+the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind
+--and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of the
+world's youth.
+
+Now and then with a crash the remains of a house fell, as the block of
+stonework which alone supported it was disarranged by the
+working soldiers.
+
+"Where am I to go?" asked Fanny, as the street wound round the base of
+the hill.
+
+"I will climb over beside you and direct you," said the French
+lieutenant, and dropped into the front seat.
+
+"Where do these soldiers sleep? Not among these ruins?"
+
+A block of masonry fell ahead of them and split its stones across the
+street.
+
+"Be careful! You can get round by this side street. Up here.... In these
+ruins. No living soul can sleep in Verdun now."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Don't you know? They sleep _beneath_ Verdun, in this hill around which
+we are circling. I am looking for the entrance."
+
+"Inside this hill? Under the town?"
+
+"But you've heard of the _citadelle?_"
+
+"Yes, but... this hill is so big."
+
+"There are fifteen kilometres of tunnel in this hollow hill, and
+hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a
+defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, here is the entrance."
+
+They left the car. Before them was a small dark hole in the side of the
+hill, an entrance not much higher than a man, into which ran a single
+rail line of narrow gauge. A sentry challenged them as they walked
+towards him.
+
+Entering the hill they found themselves in a tunnel lit by electric
+bulbs which hung in a dotted line ahead of them.
+
+"Wait!" ordered the deep voice of the Russian, and he strode from them
+into the depths of the tunnel with the Eastern swing of Ali Baba
+entering his cave.
+
+Fanny stood by the mild lieutenant, and they waited obediently.
+
+"I must tell you a secret," he said to her. "Monsieur Dellahousse is
+very glad to be here. He said this morning: 'The Governor has sent me a
+woman to break my neck!'"
+
+"But he took me...."
+
+"Could he refuse you?--For he felt that it was a glove of challenge
+thrown down by the Governor of Metz. They do not get on together.... He
+took you with dignity, but he was convinced that he placed himself in
+the jaws of death."
+
+"When do we go back? We cannot now be in Metz before dark."
+
+"But haven't they told you? Never warned you? How monstrous! We are
+staying here."
+
+"And I return alone?"
+
+"No, you stay too. You are lent to us for five days. They should have
+told you!"
+
+"Oh, I stay too. In this tunnel, here! How odd, how amusing!"
+
+"Monsieur Dellahousse has gone to ask the Commandant of the _citadelle_
+to house us all. Here he comes."
+
+The Russian returned under the chain of lights. "Follow me," he said,
+and led them further into his cavern.
+
+They followed him like children, and as they advanced the lieutenant
+whispered: "We are now well beneath the town. It lies like a crust above
+our heads. Exactly beneath the palace you will see the steps go up...."
+
+"What is the railway line for?"
+
+"Bread for the garrison. There are great bakeries in the _citadelle_."
+
+Further and further still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and
+took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were
+twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist
+floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally
+above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the _officers de
+passage_, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle
+held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a
+chair and a shelf, and each bore the name of its temporary owner written
+on a card upon the door.
+
+"Twenty ... twenty-one ... and twenty-two," read the Russian from a
+paper he carried, and threw open the door of twenty-two.
+
+"This is yours, mademoiselle"; he bowed and waved her toward it. Fanny
+entered the room, which, from his manner, might have been the gilded
+ante-chamber of his Tzar.
+
+She heard him enter his own room, and through the partition the very
+sighing of his breath was audible as it rustled upon his lips! He tried
+to give her the illusion of privacy, for, wishing to speak to her, he
+left his room again to tap at her door, though his voice was as near her
+ear whether at door or wall.
+
+"I hope you are content, mademoiselle?" he said through the woodwork.
+
+"Delighted, monsieur."
+
+"You will sleep here," he continued, as though he suspected her of
+sleeping anywhere but there, "and dine with us in the officers' mess at
+seven. Until then, please stay in the _citadelle_ in case I need you."
+
+She heard his footsteps go up the corridor, the lieutenant following
+him. "I will unpack," she thought, and from her knapsack drew what she
+had by chance brought with her. Upon the shelf she arranged a tin of
+_singe_--the French bully beef--a gilt box of powder, a toothbrush, a
+comb, a map, a packet of letters to be answered, and a magneto spanner.
+
+There was an hour yet before dinner and she wandered out into the
+corridors to explore the _citadelle_. A soldier stood upon a ladder
+changing the bulb of an electric light.
+
+Catching sight of her he hurried from his ladder, and passing her with
+a stiff face, saluted, and disappeared.
+
+Soon she began to think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the
+corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed
+behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on,
+and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about
+their duties.
+
+"Perhaps they are changing the guard...."
+
+Yet a face which had already passed her three times began to impress its
+features upon her, and she realised suddenly that it was curiosity, not
+duty, that called the soldiers from their burrows. The news was spreading,
+for out of the gloom ahead fresh parties of onlookers appeared, paused
+disconcerted as she wished them "good evening," nodded or saluted her in
+haste, then hurried by.
+
+An officer with grizzled hair stepped into the passage from a doorway.
+As she neared him she saw he wore the badges of a commandant.
+
+"Who is this?" he asked in a low voice of the soldier who followed at
+his heels.
+
+"J'n'en sais rien, mon commandant," The soldier stiffened as a watch-dog
+who sees a cat.
+
+Fanny hastened nearer. "I drive a Russian officer," she explained. "I
+hope I have your permission to stay here."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the officer, looking at her in surprise. "Colonel
+Dellahousse told me 'a driver'; he did not add that the driver was a
+lady. Where have they put you? Not in the cubicles of the _officiers de
+passage?_ No, no, that must be changed, that won't do. Come, you shall
+sleep in the room next to the bishop's room, as he is absent. It is in
+my corridor."
+
+Fanny followed him, and noticed that the corridor was now clear of
+soldiers. The commandant paused before a door decorated with flags and
+led her into another corridor lined with cubicles much larger than those
+she had seen at first.
+
+"Open number seven."
+
+The soldier took his bunch of keys and opened the door.
+
+"Now fetch mademoiselle's effects from the other corridor. Which number
+was your room, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Twenty-two. But I can fetch them ... I have really nothing."
+
+The soldier withdrew.
+
+"He will get them. You dine with us, I hope, to-night at seven. Are you
+English, mees?"
+
+"Yes, English--with the French Army. I am really so grateful...."
+
+"The other room was not possible. I like the English, mees. I have known
+them at my home near Biarritz. You and I must talk a little. Do you
+care to read?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if I get time...."
+
+"Any books you may want please take from my sitting-room, number
+sixteen in this corridor. _Tenez!_ I have an English book there--'The
+Light that Failed'--I will get it for you."
+
+"Oh! I have read ... But thank you."
+
+_"De rien, de rien!_ I will get it now." He hastened up the corridor and
+returned with the book in his hand.
+
+The soldier, too, returned, bearing the seven objects which had
+accompanied her travels.
+
+"You will clean mademoiselle's shoes, brush her uniform, and bring her
+hot water when she needs it," ordered the commandant, and the soldier
+saluted impassively--a watch-dog who had been told that it was the
+house-cat after all.
+
+Left alone, she searched all her pockets for some forgotten stick of
+chocolate, and finding nothing, sat down upon the bed to wait hungrily
+till seven. The air in the tunnels was heavy and dry, and throwing off
+her tunic she lay down on the bed and slept until footsteps passing her
+door awoke her.
+
+She became aware that the inhabitants of her corridor were washing their
+hands for dinner, and sitting up sleepily found that it was already
+seven. In a few minutes she hurried from her room and out into the main
+tunnel, glad to get nearer the fresh air which filtered in through the
+opening at the far end.
+
+Reaching a door which she had noticed before, marked "_popote_," she
+paused a second, listening to the hum of voices within, then pushed at
+the door and entered.
+
+Instantly there was a hush of astonishment as seventy or eighty
+officers, eating at a long trestle table, sharply turned their heads
+towards her, their forks poised for a second, their hands still. Then,
+with a quick recovery, all was as before, and the stream of talk
+flowed on.
+
+The first section of the table was reserved for strangers passing
+through Verdun, and here sat a party of young Russian officers in light
+blouse-tunics, an American or two, and a few French officers. At the
+next section sat the officers of the _citadelle_, a passing general, and
+at the left hand of the commandant, Monsieur Dellahousse and the mild
+lieutenant.
+
+Overhead the stone roof of the tunnel was arched with flags, and
+orderlies hurried up and down serving the diners.
+
+Fanny, halfway up the long table, wavered in doubt. Where, after all,
+was she supposed to sit? At the top section, as a guest--or, as a
+driver, among the whispering Russians at the "stranger" section? Her
+anxiety showed in her face as she glanced forwards and backwards and an
+orderly hurried towards her. "Par ici, mademoiselle, par ici!" and she
+followed him towards the head of the table. Her doubts dissolved as she
+saw the gap left for her by the friendly arm of the lieutenant, and,
+arrived at the long wooden bench upon which they sat, she bowed to the
+commandant, and lifting one leg beneath her skirt as a hen does beneath
+its feathers, she straddled the difficult bench and dropped
+into position.
+
+"Beer, mademoiselle? Or red wine?" asked the Russian, suddenly turning
+to her; and the commandant, released from his conversation, called out
+gaily: "The mees will say 'water'--but one must insist. Take the wine,
+mees, it is better for you." The idea of water had never crossed Fanny's
+mind, but having decided on beer she changed it politely to red wine,
+which she guessed to be no other than the everlasting _pinard_.
+
+"I know them...." continued the commandant, smiling at the general. "I
+know the English! My home is at Biarritz and there one meets so many."
+
+And this old man thus addressed, a great star blazing on his breast, and
+tears of age trembling in his blue eyes, lifted his hand to attract her
+attention, and said to Fanny in gentle English: "Verdun honours a
+charming guest, mademoiselle."
+
+_"Verdun ... honours...."_ His words lingered in her ear. She a guest,
+_she_ honoured ... _here_!
+
+Up till now the novelty of her situation had engrossed her, the little
+soldiers watching in the tunnels, the commandant so eager to air his
+stumbling English, these had amused her.
+
+And when she had perceived herself rare, unique, she had forgotten why
+she was thus rare, and what strange, romantic life she meddled in.
+
+Here in this womanless region, in this fortress, in this room, night
+after night, month after month, the commandant and his officers had sat
+at table; in this room, which, unlike the tomb, had held only the
+living, while the dead and the threatened-with-death inhabited the
+earth above.
+
+They had finished dinner and Monsieur Dellahousse signalled to Fanny
+that she might rise. She rose, and at the full sight of her uniform he
+remembered her duties and said stiffly: "Be good enough to wait up till
+ten to-night. I may need you."
+
+They passed out again down the length of the tables. Near the door the
+Russian paused to speak with his countrymen, who rose and stood
+respectfully round him. Fanny and the lieutenant went on alone to
+the corridor.
+
+"You have travelled with him before?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes. I am lent to him to help him through the country. He is on a
+tour of inspection for the Red Cross; he visits all the camps of Russian
+prisoners liberated from Germany."
+
+"But are there many round Verdun?"
+
+"Thousands. You will see to-morrow. And be prepared for early rising. If
+he doesn't send for you by ten to-night I will tell the orderly to let
+you know the hour at which you will be wanted to-morrow morning. The
+car is all ready to start again?"
+
+"I am going out to her now."
+
+He turned away to join the Russian, and Fanny passed the sentry at the
+tunnel's mouth, and stood in the road outside.
+
+Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.
+
+Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its
+bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came
+and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the
+tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:--with his left eye
+he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with
+his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.
+
+"Fait beau dehors." His voice startled her. She turned to him, but he
+stood immobile in the shadow as though he had never spoken. She could
+not be sure that he had indicated to her that every man has his taste
+and his choice.
+
+She set to work on her car which stood in the shelter of an archway
+opposite, and for half an hour the sky trembled unregarded above her
+head. When she had finished she stood back and gazed at the Rochet with
+an anxious friendly enmity--the friendship of an infant with a lion.
+"The garage is eighty miles away," she sighed, "with its friendly men
+who know all where I know so little.... Ah, do I know enough? What have
+I left undone?" For she felt, what was the truth, that the whole
+expedition depended on her, that the stately Russian had perhaps never
+known what it was to have a breakdown--that in Moscow, in Petrograd, in
+his faraway life, he had sat in town cars behind two chauffeurs, unaware
+of the deadly traps in rubber and metal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+Night was the same as day in the tunnels; the electric light was always
+on, and with the morning no daylight crept in to alter it. The orderly
+called her at half-past six and she took her "clients" to a barracks in
+the suburbs of Verdun, where Russian prisoners "liberated" from Germany
+crowded and jostled to see her from behind the bars of the barrack
+square, like wild animals in a cage. Armed sentries paced backwards and
+forwards across the gateway to the yard. As it came on to snow a French
+soldier came out of a guardroom and invited her in by the fire.
+
+Inside, the rest of the guard huddled about the stove, and behind them a
+Russian prisoner with a moon face swept up the crumbs from their last meal.
+
+"Why do Americans guard the gate?" she asked, "since you are a French
+guard?"
+
+"Because we don't shoot with enough goodwill," grinned a little man.
+
+"But who do you want to shoot?"
+
+"Those fellows!" said the little man, slapping the moon-faced Russian on
+the thigh. "We used to guard the gates a week ago. But the Russians were
+always escaping, and not enough were shot as they got over the wall. So
+they said: 'The Americans are the types for that!' and they put them on
+to guard the gates. Look outside! You are having a success,
+mademoiselle!"
+
+Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor,
+scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at
+Fanny in silence through the open doorway.
+
+"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they
+were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the
+Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look
+after these pigs!"
+
+A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to
+the doctor," he said sharply.
+
+"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the
+sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the
+bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.
+
+"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, _va-t'en_!" they all said,
+and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned
+towards the door.
+
+"Here, dress yourself!"
+
+"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
+
+He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and
+disappeared, buckling it on.
+
+"You have Russians in cells, too?"
+
+"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on
+bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."
+
+"But why won't they work?"
+
+"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they
+are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian,
+and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all
+useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are
+in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."
+
+An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
+French.
+
+"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly.
+"I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step
+across ... it isn't a stone's throw."
+
+She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and
+rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for
+they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes,
+and one sardine a man.
+
+After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him
+out of the hut.
+
+"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so
+we thought you'd better come and have some chips."
+
+"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to
+turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a
+shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling
+kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought
+Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she
+was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her
+a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat
+them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with
+coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only
+that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French
+that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
+
+Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had
+finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what
+remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of
+animals, they said:
+
+"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or
+they'd sure die."
+
+"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't
+get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
+
+"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
+"We wouldn't stand it."
+
+"You have no idea of poverty."
+
+Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a
+hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
+
+She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the
+Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet
+here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry,
+though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality
+they were....
+
+She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man
+standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish
+accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a
+souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."
+
+"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"
+
+"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
+Just as though you were a zebra."
+
+"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of
+silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other
+barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps
+of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_
+for lunch.
+
+At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in
+search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows,
+invisible from the main roads.
+
+And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to
+evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many
+thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them,
+and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with
+the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once
+he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you
+and interest me?"
+
+She looked round.
+
+"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is
+jealous of you."
+
+She did not know what to make of this.
+
+"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the
+_citadelle_."
+
+"But...."
+
+"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does,
+as _his woman_."
+
+"But, why...."
+
+"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman
+for miles around, and you belong to us!"
+
+"You too?"
+
+"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger
+because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great
+curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
+I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"
+
+"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
+
+"We talk of this and that."
+
+That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.
+
+"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
+
+"Oh, but that's not necessary ... mystery!"
+
+"It _is_ necessary to love."
+
+"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much,
+"does not believe that you can love what you know."
+
+The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory
+image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This
+poor lady will soon be used to everything."
+
+Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.
+
+"When do we go back?" she asked absently.
+
+The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that,
+and he smiled again.
+
+They left next day, after the midday meal.
+
+Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching
+corridors.
+
+"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."
+
+She waited.
+
+"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
+Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."
+
+Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:
+
+"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."
+
+"Let me pass...." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
+
+He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely
+ashamed of her refusal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you
+satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
+
+"My experience?"
+
+"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now,
+if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town
+where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends
+again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
+
+They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead
+violence of the plains--between trenches that wandered down from the
+side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion
+upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the
+semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
+
+The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and
+cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on
+the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the
+road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled
+with instruments. Depôt after depôt was piled between the trees and the
+notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them.
+"The drinking trough--the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no
+horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the...." but they
+flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued
+them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not
+smoke here ... _Nicht rauchen_," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "_Rauchen streng
+verboten_," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood
+chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made
+them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as
+it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of
+camouflage--small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with
+wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the
+moon--long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing
+undergrowth--and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its
+knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of
+the earth.
+
+When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out
+upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare.
+Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse
+villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow
+grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across
+village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure
+toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer
+a lift?"
+
+Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a
+murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom
+she had overtaken.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To Briey."
+
+"We, too. Get in, madame."
+
+The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing,
+climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her
+her basket and umbrella.
+
+"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her
+a rug.
+
+"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature
+against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."
+
+"You are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Cover yourself well, well."
+
+Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road,
+who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace
+they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word,
+though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears
+until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!"
+they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own
+doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing
+themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop...."
+
+They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the
+sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the
+Frenchman indicated.
+
+The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her
+handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out
+backwards, with feet feeling for the ground--"What do I owe you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"Ah, nothing, nothing."
+
+"_Mais si_! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny
+piece on the seat, she hurried away.
+
+Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny
+ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said,
+"remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of
+life is spoilt for you."
+
+"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.
+
+Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the
+foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just
+above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the
+moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed
+slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the
+window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who
+prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fräulein," said Fanny, "would it
+matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry
+it afterwards."
+
+What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had
+nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room
+overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night
+full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the
+smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.
+
+When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open
+the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow
+and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out
+ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little
+boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed.
+The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again,
+between the grey walls of her bath--so like her cradle and her
+coffin--she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.
+
+"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to
+travel is not to move across the earth."
+
+Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten
+words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+      The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill--"
+
+But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her
+through the door.
+
+"You are well, Fräulein?"
+
+Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
+I was ill?"
+
+"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we
+had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have
+just remembered her."
+
+"Well, I won't drown myself."
+
+"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."
+
+"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon
+the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to
+drown myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+
+"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and
+when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In
+the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it
+was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of
+chalk upon the pavement.
+
+"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage,
+to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"
+
+The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung
+in her mind.
+
+"Whom did you take?"
+
+She struggled with the confusing image of the Russian. Before she could
+reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this
+morning. You'll have to get something done to your car!"
+
+Outside in the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but
+in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty
+cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider,
+which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from
+wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with
+her until she had been under the hose.
+
+Out in the street, where the hose was fastened to the hydrant, the
+little pests of Metz clustered eagerly, standing on the hose pipe where
+the bursts were tied with string, and by dexterous pressure diverting
+the leaks into gay fountains that flew up and pierced the windows
+opposite. As the mud rolled off under the blast of the hose and left the
+car streaky and dripping, the little boys dipping their feet into the
+gutters and paddled.
+
+Soaked and bareheaded, Fanny drove the clean car slowly back into the
+garage and set her in her place in the long line.
+
+Stewart, beside her, whispered, "They've come, they've come! They're
+starting at the other end. Four officers."
+
+Fanny pulled her tin of English "Brasso" from a pocket-flap, and began
+to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
+standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
+tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
+on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
+clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
+all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
+curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
+ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
+and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
+lake of brass.
+
+Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
+and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
+comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
+garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
+then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
+motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.
+
+And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
+fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
+on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
+face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
+impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
+his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
+scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
+She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
+little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
+enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
+into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
+up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have
+swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."
+
+"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.
+
+The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
+beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
+Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
+that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
+back from the backs of those about him.
+
+To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
+with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
+gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
+nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
+on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
+of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
+chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
+drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
+sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
+had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
+she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
+This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
+bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
+endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
+table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
+by Pont-à-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
+in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
+new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
+the thunder out at Pont-à-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
+who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he
+had left on the household that they should frame him in velvet and keep
+him staring at his own bed for ever!) She all but saw spirits--and
+shivered at the procession of life. Outside in the street she heard a
+cry, and her name called under the window. How like the cry that
+afternoon a week ago which had sent her to Verdun! Standing in the
+shadow of the curtain she peered cautiously out.
+
+At sight of her, a voice cried up from the street: "There is a fancy
+dress dance next Tuesday night! I'm warning every one; it's so hard to
+get stuffs." The voice passed on to the house where Stewart lived.
+
+("How nice of her!") This was a good day. ("What shall I wear at the
+dance?") There, about the face of the clock, windless and steady, hung
+the hours. Not yet time to start, not yet.
+
+Through the lace of the curtain and the now closed window, the shadows
+hurried by upon the pavement, heads bobbed below upon the street.
+
+Oh Dark, and Pale, and Plain, walking soberly in hat and coat, what sign
+in these faces of the silver webbery within the brain, of the flashing
+fancies and merry plans, like birds gone mad in a cage! The tram, as
+antique as a sedan chair, clanked across the bridge over the river, and
+changing its note as it reached firmer land, roared and bumbled like a
+huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was
+assailed by little creatures who threw themselves as greedily within as
+if they were setting out upon a wild adventure.
+
+"All going to meet somebody," said Fanny, whose mind, drowned in her
+happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and
+hurry the little creatures in the glass cage were forced to unfold their
+newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
+driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
+conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
+even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
+mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
+downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
+wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
+well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
+of herself.
+
+"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
+to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
+"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
+across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
+are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."
+
+When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
+seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
+upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
+of the big drapery shop.
+
+They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
+know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
+thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
+again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
+than he.
+
+"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
+
+She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at
+least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the
+vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had
+brought them together.
+
+"How lucky...."
+
+"How lucky what?"
+
+How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He
+would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't
+like it."
+
+Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of
+talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just
+behind the mask of the face.
+
+"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her
+lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for
+her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in
+advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too
+clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she
+could not say.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?"
+
+Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like
+that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she
+said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had
+the impression of a whole conversation.
+
+"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that
+I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding
+inspections to find out."
+
+"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
+
+"Why, of course, of course!"
+
+"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say
+it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).
+
+"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car
+had returned."
+
+Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun
+that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz,
+and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.
+
+But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does
+that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it
+for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself--the
+khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The
+Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these
+human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?..."
+Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a
+fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the
+spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to
+do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to
+do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit
+assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle
+was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.
+
+She glanced at him from time to time, and would have grown more silent,
+but by his light questions he kept her talking briskly on, offering her
+no new proof, until she grew unsure and wondered whether she had been
+mistaken; and, the hour striking for her supper in the town, she went to
+it, filled anew with his charm and her anxiety. Other meetings came,
+when, thrilling with the see-saw of belief and doubt, they watched each
+other with absorbed attention, and in their fragile and unconfessed
+relationship sometimes one was the victor and sometimes the vanquished.
+Yet what was plain to the man who swept the mud from the streets was not
+plain to them.
+
+"Does he love me already?"
+
+"Will she love me soon?"
+
+When they saw other couples by the banks of the Moselle, Reason in a
+convinced and careless voice said: "That is love!" But on coming towards
+each other they were not sure at all, and each said of the other:
+"To-morrow he may not meet me...." "To-morrow she will say she is busy
+and it will not be true!"
+
+When Fanny said, "He may not meet me," she was mad. How could he fail to
+meet her when the rolling hours hung fire and buzzed about his head like
+loaded bees, unable to proceed; when in a lethargy of vision he signed
+his name at the bottom of the typewritten sheet, saying confusedly,
+"What does she think? Does she think of me?"
+
+When at last they met under the shadow of the Cathedral they would
+exclaim in their hearts: "What next?" and hurry off by the Moselle,
+looking into the future, looking into the future, and yet warding it
+off, aware of the open speech that must soon lie between them, and yet
+charmed by the beautiful, the merciful, the delay. And going home, each
+would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned
+from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with
+mountains and rivers.
+
+That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the
+town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till
+seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.
+
+"I'm going to Weile," he said.
+
+"I'm going there myself."
+
+"To get your dress?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once
+by a group of idle girls.
+
+"Stuffs ..." said Fanny, thinking vaguely.
+
+"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
+
+Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of
+empty shelves. They had no black bombazine.
+
+"Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black
+gauze, black cotton..."
+
+It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he
+had bought six yards at eight francs a yard.
+
+"White ... something ... for me."
+
+There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard. "But cheap, cheap,
+CHEAP stuff," she expostulated--"stuff you would make lampshades of,
+or dusters. It's only for a fancy dress." The idle little girls assumed
+a special air. Fanny looked round the shop in desperation. It was like
+all the shops in Metz--the window dressed, the saleswomen ready, the
+shelves scrubbed out and polished, the lady waiting at the pay desk--but
+the goods hadn't come!
+
+Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and
+eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven
+francs a yard.
+
+"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
+
+Fanny had an idea of her own.
+
+"_Wo_," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening,
+"_ist eine Schneiderin?_"
+
+"A dressmaker who speaks French...."
+
+Elsa took her out into the dark street again, and in at a neighbouring
+archway, till at the back of deep courtyards they found a tiny flat of a
+little old lady. "Like this," explained Fanny, drawing with her pencil.
+
+"Why, my mother had a dress like that!" said the little lady, pleased.
+"Before the last war." She nodded many times. "I know how to make a
+crinoline. But when do you want it?"
+
+"For Tuesday night."
+
+"Ah, dear mademoiselle! How can I! To-day is Saturday. I have only
+to-day and Monday. Unless.... Are you a Catholic?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you can sew on Sunday. You can do the frills."
+
+All Sunday Fanny sewed frills under the stag's horn, and when she went
+to meet Julien in the late afternoon, she had the frills still in a
+parcel. "What is that?" he asked, as she unfolded the parcel in the
+empty Cathedral, and began to thread her needle.
+
+"My dress for the dance."
+
+"What is it going to be?"
+
+"Frills. Hundreds of frills." She shook her lap a little, and yards and
+yards of white frills leapt on to the floor in a river.
+
+"Those flowers you bought, look, you have never put them in water!"
+
+He shook his head, and leaning from his chair, stretched out his arm for
+the parcel of white paper. "They are dying. Smell them! They yield more
+scent when they die." She sat holding the flowers near her face, and not
+thinking of him very distinctly, but not thinking of anything else.
+
+"But they won't last."
+
+"They will last this visit. I'll get new ones."
+
+"Oh, how extravagant you are with happiness!..."
+
+They looked startled and became silent. For every now and then among
+their talk some sentence which they had thought discreet rang out with
+a clarity which disturbed them.
+
+Between them there had been no avowal, and neither could count on the
+other's secret. She was not sure he loved her; and though he argued,
+"Why should she come if she does not care?" he watched her sit by him
+with as little confidence, with as much despair, as if she sat on the
+other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Is it raining again? How dark it
+gets. I must soon go." She made gaps in and scattered that alarming
+silence in which the image of each filled and fitted into the thoughts
+of the other like an orange into its close rind. Yet so dark and perfect
+is the mask of the face, so dull the inner ear, that each looked
+uncertainly about, half deaf to the song which issued so plainly from
+the other, distracted by the great gaps in the music.
+
+"Won't you stay with me till you have sewn to the end of that frill?"
+
+She sat down again without a word. And, greedy after his victory, he
+added: "But I oughtn't to keep you?"
+
+"I want to stay, too."
+
+The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an
+end.
+
+"Now I must go. It's supper--supper in the garage."
+
+He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the
+door of the house in the dark street by the river.
+
+"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps
+it's English."
+
+"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.
+
+"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room
+upstairs.
+
+"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them
+the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the
+street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night
+round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those
+uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"
+
+"Has every one had runs?"
+
+"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and
+the silence of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+
+"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the _brigadier_ and at
+the pink paper he offered her.
+
+"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night.
+You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as
+you can to the Hôtel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be,
+but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and
+Pichot is getting you two spare tubes...."
+
+She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order
+and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy
+of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead,
+the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and
+accident, pure accident, had lighted on _her_, to sweep _her_ out of
+Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city
+like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold _Anywhere_.
+White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's
+cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something,
+anything--that she was ill--and stay.
+
+She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue
+tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and
+the funnel.
+
+"And if I said--(it is mad)--if I said, 'I am in love. _I can't go_.
+Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on
+the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver
+was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen
+bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with
+the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased
+stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of
+bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung
+about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some
+close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his
+mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.
+
+The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her
+skirt and feet.
+
+"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Coming. Where are the tubes?"
+
+"I have them."
+
+She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge
+to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder--hating
+every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.
+
+At the Hôtel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded
+with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from
+which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days
+when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.
+
+She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and
+flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising,
+but intent only on her question.
+
+"And could you tell me--(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me
+very late at the garage)--and would you mind telling me which day you
+expect to get back?"
+
+He turned to the others.
+
+"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
+To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."
+
+"Where shall I drive you?"
+
+"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Trèves."
+
+Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that
+the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was
+smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself
+and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and
+the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.
+
+In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel,
+unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat
+horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to
+the left and flat grass prairie to the right--little villages and
+clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its
+tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the
+road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before
+them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the
+grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards
+sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of
+beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again,
+and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot
+and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be
+touched to be relinquished.
+
+Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the
+corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was
+half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down
+by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car,
+but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped
+down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better
+than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of
+chamois-leather.
+
+At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose
+wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass.
+The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the
+landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village
+beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along
+the dry road.
+
+The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them,
+made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
+nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
+the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
+a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
+into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
+bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
+Bread, cheese, sausage, _pâté_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
+and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
+from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
+dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
+break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
+bodies of the bottles.
+
+It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
+strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
+spreading _pâté_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
+red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.
+
+"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
+thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
+morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.
+
+The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
+innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
+thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
+against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
+that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
+of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
+intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
+knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.
+
+The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked
+appreciatively together.
+
+"_Hé!_ The _pâté_ is not bad."
+
+"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"
+
+"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the
+bottle is all warmed. Try some."
+
+"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.
+
+"He is in the army."
+
+"You have no brother--no one to take care of you?"
+
+"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they
+think it interesting for us."
+
+"Tiens!"
+
+They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But
+the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and,
+bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:
+
+"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"
+
+The others reconsidered her.
+
+"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do
+not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that
+fine leather coat?"
+
+"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.
+
+Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to
+appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.
+
+"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that
+cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than--Well, how much?"
+
+The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned
+her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.
+
+"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his
+cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very
+serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."
+
+But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider
+that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big
+Bearskin be her _impresario_ or their instructor.
+
+"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and
+turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him
+for his stay in Balham.
+
+When the lunch was over and the last fragment of _pâté_ drawn off the
+last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes
+turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and
+the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with
+care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the
+last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.
+
+All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It
+grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that
+the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud
+moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with
+the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose
+simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.
+
+As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet
+and heavy, melted on her ear.
+
+"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"
+
+They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the
+back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."
+
+"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."
+
+"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.
+
+"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."
+
+And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny
+pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might
+lift the back seat and find the curtains.
+
+"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the
+car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been
+cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting
+on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight
+of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above
+them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky
+there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few
+yards ahead.
+
+As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow.
+Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily
+at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.
+
+They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at
+last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a
+voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which
+held so much discomfort.
+
+Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was
+keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back
+and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat
+was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs
+upon the floor.
+
+"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the
+big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours,
+running downhill in another mile."
+
+They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a
+querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they
+glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of
+fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed
+to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light
+which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of
+shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village--if village
+it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in
+the forest.
+
+The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and
+skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made
+slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a
+triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was
+written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses
+glittered in the snow with flags.
+
+A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow
+bridge brought her to a standstill.
+
+"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a
+safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.
+
+"We expect Pétain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."
+
+"But Thionville is forty miles away--"
+
+"Still, he might pass here--"
+
+Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow
+behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they
+came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a
+board: "This is Germany."
+
+They pulled up. Germany it might be--but the road to Tréves? He did not
+know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in
+Germany, and with his right in France.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+GERMANY
+
+Over the side of the next mountain all Hans Andersen was stretched
+before them--tracts of _little_ country, little wooden houses with
+pointed roofs, little hills covered with squares of different coloured
+woods, and a blue river at the bottom of the valley, white with geese
+upon its banks. They held their open mouths insultedly in the air as the
+motor passed. The narrow road became like marble, and the car hissed
+like a glass ball rolled on a stone step. On every little hill stood a
+castle made of brown chocolate, very small, but complete with turrets.
+Young horses with fat stomachs and arched necks bolted sideways off the
+road in fear, followed by gaily painted lattice-work carts, and plunged
+far into the grassland at the side. Old women with coloured hoods swore
+at them, and pulled the reins. Many pointed hills were grey with
+vine-sticks, and on the crest of each of these stood a small chapel as
+if to bless the wine. The countryside was wet and fresh--white, hardly
+yellow--with the winter sun; moss by the roadside still dripped from the
+night, and small bare orchard trees stood in brilliant grass.
+
+"Look! How the grass grows in Germany!"
+
+"Ah, it doesn't grow like that in the valley of the Meuse--"
+
+Every cottage in every village was different; many wore hats instead of
+roofs, wooden things like steeples, with deep eaves and carved fringes,
+in which were shadowy windows like old eyes. Some were pink and some
+were yellow.
+
+Soon they left the woods and came out upon an open plateau surrounded by
+wavy hills with castles on them. In the middle of the plateau was a
+Zeppelin shed which looked like the work of bigger men than the crawling
+peasants in the roads. One side of the shed was open, and the strange
+predatory bird within, insensible to the peering eye of an enemy, seemed
+lost in thought in this green valley. The camp of huts beside it was
+deserted, and there seemed to exist no hand to close the house door.
+They rose again on to a hillside, and on every horizon shone a far blue
+forest faint like sea or cloud.
+
+Nearer Tréves the villages were filled with Americans--Americans mending
+the already perfect roads, and playing with the children.
+
+"This is a topsy-turvy country, as it would be in Hans Andersen,"
+thought Fanny. "I thought the Germans had to mend the broken roads
+in France!"
+
+They stayed that night in the Porta-Nigra hotel, which had been turned
+into an Allied hostel. The mess downstairs was chiefly filled with
+American officers, though a few Frenchmen sat together in one corner.
+The food was American--corn cakes, syrup, and white, flaky bread.
+
+"Well, what bread! It's like cake!"
+
+"Oh, the Americans eat well!"
+
+"I don't agree with you. They put money into their food, and they eat a
+lot of it, but they can't cook.
+
+"Isn't it astonishing what they eat! It's astonishing what all the
+armies eat compared with our soldiers."
+
+"Now this cake-bread! I should soon sicken of it. But _they_ will eat
+sweets and such things all day long."
+
+"Well, I told you they are children!"
+
+"The Americans here seem different. They behave better than those in
+France."
+
+"These are very _chics types_. Pershing is here. This is the
+Headquarters Staff."
+
+"Yes, one can see they are different."
+
+"It appears they get on very well with the Germans."
+
+"Hsh--not so loud."
+
+After dinner they strolled out into the town. The Bearskin was very
+anxious to get a "genuine iron cross."
+
+He was offered iron crosses worked on matchboxes, on cigarette lighters,
+on ladies' chains.
+
+"But are they genuine?"
+
+He did not know quite what he meant.
+
+"I don't suppose them to be taken from a dead man's neck, but are they
+genuine?"
+
+In the streets the Germans sold iron crosses from job lots on barrows
+for ten francs each.
+
+"But I will get one cheaper!" said the Bearskin, and clambered up the
+steps into shop after shop. He found an iron cross on a chain for seven
+francs. No one knew what the mark was worth, and the three men, with the
+German salesman, bent over the counter adding and subtracting on paper.
+
+"How can a goblin countryside breed people who sell iron crosses at ten
+francs each?" wondered Fanny.
+
+There was a notice on the other side of the street, "Y.M.C.A., two doors
+down the street on your left," and the thin man stood in the door of the
+shop beside Fanny and pointed to it.
+
+"Couldn't you go there and get me cigars? They will be very cheap. Have
+you money with you?"
+
+"I'll try," said Fanny, "I've money. We can settle afterwards," inwardly
+resolving to get as many cigarettes as she could to take back for the
+men in the garage. She crossed the street, but looked back to find the
+thin man creeping after her. She waited for him, irritated.
+
+"Go back. If the American salesman sees you he'll know it's for the
+French, and he won't sell."
+
+"Tiens?"
+
+"He knew that quite well," she thought impatiently to herself, "or he
+wouldn't have asked me to buy for him."
+
+The thin man turned back to the cover of the shop like an eager little
+dog which has jumped too quickly for biscuit and been snubbed.
+
+She went down the street and into the Y.M.C.A.
+
+Instantly she was among three or four hundred men, who stood with their
+backs to her, in queues up the long wooden hall. Far ahead on the
+improvised counter was a _guichet_ marked "Cigars." She placed herself
+at the tail of that queue.
+
+"Move up, lady," said the man in front of her, moving her forward. "Say
+here's a lady. Move her up."
+
+Men from the other queues looked round, and one or two whistled slyly
+beneath their breath, but her own queue adopted her protectingly, and
+moved her up to their head, against the counter.
+
+It was out of the question to get cigars now. She had become a guest,
+and to get cigars would imply that she was not buying for herself, but
+to supply an unknown man without. And the marks on her uniform showed
+that the unknown was French.
+
+"One carton of Camels, please," she said, used to the phraseology.
+
+"Take two if you like," said the salesman. "We've just got a dump in."
+
+She took two long cardboard packets of cigarettes, and put down ten
+francs.
+
+"Only marks taken here," said the salesman. "You got to make the change
+as you come in."
+
+"Oh, well--I'll--"
+
+"Put it down. Put it here. We don't get a lady in every day."
+
+He gave her the change in marks, which seemed countless.
+
+"I'm sure you've given me too much!"
+
+"Oh no. Marks is goin' just for love in this country. Makes you feel
+rich!"
+
+As she emerged from the hall with her two long cartons under her arm she
+found the thin man, the Bearskin and Blackberry-Eyes standing like
+children on the doorstep.
+
+It was too much--to give her away like that.
+
+Other Americans, coming out, looked at them as a gentleman coming out of
+his own house might look at a party of penguins on his doorstep.
+
+Fanny swept past her friends without a glance and walked on up the
+street with her head in the air. They turned and came after her
+guiltily. When they caught her up in the next street, she said to the
+thin man, "I asked you not to come near while I was buying--"
+
+"Have you got cigars, mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, I couldn't. Why did you come like that? Now I can go in no more.
+You'd only to wait two minutes."
+
+They looked crestfallen, while she held the cigarettes away from them as
+a nurse holds sweets from a naughty child.
+
+"I could only get two packets. I can give you one. I'm sorry, but I
+promised to get cigarettes for some people in Metz."
+
+The thin man brightened, and took the big carton of Camels with delight.
+
+"They're good, those!" he said knowingly to the others. "How much were
+they, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Five francs twenty the carton."
+
+"Is it possible? And we have to pay...."
+
+By his tone he made it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a
+country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult
+to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the
+floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been a bitter journey for
+them.
+
+After all--those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated
+down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three
+times a day to keep their spirits up--why shouldn't they let him have
+their cigarettes?
+
+"You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it.
+"I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."
+
+He thanked her, delighted, and they went back to the hotel.
+
+The problem of the kindness of the Americans, and her frequent abuse of
+it to benefit the French, puzzled her.
+
+"But, after all, it's very easy to be kind. It's much easier to be kind
+if you are American and pink than if you are French and anxious."
+
+Another difference between the two nations struck her.
+
+"The Americans treat me as if I were an amusing child. The French, no
+matter how peculiar their advances, always, always as a woman."
+
+Next morning, when she got down to breakfast at eight, she found that
+the three Frenchmen had already gone out about their work.
+
+"Perhaps I shall get home to-night, after all," she prayed. She sat in
+the hotel and watched the Americans, or wandered about the little town
+until eleven. The affair with the cigars was suitably arranged. The hall
+was nearly empty when she went in, and the few men who stood about in it
+did not disarm her with special kindness. On getting back to the hotel
+she found the Bearskin pushing breathlessly and anxiously through the
+glass doors.
+
+"Monsieur Raudel has left his cigarettes in his bedroom," he said,
+"unlocked up. He is anxious so I have come back."
+
+"Well, tell him that if he--tell him quite as a joke, you know--that if
+I can get home--"
+
+(Something in his little blue eye shone sympathetically, and she leant
+towards him.) "Well, I'll tell _you_! There is a dance to-night in Metz,
+and I am asked. And tell him that I have bought two boxes of cigars
+for him!"
+
+The Bearskin, enchanted, promised to do his best.
+
+By half-past twelve the three were back at lunch in the hotel. Over the
+coffee Monsieur Raudel looked reflectively at his well-shaped nails.
+
+"Well, mademoiselle, so this is what it is to have a woman chauffeur--"
+
+Fanny looked up nervously, regretting her confidence in the Bearskin.
+
+"Apart from the pleasure of your company with us, we get cheap cigars,
+and you get your dance, so every one is pleased."
+
+"Oh!" She was radiant. "But you haven't hurried too much? Are we really
+starting back?"
+
+Monsieur Raudel, who was a new man when he wasn't cold, reassured her,
+and soon they were all packed in the Renault, and running out of Tréves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE CRINOLINE
+
+That same night as dusk fell she shook the snow from her feet and
+clothes and entered the dressmaker's kitchen. Four candles were burning
+beside the gas, and the tea-cups lay heaped and unwashed upon
+the dresser.
+
+"Good-evening, good-evening," murmured a number of voices, German and
+French, and the old dressmaker, standing up, her face haggard under the
+gas, took both Fanny's hands with a whimper:
+
+"It will never be done! Oh, dear child, it will _never_ be done!"
+
+The crinoline which they were preparing lay in white rags upon the
+table.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, that is good! Are you helping too?" Elsa had brought three of
+her friends with her, and the four bright, bullety heads bent over the
+long frills which moved slowly through their sewing fingers. "_Good_
+Conquered Children!" They were sewing like little machines.
+
+"The Fräulein Schneiderin," explained Elsa, "is so upset."
+
+And this was evident and needed no explaining. The little lady twisted
+her fingers, grieved and scolded, snatching at this and that, and
+rapping with her scissors upon the table as though she were going to
+wear the dress herself.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I had to get them." She nodded towards the busy Conquered
+Children, apologising for them as though she feared Fanny might think
+she had done a deal with the devil for her sake.
+
+"Here are my frills," said Fanny, bringing from her pocket two paper
+parcels, one of which she laid in mystery upon the table, the other
+opened and shook out her two long frills. She drew off her leather coat
+and sat down to sew.
+
+"Oh, how calm you are!" burst out the dressmaker. "How can you be so
+calm? It won't be finished."
+
+"Yes, yes, yes. It's only half-past five. Can I have a needle?"
+
+"My mother had a dress like this before the last war." (This for the
+fiftieth time.) "And will your _amoureux_ be there?" she asked with the
+licence of the old.
+
+"Well, yes," said Fanny smiling, "he will."
+
+"And what will he wear?"
+
+"Oh, it's a secret. I don't know. But I chose this particular dress
+because it is so feminine, and it will be the first time he has seen me
+in the clothes of a woman."
+
+"Children, hurry, hurry!" cried the dressmaker, in a frenzy of sympathy.
+"Minette, get down!" She slapped the grey cat tenderly as she lifted him
+off the table. "Tell them in their language to hurry!" she exclaimed.
+"_I_ never learnt it!"
+
+But, after the breath of excitement, followed her poor despair, and she
+dropped her hands in her lap. "It will never be done. I can't do it."
+
+"Look, my dear, courage! The bodice is already done ... Have you had any
+tea?"
+
+"The children ate. I couldn't. I am too excited. But you are so calm.
+You have no nerves. It isn't natural!"
+
+Yet she ate a little piece of cake, scolding the cat and the children
+with her mouth full, prowling restlessly above their bent heads as they
+sewed and solidly sewed.
+
+At the end of an hour and a half the nine frills were on the skirt, the
+long hoops of wire had been run in, and the hooks and eyes on the belt.
+
+Often the door opened and shut; visitors came and went in the room; the
+milk woman put her head in, crying: "What a party!" and left the tiny
+can of milk upon the floor: Elsa's mother came to call her daughter to
+supper, but let her stay when she saw the dress still unfinished. Now
+and then some one would run out of the flat opposite, the flat above or
+the flat next door and, popping a head in at the door, wish them good
+luck. All the building seemed to know of the crinoline that was being
+made in the kitchen.
+
+"You do not smoke a pipe?..." said the dressmaker softly, with
+appreciation.
+
+"But none of us do!"
+
+"Oh, pardon, yes! I saw it yesterday. A great big girl dressed like you
+with her hands in her pockets and a pipe in her mouth. It made an effect
+on me--you can hardly believe how it startled me! I called Madame
+Coppet to see."
+
+"I know it wasn't one of us. And (it seems rude of me to say so) I even
+think the woman you saw was French."
+
+"Oh, my dear, French women never do that!"
+
+"Well, they do when they get free. They go beyond us in freedom when
+they get it The woman you saw (I have seen her, too) works with the men,
+shoulder to shoulder, eats with them, smokes with them, drinks with
+them, drives all night and all day, and they say she can change a tyre
+in two minutes.
+
+"There was a woman, too, who drove a lorry between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc,
+not a tender, you know, but a big lorry. She wore a bit of old ermine
+round her neck, knickerbockers, and yellow check stockings. One could
+imagine she had painted her face by the light of a candle at four in the
+morning. She never wore a hat, and her short yellow hair stuck out over
+her face which was as bright as a pink lamp shade."
+
+"Terrible."
+
+"She may have been, but she worked hard! She was always on that road. Or
+she would disappear for days with her lorry and come back caked in rouge
+and mud. I wish I could have got to know her and heard where she went
+and the things that happened to her."
+
+"But, my dear, I keep thinking what a strange life it is for you. Are
+you always alone on your car?"
+
+"Always alone."
+
+"You are with men alone then all the time?"
+
+"All the time."
+
+"Well, it's more than I can understand. It's part of the war."
+
+Elsa bent across the table and picked up the folded bodice, murmuring
+that it was done. The dressmaker rose, and reaching for the hooped
+skirt, held it up between her two arms. It was a thrilling moment.
+Fanny, too, rose. "Put it on a dummy," she commanded. Candles were
+placed around the dummy, who seemed to step forward out of the shades of
+the kitchen, and offer its headless body to be hooked and buttoned into
+the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schön!" said
+Elsa's shiny-headed friends, peering with their mouths open.
+
+"Ah, dear child, you were so calm, and now it is done!" said the old
+dressmaker.
+
+The dress stood stiffly glittering at them, white as snow, the nine
+frills pricking away from the great hooped skirt.
+
+Fanny picked up the brown paper parcel she had laid on the dresser,
+taking from it a bottle of blue ink, a bottle of green, and a paint
+brush, and diluted the inks in a saucer under the tap. There was awe in
+the kitchen as she held the brush, filled with colour, in the air, and
+began to paint blue flowers on the dress.
+
+At the first touch of the brush the old dressmaker clasped her hands.
+"What is she doing, the English girl! And we who have kept it so
+white...."
+
+"Hush," said Fanny, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"
+
+The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that
+Fanny felt her hair stir on her neck. She covered the plain, tight-
+waisted bodice with dancing flowers in blue and green.
+
+On the frills of the skirt a dozen large flowers were painted as though
+fallen from the bodice. Soon it was done.
+
+"Like that! In five minutes!" groaned the dressmaker, troubled by the
+peculiar growth of the flowers.
+
+"Let it dry," said Fanny. "I'll go home and start doing my hair. Elsa
+will bring it round when it's dry."
+
+The old woman held out both her hands, in a gesture of mute
+congratulation and fatigue.
+
+"Now rest," said Fanny. "Now sleep--and in the morning I will come and
+tell you all about it," and ran out into the snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The top hook of the bodice would not meet. With her heart in her mouth,
+with despair, she pulled. Then sat down on the bed and stared blankly
+before her.
+
+"Then if _that_ won't meet, all, all the dress is wasted. I can't go.
+No, right in the front! There is nothing to be done, nothing to be
+done!" She sat alone in the room, the five candles she had lighted
+guttering and spilling wax. She was in the half-fastened painted bodice
+and a fine net petticoat she had bought at Nancy. Even the green silk
+bedroom slippers were on, tied round her ankles with ribbons, the only
+slippers she had found in Metz, and she had searched for them for hours.
+
+The room was icy cold, and the hand of the clock chasing towards the
+hour for the dance. Should she go in uniform? Not for the world.
+
+She would not meet him, and it seemed as though there could be no
+to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This
+meeting had had a peculiar significance--the flouncy, painted dress, the
+plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in
+absurd anguish she sat still on the bed.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, Elsa, look!" Better the child than no one, and the shiny head
+was hanging round the door. ("Wie schön!")
+
+"But it isn't _schön_! Look! It won't meet!"
+
+"Oh!..." Elsa's eyes grew round with horror, and she went to fetch her
+mother. "Tanzen!" They talked so much of "tanzen" in that household. The
+thin mother was all sympathy, and stood in helpless sorrow before the
+gap in the bodice.
+
+"What's all this?" and _der Vater_ stood in the doorway, heavy as lead,
+and red as a plum.
+
+"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident,
+and "Oh!..." said Elsa's mother, and disappeared. She came back with
+three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa's hat, and the gap in the
+bodice was hidden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_He was not there_. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows
+in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she
+could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the
+entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but
+others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into
+the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress
+chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she
+shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the
+personality of the Commandant Dormans.
+
+At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks,
+clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the
+room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer,
+clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval,
+who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the
+swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that
+her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was
+the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over
+Duval's head, she tried to see through the crowd.
+
+Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian,
+standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish
+colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this
+evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the
+shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a
+further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep's wool,
+which made him seem fantastically tall.
+
+When Fanny had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit
+feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned
+willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold
+her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of
+wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung
+backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
+
+Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and
+came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff
+that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body
+that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery
+of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval
+breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the
+Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled
+her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her
+own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her
+meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the
+admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and
+the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say,
+without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and,
+the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her
+ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive...." Her sense of
+triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the
+reproach in his voice.
+
+She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to
+forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close
+enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into
+his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep's wool and painted flowers
+went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding
+his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of
+the room, and heard the dimmed music and the scrape of feet.
+
+For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre.
+For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the
+glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the
+weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very
+furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.
+
+They danced on, not wearing away the shining boards with their feet half
+so much as they wore away the thin ice above the enchanted lake.
+
+The Commandant Dormans crossed the room to them.
+
+"She must be drawn. She must go for her portrait. Spare me your partner.
+Mademoiselle, we have an artist, a _poilu_, drawing some of the dresses.
+Will you come with me and sit for yours?"
+
+She went into the little room and stood for the drawing; the door shut
+on her, and she and the artist faced each other. Through the door the
+music came softly, and as she stood, hands resting without a breath's
+stir on fold, on frill, head bent and wandering eyes, the artist with
+twitching face and moving hand looked up and down, up and down, and she
+sank, swaying a little upon her rooted feet, into a hypnotised
+tranquillity. She did not care what the man put upon the white paper
+with his flying hands; he might draw the flowers upon her skirt, but not
+the tall blooming flowers within her, growing fabulously like the lilies
+in a dream. Her thoughts went out to meet the waves of music floating
+through the door; her rooted body held so still that she no longer felt
+it, and her spirit hung unbodied in an exaltation between love which
+she remembered and love which she expected. No one came through the
+door; they left her in silence, enclosed in the cell of the room and of
+her dreams, and she was content to stand without movement, without act
+or thought. The near chair, the wall hard by, the golden room which she
+had just left so suddenly were alike to her; her eyes and her
+imagination were tuned to the same level, and there was no distinction
+between what was on her horizon and beyond it. Across the face of the
+artist the scenes in the room behind her passed in unarrested
+procession, and the voice of an illusory lover in her ear startled her
+by its clearness. The music wandered about the room like visible
+movement, and the artist, God bless him, never opened his mouth between
+his shower of tiny glances.
+
+"Finished, mademoiselle!" and he held the drawing towards her as he
+leant back with a sigh. He had made too many drawings that evening, and
+any talent he had hung in his mind as wearily as a flag in an airless
+room. With an effort she broke her position and moved towards him,
+taking up the drawing in her hand with a forced interest. "Yes, thank
+you, thank you," she said, and he took it back and laid it with the pile
+he had made. "You don't like it? But I'm so tired. Look at these others
+I did earlier in the evening...."
+
+But while she bent over them the door burst open and Dormans came in,
+followed by Duval and Dennis. "Is it finished? Let me look! Yes, yes,
+very good! Quite good!" They were pleased enough, and drew the artist
+away with them to the buffet.
+
+Suddenly Julien was with her and had closed the door. He was hurried,
+excited, and it seemed as though he said what he could no longer contain,
+as though the thought biggest in his mind broke in a bound from him. He
+was white and he exclaimed: "It's terrible how _much_ you could hurt me
+if you would!"
+
+He seemed to close his eyes a little then and lean his head towards her.
+She looked at the drooping, half-lit head, and she knew that she had him
+without fear of escape. Knew too, that the moment was brief. Their recent,
+undeclared silence brooded as though still with them, half regretful and
+departing angel. "You will have other beauties," she said to her heart,
+"but none like this silence."
+
+They were breathless. The ice had gone from the lake and the ship had
+not yet set sail. In a dream she moved down to the beach. She saw him
+open his eyes and stare at her incredulously. "I am going to break this
+beauty," she breathed alone, and put out her hand and launched the ship.
+He was by her side, the silence broken, the voyage begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+
+Clouds, yellow, mauve and blue, hung ominously over the road to Nancy.
+The valley was filled with shades, but the road itself gleamed like a
+bleached bone in a ditch. Seated upon the dashboard of her wounded car,
+Fanny had drummed her heels for warmth since morning, and seemed likely
+soon to drum them upon a carpet of snow. Beneath the car a dark stream
+of oil marked the road, and the oil still dripped from the differential
+case, where the back axle lay in two halves.
+
+"I will telephone to your garage," her "client" had promised, as he
+climbed on to a passing lorry and continued his journey into Nancy. With
+that she had to be content, while she waited, first without her lunch,
+and then without her tea, for the breakdown lorry which his telephone
+message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four
+o'clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold
+made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve
+shades thickened upon the sky no flake of snow had fallen.
+
+Only last night, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been preparing for
+the dance; and only last night she had said to Julien ... What had she
+said to Julien? What had he said to her? Again she was deep in a reverie
+that had lasted all day, that had kept her warm, had fed her.
+
+She was almost asleep when a man's voice woke her, and she found a car
+with three Americans drawn up beside her.
+
+"I guess this is too bad," said the man who had woken her. "We passed
+you this morning on our way into Nancy, and here you are still looking
+as though you had never moved. 'Ain't you had any food since then?"
+
+"I haven't been so very hungry."
+
+"Not hungry? You're sure past being hungry! Lucky we've got food with us
+in the car. Pity we've got to hurry, but here's sandwiches and sandwiches,
+and cakes and candy, and bits of bunstuff, and an apple. And here's a
+cheese that's running out of its wrappin'. When's your show coming to
+fetch you? 'Ain't you coming home along with us?"
+
+"They won't be long now. Oh, you are good...." Fanny's hunger revived as
+she took the food, and now she was waiting ungratefully for them to be
+gone that she might start on her heavensent meal.
+
+"Good-bye, ma'am," they cried together.
+
+"Good-bye," she waved, and as their car passed onwards she climbed up on
+to the mudguard and spread the rug over her knees.
+
+The slow night grew out of nothing, expanded, and nearly enveloped the
+slopes of the hill below. The wind dropped in the cloudy, heavy
+twilight, and the papers of the sandwiches did no more than rustle upon
+her knees. Not prepared yet to light her car lamps, Fanny laid her torch
+upon her lap, and its patch of white light lit her hands and the piles
+of bread, cake, and fancy buns.
+
+Across the road in the deeper gloom that dyed the valley and spilt over
+its banks, a head rustled in the ragged border of twig and reed, and
+eyes watched the brightly-lighted meal which seemed to hang suspended
+above the vague shape of the motor car.
+
+With a sense of being perfectly alone, walled round by the gathering
+dusk, Fanny made a deep inroad upon her sandwiches and cake, finishing
+with the apple, and began to roll up what remained in case of further
+need, should no one come to fetch her.
+
+She reflected that her torch would not last her long and that she ought
+to put it and light her head and tail lamps instead, but, drowsy with
+pleasure in her lonely dinner, she sat on, prolonging the last moments
+before she must uncurl her feet and climb down on to the ground. The
+torch slipped from her knee on to a lower fold of the rug, lighting only
+the corner of a packet in which she had rolled the cake.
+
+Suddenly, while she watched it, the gleam of the corner disappeared. She
+stared at the spot intensely, and saw a hand, a shade lighter than the
+darkness, travel across the surface of the rug, cover with its fingers
+the second parcel and draw it backwards into what had now become dense
+night. Her skin stirred as though a million antennae were alive upon it;
+she could not breathe lest any movement should fling the unknown upon
+her; her eyes were glued to the third packet, and, in a moment, the hand
+advanced again. With horror she saw it creep along the rug, a small
+brown, fibrous hand, worn with work. The third packet was eclipsed by
+the fingers and receded as the others had done, but as it reached the
+edge of the rug, overflowing horror galvanised her into movement, and
+catching the corners of the rug she threw it violently after the package
+and over the hand, at the same moment jumping from her seat and on to
+the footboard, to grope wildly for the switch. Her heart was leaping
+like a fish just flung into a basket, and every inch of her body winced
+from an expected grasp upon it. She flung herself over the side and into
+the seat of the car, found the switch and pushed it.
+
+A dozen Chinese at least were caught in the two long beams that flew out
+across the darkness. For a second their wrinkled faces stared, eyes
+blinked, and short, unhollowed lips stretched over yellow teeth, then,
+with a flutter of dark garments, the Chinese started away from the fixed
+beams and were gone into the shadow. Except for the sudden twitter of a
+voice, the spurt of a stone flung up against the metal of the car, they
+melted silently out of sight and hearing. Sick with panic, Fanny leant
+down upon her knees and covered her head with her two arms, expecting a
+blow from above. Seconds passed, and ice-cold, with one leg gone to
+sleep, she lifted her head, switched off the lights and stared into the
+night. She could see nothing, and gradually becoming accustomed to the
+darkness, she found that they had completely disappeared. The rug, too,
+had gone, and all three packets of sandwiches. Cautiously, with
+trembling legs, she stepped upon the footboard.
+
+Something hit her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to
+suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in
+its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...."
+she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture
+them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were
+now far from her on their way to some encampment.
+
+Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she
+prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
+There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
+
+Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and
+curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road
+around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between
+the spokes of the wheels.
+
+Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car,
+and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the
+hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly
+bent, with a knob at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure,
+but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming
+out from Pont-à-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps
+glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his
+thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through
+the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
+
+The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and
+climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled
+about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the
+open valley on the left.
+
+"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
+
+"Hardly yet, _mon capitaine_. It was unlucky the _brigadier_ should be
+at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but
+it wants two men to tow in the car."
+
+"This is Marbache!"
+
+In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a
+handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately
+darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind
+burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the glass.
+
+"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the
+right here."
+
+The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes
+drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The
+left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and
+deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+A pale light hung in the dark ahead of them.
+
+"Is it a car? No."
+
+"Yes, lamps. With the beam broken by the snow."
+
+"Go slow."
+
+For fear of blinding the driver of a lighted vehicle which might, after
+all, be moving, one of the men put out his hand and switched off the
+headlights, and the car glided forward on its own momentum.
+
+Thus they came upon Fanny, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an
+obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her
+mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in
+her right hand, the torch ready as a signal in her left.
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Well, yes, my poor child!" And she saw the man behind him, and laughed.
+
+"Help me down. Within and without I am set in plaster."
+
+"You look like a poor, weather-chipped goddess, or an old stone pillar
+with a face."
+
+"Be careful, that leg will not stand.... Oh, look, look how the snow
+clings. It's frozen on my lap."
+
+"We must be quick. Everything must be quickly done, or we shall all stay
+here."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that now!"
+
+"What have you got in your hand? Give it to me."
+
+"That's a weapon. I almost needed it. Where is the lorry?"
+
+"The garage was empty. The _brigadier_ was at Thionville. The lorry had
+a spring broken."
+
+"And they told you?"
+
+"I did not call at the 'C.R.A.' office till late in the day, or you
+would have been fetched long ago. Come along! Have you got your things
+together? We must take them back in the other car. And the magneto too."
+
+"We're to leave the car after all my guarding care?"
+
+"No; here's Pichot volunteered to take your place."
+
+"Has he got food with him and rugs. My rug has gone...."
+
+"He has everything. Come along! Let's put everything of value into the
+other car."
+
+When they had finished the night air was clear of snowflakes; hill, road
+and valley were lit by the pallor of the fallen snow.
+
+Fanny followed Julien to the other car. He swung the handle and jumped
+into the driving seat. "Come...." he said, and held out a hand.
+
+"Good-night, Pichot. We'll send for you early in the morning."
+
+"Good-night, _mon capitaine._ Good-night, mademoiselle."
+
+They moved forward, and the moon like a wandering lamp lit their faces.
+
+"Blow out, old moon!" said Julien, turning his silvered face and hair up
+to the sky. The moon flew behind a cloud.
+
+"Quick!" he said.
+
+"What?"
+
+... and kissed her. The jacks and tyres and wheels and bolts fluttered
+out of Fanny's head like black ravens and disappeared. They flew on,
+over the bridge at Pont-à-Moussons, up the shining ruinous street.
+
+"Crouch lower!" said Julien. "If any one wanted to, they could count
+your eyelashes from the windows."
+
+"Ah, yes, if there was any one to count...." She glanced up at the
+fragmentary pronged chimneys, the dark, unstirring caves of brick.
+
+Soon the church clocks of Metz rang out, quarrelling, out of time with
+one another.
+
+"Do you know this isn't going to last?" said Julien suddenly, as if the
+clocks had reminded him.
+
+She turned swiftly towards him.
+
+"The Grand Quartier is moving?"
+
+"Ah, you knew? You had heard?"
+
+"No, no," she shook her head. "But do you think I haven't thought of it?
+I keep thinking, 'We can't stay here for ever. Some end will come.' And
+then--'It will come this way. The Grand Quartier will go.'"
+
+"But you are going with it."
+
+"Julien! Is that true?"
+
+"Certain. It was settled to-day. We are actually leaving in three days
+for Chantilly; and you, with all the garage, all the drivers, and the
+offices of the 'C.R.A.' are to be at Précy-sur-Oise, five miles away."
+
+"But you are at Précy too?"
+
+"No, I have to be at Chantilly. And worse than that ... The bridge over
+the Oise at Précy is blown up and all cars have to come sixteen miles
+round to Chantilly by another bridge. I am in despair about it. I have
+tried every means to get Dormans to fix upon another village, but he is
+obstinate, and Précy it must be for you, and Chantilly for me. But don't
+let's think of it now. Wait till you've eaten and are warm, and we can
+plan. Here are the gates!"
+
+He handed out the paper pass as a red light waved to and from upon the
+snow. First the Customs-men, Germans still, in their ancient civic
+uniform. "Nothing to declare?" Then the little soldier with the lantern
+in his hand: "Your pass, _ma belle!_" As he caught sight of Julien,
+"Pardon, mademoiselle!" Lastly, up the long road into the open square by
+the station, down the narrow street, splashing the melted snow-water
+against the shop windows, and under the shadow of the cathedral.
+
+"Put the car away and come and dine with me at Moitriers."
+
+She looked at him astonished. "The car? Whose car is it? Does it belong
+to our garage?"
+
+"It will in future. It arrived last night, fresh from Versailles. I am
+arranging with Dennis for you to take it over to-morrow."
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "A beautiful Renault! A brand new Renault!..."
+
+He laughed. "Hurry, or you will faint with hunger. Put it away and come,
+just as you are, to Moitriers, up into the balcony. I am going there
+first to order a wonderful dinner."
+
+In a quarter of an hour they were sitting behind the wooden balustrade
+of the balcony at Moitriers--the only diners on the little landing that
+overhung the one fashionable restaurant in Metz. It was a quarter to
+nine; down below, the room, which was lined with mirrors set in gilt
+frames, was filled with light; knives and forks still tapped upon the
+plates, but the hour being late many diners leant across the strewn
+tablecloths and talked, or sat a little askew in their chairs and
+listened. A hum filled the warm air, and what was garish below, here,
+behind the balustrade, became filtered and strained to delicate streaks
+and bars of light which crossed and recrossed their cloth, their hands,
+their faces--what was noisy below was here no more than a soft insect
+bustle, a murmurous background to their talk.
+
+The door of the balcony opened behind them, and Madame Berthe, the
+proprietress herself, moved at their side; her old-fashioned body,
+shaped like an hour-glass, was clothed in rucked black silk, which
+flowed over her like a pigment; flowed from her chin to the floor, upon
+which it lay stiffly in hills and valleys of braided hem. Her gay gold
+tooth gleamed, and the gold in her ears wagged, as she fed them gently
+on omelette, chicken and tinned peas, and a _soufflé_ ice.
+
+They talked a little, sleepy after the wind, smiling at each other.
+
+"Don't you want more light than that?" said Madame Berthe, coming in
+again softly with the coffee.
+
+Fanny shook her head. "Not any more than this."
+
+Then they were left alone, stirring the coffee, gazing down between the
+wooden columns at the diners below.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked, as a sigh escaped her companion.
+
+"The move to Chantilly. I am so loth to break up all this."
+
+"Break up?"
+
+"Ah, well, it changes, doesn't it? Even if it is no longer the same
+landscape it changes!"
+
+After a silence he added: "How fragile it is!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You!" He covered her hand with both his. "You! What I think you are,
+and what you think I am. Love and illusion. Too fragile to be given to
+us with our blunders and our nonsense."
+
+She watched him, silent, and he went on:
+
+"I don't understand this life. That's why I keep quiet and smile, as you
+say I do. There are often things I don't say when I smile."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh, I wonder how much you believe me. And I listen to that immense
+interior life, which talks such a different language. I _hate_ to move
+on to Chantilly."
+
+Suddenly she recognised that they were at a corner which he had wanted
+her to turn for days. There had been something he had hinted at,
+something he wanted to tell her. He chafed at some knowledge he had
+which she did not share, which he wanted her to share.
+
+Once he had said: "I had letters this morning which worried me...."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"One in particular. It hurt me. It gave me pain."
+
+But she had not wanted to ask what was in the letter. Then he had grown
+restless, sighed and turned away, but soon they had talked again and it
+had passed.
+
+And now to-night he said:
+
+"Look how detached we are in this town, which is like an island in the
+middle of the sea. We behave as though we had no past lives, and never
+expected any future. Especially you."
+
+"Especially I?"
+
+"You behave as though I was born the day before you met me, and would
+die the day after you leave me. You never ask anything about me; you
+tell me nothing about yourself. We might be a couple of stars hanging in
+mid air shining at each other. And then I have the feeling that one
+might drop and the other wouldn't know where to look for it."
+
+But after a little silence the truth burst out, and he said with
+despair: "Don't you want to know _anything_ about me?"
+
+(Yes, that was all very well. She did, she did. But not just this that
+was coming!)
+
+And then he told her....
+
+     *     *     *     *     *
+
+"What is she like ... Violette?"
+
+"Fair."
+
+After several low questions she seemed to stand between them like a
+child, thin and fair, delicate and silent, innocently expecting to be
+spared all pain.
+
+"No, she doesn't go out very much. She stays indoors and does her hair,
+and her nails, and reads a little book."
+
+"And have you known her for a long time?"
+
+"A long time...."
+
+After this they pretended that she did not exist, and the little wraith
+floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when
+she had written him certain letters which had brought tears into
+his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+Fanny turned again to seek the lights of the town and the dagger points
+of the churches that climbed against the sky upon the hill behind her,
+but all that met her eyes was the blanket of wet darkness, and the
+shimmer of the snowflakes under the lamps.
+
+She slipped through the garage gates, touching the iron bars ... "almost
+for the last time."
+
+"But what does it matter? All towns are the same and we sing the same
+song in each and wear the same coloured feathers." She stirred the snow
+in the yard with her foot. "An inch already and the Renault has so
+little grip upon the snow. Shall we be able to start to-morrow?"
+
+Then she set out to look for a heap of snow chains which she had noticed
+before in a corner of the yard. Not far from her another little torch
+moved in the darkness, and under its downward ray she caught sight of a
+khaki skirt and a foot. "Someone else has thought of chains, too! And
+there are so few!" She clicked off her light and moved stealthily along
+the forest of cars, her fingers sweeping blankets of snow from the
+mudguards. Passing the first line of corpse-cars she saw the light
+again. "She's in the wrong place!" she thought, and hurried on. "Those
+bags of chains are just behind the Berliet they brought in backwards."
+Behind the Berliet little mounds showed in the snow. She stooped over
+them, shading her light with her knees, and dug in the light powder with
+her hand, pulling out a small canvas bag which she dusted and beat with
+her fingers.
+
+"Are you looking for chains?" she called to the other light, her bag
+safely in her arms.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"They are here. Here! In this corner!"
+
+"Who are you?" cried the voice.
+
+But she slipped away in silence to the garage door; for on this last
+black and white night in Metz she longed to creep about unspoken to,
+unquestioned. A little soldier sat on guard by a brazier of glowing
+charcoal near the door. She nodded to him as she moved down the long
+line of cars to her own.
+
+There it stood, the light of the brazier falling faintly upon it, the
+two points of the windscreen standing up like the ready ears of an
+interested dog, the beautiful lines of its body, long bonnet and
+mudguards stretched like a greyhound at a gallop, at rest until the
+dawn. She flung the bag of chains inside, and, patting the bonnet,
+slipped away and out into the street without attempting to try the fit
+of the chains upon the wheels.
+
+She slept a last night in the dark red German room three streets
+away--first making a little tour of the walls in her nightgown, the
+candle flame waving from her hand, the hot wax running in a cascade over
+her fingers--and looked at the stag's horn fastened to the bracket and
+the cluster of Christmas postcards pinned to the wall.
+
+The postcards arrested her attention, and a light darted in her mind.
+They were dark postcards, encrusted with shiny frosting, like the snow
+outside. Little birds and goblins, a wreath of holly, and a house with
+red mica windows were designed on them. She put out a finger and gently
+touched the rough, bright, common stuff; standing opposite them, almost
+breathless with a wave of memory. She could see herself no taller than
+the nursery fireguard, with round eyes to which every bright thing was a
+desire. She could feel herself very small amid the bustle and clatter of
+Christmas, blowing dark breath marks against the bright silver on the
+table, pulling the fringe round the iced cake, wetting her finger and
+picking up "hundreds and thousands" with it from a bag.
+
+These postcards now in front of her were made by some one with the mind
+of a child. It struck and shook her violently with memory to see them.
+"That's why the Germans write good fairy stories!" she thought, and her
+eyes passed to the framed photographs that hung near the postcards,
+pictures of soldiers in uniform, sitting at a table with the two
+daughters of the house. But these wooden faces, these bodies pressing
+through unwieldy clothes seemed unrelated to the childish postcards.
+
+She went contentedly to her bed, the room, bare of all her belongings,
+except the one bag that stood, filled and open, upon the table; sleeping
+for the last time in the strange bed in the strange town which she might
+never see again. It was time indeed to go.
+
+For days past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old
+horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk
+chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the
+strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture
+that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain
+was returning through all the roads of France, repacked and dusted, to
+set up the spirit of civilian life again.
+
+It was time to go, following all the other birds of passage that war had
+dragged through the town of Metz--time to make way for the toiling
+civilian with his impedimenta of civilisation.
+
+In the morning when she opened her eyes the room was darker than usual,
+and the opening of the window but the merest square of light. Snow was
+built up round the frame in thick rolls four inches high.
+
+She dressed hurriedly and rolled up the sleeping-sack with her few last
+things inside it. Out in the street the snow was dry and thick and
+beautifully untrodden. The garage gates looked strange, with a thick
+white banner blown down each side of the pillars. She looked inside the
+garage shed. Yes, all the cars had gone--hers stood alone, the suitcases
+inside, tyres pumped stiff and solid, the hood well buckled back.
+
+"Mademoiselle hasn't gone with the convoy?" said the _maréchal des
+logis_, aghast.
+
+"Oh, I'm separate," she laughed.
+
+"But the convoy is gone."
+
+"I know it. But I'm not with them. It's an order. I'm going alone."
+
+"_Bien_. But do you know the route?"
+
+"I'm not going by it."
+
+He laughed, suddenly giving up all attempt at responsibility, and bent
+to catch her starting handle.
+
+"Oh, don't worry."
+
+"Yes, it's your last day, I may as well help you to go away."
+
+The engine started easily and she drove out of the garage into the yard,
+the wheels flying helplessly in the snow, and flinging up dry puffs like
+flour. "Haven't you chains?" said the _maréchal des logis_. But she
+smiled and nodded and could not wait. "Good-bye--good-bye to all the
+garage," she nodded and waved. The sun broke out from behind a cloud,
+her brass and glass caught fire and twinkled gaily, the snow sparkled,
+the gate-posts shone at her. She left the garage without a regret in her
+heart, with not a thought in her head, save that in a minute she would
+be safe, no accident could stop her, she would be abroad upon the magic,
+the unbelievable journey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were in a small circular room, shaped like an English oasthouse,
+its roof running upwards in a funnel to meet the sky. At the apex was a
+round porthole of thick glass to let in the light, but as this was
+supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected
+only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the
+centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes
+were fine and black--her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever,
+lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her
+cheeks rose up and cut the black eyes into hoops.
+
+"We are on a long journey, madame, to Chantilly. We are cold; can we
+have coffee?"
+
+She drew out chairs and bade them sit, then placed two tall glasses of
+coffee in the ring of light from the lamp, sugar melting in a sandy heap
+at the bottom of each.
+
+"What an odd shape your house is!" said Julien, looking round him.
+
+"It's very old, like me. And the light is poor. You have to know it to
+get used to it," she replied.
+
+"You've only that one window?" He stared up the funnel to where he
+could see the grey underside of the cone of snow.
+
+"But I can make that one better than it is; and then the lady can see
+herself in this little glass!" The old woman moved to the side of the
+wall where a rope hung down. "_Elle a raison_; since she has a gentleman
+with her! I was the same--and even not so long ago!"
+
+She put up her thin arm and gave the rope a long pull. She must have
+been strong, for the skylight and all its burden opened on a hinge, and
+the snow could be seen sliding from it, could be heard in a heavy body
+rumbling on the roof. She closed the skylight, and now a wan light
+filtered down the funnel and turned their faces green. It was like life
+at the bottom of a well, and they felt as though the level of the earth
+was far above their heads, and its weighty walls pressing against
+their sides.
+
+"But why is it built this way?"
+
+"Many houses are," said the old woman with a shrug. "It's old, older
+than my mother." She sat down beside them. "Soldiers have been drunk in
+here many times in the war," she said. "And in the old war, too. But I
+never saw one like you." She pinched Fanny's sleeve. "Fine stuff," she
+said. "The Americans are rich!"
+
+"I'm not American."
+
+"Rich they are. But I don't care for them. They have no real feeling for
+a woman. You are not stupid, _ma belle_, to get a Frenchman for a lover."
+
+"Don't make him vain."
+
+"It is the truth. He knows it very well. Why should he be vain? An
+American loves a pretty face; but a Frenchman loves what is a woman."
+She rose and lifted the lamp, and let its ray search out a corner of the
+room wherein the great bed stood, wooden and square, its posts black
+with age, its bedding puffed about it and crowned with a scarlet
+eiderdown as solid and deep as the bed itself.
+
+"A fine bed; an old bed; it is possible that you will not believe me,
+but I shared that bed with a bishop not two years ago."
+
+Fanny's eyes were riveted on the bed.
+
+Julien laughed. "In the worst sense, mother?"
+
+"In the best, my son," bragged the old woman, sliding a skinny finger to
+the tip of her nose. "You don't believe me?"
+
+Coming nearer, she stood with the lamp held in her two hands resting on
+the table, so that she towered over them in fluttering shawl and shadow.
+
+"He arrived in the village one night in a great storm. It was past the
+New Year and soldiers had been coming through the street all day to go
+up to the lines beyond Pont-à-Moussons. I've had them sleeping in here
+on the floor in rows, clearing away the table and lying from wall to
+wall so thick that I had to step on them when I crossed the room with my
+lamp. But that night there were none; they were all passing through up
+to the front lines, and though the other end of the village was full, no
+one knocked here. There was snow as there is to-day, but not lying still
+on the ground. It was rushing through the air and choking people and
+lying heavy on everything that moved outside. That glass of mine up
+there was too heavy for me to move so I let it be. A knock came at the
+door in the middle of the night, and when I got up to unbar the door
+there was a soldier on the doorstep. I said: 'Are you going to wake me
+up every night to fill the room with men?' And he said: 'Not to-night,
+mother, only one. Pass in, monsieur.'
+
+"It was a bishop, as I told you. _Un éveque_. A great big man with a red
+face shining with the snow. If he had not been white with snow he would
+have been as black as a rook. He stamped on the cobbles by the door and
+the snow went down off him in heaps, and there he was in his beautiful
+long clothes, and I said to myself: 'Whatever shall I do with him? Not
+the floor for such a man!' So there we were, I in my red shawl that
+hangs on the hook there, and he in his long clothes like a black baby
+in arms, and his big man's face staring at me over the top.
+
+"'I can't put you anywhere but in my bed,' I told him. I told him like
+that, quickly, that he might know. And he answered like a gentleman, the
+Lord save his soul: 'Madame, what lady could do more!'
+
+"'But there's only one bed' I told him (I told him to make it clear),
+'and I'm not young enough to sleep on the floor.' Not that I'm an old
+woman. And he answered like a gentleman, the Lord save him...."
+
+"I will tell _you_ the end," said the old woman, drawing near to Julien
+as he took some money from his pocket to pay for the coffee.
+
+Two hours later they drew up at a _café_ in the main square at Ligny.
+
+Within was a gentle murmur of voices, a smell of soup and baking bread;
+warm steam, the glow of oil lamps and reddened faces.
+
+Sitting at a small table, with a white cloth, among the half-dozen
+American soldiers who, having long finished their lunch, were playing
+cards and dominoes, they ordered bread-soup, an omelette, white wine,
+brille cheese and their own ration of bully beef which they had brought
+in tins to be fried with onions.
+
+A woman appeared from the door of the kitchen, carrying their bowl of
+bread-soup. Across the plains of her great chest shone a white satin
+waistcoat fastened with blue glass studs, and above her handsome face
+rose a crown of well-brushed hair dyed in two shades of scarlet. A
+little maid followed, and they covered the table with dishes, knives and
+forks, bread and wine. The woman beamed upon Fanny and Julien, and
+laying her hand upon Fanny's shoulder begged them not to eat till she
+had fetched them a glass of her own wine.
+
+"You bet it's good, ma'am," advised a big American sergeant at a table
+near them. "You take it."
+
+She brought them a wine which shone like dark amber in a couple of
+glasses, and stood over them listening with pleasure to their
+appreciation while each slight movement of her shoulders sent ripples
+and rivers of heaving light over the waistcoat of satin.
+
+The butter round the omelette was bubbling in the dish, the brille had
+had its red rind removed and replaced by fried breadcrumbs, the white
+wine was light and sweet, and with the coffee afterwards they were given
+as much sugar as they wished.
+
+"I have seen her before somewhere," said Julien, as the scarlet head
+receded among the shadows of the back room. "I wonder where?"
+
+"One wouldn't forget her."
+
+"No. It might have been in Paris; it might have been anywhere."
+
+The little maid was at his elbow. "Madame would be glad if you would
+come to her store and make your choice of a cigar, monsieur."
+
+"Well, I shall know where I met her. Do you mind if I go?"
+
+He followed the girl into the back room. Fanny, searching in her pocket
+for her handkerchief, scattered a couple of German iron pennies on the
+floor; an American from the table behind picked them up and returned
+them to her. "These things are just a weight and a trouble," he said.
+"I think I shall throw mine away?"
+
+"You've come down from Germany, then?"
+
+"Been up at Trêves. They do you well up there."
+
+"Not better than here!"
+
+"No, this is an exception. It's a good place."
+
+"Madame is a great manager."
+
+"Hev' you got more German pennies than you know what to do with?" said
+the American sergeant who had advised her to drink the wine. "Because,
+if you hev' so hev' I and I'll play you at dominoes for them."
+
+As Julien did not return at once, Fanny moved to his table and piled her
+German pennies beside her, and they picked out their dominoes from
+the pile.
+
+"I want to go home," said the American, and lifted up his big face and
+looked at her.
+
+"You all do."
+
+"That's right. We all do," assented another and another. They would make
+this statement to her at every village where she met them, in every
+_estaminet_, at any puncture on the road over which they helped her
+--simply, and because it was the only thing in their minds.
+
+"Do you hev' to come out here?" he enquired.
+
+"Oh, no. We come because we like to."
+
+Thinking this a trumpery remark he made no answer, but put out another
+domino--then as though something about her still intrigued his heavy
+curiosity: "You with the French, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like that too?"
+
+He sat a little back into his chair as though he felt he had put her in
+a corner now, and when she said she even liked that too, twitched his
+cheek a little in contempt for such a lie and went on playing.
+
+But the remark worked something in him, for five minutes later he
+pursued:
+
+"I don't see anything in the French. They ain't clean. They ain't
+generous. They ain't up-to-date nor comfortable."
+
+Fanny played out her domino.
+
+"They don't know how to _live_," he said more violently than he had
+spoken yet.
+
+"What's living?" she said quickly. "What is it to live, if _you_ know?"
+
+"You want to put yourself at something, an' build up. Build up your
+fortune and spread it out and about, and have your house so's people
+know you've got it. I want to get home and be doing it."
+
+"Mademoiselle actually knows it!" said Julien in the doorway to the
+red-haired woman in the back room, and Fanny jumped up.
+
+The American passed four iron coins across the table. "'Tisn't going to
+hinder that fortune I'm going to make," he said, smiling at last.
+
+"What do I know?" she asked, approaching the doorway, and moving with
+him into the back room.
+
+"Madame owns a house in Verdun," said Julien, "and I tell her you know
+it."
+
+"_I_ know it?"
+
+"Come and drink this little glass of my wine, mademoiselle," said the
+red-haired woman good-humouredly, "and tell me about my poor little
+house. I had a house on the crown of the hill ... with a good view
+... and a good situation (she laughed) by the Cathedral."
+
+"Had you? Well, there are a great many by the Cathedral," Fanny answered
+cautiously, for she thought she knew the house that was meant.
+
+"But my house looked out on the _citadelle_, and stood very high on a
+rock. Below it there was a drop and steep steps went down to a street
+below."
+
+"Had you pink curtains in the upper windows?"
+
+"Is it not then so damaged?" demanded the woman eagerly, dropping her
+smile. "The curtains are left? You can see the curtains?"
+
+"No, no, it is terribly damaged. If it is the house you mean I found a
+piece of pink satin and a curtain ring under a brick, and there is a sad
+piece which still waves on a high window. But wait a minute, excuse me,
+I'll be back." She passed through the café and ran out to the car,
+returning in a moment with something in her hand.
+
+"I fear I looted your house, madame," she said, offering her a small
+cylindrical pot made of coarse clouded glass, and half filled with a
+yellowish paste. "I found that inside on the ground floor; I don't know
+why I took it."
+
+The woman held it in her hand. "Oh!" she wailed, and sliding down upon
+the sofa, found her handkerchief.
+
+"_Mais non!_" said Julien, "you who have so much courage!"
+
+"But it was my own _face_!" she cried incoherently, holding out the
+little pot. "My poor little cream pot!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It was my face cream!"
+
+"How strange!"
+
+"I had not used it for a week because they had recommended me a new one.
+Ah! miraculous! that so small a thing should follow me!"
+
+She touched her eyes carefully with her handkerchief, but a live tear
+had fallen on the waistcoat.
+
+"Tell me, mademoiselle ... sit down beside me, my dear ... the poor
+little house is no more good to me? I couldn't live there? Is there
+a roof?"
+
+"You couldn't live in it."
+
+"But the roof?"
+
+"It was on the point of sliding off; it was worn like a hat over one
+ear. The front of the house is gone. Only on the frame of one window
+which sticks to the wall could I see your piece of pink curtain
+which waves."
+
+"My poor, pretty house!" she mused. "My first, you know," she said in an
+undertone to Julien. "Ah, well, courage, as you say!"
+
+"But you are very well here."
+
+"True, but this isn't my vocation. I shall start again elsewhere. And
+Verdun itself, Mademoiselle, can one live in it?"
+
+"No, not yet. Perhaps never."
+
+"Well, well...."
+
+"Madame, we must move on again," interrupted Julien. "We have a long way
+to go before night."
+
+The woman rose, and turning to a drawer, pulled out a heap of soiled
+papers, bills and letters. "Wait," she said, "wait an instant!"
+
+Turning them over she sought and found a couple of old sheets pinned
+together, and unpinning them she handed one to Fanny.
+
+"It is the receipt for the cream," she said, "that I want to give you.
+It is a good cream though I left the pot behind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun sank and the forests around Chantilly grew vague and deep. White
+statues stood by the roadside, and among the trees chateaux with closed
+eyes slept through the winter. Every tree hung down beneath its load of
+snow; the telephone wires drooped like worsted threads across the road.
+
+Fanny, who had left Julien at his new billets in Chantilly, drove on
+alone to the little village on the Oise which was to be her home. It was
+not long before she could make out the posts and signals of the railway
+on her left, and the river appeared in a broad band below her. The moon
+rose, and in the river the reeds hung head downwards, staring up at the
+living reeds upon the bank.
+
+"PRECY."
+
+It gleamed upon a signpost, and turning down a lane on the left she came
+on a handful of unlighted cottages, and beyond them a single village
+street, soundless and asleep. A chemist's shop full of coloured glasses
+was lit from within by a single candle; upon the step the chemist stood,
+a skull cap above his large, pitted face.
+
+Somewhere in the shuttered village a roof already sheltered her
+companions, but before looking for them she drew up and gazed out beyond
+the river and the railway line to where the moon was slowly lighting
+hill after hill. But the spectral summer town which she sought was
+veiled in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+PRECY-SUR-OISE
+
+The light of dawn touched Paris, the wastes of snow surrounding her,
+forests, villages scattered in the forest and plains around Senlis,
+Chantilly, Boran, Précy. The dark receded in the west; in the east a
+green light spread upwards from the horizon, touched the banks of the
+black Oise, the roofs of the houses of Précy, the dark window panes, and
+the flanks of the granite piers that stood beheaded in the water--all
+that was left of the great bridge that had crossed from bank to bank.
+
+Above the river stood the station hut and the wooden gates of the level
+crossing, upon which the night lantern still hung; above again a strip
+of snow divided the railway line from the road, at the other side of
+whose stone wall the village itself began, and stretched backwards up
+a hill.
+
+Upon a patch of snow above the river and below the road stood a
+flourishing little house covered with gables and turrets; and odd shapes
+like the newel-posts of staircases climbed unexpectedly about the roof.
+In summer, fresh with paint, the outside of the house must wave its
+vulgar little hands into the sky, but now, everything that bristled upon
+it served only as a fresh support for the snow which hung in deep
+drifts on its roof, and around its balconied windows. It stood in its
+own symmetrical walled garden, like a cup in a deep saucer, and within
+the wall a variety of humps and hillocks showed where the bushes
+crouched beneath their unusual blanket. One window, facing towards the
+railway and the river, had no balcony clinging to its stonework, and in
+the dark room behind it the light of the dawn pressed faintly between
+the undrawn curtains. A figure stirred upon the bed within, and Fanny,
+not clearly aware whether she had slept or not, longed to search the
+room for some heavier covering which, warming her, would let her sink
+into unconsciousness. Her slowly gathering wits, together with the
+nagging cold, forced her at last from the high bed on to the floor, and
+she crossed the room towards the light. In the walled garden below
+strange lights of dawn played, red, green and amber, like a crop of
+flowers. The railway lines beyond the garden wall disappeared in fiery
+bands north and south, lights flashed down from the sky above and winked
+in the black and polished river; at the limit of the white plain beyond,
+a window caught the sun and turned its burning-glass upon the snow.
+
+"Chantilly...." A word like the dawn, filled with light and the promise
+of light! Turning back into the dim room, she flung her coat upon the
+bed, climbed in and fell asleep. Three hours later something pressed
+against her bed and she opened her eyes again. The room was fresh with
+daylight, and Stewart standing beside her carried a rug on her arm and
+wore a coat over her nightgown. "I'm coming down to have chocolate in
+your room...."
+
+Fanny watched her. Stewart climbed up beside her wrapped in the rug. A
+knock at the door heralded the entry of a woman carrying a tray. Fanny
+watched her too, and saw that she was fresh, smiling, clean and big, and
+that steam flew up in puffs from the tray she carried. The woman pulled
+a little table towards the bed and set the tray on it.
+
+"This is Madame Boujan!" said Stewart's voice.
+
+Fanny tried to smile and say "Good morning," and succeeded. She was not
+awake but knew she was in clover. The cups holding the steaming
+chocolate were as large as bowls, and painted cherries and leaves
+glistened beneath their lustre surface. Beside the cups was a plate with
+rolls, four rolls; and there were knives and two big pots which must be
+butter and jam.
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+Fanny rolled nearer to the chocolate, sniffed it and pulled herself up
+in bed. The woman, still smiling beside them, turned and hunted among
+the clothes upon the chair; then held a jersey towards her shoulders and
+guided her arms into its sleeves. Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other
+similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery
+wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of
+a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned figure as this,
+by a smile on just such a pink face; or wakings after illness when her
+freshening life had leapt in her at the sound of a blind drawn up, at
+the sight of the white-cuffed hand that pulled the cord.
+
+Oh, heavenly woman, who stood beside the tray, who fed her and warmed
+her while she was yet weak and babyish from sleep! Beyond her the white
+plains of beauty shone outside the window.... She sat up and smiled:
+"I'm awake," she said.
+
+And Madame Boujan, having seen that her feet were set upon the threshold
+of day, went out of the door and closed it softly.
+
+They held the lustre bowls cupped in their hands and sipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During lunch in the little villa, while they were all recounting their
+experiences, Madame Boujan came softly to Fanny's side and whispered:
+
+"A soldier has brought you a note from Chantilly."
+
+"Keep it for me in the kitchen," Fanny answered, under her breath,
+helping herself to potatoes.
+
+"Will you come and cut wood for the bedroom fire?" said Stewart, when
+lunch was over. "I bought a hatchet in the village this morning."
+
+"Come down by the river first," insisted Fanny, who had her note in her
+hand.
+
+"Why? And it gets dark so soon!"
+
+"I want to find a boat."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To cross the river."
+
+"To cross the river! Do you want to see what's on the other side?"
+
+"Julien will be on the other side.... I have had a letter from him. I am
+to dine in Chantilly. He will send a car at seven to wait for me in the
+fields at the other side of the broken bridge, and trusts to me to find
+a boat. Come over the level crossing to the river."
+
+They passed the station hut and came to a little landing stage near
+which a boat was tied.
+
+"There's a boat," said Stewart. "Shall we ask at that hut?"
+
+The wooden hut stood above their heads on a pedestal of stone; from its
+side the haunch of the stone bridge sprang away into the air, but
+stopped abruptly where it had been broken off. The hut, once perhaps a
+toll-house, was on a level with what had been the height of the bridge,
+and now it could be reached by stone steps which wound up to a small
+platform in front of the door. From within came men's voices singing.
+
+"Look in here!"
+
+A flickering light issued from a small window, and having climbed the
+steps they could see inside. Two boys, about sixteen, a soldier and an
+old man, sat round a table beneath a hanging lamp, and sang from scraps
+of paper which they held in their hands. Behind the old man a girl stood
+cleaning a cup with a cloth.
+
+"They are practising something. Knock!"
+
+But there was no need, for a dog chained in a barrel close to them set
+up a wild barking.
+
+"Is he chained? Keep this side. The old man is coming."
+
+The door opened. The voices ceased; the girl stood by the old man's
+side.
+
+"Yes, it could be arranged. People still crossed that way; their boat
+was a sort of ferry and there was a charge.
+
+"There might be a little fog to-night, but it didn't matter. Margot
+knows the way across blindfold--Margot would row the lady. She would be
+waiting with a lantern at five minutes to seven; and again at half-past
+nine. Not too late at all! But Margot would not wait on the other side,
+it was too cold. They would lend the lady a whistle, and she must blow
+on it from the far bank."
+
+"There's romance!" said Fanny, as they came away.
+
+"Not if you are caught."
+
+"There's my magic luck!"
+
+"How dare you ask like that? Even if you are not superstitious, even if
+you don't believe a word of it, why be so defiant--why not set the
+signs right!"
+
+"Oh, my dear Stewart, I hardly care! And to the creature who doesn't
+care no suspicion clings. Haven't I an honest face? Would you think it
+was me, me, of all the Section, to cross the river to-night, in a little
+boat with a lantern, to creep out of the house, out of the village, to
+dine forbidden in Chantilly, with some one who enchants me! You
+wouldn't. Why, do you know, if I lived up in their house, under their
+eyes, I would go out just the same, to cross the river. I wouldn't climb
+by windows or invent a wild tale to soothe them, but open the door and
+shut the door, and be gone. And would anybody say: 'Where's Fanny?'"
+
+"They might."
+
+"They might. But they would answer their own question: 'Innocently
+sleeping. Innocently working. Innocently darning, reading, writing.'
+I don't suspect myself so why should any one else suspect me!"
+
+Fanny broke off and laughed.
+
+"Come along and cut wood!"
+
+They moved off into the woods as people with not a care in the world,
+and coming upon a snow-covered stack of great logs which had been piled
+by some one else, began to steal one or two and drag them away into a
+deep woodland drive where they could cut them up without fear of
+being noticed.
+
+They worked on for an hour, and then Stewart drew a packet of cake from
+her coat pocket, and sitting upon the logs they had their tea.
+
+Soon Fanny, wringing her hands, cried:
+
+"I'm blue again, stiff again, letting the cold in, letting the snow
+gnaw. Where's the hatchet?"
+
+For a time she chopped and hacked, and Stewart, shepherding the
+splinters which flew into the snow, piled them--splinters, most precious
+of all--_petit bois_ to set a fire alight; and the afternoon grew bluer,
+deeper. Stewart worked in a reverie--Fanny in a heat of expectation. One
+mused reposedly on life--the other warmly of the immediate hours
+before her.
+
+"Now I'm going to fetch the car," said Stewart at last. "Will you stay
+here and go on cutting till I come? There are two more logs."
+
+She walked away up the drive, and Fanny picked the hatchet out of the
+snow and started on the leathery, damp end of a fresh log. It would not
+split, the tapping marred the white silence, and yet again she let the
+hatchet fall and sat down on the log instead. It was nearly six--they
+had spent the whole afternoon splitting up the logs, and making a fine
+pile of short pieces for firewood; the forest was darkening rapidly,
+blue deepened above the trees to indigo, and black settled among the
+trunks. Only the snow sent up its everlasting shine. Her thoughts fell
+and rose. Now they were upon the ground busy with a multitude of small
+gleams and sparkles--now they were up and away through the forest
+tunnels to Chantilly. What would he say first? How look when he met her?
+
+"Ah, I am a silly woman in a fever! Yet happy--for I see beauty in
+everything, in the world, upon strange faces, in nights and days. Upon
+what passes behind the glassy eyes" (she pressed her own) "depends
+sight, or no sight. There is a life within life, and only I" (she
+thought arrogantly, her peopled world bounded by her companions) "am
+living in it. We are afraid, we are ashamed, but when one dares talk of
+this strange ecstasy, other people nod their heads and say: 'Ah, yes, we
+know about that! They are in love.' And they smile. But what a
+convention--tradition--that smile!"
+
+There was no sound in the forest at all--not the cry of a bird, not the
+rustle of snow falling from a branch--but there was something deeper and
+remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the
+face of the forest--an effective silence which was not blankness--a
+voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his
+place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of
+receiving a guest.
+
+"Oh, what wretched earnest I am in," she thought, suddenly chilled. "And
+it can only have one end--parting." But she had a power to evade these
+moods. She could slip round them and say to herself: "I am old enough--I
+have learnt again and again--that there is only one joy--the Present;
+only one Perfection--the Present. If I look into the future it is lost."
+
+She heard the returning car far up the forest drive, and in a moment saw
+the gleam of its two lamps as they rocked and swayed. It drew up, and
+Stewart put out the lamps, ever remembering that their logs were stolen.
+There was still light enough by which they could pack the car with wood.
+As they finished Stewart caught her arm: "Look, a fire!" she said,
+pointing into the forest. Through a gap in the trees they could see a
+red glow which burst up over the horizon.
+
+"And look behind the trees--the whole sky is illumined--What a fire!" As
+they watched, the glare grew stronger and brighter, and seemed about to
+lift the very tongue of its flame over the horizon.
+
+"It's the moon!" they cried together.
+
+The cold moon it was who had come up red and angry from some Olympic
+quarrel and hung like a copper fire behind the forest branches. Up and
+up she sailed, but paling as she rose from red to orange, from orange to
+the yellow of hay; and at yellow she remained, when the last branch had
+dropped past her face of light, and she was drifting in the height
+of the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE INN
+
+They drove back to the village and down to their isolated villa, and
+here on the road they passed ones and twos of the Section walking
+into supper.
+
+"How little we have thought out your evasion!" whispered Stewart at the
+wheel, as they drew up at the door: "Get out, and go and dress. I will
+take the car up to the garage and come back."
+
+Fanny slipped in through the garden. What they called "dressing" was a
+clean skirt and silk stockings--but silk stockings she dared not put on
+before her brief appearance at supper. Stuffing the little roll into her
+pocket she determined to change her stockings on the boat.
+
+Soon, before supper was ended, she had risen from the table,
+unquestioned by the others, had paused a moment to meet Stewart's eye
+full of mystery and blessing, had closed the door and was gone.
+
+She slipped down the road and across the field to the railway. There was
+a train standing, glowing and breathing upon the lines, and the driver
+called to her as she ran round the buffers of the engine. Soon she was
+down by the riverside and looking for Margot. Though there was moonlight
+far above her the river banks were wrapped in fog that smelt of water,
+and Margot's face at the hut window was white, and her wool dress white,
+too. She came down and they rowed out into the fog, in an upward circle
+because of the stream. Fanny could just see her companion's little blunt
+boots, the stretched laces across her instep, and above, her pretty face
+and slant eyes. Hurriedly, in the boat she pulled off the thick stockings,
+rolled them up, and drew on the silk. A chill struck her feet. She wrapped
+the ends of her coat lightly round her knees and as she did so the roll
+of thick stockings sprang out of her lap and fell overboard into the fog
+and the river.
+
+"Mademoiselle goes to a party?" said Margot, who had not noticed. The
+soft sympathetic voice was as full of blessing as Stewart's eyes had
+been.
+
+"Yes, to a party. And you will fetch me back to-night when I whistle?"
+
+"Yes. Blow three times, for sometimes in the singing at home I lose the
+sound."
+
+The opposite bank seemed to drift in under the motionless boat, and she
+sprang out.
+
+"A tout à l'heure, mademoiselle."
+
+At the top of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker
+on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious
+eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up
+the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by
+Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed
+along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched form of
+a tree.
+
+Strange that the fog should reach so much further inland on this side of
+the river. Perhaps the ground was lower. Standing still her ear caught a
+rich, high, throaty sound, a choking complaint which travelled in the air.
+
+"It is the car," she thought. Far away a patch of light floated in the
+sky, like an uprooted searchlight.
+
+"That is the fog, bending the headlights upward."
+
+She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew
+nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky
+and pierced her--she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.
+
+Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red,
+wooden face like a Hindoo god made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said:
+"We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed
+car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.
+
+"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop
+a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly
+and the street is very full."
+
+"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."
+
+Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted
+this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt
+antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both
+with his cynical impassivity.
+
+"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from
+Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!
+
+In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug--her expectations closing,
+unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the glass of the car
+and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man
+could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of
+the Grand Condé. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty
+car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of
+the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as
+the car stopped.
+
+"Now mademoiselle!"
+
+And there stood Julien, at the end of the passage, he whom she had left,
+sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She
+saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited,
+he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.
+
+"Fanny, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous êtes en beauté!"
+
+Within, a table was laid for three--three chairs, three plates, three
+covers. He saw her looking at this.
+
+"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.
+My old friend--Where is Alfred?"
+
+"I am here."
+
+"My old friend--four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.
+He has heard--"
+
+("----Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend;
+he is against me!")
+
+"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand.
+She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he
+beheld it too.
+
+"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But
+he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.
+
+"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to
+the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I
+am not allowed."
+
+The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little
+eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has
+made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly
+decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man,
+how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him.
+Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said,
+and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not
+perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk,
+Fanny, talk, Fanny, you have an audience. To-night you have two to
+dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might
+as easily dazzle a mahogany god, a little god alive beneath its casing
+with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined
+to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe
+her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should
+she want to be praised, she had it from his eye--or be assured of love,
+it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of
+Alfred, he could put nothing into words--because he must be dumb she
+could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.
+
+She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an
+addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk
+with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.
+
+When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back
+with the car in half an hour, to take Fanny to the river.
+
+"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.
+Fanny said she would. "And _do_ you like him?" Fanny said she did.
+
+"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time
+through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."
+
+"Did she treat him badly?"
+
+"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"
+
+"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.
+
+"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over
+life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her
+was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never
+still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and
+carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the
+horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated
+upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him
+this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat
+beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had
+been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan-
+Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage
+into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and
+coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared,
+and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note
+for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the
+roses, she never has written one since."
+
+"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"
+
+"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was
+distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.
+He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next
+morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't
+be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country
+where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself,
+'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later
+in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing
+all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and
+the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had
+taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the
+remaining horse."
+
+"It was then he grew cool about women!"
+
+"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who
+insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not
+understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'
+
+"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
+'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
+What shall I do?'
+
+'Why _shouldn't_ you marry her?' I said.
+
+And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that
+he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he
+said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much.
+You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'
+
+"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the
+girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as
+tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of
+courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her
+alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl
+herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her
+to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the
+house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and
+then to England."
+
+"But why did the girl--?"
+
+"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to
+anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct,
+but it was inexplicable."
+
+"He should have asked her twice."
+
+"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused
+him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was
+a whim."
+
+"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest
+run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we
+are flawed?"
+
+"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in
+women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold
+he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a
+creature half-lunatic, half-snake."
+
+"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"
+
+"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of
+putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much
+heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says
+is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."
+
+"But--(alas, poor Alfred)--you have made a charming confidante for us!"
+
+"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"To anything, to any one I care for."
+
+"Not to me. What you have told me is the key to his expression when he
+looks at me. If he is devoted to you it is not an unreasoning devotion,
+and he is judging me poisonous to you. As he has himself been hurt, he
+will not have you hurt. I wish he had never come. I wish he might never
+be my driver to the river, and your friend, and our enemy."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"I wish it. I am unhappy about him, and unhappiness is always punished.
+While we were in Metz every one smiled at us; here every one will spy
+us out, scold, frown, punish--"
+
+"And your magic luck?"
+
+"Alfred threatens my luck," she said. Then, with another look, "Are you
+angry with me? Can you love such a character?"
+
+"I love it now."
+
+"You have never heard me when I scold, or cry or am sulky?..."
+
+"Never."
+
+"But if I make the experiment?"
+
+"I could make a hundred experiments, but I make none of them. We cannot
+know what to-morrow may bring."
+
+This she remembered suddenly with all her heart.
+
+"Come nearer to me, Fanny. Why are you sitting so far away?"
+
+She sat down nearer to him; she put all her fingers tightly round his
+wrist.
+
+"I am not always sure that you are there, Julien; that you exist."
+
+"Yet I am substantial enough."
+
+"No, you are most phantom-like. It is the thought of parting that checks
+my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the
+thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with;
+that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in
+me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it,
+steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short
+a time. I have had nothing but pleasure from you; isn't it possible that
+I can escape without pain?"
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"No, no, no!" She laid her cheek upon his hand. "Do something to make it
+easier. Must it be that when you go you go completely? Promise me at
+least that it will be gradual, that you will try to see me when you have
+taken up your other life."
+
+"But if I can't? If you are ordered back to Metz?"
+
+"Why should I be? But, if I am, promise me that you will try. If it is
+only an artifice, beguile me with it; I will believe in any promise."
+
+"You don't need to ask me to promise; you know you don't need to make me
+promise. Wherever you are sent I will try to come. _Wherever_--do you
+hear? Do you think that that 'other' life is a dragon to eat me up? That
+it will be such bliss to me that I shall forget you completely? It isn't
+to be bliss, but work, hard work, and competition. It is the work that
+will keep me to Paris, not my happiness, my gaiety, my content with
+other faces. That would comfort me if I were listener, and you the
+speaker. But, Fanny, Fanny, I never met any one with such joy as you--it
+is you who change the forest and the inns we meet in, make the journeys
+a miracle. Don't show me another face. We have been in love without a
+cloud, without scenes, without tears. You have laughed at everything.
+Don't change, don't show me someone whom I don't know; _not that
+sad face_!"
+
+"This then!" She held up a face in whose eyes and smile was the hasty
+radiance his fervour had brought her--and at sight of it the words broke
+from him--"Are you happy so quickly?"
+
+"Yes, yes, already happy."
+
+"Because I speak aloud of what I feel? What a doubting heart you have
+within you! And I believe you only pretend to distress yourself, that
+you may test whether I am sensitive enough to show the reflection of it.
+Come! Well--am I right?"
+
+"Partly. But I need not think. Oh, I am glad your feeling is so like
+mine, and mine like yours! I will let the parting take care of itself
+--yet there is one thing about which I cannot tell. What does your
+heart do in absence, what kind of man are you when there is no one but
+Alfred, who will say: 'Forget her'?"
+
+"What kind do you think?"
+
+"While I am here beside you, you cannot even imagine how dim I might
+become. Can I tell? Can you assure me?"
+
+Dim she might become to him, but dim she was not now as she besought him
+with eyes that showed a quick and eager heart, eyes fixed on his face
+full of enquiry, sure of its answer, feigning doubt that did not
+distress her.
+
+"And I to you, and I to you?" he said, speaking in her ear when he had
+made her an answer. "Dim, too? Why do we never talk of your inconstancy?
+We must discuss it."
+
+"Inconstancy! That word had not occurred to me. It was _your_
+forgetfulness that I dreaded."
+
+"I shall not be unforgetful until I am inconstant."
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"My love!"
+
+"You can afford to tease me now you have me in such a mood!"
+
+"In such a mood! Have I, indeed? Yet you will forget me before I forget
+you."
+
+"You tell me to my face that I shall change?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. And since you are bound to forget me, I insist at least that there
+shall be a reason for doing so. I would rather be a king dethroned than
+allowed to lapse like a poor idiot."
+
+"You would? You can say that?" Her voice rose.
+
+"One instant, Fanny. Even when my teasing is out of taste, learn to
+distinguish it from what I say in earnest. My dear, my dear, why should
+you have to listen to the matter of _my_ philosophy and _my_ experience
+which tells me all creatures forget and are forgotten! No! I wipe out!
+You will not vanish--"
+
+The door opened and Alfred entered the room.
+
+"The car is ready," he said. "I have had trouble in getting here."
+
+Fanny turned to him. "I am ready," she said. "It is dreadful to have to
+trouble you to take me so late at night to the river."
+
+"No, no--" Alfred, glowing from the exercise in the snowy night outside,
+was inclined to be more friendly, or at least less sparing of his words.
+"Here are some letters that were at your lodging." He handed three
+to Julien.
+
+"When do you dine with me again?" Julien, holding the letters, placed
+his hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"I cannot tell what the work will be. Perhaps little, as the snow is
+deep."
+
+"It is snowing again outside," said Alfred.
+
+"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."
+
+"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.
+I will send you a note, Fanny."
+
+"That is quite easy, is it?"
+
+"Easy. But compromising."
+
+"Oh, surely--not very?"
+
+"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But
+he will find a way to send it."
+
+Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are
+going?" as though it distressed him.
+
+"I must."
+
+"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here--"
+
+He found it.
+
+"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper
+with the final date. I will look--"
+
+"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the passage. "It is
+snowing wildly."
+
+"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large
+unfolded document.
+
+"When, when--?" Fanny, hanging on his words, watched him.
+
+"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"
+
+"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the
+paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say--ah, wait,
+did I register at Charleville or Paris?"
+
+"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."
+
+"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges
+of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.
+
+"Fanny, it has come sooner than I expected."
+
+She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.
+
+"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her
+in a minute."
+
+"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany god, grown wooden again
+under the light, and retreated.
+
+"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those
+days I didn't know you--"
+
+"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me--only tell me _which_ day!
+To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.
+
+"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better
+than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before
+me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. Fanny,
+it is only a change, not a parting!"
+
+Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!
+Julien, bring her!"
+
+"One instant. She is coming. Fanny, I must think it out. Until I go--I
+shall have time--we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I
+must come often to see my land and my factory."
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Often, I must--"
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"
+
+"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is
+absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."
+
+"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry,
+good-night, good-night!"
+
+She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he
+pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"
+
+At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed
+her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and
+the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE RIVER
+
+The indifferent Alfred drove his unhappy burden towards the river.
+Walled in by the rush of snowflakes about him he made what way he could,
+but it was well-nigh impossible to see. The lamps gave no light, for the
+flakes had built a shutter across the glass like a policeman's dark
+lantern. The flying multitudes in the air turned him dizzy; he could not
+tell upon which side of the road he drove, and he could not tell what he
+would do when the wall beyond the outskirts of Chantilly forsook him. As
+to what was happening below him, what ruts, ditches, pits or hillocks he
+was navigating, he had no idea; his ship was afloat upon the snow,
+sluggishly rolling and heaving as it met with soft, mysterious
+obstacles.
+
+Heaviness and gloom sat upon the velvet seat behind him. The white, wild
+night outside was playful and waggish compared with the black dejection
+behind the opaque glass windows.
+
+Fanny, who could not see her hand move in the darkness, saw clearly with
+other miserable and roving eyes the road that lay before her.
+
+"Julien, good-bye. Don't forget me!" That she would say to him in a few
+days; that was the gate, the black portal which would lead her into the
+road. That she would say, with entreaty, yet no painful tones of hers
+would represent enough the entreaty of her heart that _neither would
+forget the other_. She thought of this.
+
+Not in wilful unreason, or in disbelief of his promise, she looked at
+this parting as though it might be final. Without him she could see no
+charm ahead. And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner
+she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this
+enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work
+upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving
+comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.
+
+Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently
+employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of
+Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide,
+second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter
+storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the
+forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him
+with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the
+illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung
+on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He
+turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the
+centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night
+was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the
+most resolved and native traveller.
+
+He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are
+filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself
+wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or
+melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the
+true road from the false. He chose a road which instantly he saw to be
+no road. Too late. He pitched, this time not to recover. "A river--a
+river-bed!" was his horrified thought. Down went the nose of the car
+before him, the steering-wheel hitting him in the chest. Down came Fanny
+and all her black thoughts against the glass at his back. The car had
+not fallen very far; it had slid forward into a snow-lined dyke, and
+remained, resting on its radiator, its front wheels thrust into the
+steep walls of the bank, its back wheels in the air. Alfred climbed down
+from a seat which had lost its seating power; Fanny opened the door and
+stepped from the black interior into the deep snow. The front lamps were
+extinguished and buried in the opposite bank, the little red light at
+the back shone upwards to heaven.
+
+"Well--"
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Are you hurt?"
+
+"Not at all. And you?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+Their cold relations did not seem one whit changed from what they had
+been in the inn. Nothing had intervened but a little reflection, a
+little effort, and a vigorous jerk. Why should they change? They stood
+side by side in the noisy violence of the storm, and one shouted to the
+other: "Can you get her out!" and the other answered, "No."
+
+"I will walk on to the river."
+
+"You would never find it."
+
+The truth of this she saw as she looked round.
+
+Alfred left her and descending into the dyke, went on his knees by the
+radiator and fumbled deep in the snow with his hand. A hissing arose as
+the heated water ran from the tap he had turned. He emptied the water
+from the generator; the tail light sank and went out.
+
+"No one will run into her," he remarked. "No one will pass."
+
+Aie--screamed the wind and created a pillar of white powder. Fanny,
+losing her balance, one foot sank on the edge of a rut, and she went
+down on her hands; to the knees her silk-clad legs met the cold bite
+of the snow.
+
+"You must come back with me," shouted Alfred in her ear.
+
+That seemed true and necessary; she could not reach the river; she could
+not stay where she was. She followed him. At the next ditch he put out
+his hand and helped her across. They had no lamp. By the light of the
+snow she watched his blue-clad legs as they sank and rose; her own
+sinking and rising in the holes he left for her, the buffets of wind
+un-steadying her at every step. She followed him. And because she was as
+green as a green bough which bursts into leaf around a wound, the
+disturbing, the exciting menace of her discovery brightened her heart,
+set her mind whirling, and overgrew her dejection.
+
+They gained the Chantilly wall, and experienced at once its protection.
+The howling wind passed overhead and left them in a lew; the dancing
+snowflakes steadied and dropped more like rain upon them; she moved up
+abreast of Alfred.
+
+"I will take you back to the inn," he said. "They will have a room
+there."
+
+"Julien will have left and gone to his lodging."
+
+"Yes, at the other end of the town," answered Alfred, she fancied with
+grim satisfaction. ("Though it is as well," she thought; "there will be
+less scandal in the eyes of the innkeeper.")
+
+"To-morrow morning, mademoiselle, I will fetch you at six with another
+car and its driver, Foss, a man whom I can trust. We will take you to
+the river, and on the return journey drag the car from the ditch. It
+should be easy; she has not heeled over on her side."
+
+"That will be marvellous. I cannot tell you how I apologise."
+
+This, she began to see, was serious; her debt to the enemy Alfred was
+growing hourly.
+
+"No, no," he said, as though he saw the thing in the light of common
+justice. "You have come over to dine with Julien; we must get you back
+to the river."
+
+"Nevertheless it's monstrous," she thought, "what he has to do for me."
+
+But Alfred regarded it less as a friendly office towards Julien than as
+a duty, an order given by an officer. He was a sergeant, and four years
+of war had changed him from an irritable and independent friend to a
+dogged and careful subordinate. He did not like Fanny any the more for
+the trouble she was giving him; but he did not hold her responsible for
+his discomforts. She must be got to the river and to the river he
+would get her.
+
+Pray heaven she never crossed it again.
+
+When they arrived on the pavement outside the inn, he said: "Knock,
+mademoiselle, and ask if there is a room. It would be better that I
+should not be seen. Explain that the snow prevented you from returning.
+If there is a room do not come back to tell me, I shall watch you enter,
+and fetch you at six in the morning."
+
+She thanked him again, and following his instructions, found herself
+presently in a small room under the eaves--pitied by the innkeeper's
+wife, given a hot brick wrapped in flannel by the innkeeper's daughter,
+warmed and cheered and, in a very short time, asleep. At half-past five
+she was called, dressed herself, and drank a cup of coffee; paying a
+fabulous bill which included two francs for the hot brick.
+
+At six came Alfred, in another car, seated beside Foss, the new driver,
+a pale man with a grave face. They moved off in the grey dawn which
+brightened as they drove. Beyond the Chantilly wall the plain stretched,
+and on it the labouring wheel-marks of the night before were plainly
+marked. Alfred, beside the driver, let down a pane of glass to tell her
+that he had already been out with Foss and towed in the other car. She
+saw the ditch into which they had sunk, the scrambled marks upon the
+bank where she had been towed out. In ten minutes they were in the midst
+of the forest.
+
+Now, Fate the bully, punishing the unlucky, tripping up the hurried,
+stepped in again. This car, which had been seized in a hurry by cold and
+yawning men, was not as she should be.
+
+"Is she oiled?" Foss had called to the real driver of the car.
+
+"She is ... everything!" answered the man, in a hurry, going off to his
+coffee. She was not.
+
+Just as the approaching sun began to clear the air, just as with a
+spring at her heart Fanny felt that to be present at the opening of a
+fine day was worth all the trouble in the world, the engine began to
+knock. She saw Foss's head tilt a little sideways, like a keen dog who
+is listening. The knock increased. The engine laboured, a grinding set
+in; Foss pulled up at the side of the road and muttered to Alfred. He
+opened the bonnet, stared a second, then tried the starting handle. It
+would not move. Fanny let down the pane of glass and watched them in
+silence. "Not a drop," said Foss's low voice. And later, "Oil, yes,
+but--find me the tin!"
+
+"Do you mean there is no oil, no spare oil--" Alfred hunted vainly round
+the car, under the seats, in the tool box. There was no tin of oil.
+
+"If I had some oil," said Foss, "and if I let her cool a little, I could
+manage--with a syringe."
+
+They consulted together. Alfred nodded, and approached the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I am going on to the next village to get a tin
+of oil. There is a garage. Cars will be passing soon; I must ask you to
+lie covered with the rug in the bottom of the car; your uniform is very
+visible. Foss will remain with you."
+
+Fanny lay down in the bottom of the car, fitting her legs among a couple
+of empty petrol tins; Foss covered her with the rug. A quarter of an
+hour went by, and above her she began to hear the voices of birds; below
+her the cold crept up. She had no idea how far the village might be, and
+it is possible that Alfred had had no idea either. A bicycle bell rang
+at her side; later she heard the noise of a car, which passed her with
+a rush. Lying with her ear so close to the poor body of the motor she
+felt it to be but cold bones in a cemetery, dead, dead.
+
+Outside in the road, Foss shaded his eyes and looked up the now sparkling
+road a hundred times. The motors increased; the morning traffic between
+Précy and Chantilly awoke; the cars were going in to the offices of the
+G.Q.G. Now and then Foss would come to the window of the car. "Don't
+move," he would say. The floor-boards were rattled by an icy wind that
+blew over the face of the snow and up under the car; the brown, silk legs
+lay prone and stiff between the petrol cans, lifeless now to the knee.
+She was seized with fits of violent shivering. At one moment she had
+planned in her despair to call to Foss and tell him she would walk--but
+she had let the moment pass and now she put away the thought of walking
+on those lifeless feet. Besides, she would be seen--that well-known cap,
+bobbing back between the trees from Chantilly so early in the morning!
+
+"Oh, Honour of the Section, I am guarding you like my life!" She tried
+to raise her head a little to ease her neck.
+
+"Don't move," said Foss.
+
+Feet pattered past her; motors swept by; bicycle bells rang.
+
+"Foss," she said.
+
+The soldier leant towards her and listened.
+
+"Choose your own time, but you must let me sit up a moment. I am in
+pain."
+
+"Then, now, mademoiselle!"
+
+She sat up, flinging the rug back, dazzled by the splendour of the
+forest, the climbing sun, the heavy-burdened trees. Behind her was a
+cart coming up slowly; far ahead a cyclist swayed in the ruts of the
+road. As they approached her she pleaded: "They can't know me! Let
+me sit up--"
+
+But Foss knew only one master, his sergeant.
+
+"Better go down, mademoiselle."
+
+She went down again under the black rug, close against the wind that
+lifted the floor-boards, wrapping her coat more tightly round her,
+folding her arms about her knees.
+
+"It must be nearly eight. I have an hour more before they come in to
+breakfast. Ah, and when they do, will one of them go into my bedroom
+with my letters?"
+
+She tried to pick out in her mind that one most friendly to her, that
+one who was to destroy her. She heard in spirit her cry: "Fanny
+_isn't there!_"
+
+She thought of Stewart who would have woken early, planning anxiously to
+save her. The faces of the Guardians of the Honour of the Section began
+to visit her one by one, and horror spread in her. Then, pushing them
+from her, attempting to escape: "They are not all the world--" But they
+_were_ all the world--if in a strange land they were all to frown
+together. The thought was horrible. Time to get there yet! Alas, that
+the car was not facing _towards_ Chantilly--so early in the morning!
+
+"Foss, Foss, don't you see him coming?"
+
+"The road is full of people."
+
+A car rushed by them, yet never seemed to pass. The engine slowed down
+and a voice called: "What's up? Anything you want?"
+
+It was the voice of Roland Vauclin. Ah, she knew him--that fat, childish
+man, who loved gossip as he loved his food. To Fanny it seemed but a
+question of seconds before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good
+morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village
+spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay
+still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could not hear.
+
+Then she heard him clear his throat and speak.
+
+"The Captain asked me to get a bit of wood for his fire, sir. I have a
+man in there gathering branches, while I do a bit of 'business' with
+the car."
+
+"Oh, right!... Go on!" said Vauclin to his own chauffeur. Again they were
+left alone. Talk between them was almost impossible; Fanny was so
+muffled, Foss so anxiously watched for Alfred. The reedy singing between
+the boards where the wind attacked her occupied all her attention. The
+very core of warmth seemed extinguished in her body, never to be lit
+again. She remembered their last _fourier_, or special body-servant, who
+had gone on leave upon an open truck, and who had grown colder and
+colder--"and he never got warm again and he died, madame," the letter
+from his wife had told them.
+
+"I think he is coming! There is no one else on the road, mademoiselle.
+Will you look? I don't see very well--"
+
+She tried to throw off the rug and sit up, but her frozen elbow slipped
+and she fell again on the floor of the car. Pulling herself up she
+stared with him through the glass. Far up the white road a little figure
+toiled towards them, carrying something, wavering as though the ice-ruts
+were deep, picking its way from side to side. Neither of them was sure
+whether it was Alfred; they watched in silence. Before she knew it was
+upon her a car went by; she dived beneath the rug, striking her forehead
+on the corner of the folding seat.
+
+"Did they see? Was any one inside?"
+
+"It was an empty car. Please be careful."
+
+Foss was cold with rebuke. After that she lay still, isolated even from
+Foss. Ten minutes went by and suddenly Foss spoke--"Did you have to go
+far?"
+
+And Alfred's hard voice answered "Yes."
+
+Then she heard the two men working, tools clattering, murmured voices,
+and in ten minutes Foss said: "Try the starting handle."
+
+She heard the efforts, the labour of Alfred at the handle.
+
+"He will kill himself--he will break a blood-vessel," she thought as she
+listened to him. Every few minutes someone seized the handle and wound
+and wound--as she had never wound in her life--on and on, past the very
+limit of endurance. And under her ear, in the cold bones of the car, not
+a sign of life! Not a sign of life, and, as though she could hear them,
+all the clocks in the world struck nine.
+
+The Guardians of the Honour would be in at breakfast now! they would be
+sitting, sitting--discussing her absence. Stewart, upstairs, would be
+looking out of the window, watching the river, perhaps answering
+questions indifferently with her cool look. "Oh, in the garage--or
+walking in the forest. I don't know." Cough! She jumped as the bones in
+the bottom of the car moved under her, and the engine breathed. The
+noise died out, Foss leapt to the handle and wound and wound, fiercely,
+like a man who meant to make her breathe again or die. Again she
+struggled to life, lived for a few minutes, choked and was silent.
+
+"How is the handle?"
+
+"Pretty stiff," said Foss, "but getting better. Give me the oil squirt."
+
+Alfred took his place at the handle. Suddenly the car sprang to life
+again on a full deep note. Fanny lifted her head a little. Foss was
+leaning over the carburettor with his thin anxious look: Alfred stood
+in the snow, dark red in the face, and covered with oil. Soon they were
+moving along the road, slowly at first, and with difficulty: then faster
+and more freely. A little thin warmth began to creep up through the
+boards and play about her legs.
+
+She was carried along under her dark rug for another twenty minutes,
+then fell against the seat as the car turned sharply into the forsaken
+road that led to the broken bridge. In five minutes more the car had
+stopped and Alfred was at the door saying: "At last, mademoiselle!" She
+stammered her thanks as she tried to step from the car to the ground
+--but fell on her knees on the dashboard.
+
+"Have you hurt your foot?" said Alfred, who was hot.
+
+"I am only cold," she said humbly, unwilling to intrude her puny
+endurances on their gigantic labours.
+
+She sat on the step of the car rubbing her ankles, and stared at the
+meadows of thawing snow, at the open porches of stone which led the road
+straight into the river, at the church and the sunlit houses on the
+other side.
+
+Bidding them good-bye she reached the bank, and climbed down it,
+stumbling in the frozen mud and pits of ice till she reached the stiff
+reeds at the bank.
+
+The river had floes of ice upon it, green ice which swung and caught
+among the reeds at the edge. "It is thin," she thought, pushing her
+shoe through it, "it can't prevent the boat from crossing the river."
+Yet she was anxious.
+
+There on the other side was the little hut, the steps, the boat tied to
+the stone and held rigid in the ice. A shaggy dog ran by her feet to the
+river's edge and barked. Feet came clambering down the bank and a
+workman followed the dog, with a bag of tools and a basket. He walked up
+to the river, and putting his hands in a trumpet to his mouth called in
+a huge voice: "Un passant, Margot! Margot!" Fanny remembered her whistle
+and blew that too.
+
+There was no sign of life, and the little hut looked as before, like a
+brown dog asleep in the sun. Fanny turned to the man, ready to share her
+anxiety with him, but he had sat down on the bank and was retying a
+bootlace that had come undone.
+
+Margot never showed herself at the hut window, at the hut door. When
+Fanny turned back to whistle again she saw her standing up in the boat,
+which, freed, was drifting out towards them--saw her scatter the ice
+with her oar--and the boat, pushed upstream, came drifting down towards
+them in a curve to hit the bank at their feet. The girl stepped out,
+smiling, happy, pretty, undimmed by the habit of trade. The man got in
+and sat down, the dog beside him.
+
+"I would stand," said Margot to Fanny, "it's so wet."
+
+She made no allusion to the broken appointment for the night before.
+Fanny, noticing the dripping boards of the boat, stood up, her hand upon
+Margot's shoulder to steady herself. The thin, illusory ice shivered and
+broke and sank as the oar dipped in sideways.
+
+Cocks were crowing on the other side--the sun drew faint colours from
+the ice, the river clattered at the side of the boat, wind twisted and
+shook her skirt, and stirred her hair. All was forgotten in the glory of
+the passage of the river.
+
+Margot, smiling up under her damp, brown hair, took her five sous,
+pressed her town boots against the wooden bar, and shot the boat up
+against the bank.
+
+Fanny went up the bank, over the railway lines, and out into the road.
+Two hundred yards of road lay before her, leading straight up to the
+house. On the left was a high wall, on the right the common covered with
+snow--should some one come out of the house there was no chance of
+hiding. She glanced down at her tell-tale silk stockings; yet she could
+not hurry on those stiff and painful feet. She was near the door in
+the wall.
+
+She passed in--the dog did not bark; came to the foot of the steps--nobody
+looked out of the window; walked into the hall among their hanging coats
+and macintoshes, touched them, moved them with her shoulder; heard voices
+behind the door of the breakfast room, was on the stairs, up out of sight
+past the first bend, up, up, into Stewart's room.
+
+"_Do you know_...?"
+
+"_No one knows_!"
+
+"Oh ... oh...." All her high nerves came scudding and shuddering down
+into the meadows of content. Eternal luck.... She crept under Stewart's
+eiderdown and shivered.
+
+"Here's the chocolate. I will boil it again on my cooker. Oh, you have
+a sort of ague...."
+
+Good friend ... kind friend! She had pictured her like that, anxious,
+unquestioning and warm!
+
+Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon
+the Guardians of the Honour.
+
+As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes
+of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a
+gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud
+from her hands, her feet.
+
+"Had your breakfast?" said some one.
+
+"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
+
+She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form
+the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds
+of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her.
+Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
+
+But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third
+breakfast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+ALLIES
+
+A thaw set in.
+
+All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks,
+sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered,
+breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise,
+which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under
+its banks.
+
+With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and
+fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the
+dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet,
+and towers of wood.
+
+In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of
+aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a
+paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her
+mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the
+demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the
+familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
+
+She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She
+could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic
+forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but
+closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the
+lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving
+for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
+
+All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the
+villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the
+bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her,
+followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of
+wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a
+thawing forest.
+
+There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a
+bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of
+farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more
+for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly
+was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced
+at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.
+
+She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to
+accompany her on her journey only to turn back.
+
+All the way to Amiens he reassured himself and her: "In a week I will
+come to Charleville."
+
+And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week
+you will come."
+
+(Why then this dread?)
+
+"In a week--in a week," ran the refrain.
+
+"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"
+
+"No, I shall write to the 'Silver Lion.' You will find in the middle of
+the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window
+sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."
+
+"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said
+'Good-bye' to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."
+
+And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not
+contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered
+once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.
+
+"It isn't that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn't that I
+fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."
+
+"I, too, know that."
+
+They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.
+
+The rain poured.
+
+"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is
+mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I
+have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to
+think of that."
+
+"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."
+
+"Yes--oh, you will see it easily--on the banks of the Meuse. I was born
+there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time--I will come, too."
+
+She stopped the car in a side street of the town.
+
+Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed
+them back on the wheel. "They can't," she said, and shook her head.
+
+He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.
+
+"You take the three o'clock train back to Paris when the papers are
+through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh,
+we've said everything! Oh, let's get it over--"
+
+He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
+She drove down the street without looking back.
+
+There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that
+if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from
+her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was
+done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She
+had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she
+felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted
+her all the morning.
+
+She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond
+the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly,
+violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if
+I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
+
+But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in
+trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen
+that violent pain.
+
+She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small
+cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusée. Wherever
+her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within
+her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do
+instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went
+moving off down the street of her endless thought.
+
+"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out
+in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
+She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone
+behind her.
+
+Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
+
+Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were
+gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on
+each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through
+it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards
+ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
+
+Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white
+letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as
+everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins,
+carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
+
+At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
+
+"Will you give me a lift?"
+
+He sat down beside her.
+
+"What do you do?" she asked.
+
+"I look after Chinamen."
+
+"Ah, how lonely!"
+
+"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army
+gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up
+the crumbs."
+
+She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground
+indistinguishable from the rest.
+
+"Is that where you live?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to
+this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a
+friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the
+rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like
+action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving
+ground; passing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.
+
+Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and
+could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron,
+brown grass--brown grass and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway
+lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far
+between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing
+grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of
+five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand
+grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends
+together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood
+erect for miles and miles--when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon!
+Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life
+stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of
+village bones?
+
+She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of
+dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a
+father or mother below--" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up
+into the air; the child was gone.
+
+A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. Fanny held
+out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.
+
+"Have you been here long?" she asked.
+
+"A month, mademoiselle."
+
+"Are there many of you in this--village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of
+bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)
+
+"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."
+
+"But how are you fed?"
+
+"A lorry passes once a week for all the people in this district--within
+fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two
+in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don't come.
+We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got
+water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the
+radiators of other lorries."
+
+"What have you got down there?"
+
+"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still,
+and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can't build
+anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep
+between the ten of us."
+
+"Take my hammer," said Fanny. "I can get another in the garage."
+
+He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of
+recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his
+banner of blue smoke.
+
+Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.
+
+"This _was_ Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads
+ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the
+village--not a brick lay where the signpost stood.
+
+Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered--and suddenly, out
+of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little
+horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.
+
+"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face.
+His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his
+springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the
+tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung
+out beyond the mudguards.
+
+"Dandy car you've got!" he said with envy. "French?"
+
+Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with
+the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round
+in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she
+stood by the signpost in the desert.
+
+Then she took the road to Peronne.
+
+"I won't have my lunch yet--" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch
+had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She
+passed Peronne--uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into
+the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted
+village, oddly untouched by shell or fire. Here the doors swung and
+banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with
+curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.
+
+The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the
+henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.
+
+With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their
+handle spread it on the bread.
+
+"Lord, how lonely it is--surely some door might open, some face look
+out--" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat,
+for a front door slammed and blew back again.
+
+"I couldn't stay here the night--" with a shiver--and the bird on the
+branch sang louder than ever. "It's all very well," she addressed him.
+"You're with your own civilisation. I'm right _out_ of mine!"
+
+The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the
+sky, came down upon the other.
+
+Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village,
+talked a little to him, and set him down.
+
+A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion
+for half an hour.
+
+"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"
+
+"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question,
+when all France meant Julien!)
+
+"Don't you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he
+grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to
+be French!"
+
+"Little Belgium--jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the
+elder woman of the world!"
+
+A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.
+
+"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of
+severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English
+could do this--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."
+
+She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words
+were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that
+theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor
+would she have known how had she wished it.
+
+They passed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green
+bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came,
+and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I'll teach you to
+meddle with my daughter--"
+
+"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning
+from the car to watch.
+
+A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.
+
+"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed
+wire, fenced round with armed sentries.
+
+She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.
+
+"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don't much like
+driving Americans."
+
+"But I am English."
+
+"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the
+French Mission."
+
+"Why don't you like Americans?"
+
+"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"
+
+"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"
+
+"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I
+don't like them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her
+bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"
+
+"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes
+no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion--and each told
+his women tales of the other's shortcomings.
+
+Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of
+the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did
+not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese,
+Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they
+were in amity or enmity.
+
+Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. _There_ the Allies
+walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. _There_
+were no epithets to fling--they had all been flung long ago.
+
+And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as
+souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different
+languages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE ARDENNES
+
+The day wore on--
+
+The sun came lower and nearer, till the half-light ran with her half-
+thought, dropping, sinking, dying. "Guise," said the signpost, and
+a battlement stared down and threw its shadow across her face. "Is that
+where the dukes lived?" She was a speck in the landscape, moving on
+wheels that were none of her invention, covering distances of hundreds
+of miles without amazement, upon a magic mount unknown to her
+forefathers. Dark and light moved across the face of the falling day.
+Sometimes when she lifted her eyes great clouds full of rain were
+crossing the sky; and now, when she looked again the wind had torn them
+to shreds and hunted them away. The shadows lengthened--those of the few
+trees falling in bars across the road. A turn of the road brought the
+setting sun in her face, and blinded with light, she drove into it. When
+it had gone it left rays enough behind to colour everything, gilding the
+road itself, the air, the mists that hung in the ditches.
+
+Before the light was gone she saw the Ardennes forests begin upon her
+left.
+
+When it was gone, wood and road, air and earth, were alike stone-coloured.
+Then the definite night, creeping forward on all sides, painted out all
+but the road and the margin of the road--and with the side lights on all
+vision narrowed down to the grey snout of the bonnet, the two hooped
+mudguards stretched like divers' arms, and the blanched dead leaves which
+floated above from the unseen branches of the trees.
+
+Four crazy Fords were drawn up in one village street, and as her lights
+flashed on the door she caught sight of the word "Café" written on it.
+Placing the Renault beside the Fords she opened the door. Within five
+Frenchmen were drinking at one table, and four Americans at another. The
+Americans sprang up and claimed her, first as their own kin, and then at
+least as a blood sister. They gave her coffee, and would not let her
+pay; but she sat uneasily with them.
+
+"For which nation do you work? There are no English here," they said.
+
+"I am in the French Army."
+
+"Gee, what a rotten job!" they murmured sympathetically.
+
+"Where have you come from?"
+
+"We've just come back from Germany, and you bet it's good up there!"
+
+"Good?"
+
+"Every darn thing you want. Good beds, good food, and, thank God, one
+can speak the lingo."
+
+"You don't speak French then?"
+
+"You bet not."
+
+"Why don't you learn? Mightn't it be useful to you?"
+
+"Useful?"
+
+"Oh, when you get back home. In business perhaps--"
+
+"Ma'am," said the biggest American, leaning earnestly towards her, "let
+me tell you one thing. If any man comes up to me back in the States and
+starts on me with that darn language--I'll drop him one."
+
+"And German is easier?"
+
+"Oh, well, German we learn in the schools, you see. How far do you make
+it to St. Quentin?"
+
+"Are you going there on those Fords?"
+
+"We hope to, ma'am. But we started a convoy of twenty this morning, and
+these here four cars are all we've seen since lunch."
+
+"I hardly think you'll get as far as St. Quentin to-night. And there's
+little enough to sleep in on the way. I should stay here." She rose. "I
+wish you luck. Good-bye."
+
+She thanked them for their coffee, nodded to the quiet French table and
+went out.
+
+One American followed her.
+
+"Can you buzz her round?" he asked kindly, and taking the handle, buzzed
+her round.
+
+"I bet you don't get any one to do that for you in your army, do you?"
+he asked, as he straightened himself from the starting handle. She put
+her gear in with a little bang of anger.
+
+"You're kind," she said, "and they are kind. That you can't see it is
+all a question of language. Every village is full of bored Americans
+with nothing to do, and never one of them buys a dictionary!"
+
+"If it's villages you speak of, ma'am, it isn't dictionaries is needed,"
+he answered, "'tis plumbing!"
+
+She had not left him ten minutes before one of her tyres punctured.
+
+"Alas! I could have found a better use for them than arguing," she
+thought ruefully, regretting the friendly Americans, as she changed the
+tyre by the roadside under the beam from her own lamps.
+
+When it was done she sat for a few minutes in the silent car. The moon
+came up and showed her the battlements of the Ardennes forest standing
+upon the crest of the mountains to her left. "That is to be my home--"
+
+Julien was in Paris by now, divested of his uniform, sitting by a great
+fire, eating civilised food. A strange young man in dark clothes--she
+wondered what he would wear.
+
+He seemed a great many difficult miles away. That he should be in a
+heated room with lights, and flowers, and a spread table--and she under
+the shadow of the forest watching the moon rise, lengthened the miles
+between them; yet though she would have given much to have him with her,
+she would have given nothing to change places with him.
+
+The road left the forest for a time and passed over bare grass hills
+beneath a windy sky. Then back into the forest again, hidden from the
+moon. And here her half-stayed hunger made her fanciful, and she started
+at the noise of a moving bough, blew her horn at nothing, and seemed to
+hear the overtaking hum of a car that never drew near her.
+
+Suddenly, on the left, in a ditch, a dark form appeared, then another
+and another. Down there in a patch of grass below the road she caught
+sight of the upturned wheels of a lorry, and stopping, got down, walked
+to the ditch and looked over. There, in wild disorder, lay thirty or
+forty lorries and cars, burnt, twisted, wheelless, broken, ravaged,
+while on the wooden sides the German eagle, black on white, was marked.
+
+"What--what--can have happened here!"
+
+She climbed back into the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights
+came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and
+die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up
+by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to
+firm land on the other side. Some of the planks were missing, and moving
+carefully around the crater she heard others tip and groan beneath her.
+
+"Could that have been a convoy caught by the mine? Or was it a dumping
+ground for the cars unable to follow in the retreat?"
+
+The mine crater, which was big enough to hold a small villa, was
+overgrown now at the bottom with a little grass and moss.
+
+On and on and on--till she fancied the moon, too, had turned as the sun
+had done, and started a downward course. It grew no colder, she grew no
+hungrier--but losing count of time, slipped on between the flying tree
+trunks, full of unwearied content. At last a light shone through the
+trees, and by a wooden bridge which led over another crater she came on
+a lonely house. "Café" was written on the door, but the shutters were
+tight shut, and only a line of light shone from a crack.
+
+From within came sounds of laughter and men's voices. She knocked, and
+there was an instant silence, but no one came to answer. At length the
+bolts were withdrawn and the head of an old woman appeared through the
+door, which was cautiously opened a little.
+
+"An omelette? Coffee?"
+
+"You don't know what you speak of! We have no eggs."
+
+"Then coffee?"
+
+"No, no, nothing at all. Go on to Charleville. We have nothing."
+
+"How far is Charleville?"
+
+But the door shut again, the bolts were shot, and a man's voice growled
+in the hidden room behind.
+
+"Dubious hole. Yet it looks as though a big town were near----" And down
+the next slope she ran into Charleville. The town had been long abed,
+the street lamps were out, the cobbles wet and shining.
+
+On the main boulevard one dark figure hurried along.
+
+"Which is the 'Silver Lion'?" she called, her voice echoing in the empty
+street.
+
+Soon, between rugs on a bed in the "Silver Lion," between a single sheet
+doubled in two, she slept--propping the lockless door with her suitcase.
+
+The Renault slept or watched below in the courtyard, the moon sank, the
+small hours passed, the day broke, the first day in Charleville.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE STUFFED OWL
+
+A stuffed bird stood upon a windless branch and through a window of blue
+and orange squares of glass a broken moon stared in.
+
+A bedroom, formed from a sitting-room, a basin to wash in upon a red
+plush table--no glass, no jug, no lock upon the door. Instead, gilt
+mirrors, three bell ropes and a barometer. A bed with a mattress upon it
+and nothing more.
+
+This was her kingdom.
+
+Beyond, a town without lights, without a station, without a milkshop,
+without a meat shop, without sheets, without blankets, crockery, cooking
+pans, or locks upon the doors. A population half-fed and poor. A sky
+black as ink and liquid as a river.
+
+Prisoners in the streets, moving in green-coated gangs; prisoners in the
+gutters, pushing long scoops to stay the everlasting tide of mud; thin,
+hungry, fierce and sad, green-coated prisoners like bedraggled parrots,
+out-numbered the population.
+
+The candle of the world was snuffed out--and the wick smoked.
+
+The light was gone--the blinding light of the Chantilly snows, the
+lights on the Précy river--moonlight, sunlight--the little boat
+crossing at moonrise, sunrise.
+
+"Ah, that long journey! How I pressed on, how I fled from Amiens!"
+
+"What, not Charleville yet?" I said. "Isn't it Charleville soon? What
+hurry was there then to get there?"
+
+The stuffed bird eyed her from his unstirring branch, and that yellow
+eye seemed to answer: "None, none..."
+
+"This is his home; his country. He told me it was beautiful. But I
+cannot see beauty. I am empty of happiness. Where is the beauty?"
+
+And the vile bird, winking in the candle's light, replied: "Nowhere."
+
+But he lied.
+
+Perhaps she had been sent, stuffed as he was, from Paris. Perhaps he had
+never flown behind the town, and seen the wild mountains that began at
+the last house on the other bank of the river. Or the river itself,
+greener than any other which flowed over black rocks, in cold gulleys
+--the jade-green Meuse flowing to Dinant, to Namur. Perhaps from his
+interminable boulevard he had never seen the lovely Spanish Square of red
+and yellow, its steep-roofed houses standing upon arches--or the proud
+Duc Charles de Gonzague who strutted for ever upon his pedestal, his
+stone cape slipping from one shoulder, his gay Spaniard's hat upon his
+head--holding back a smile from his handsome lips, lest the town which he
+had come over the mountains to found should see him tolerant and sin
+beneath his gaze.
+
+That bird knew the rain would stop--knew it in his dusty feathers,
+but he would not kindle hope. He knew there was a yellow spring at
+hand--but he left her to mourn for the white lustre of Chantilly.
+Vile bird!... She blew out the candle that he might wink no more.
+
+"To-morrow I will buy a padlock and a key. If among these gilt mirrors I
+can have no other charm, I will have solitude!" And having hung a
+thought, a plan, a hope before her in the future, she slept till day
+broke--the second day in Charleville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke, a mixture of courage and philosophy.
+
+"I can stand anything, and beyond a certain limit misfortune makes me
+laugh. But there's no reason why I should stand this!" The key and
+padlock idea was rejected as a compromise with happiness.
+
+"No, no, let us see if we can get something better to lock up than that
+bird." He looked uncommonly dead by daylight.
+
+"I would rather lock up an empty room, and leave it pure when I must
+leave it!"
+
+Dressing, she went quickly down the street to the Bureau de la Place.
+The clerks and secretaries nodded and smiled at each other, and bent
+their heads over their typewriters when she looked at them.
+
+"Can I see the billeting lieutenant?"
+
+"He is not here."
+
+"I saw him enter."
+
+"We will go and see...."
+
+She drummed upon the table with her fingers and the clerks and
+secretaries winked and nodded more meaningly than ever.
+
+"_Entrez_, mademoiselle. He will see you."
+
+The red-haired lieutenant with pince-nez was upon his feet looking at
+her curiously as she entered the adjoining room.
+
+"Good morning, mademoiselle. There is something wrong with the billet
+that I found you yesterday?"
+
+She looked at him. In his pale-blue eyes there was a beam; in his
+creased mouth there was an upward curve. The story of legitimate
+complaint that she had prepared drooped in her mind; she looked at
+him a little longer, hesitated, then, risking everything:
+
+"Monsieur, there is a stuffed owl in the room."
+
+He did not wince. "Take it out, mademoiselle."
+
+"H'm, yes. I cannot see heaven except through orange glass."
+
+"Open the window."
+
+"It is fixed."
+
+Then he failed her; he was a busy, sensible man.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I find you a billet, I instal you, and you come to me in
+the middle of the morning with this ridiculous story of an owl. It isn't
+reasonable...."
+
+The door opened and his superior officer walked in, a stern captain with
+no crease about his mouth, no beam in his olive eye.
+
+Ah, now ... Now the lieutenant had but to turn to his superior officer
+and she would indeed be rent, and reasonably so.
+
+"What is the matter?" said the newcomer. "Is something fresh needed?"
+
+The billeting lieutenant never hesitated a second.
+
+"_Mon capitaine_, unfortunately the billet found yesterday for this lady
+is unsuitable. The owner of the house returns this week, and needs
+the room."
+
+"Have you some other lodging for her?"
+
+"Yes, _mon capitaine_, in the Rue de Clèves."
+
+"Good. Then there is no difficulty?"
+
+"None. Follow me, mademoiselle, the street is near. I will take you to
+the _concierge_."
+
+She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.
+
+"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and
+susceptible."
+
+"Oh, no, no...."
+
+"Indeed, I _am_ young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I
+came to Charleville...."
+
+"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the
+window. Here is the street."
+
+"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and
+how delighted. Is the house here?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. _It is an empty house._"
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But you are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"
+
+"Very little. We will see."
+
+He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful
+face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "_Eh bien!
+More_ officers? I told you, _mon lieutenant_, we have not room for
+one more."
+
+"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this
+time. Have you the key?"
+
+"But the house opposite is empty."
+
+"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+The young _concierge,_ under the impression that he was certainly
+installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with
+a look of impish reproof in her eyes.
+
+Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron
+door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard,
+leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led
+up into the house.
+
+"All this ... all this mine?"
+
+"All yours, mademoiselle."
+
+The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues,
+arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high
+wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the
+staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows
+and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed
+through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and
+mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.
+
+"Who lived here?"
+
+"Who lived here?" echoed the _concierge_, and a strange look passed over
+her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans...."
+
+"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
+
+"All the time. I knew them all."
+
+In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to
+her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house
+opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what
+you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this
+dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take
+that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems
+hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."
+
+"Who is the owner?"
+
+"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She
+has turned _méchante_. She will abuse me when she comes here to see
+this--as though _I_ could have saved it. Her husband and her son were
+killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the
+war, and Phillippe ... I don't know when, but somewhere near here."
+
+"You think she will come back?"
+
+"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her
+daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the
+sun ... was the good God to her."
+
+"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here
+in this empty house? There will be rats...."
+
+"I can be very happy--and so grateful. I will move my things across
+to-day. My companions ... that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy
+from Chantilly to-morrow."
+
+"Six more! Had you told me that before ... But what more simple! I can
+put them all in here. There is room for twenty."
+
+"Oh...." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house
+for myself. And I was so happy!"
+
+"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your sex
+every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you
+cannot lodge with your compatriots!..."
+
+"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"
+
+"I was joking. Take the house--the rats and the rubbish included with
+it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a
+better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I
+must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"
+
+"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."
+
+He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the _concierge._
+
+"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your
+sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life."
+Fanny agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the
+garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of
+brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak
+bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of
+open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other
+furniture.
+
+"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the
+house opposite."
+
+She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the
+road. Fanny fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six
+logs and some twigs from the _concierge,_ promising to fetch her an
+ample store from the hills around.
+
+All day she rummaged in the empty house--finding now a three-legged
+armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian glass
+scrolled in gold for her tooth glass.
+
+In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay
+rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its
+blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.
+
+It covered her oak bed exactly--and by removing the pillows it looked
+like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon
+burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her
+room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale
+afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.
+
+A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey
+of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for
+her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over
+floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for
+cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron
+lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.
+
+But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy's things were
+everywhere, the father's and the son's. Her eyes took in the host of
+relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their
+youth, pressing among phantoms.
+
+"Irons ... For ironing! For my collars!"
+
+But they were so small, too small. His again--the son's. "Yet why
+shouldn't I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon
+one finger.
+
+Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as
+though nothing had ever been packed up--dolls' houses, rocking-horses,
+slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and
+guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.
+
+Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers
+and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom
+she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here
+... how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter
+to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this
+perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had
+changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah ...
+inhuman... was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not
+weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the
+branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed
+in a thin glass upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the
+house, from her solitude?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+
+What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn't burn in the
+open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage,
+but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn't
+proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and
+had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches.
+All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by
+the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains
+on trays slung on ropes.
+
+Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then,
+when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle.
+"I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
+
+The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down,
+leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
+
+Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the
+Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in
+the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up
+to the attics again.
+
+"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of
+broken white wood from the floor.
+
+It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your
+name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The
+place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse
+cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle
+scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of
+things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it
+away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of
+dried modelling clay....
+
+"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless
+fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had
+"P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
+
+Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any
+use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still
+in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright
+treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of
+a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written
+and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German
+as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of
+difficult questions.
+
+Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished
+chair-back in her hand.
+
+"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am
+doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't
+or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at.
+Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
+
+She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his
+mother's initials on it in gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the
+"Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien's voice
+would call to her.
+
+"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down
+at her from her high seat behind the mugs and glasses.
+
+"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn't written," and
+even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and
+turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her
+and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.
+
+"I am in no hurry," she said, sure that he would come, and walked on
+into the Spanish Square, to stare in the shops behind the arcaded
+pillars. Merchandise trickled back into the empty town in odd ways. By
+lorry, train, and touring car, merchants penetrated and filled the
+shops with provisions, amongst which there were distressing lacks.
+
+The trains, which had now been extended from Rheims over many laborious
+wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the
+bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a
+railroad. To the passenger train, which left Paris twice a week, one
+goods truck full of merchandise was attached--and it seemed as though
+the particular truck to arrive was singled out casually, without any
+regard to the needs of the town. As yet no dusters, sheets or kitchen
+pans could be bought, but to-day in the Spanish Square every shop was
+filled to overflowing with rolls of ladies' stays; even the chemist had
+put a pair in the corner of his window. Fanny inquired the cause. A
+truck had arrived filled with nothing but stays. It was very unfortunate
+as they had expected condensed milk, but they had accepted the truck,
+as, no doubt, they would find means of selling them--for there were
+women in the country round who had not seen a pair for years.
+
+A man appeared in the Square selling boots from Paris--the first to come
+to the town with leather soles instead of wooden ones. Instantly there
+was a crowd round him.
+
+It was dark now and the electric street lamps were lit round the
+pedestal of the Spanish Duke. The organisation of the town was jerky,
+and often the lights would come on when it was daylight and often
+disappear when it was dark. Where Germans had been there were always
+electric light and telephones. No matter how sparse the furniture in the
+houses, how ragged the roof, how patched the windows--what tin cans,
+paper and rubbish lay heaped upon the floors, the electric light
+unfailingly illumined all, the telephone hung upon the wall among the
+peeling paper.
+
+A little rain began to fall lightly and she hurried to her rooms. There,
+once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire
+lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet
+showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece,
+the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.
+
+"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it
+fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.
+
+"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open
+her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the
+street below.
+
+She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop
+which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so
+powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated
+red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He
+would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought
+well of.
+
+"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had
+said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other
+times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold
+meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.
+
+"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"
+She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The days passed.
+
+Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the
+battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.
+Changes passed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying
+clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest,
+shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in
+the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and grass itself, as
+rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.
+
+A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the
+borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey
+carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and
+tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and
+pill-boxes, in wooden shelters scraped together from the _débris_ of
+their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families
+the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a
+patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a
+fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little
+notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the
+earth. "Vin-Café" or "Small motor repairs done here."
+
+All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side
+roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars,
+no one set up his habitation.
+
+A certain lawlessness was abroad in the lonelier areas of the
+battlefields. Odds and ends of all the armies, deserters, well hidden
+during many months, lived under the earth in holes and cellars and used
+strange means to gain a living.
+
+There had been rumours of lonely cars which had been stopped and
+robbed--and among the settlers a couple of murders had taken place in a
+single district. The mail from Charleville to Montmédy was held up at
+last by men in masks armed with revolvers. "We will go out armed!"
+exclaimed the drivers in the garage, and polished up their rifles.
+
+After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the
+French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and
+whisky sold in subterranean _estaminets_ of ruined villages, picked a
+quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They
+must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath
+upon the homesick Americans.
+
+Somewhere beyond Rheims the wreck of a cindery village sprawled along a
+side road. Not a chimney, not a pile of bricks, not a finger of wood or
+stone reached three feet high, but in the middle, a little wooden stake
+rose above the rubbish, a cross-bar pointing into the ground, and the
+words "Vin-Café" written in chalk upon it. Fanny, who was thirsty, drew
+up her car and climbed across the village to a hole down which the board
+pointed. Steps of pressed earth led down, and from the hole rose the
+quarrelling, fierce voices of three men. She fled back to the car,
+determined to find a more genial _café_ upon a national road.
+
+The same day, upon another side road, she came on the remains of a
+village, where the road, instead of leading through it, paused at the
+brink of the river, over which hung the end spars of a broken bridge.
+
+"I will make a meal here," she thought, profiting by the check--and
+pulled out a packet of sandwiches, driving her car round the corner of a
+wall out of the wind. Here, across the road, a donkey cart was standing,
+and a donkey was tied to a brick in the gutter.
+
+Upon the steps of a doorway which was but an aperture leading to
+nothing, for the house itself lay flat behind it and the courtyard was
+filled with trestles of barbed wire, a figure was seated writing
+earnestly upon its knees. She went nearer and saw an old man, who
+looked up as she approached.
+
+"Sir ..." she began, meaning to inquire about the road--and the wind
+through the doorway blew her skirt tight against her.
+
+"I am identifying the houses," he said, as though he expected to be
+asked his business. She saw by his face that he was very old--eighty
+perhaps. The book upon his knee contained quavering drawings, against
+each of which a name was written.
+
+"This is mine," he said, pointing through the doorway on whose step he
+sat. "And all these other houses belong to people whom I know. When they
+come back here to live they have only to come to me and I can show them
+which house to go to. Without me it might be difficult, but I was the
+oldest man here and I know all the streets, and all the houses. I carry
+the village in my head."
+
+"That is your donkey cart, then?"
+
+"It is my son's. I drive here from Rheims on Saturdays, when he doesn't
+want it."
+
+He showed his book, the cheap paper filled with already-fading maps,
+blurred names and vague sketches. The old man was in his dotage and
+would soon die and the book be lost.
+
+"I carry the village in my head," he repeated. It was the only life the
+village had.
+
+So the days went on, day after day, and with each its work, and still no
+letter at the "Silver Lion," Though vaguely ashamed at her mood, she
+could not be oppressed by this. Each cold, fine, blooming day in the
+mountains made him less necessary to her, and only the delicate memory
+of him remained to gild the town. When hopes wither other hopes spring
+up. When the touch of charm trembles no more upon the heart it can no
+longer be imagined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+
+The horn of a two days' moon was driving across the window; then stars,
+darkness, dawn and sunrise painted the open square; till rustling, and
+turning towards the light, she awoke. At the top of the window a magpie
+wiped his beak on a branch, bent head, and tail bent to balance him
+--then dropped like a mottled pebble out of sight. She sat up, drew the
+table prepared overnight towards her, lit the lamp for the chocolate
+--thinking of the dim Julien who might pay his beautiful visit in turn
+with the moon and the sun.
+
+She got up and dressed, and walked in the spring morning, first to the
+bread shop to buy a pound of bread from the woman who wouldn't smile
+... so serious and puzzling was this defect that Fanny had once asked
+her: "Would you rather I didn't buy my bread here?"
+
+"No, I don't mind."
+
+Then to the market for a bunch of violets and an egg.
+
+And at last through the "Silver Lion"--for luck, opening one door of
+black wood, passing through the hot, sunny room, ignoring the thrilled
+glances of soldiers drinking at the tables, looking towards the girl at
+the bar, who shook her head, saying: "No, no letter for you!" and out
+again into the street by the other black door (which was gold inside).
+
+She passed the morning in the garage working on the Renault, cleaning
+her, oiling her--then ate her lunch in the garage room with the Section.
+
+Among them there ran a rumour of England--of approaching demobilisation,
+of military driving that must come to an end, to give place to civilian
+drivers who, in Paris, were thronging the steps of the Ministry of the
+Liberated Regions.
+
+"Already," said one, "our khaki seems as old-fashioned as a crinoline.
+A man said to me yesterday: 'It is time mademoiselle bought her dress
+for the summer!'"
+
+(What dream was that of Julien, and of a summer spent in Charleville!
+The noise of England burst upon her ears. She heard the talk at
+parties--faces swam so close to hers that she looked in their eyes and
+spoke to them.)
+
+And how the town is filling with men in new black coats, and women in
+shawls! Every day more and more arrive. And the civilians come first
+now! Down in the Co-operative I asked for a tin of milk, and I was told:
+'We are keeping the milk for the "Civils."' 'For the "Civils"?' I said,
+for we are all accustomed to the idea that the army feeds first."
+
+"Oh, that's all gone! We are losing importance now. It is time to go
+home."
+
+As they spoke there came a shrill whistle which sounded through
+Charleville.
+
+"Ecoute!" said a man down the street, and the Section, moving to the
+window, heard it again, nameless, and yet familiar.
+
+Unseen Charleville lifted its head and said, "Ecoute."
+
+The first train had crawled over the new bridge, and stood whistling its
+triumph in the station.
+
+As spring became more than a bright light over the mountains so the town
+in the hollow blossomed and functioned. The gate bells rang, the electric
+light ceased to glow in the daytime, great cranes came up on the trains
+and fished in the river for the wallowing bridges. Workmen arrived in the
+streets. In the early summer mornings tapping could be heard all about
+the town. Civilians in new black suits, civilians more or less damaged,
+limping or one-eyed, did things that made them happy with a hammer and
+a nail. They whistled as they tapped, nailed up shutters that had hung
+for four years by one hinge, climbed about the roofs and fixed a tile or
+two where a hundred were needed, brought little ladders on borrowed
+wheelbarrows and set them against the house-wall. In the house opposite,
+in the Rue de Clèves, a man was using his old blue puttees to nail up his
+fruit-trees.
+
+All the men worked in new Sunday clothes; they had, as yet, nothing old
+to work in. Every day brought more of them to the town, lorries and
+horse carts set them down by the "Silver Lion," and they walked along
+the street carrying black bags and rolls of carpet, boxes of tools, and
+sometimes a well-oiled carbine.
+
+"Yes, we must go home," said the Englishwomen. "It's time to leave the
+town."
+
+The "Civils" seemed to drive them out. They knew they were birds of
+passage as they walked in the sun in their khaki coats.
+
+The "Civils" were blind to them, never looked at them, hurried on,
+longing to grasp the symbolic hammer, to dust, sweep out the German rags
+and rubbish, nail talc over the gaping windows, set their homes going,
+start their factories in the surrounding mountains, people the houses so
+long the mere shelter for passing troops, light the civilian life of the
+town, and set it burning after the ashes and dust of war.
+
+There were days when every owner, black-trousered and in his shirt-
+sleeves, seemed to be burning the contents of his house in a bonfire in
+the gutter. Poor men burned things that seemed useful to the casual eye
+--mattresses, bolsters, all soiled, soiled again and polluted by four
+years of soldiery.
+
+Idling over the fire in the evening, Fanny's eye was caught by a stain
+upon her armchair. It was sticky; it might well be champagne--the
+champagne which stuck even now to the bottoms of the glasses downstairs.
+
+"I wonder if they will burn the chair--when _they_ come back." Some one
+must come back, some day, even if Philippe's mother never came. She
+seemed to see the figure of the Turkish officer seated in her chair,
+just as the _concierge_ had described him, stout, fezzed, resting his
+legs before her fire--or of the German, stretched back in the chair in
+the evening reading the copy of the _Westfälisches Volksblatt_ she had
+found stuffed down in the corner of the seat.
+
+How, how did that splash of wax come to be so high up on the face of the
+mirror? Had someone, some predecessor, thrown a candle in a temper? It
+puzzled her in the morning as she lay in bed.
+
+On the polished wooden foot of the bed was burnt the outline of a face
+with a funny nose. A child's drawing. That was Philippe's. The nurse had
+cried at him in a rage, perhaps, and snatched the hot poker with which
+he drew--and that had made the long rushing burn that flew angrily
+across the wood from the base of the face's chin. "Oh, you've made it
+worse!" Philippe must have gibed.
+
+("B"--who wrote "B" on the wall? The Bulgarian--)
+
+She fell asleep.
+
+The first bird, waking early, threw the image of the world across her
+lonely sleep. He squeaked alone, minute after minute, from his tree
+outside the window, thrusting forests, swamps, meadows, mountains in
+among her dreams. Then a fellow joined him, and soon all the birds were
+shouting from their trees. Slowly the room lightened till on the
+mantelpiece the buds of the apple blossom shone, till upon the wall the
+dark patch became an oil painting, till the painting showed its features
+--a castle, a river and a hill.
+
+In the night the last yellow down had fallen from the palm upon the
+floor.
+
+The common voice of the tin clock struck seven. And with it came women's
+voices--women's voices on the landing outside the door--the voice of
+the _concierge_ and another's.'
+
+Some instinct, some strange warning, sent the sleeper on the bed flying
+from it, dazed as she was. Snatching at the initialled cup of gold
+veining she thrust it behind the curtain on the window sill. An act of
+panic merely, for a second glance round the room convinced her that
+there was too much to be hidden, if hidden anything should be. With a
+leap she was back in bed, and drew the bedclothes up to her neck.
+
+Then came the knock at the door.
+
+"I am in bed," she called.
+
+"Nevertheless, can I come in?" asked the _concierge_.
+
+"You may come in."
+
+The young woman came in and closed the door after her. She approached
+the bed and whispered--then glancing round the room with a shrug she
+picked up a dressing-gown and held it that Fanny might slip her
+arms into it.
+
+"But what a time to come!"
+
+"She has travelled all night. She is unfit to move."
+
+"Must I see her now? I am hardly awake."
+
+"I cannot keep her any longer. She was for coming straight here when the
+train came in at five. I have kept her at coffee at my house. _Tant
+pis!_ You have a right to be here!"
+
+The _concierge_ drew the curtain a little wider and the cup was exposed.
+She thrust it back into the shadow; the door opened and Philippe's
+mother walked in. She was very tall, in black, and a deep veil hung
+before her face.
+
+"_Bonjour_, madame," she said, and her veiled face dipped in a faint
+salute.
+
+"Will you sit down?"
+
+She took no notice of this, but leaning a little on a stick she carried,
+said, "I understand that it is right that I should find my house
+occupied. They told me it would be by an officer. Such occupation I
+believe ceases on the return of the owner."
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I am the owner of this house."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask of what nationality you are?"
+
+The _concierge_ standing behind her, shrugged her shoulders impatiently,
+as if she would say, "I have explained, and explained again!"
+
+"I am English, madame."
+
+The lady seemed to sink into a stupor, and bending her head in silence
+stared at the floor. Fanny, sitting upright in bed, waited for her to
+speak. The _>concierge_, her face still as an image, waited too.
+
+Philippe's mother began to sway upon her stick.
+
+"Do please sit down," said Fanny, breaking the silence at last.
+
+"When will you go?" demanded the old lady, suddenly.
+
+"Go?"
+
+"Who gave you that lamp? That is mine." She pointed to a glass lamp
+which stood upon the table.
+
+"It is all yours," said Fanny, humbly.
+
+"Mademoiselle borrowed it," said the voice of the _concierge_. "I lent
+it to her."
+
+"Why are my things lent when I am absent? My armchair--dirty, soiled,
+torn! Paul's picture--there is a hole in the corner. Who made that hole
+in the corner?"
+
+"I didn't," said Fanny feebly, wishing that she were dressed and upon
+her feet.
+
+"Madame, a Turkish officer made the hole. I spoke to him about it; he
+said it was the German colonel who was here before him. But I am sure it
+was the Turk."
+
+"A Turk!" said Philippe's mother in bewilderment. "So you have allowed a
+Turk to come in here!"
+
+"Madame does not understand."
+
+"Oh, I understand well enough that my house has been a den! The house
+where I was born--All my things, all my things--You must give that
+lamp back!"
+
+"Dear madame, I will give everything back, I have hurt nothing--"
+
+"Not ruined my carpet, my mother's carpet! Not soiled my walls, written
+your name upon them, cracked my windows, filled my room downstairs with
+rubbish, broken my furniture--But I am told this is what I must expect!"
+Fanny looked at her, petrified. "But I--" she began.
+
+"You don't understand," said the young _concierge_ fiercely. "Don't you
+know who has lived here? In this room, in this bed, Turks, Bulgars,
+Germans. Four years of soldiers, coming in one week and gone the next. I
+could not stop it! When other houses were burnt I would say to myself,
+'Madame is lucky.' When all your china was broken and your chairs used
+for firewood, could I help it? Can _she_ help it? She is your last
+soldier, and she has taken nothing. So much has gone from this house it
+is not worth while to worry about what remains. When you wrote to me
+last month to send you the barometer, it made me smile. Your barometer!"
+
+"Begone, Elsie."
+
+"No, madame, no! Not till you come back with me. They should not have
+let you come alone. But you were always wilful. You cannot mean to
+live here?"
+
+"I wish this woman gone to-day. I wish to sleep here to-night."
+
+"No, madame, no. Sleep in the house opposite to-night. Give her time to
+find a lodging--"
+
+"A lodging! She will find a lodging soon enough. A town full of
+soldiers--" muttered the old woman.
+
+"I think this is a question for the billeting lieutenant," said Fanny.
+"He will explain to you that I am billeted here exactly as a soldier,
+that I have a right to be here until your arrival. It will be kind of
+you to give me a day in which to find another room."
+
+"Where are _his_ things?" said the old woman unheedingly. "I must go up
+to the attics."
+
+A vision of those broken toys came to Fanny, the dusty heap of horses,
+dolls and boxes--the poor disorder.
+
+"You mustn't, yet!" she cried with feeling. "Rest first. Sit here longer
+first. Or go another day!"
+
+"Have you touched _them_?" cried Philippe's mother, rising from the
+chair. "I must go at once, at once----" but even as she tried to cross
+the room she leant heavily upon the table and put her hand to her heart.
+"Get me water, Elsie," she said, and threw up her veil. Her ruined face
+was grey even at the lips; her eyes were caverns, worn by the dropping
+of water, her mouth was folded tightly that nothing kind or hopeful, or
+happy might come out of it again. Elsie ran to the washing-stand.
+Unfortunately she seized the glass with the golden scrolling, and when
+she held it to the lips of her mistress those lips refused it.
+
+"_That_, too, that glass of mine! Elsie, I wish this woman gone. Why
+don't you get up? Where are your clothes? Why don't you dress and go--"
+
+"Madame, hush, hush, you are ill."
+
+"Ah!" dragging herself weakly to the door, "I must take an inventory.
+That is what I should have done before! If I don't make a list at once I
+shall lose something!"
+
+"Take an inventory!" exclaimed the _concierge_ mockingly, as she
+followed her. "The house won't change! After four years--it isn't now
+that it will change!" She paused at the door and looked back at Fanny.
+"Don't worry about the room, mademoiselle. She is like that--_elle a des
+crises._ She cannot possibly sleep here. Keep the room for a day or two
+till you find another."
+
+"In a very few days I shall be going to England."
+
+"Keep it a week if necessary. She will be persuaded when she is calmer.
+Why did they let her come when they wrote me that she was a dying woman!
+But no--_elle est comme toujours--méchante pour tout le monde._"
+
+"You told me she thought only of Philippe."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, she is like many of us! She has still her sense of
+property."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+Around the Spanish Square the first sun-awnings had been put up in the
+night, awnings red and yellow, flapping in the mountain wind.
+
+In the shops under the arches, in the market in the centre of the
+Square, they were selling anemones.
+
+"But have you any eggs?"
+
+"No eggs this morning."
+
+"Any butter?"
+
+"None. There has been none these three days."
+
+"A pot of condensed milk?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, the train did not bring any."
+
+"Must I eat anemones? Give me two bunches."
+
+And round the Spanish Square the orange awnings protecting the empty
+shop-fronts shuddered and flapped, like a gay hat worn unsteadily when
+the stomach is empty.
+
+What was there to do on a last day but look and note, and watch, and
+take one's leave? The buds against the twig-laced sky were larger than
+ever. To-morrow--the day after to-morrow ... it would be spring in
+England, too!
+
+"_Tenez_, mademoiselle," said the market woman, "there is a little
+ounce of butter here that you may have!"
+
+The morning passed and on drifted the day, and all was finished, all was
+done, and love gone, too. And with love gone the less divine but wider
+world lay open.
+
+In the "Silver Lion" the patient girl behind the counter shook her head.
+
+"There is no letter for you."
+
+"And to-morrow I leave for England."
+
+"If a letter comes where shall I send it on?"
+
+"Thank you, but there will come no letter now. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+It was the afternoon. Now such a tea, a happy, lonely tea--the last, the
+best, in Charleville! Crossing the road from the "Silver Lion" Fanny
+bought a round, flat, sandwich cake, and carried it to the house which
+was her own for one more night, placed it in state upon the biggest of
+the green and gold porcelain plates, and the anemones in a sugar-bowl
+beside it. She lit the fire, made tea, and knelt upon the floor to toast
+her bread. There was a half-conscious hurry in her actions.
+
+("So long as nobody comes!" she whispered. "So long as I am left
+alone!") she feared the good-byes of the _concierge_, the threatened
+inventory of Philippe's mother, a call of state farewell from the
+billeting lieutenant.
+
+When the toast was done and the tea made, some whim led her to change
+her tunic for a white jersey newly back from the wash, to put on the
+old dancing shoes of Metz--and not until her hair was carefully brushed
+to match this gaiety did she draw up the armchair with the broken leg,
+and prop it steadily beside the tea-table.
+
+But--
+
+Who was that knocking on the door in the street?
+
+One of the Section coming on a message? The _brigadier_ to tell her that
+she had some last duty still?
+
+"Shall I go to the window?" (creeping nearer to it). Then, with a glance
+back at the tea-table, "No, let them knock!"
+
+But how they knocked! Persistent, gentle--could one sit peacefully at
+tea so called and so besought! She went up to the blue curtains, and
+standing half-concealed, saw the _concierge_ brooding in the sunlight of
+her window-sill.
+
+"Is _nobody_ there?" said a light voice in the hidden street below, and
+at that she peered cautiously over the edge of the stonework, and saw a
+pale young man in grey before the door.
+
+She watched him. She watched him gravely, for he had come too late. But
+tenderly, for she had been in love with him. The _concierge_ raised her
+two black brows in her expressive face and looked upwards. Her look
+said: "Why don't you let him in?"
+
+Yet Fanny stood inactive, her hands resting on the sun-warmed stone.
+
+"Julien is here--is here! And does not know that I go to-morrow!"
+
+But she put _to-morrow_ from her, and in the stillness she felt her
+spirit smiling for pleasure in him. She had mourned him once; she never
+would again.
+
+In her pocket lay the key of the street door, and the curtain-cord, long
+rotted and useless, dangled at her cheek. With a quick wrench she
+brought its length tumbling beside her on the sill, then knotted it to
+the key and let it down into the street.
+
+The young man saw it hang before his eyes.
+
+"Are you coming in?" said a voice above him. "Tea is ready."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"It has been ready for six weeks."
+
+"Only wait--" He was trying the key in the door.
+
+"What--still longer?" said the voice.
+
+He was gone from the pavement, he had entered her house, he was on her
+stair--the grey ghost of the soldier!
+
+She had a minute's grace. Slipping her hand into the cupboard she drew
+out another cup and saucer, and laid the table for two.
+
+There was his face--his hands--at her door! But what a foreign grey
+body!
+
+"Come in, Ghost!" she said, and held out her hands--for now she cared at
+least for "he who cared"--lest that, too, be lost! Does a ghost kiss?
+Yes, sometimes. Sometimes they are ghosts who kiss.
+
+"Oh, Fanny!" Then, with a quick glance at the table, "You are expecting
+someone?"
+
+"You. How late you come to tea with me!"
+
+"But I--You didn't know."
+
+"I waited tea for you," she said, and turning to a calendar upon a
+wooden wheel, she rolled it back a month.
+
+She made him sit, she made him drink and eat. He filled the room with
+his gaiety. He had no reasons upon his tongue, and no excuses; she no
+reproaches, no farewell.
+
+A glance round the room had shown her that there were no signs of her
+packing; her heavy kitbag was at the station, her suitcase packed and in
+the cupboard. She put her gravest news away till later.
+
+"You came by the new train--that has arrived at last in Charleville?"
+
+"Yes, and I go up to Revins to-night."
+
+She paused at that. "But how?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, smiling at her.
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "Could I?" (She had that morning delivered the car to
+its new driver.) "Of course. I could! I will, I will, I'll manage! You
+counted on me to drive you to Revins?"
+
+"Will it be difficult to manage?"
+
+"No--o--But I must get the car out before dark or there will be no
+excuse--" She pushed back her chair and went to the window. The sun was
+sinking over the mountains and the scenery in the western sky was
+reflected in the fiery pools between the cobbles in the street.
+
+"I must go soon and get it. But how--"
+
+She paused and thought. "How do you come down to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't. I go on to Brussels. There is a car at Revins belonging to my
+agent. He will take me to Dinant for the Brussels train."
+
+"You are bound for Brussels? Yet you could have gone straight from Paris
+to Brussels?"
+
+"Yet I didn't because I wanted to see you!"
+
+She took down her cap and coat from the nail on which they were hanging.
+
+"Need you go yet?" he said, withdrawing the clothes from her arm, and
+laying them upon a chair. She sat down again.
+
+"The sun is sinking. The town gets dark so quickly here, though it's
+light enough in the mountains. If I leave it later the men will be gone
+home, and the garage key with them."
+
+"You're right," he said. "Put them on," and he held the coat for her.
+"But once you have the car there's no hurry over our drive. Yes, fetch
+it quickly, and then we'll go up above Revins and I'll show you the
+things I have in mind."
+
+"What things?"
+
+He drew out a fat, red note-book and held it up.
+
+"It's full of my thoughts," he said. "Quick with the car, and we'll get
+up there while it's light enough to show you!"
+
+She slipped out under the apple-red sky, through the streets where the
+shadows of the houses lay black as lacquer.
+
+Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking
+his little, dry cigarettes.
+
+"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What
+an evening!"
+
+"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
+
+"But you've given up the car."
+
+"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!
+And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the
+key!"
+
+He gave her the key.
+
+"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come
+in hang the key on the nail in the office."
+
+Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
+Rue de Clèves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
+
+"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would
+have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started
+on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed
+excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil
+their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him
+as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance
+from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in
+which to fight with her disinclination.
+
+"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I
+can't tell him in the street!"
+
+For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the
+_concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched
+the town.
+
+"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened
+and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself,
+when it will be easy and natural."
+
+By back streets they left the town, and soon upon the step road had
+climbed through the belt of trees and out on to bare slopes.
+
+As they wound up the mountain, sitting so dose together, she felt how
+familiar his company was to her, and how familiar his silence. Their
+thoughts, running together, would meet presently, as they had often met,
+at the juncture when his hand was laid upon hers at the wheel: But when
+he spoke he startled her.
+
+"How long has the railway been extended to Charleville?"
+
+"A fortnight," she answered upon reflection.
+
+"How about the big stone bridge on this side? The railway bridge?"
+
+"Why that lies at the bottom of the river as usual."
+
+"And haven't they replaced it yet by a wooden one?"
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"And no one is even working there?"
+
+"I haven't been there lately," she answered. "Maybe they are by now. Is
+it your railway to Revin you are thinking of?"
+
+He was fingering his big note book.
+
+"I can't start anything till the railway runs," he answered, tapping on
+the book, "but when it runs--I'll show you when we get up there."
+
+They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient
+trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small
+branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its shaking
+holes.
+
+"You see," he said, pursuing his thought, "lorries wouldn't do here.
+They'd sink."
+
+"They would," she agreed, and found that his innocence of her secret
+locked her words more tightly in her throat. Far above, from an iron
+peak, the light of the heavy sun was slipping. Beneath it they ran in
+shadow, through rock and moss. Before the light had gone they had
+reached the first crest and drew up for a moment at a movement of
+his hand.
+
+Looking back to Charleville, he said, "See where the river winds. The
+railway crosses it three times. Can we see from here if the bridges are
+all down?" And he stood up and, steadying himself upon her shoulder,
+peered down at Charleville, to where man lived in the valleys. But
+though the slopes ahead of them were still alight, depths, distance, the
+crowding and thickening of twilight in the hollows behind them offered
+no detail.
+
+"I fear they are," she said, gazing with him. "I think they are. I think
+I can remember that they are."
+
+Soon they would be at the top of the long descent on Revins. Should she
+tell him, he who sat so close, so unsuspecting? An arrowy temptation
+shot through her mind.
+
+"Is it possible--Why not write a letter when he is gone!"
+
+She saw its beauty, its advantages, and she played with it like someone
+who knew where to find strength to withstand it.
+
+"He is so happy, so gay," urged the voice, "so full of his plans! And
+you have left it so late. How painful now, just as he is going, to bid
+him think: 'I will never see her face again!'"
+
+(How close he sat beside her! How close her secret sat within her!)
+
+"Think how it is with you," pursued the tempting voice. "It is hard to
+part from a face, but not so hard to part from the writer of a letter."
+
+Over the next crest the Belgian Ardennes showed blue and dim in the
+distance.
+
+"Stop!" he said, holding up his hand again.
+
+They were on the top of a high plateau; she drew up. A large bird with
+red under its wings flapped out and hung in the air over the precipice.
+
+"See--the Meuse!" he said. "See, on its banks, do you see down there?
+Come to the edge."
+
+Hundreds of feet below lay a ribbon-loop of dark, unstirring water. They
+stood at the edge of the rock looking down together. She saw he was
+excited. His usually pale face was flushed.
+
+"Do you see down there, do you see in this light--a village?"
+
+She could see well enough a village.
+
+"That's Revins. And those dark dots beyond----"
+
+"I see them."
+
+"My factories. Before the summer you'll see smoke down there! They are
+partially destroyed. One can't see well, one can't see how much--"
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you never been back? Have you never seen what's happened?"
+
+She had not guessed this: she was not prepared for this. This was the
+secret, then of his absorption.
+
+"I've not seen it yet. I've not been able to get away. And the Paris
+factories have held me every minute. But now I'm here, I'm--I'm
+wondering--You see that dot beyond, standing separate?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's where I sleep to-night. That's the house."
+
+"But can you sleep there?" she asked, still shocked that she had not
+realised what this journey was to him.
+
+"Can I?"
+
+"I mean is the house ruined?"
+
+"Oh, the house is in bad order," he said. "Not ruined. 'Looted,' my old
+_concierge_ writes. She was my nurse a hundred years ago. She has been
+there through the occupation. I wrote to her, and she expects me
+to-night. To-night it will be too dark, but to-morrow before I leave I
+shall see what they have done to the factories."
+
+"Don't you know at all how bad they are?"
+
+"I've had letters. The agent went on ahead five days ago and he has
+settled there already. But letters don't tell one enough. There are
+little things in the factories--things I put in myself--" He broke off
+and drew her to another side of the plateau. "See down there! That
+unfortunate railway crosses two more bridges. I can't see now, but
+they're blown up, since all the others are. And such a time for
+business! It hurts me to think of the things I can't set going till that
+railway works. Every one is crying out for the things that I can
+make here."
+
+On and on he talked in his excitement, absorbed and planning, leading
+her from one point of view on the plateau to another. Her eyes followed
+his pointing hands from crest to crest of the mountains their neighbours,
+till the valleys were full of creeping shadows. Even when the shades
+filmed his eager hand he held it out to point here and there as though
+the whole landscape of the mountains was printed in immortal daylight on
+his mind.
+
+"I can't see," she said. "It's so dark down there. I can't see it," as
+he pointed to the spot where the Brussels railway once ran.
+
+"Well, it's there," he said, staring at the spot with eyes that knew.
+
+The blue night deepened in the sky; from east, west, north, south,
+sprang the stars.
+
+"Fanny, look! There's a light in my house!"
+
+Fathoms of shade piled over the village and in the heart of it a light
+had appeared. "Marie has lit the lamp on the steps. I mustn't be too
+late for her--I must soon go down."
+
+"What, you walk? Is there a footpath down?"
+
+"I shall go down this mountain path below. It's a path I know, shooting
+hares. Soon I shall be back again. Brussels one week; then Paris; then
+here again. I'll see what builders can be spared from the Paris
+factories. They can walk out here from Charleville. Ten miles, that's
+nothing! Then we'll get the stone cut ready in the quarries. Do you
+know, during the war, I thought (when I thought of it), 'If the Revins
+factories are destroyed it won't be I who'll start them again. I won't
+take up that hard mountain life any more. If they're destroyed, it's too
+discouraging, so let them lie!' But now I don't feel discouraged at
+all. I've new ideas, bigger ones. I'm older, I'm going to be richer. And
+then, since they're partly knocked down I'll rebuild them in a better
+way. And it's not only that--See!" He was carried away by his resolves,
+shaken by excitement, and pulling out his note-book he tilted it this
+way and that under the starlight, but he could not read it, and all the
+stars in that sky were no use to him. He struck a match and held the
+feeble flame under that heavenly magnificence, and a puff of wind
+blew it out.
+
+"But I don't need to see!" he exclaimed, and pointing into the night he
+continued to unfold his plans, to build in the unmeaning darkness,
+which, to his eyes, was mountain valleys where new factories arose,
+mountain slopes whose sides were to be quarried for their stony ribs,
+rivers to move power-stations, railways to Paris and to Brussels. As she
+followed his finger her eyes lit upon the stars instead, and now he
+said, "There, there!" pointing to Orion, and now "Here, here!" lighting
+upon Aldebrande.
+
+As she followed his finger her thoughts were on their own paths,
+thinking, "This is Julien as he will be, not as I have known him." The
+soldier had been a wanderer like herself, a half-fantastic being. But
+here beside her in the darkness stood the civilian, the Julien-to-come,
+the solid man, the builder, plotting to capture the future.
+
+For him, too, she could no longer remain as she had been. Here, below
+her was the face, the mountain face, of her rival. Unless she became one
+with his plans and lived in the same blazing light with them, she would
+be a separate landscape, a strain upon his focus.
+
+Then she saw him looking at her. Her face, silver-bright in the
+starlight, was as unreadable as his own note-book.
+
+"Are you sure," he was saying, "that you won't be blamed about the car?"
+
+"Sure, quite sure. The men have all gone home."
+
+"But to-morrow morning? When they see it has been out?"
+
+"Not--to-morrow morning. No, they won't say anything to-morrow morning.
+Oh, dear Julien--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think, I hope you are going to have a great success here. And don't
+forget--me--when you--"
+
+"--When I come back in a week!"
+
+"But your weeks--are so long."
+
+"Yet you will be happy without me," he said suddenly.
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"You've some solace, some treasure of your own." He nodded. "In a way,"
+he said, "I've sometimes thought you half out of reach of pain."
+
+She caught her breath, and the starry sky whirled over her head.
+
+"You're a happy foreigner!" he finished. "Did you know? Dormans called
+you that after the first dance. He said to me: 'I wonder if they are all
+so happy in England! I must go and see.'"
+
+"You too, you too!" she said, eagerly, and she wanted him to admit it.
+"See how happy, how busy, how full of the affairs of life you soon will
+be! Difficulties of every sort, and hard work and triumph--"
+
+"And you'll see, you'll see, I'll do it," he said, catching fire again.
+"I'll grow rich on these bony mountains--it isn't only the riches, mind
+you, but they are the proof--I'll wring it out in triumph, not in water,
+but in gold--from the rock!"
+
+He stood at the edge of the path, a little above her, blotting out the
+sky with his darker shape, then turning, kissed her.
+
+"For the little time!" he said, and disappeared.
+
+The noise of his footsteps descended in the night below. Ten minutes
+passed, and as each step trod innocently away from her for ever she
+continued motionless and silent to listen from her rock. The noises all
+but faded, yet, loth to put an end to the soft rustle, she listened
+while it grew fainter and less human to her ear, till it mingled at last
+with the rustle of nature, with the whine of the wind and the pit-pat of
+a little creature close at hand.
+
+She stirred at last, and turned; and found herself alone with that
+flock of enormous companions, the hog-backed mountains, like cattle
+feeding about her. Above, uniting craggy horn to horn, was an
+architrave of stars.
+
+"Good-bye"--to the light in the valley, and starting the car she began
+the descent on Charleville. There are moments when the roll of the world
+is perceptible to the extravagant senses. There are moments when the
+glamour of man thins away into oblivion before the magic of night, when
+his face fades and his voice is silenced before that wind of excited
+perception that blows out of nowhere to shake the soul.
+
+In such a mood, in such a giddy hour, seated in person upon her car, in
+spirit upon her imagination, Fanny rode down the mountain into the night.
+
+She was invincible, inattentive to the voice of absent man, a hard,
+hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven--composing and chanting
+unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven,
+protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her
+down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought
+her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot
+of the last hill.
+
+Recalled to earth by the light of Charleville she drove slowly up the
+main street, replaced the car in the garage, and returned to her house
+in the Rue de Clèves.
+
+"It is true," she whispered, as she entered the room, "that I am half
+out of reach of pain--" and long, in plans for the future, she hung over
+the embers.
+
+The gradual sinking of the light before her reminded her of the present.
+"The last night that the fire burns for me!" She heaped on all her logs.
+
+"Little pannikin of chocolate, little companion!" Hunger, too, awoke,
+and she dropped two sticks of chocolate into the water. "The fire dies
+down to-night. To-morrow I shall be gone." A petal from the apple
+blossom on the mantelpiece fell against her hand.
+
+"To-morrow I shall be gone. The apple blossom is spread to large wax
+flowers, and the flowers will fall and never breed apples. They will
+sweep this room, and Philippe's mother will come and sit in it and make
+it sad. So many things happen in the evening. So many unripe thoughts
+ripen before the fire. Turk, Bulgar, German--Me. Never to return. When
+she comes into this room the apple flowers will stare at her across the
+desert of _my_ absence, and wonder who _she_ is! I wonder if I can teach
+her anything. Will she keep the grid on the wood fire? And the blue
+birds flying on the bed? It is like going out of life--tenderly leaving
+one's little arrangements to the next comer--"
+
+And drawing her chair up to the table, she lit the lamp, and sat down to
+write her letter.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9978-8.txt or 9978-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/9/7/9978/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/9978-8.zip b/9978-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7e25f2a
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9978-8.zip
diff --git a/9978.txt b/9978.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..805d500
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9978.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8608 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Happy Foreigner
+
+Author: Enid Bagnold
+
+Posting Date: November 23, 2011 [EBook #9978]
+Release Date: March, 2006
+First Posted: November 7, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY FOREIGNER
+
+by
+
+ENID BAGNOLD
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PROLOGUE: THE EVE
+
+
+PART I. THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+CHAPTER I. THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+PART II. LORRAINE
+
+CHAPTER II. METZ
+CHAPTER III. JULIEN
+CHAPTER IV. VERDUN
+CHAPTER V. VERDUN
+CHAPTER VI. THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+CHAPTER VII. THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+CHAPTER VIII. GERMANY
+CHAPTER IX. THE CRINOLINE
+CHAPTER X. FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+CHAPTER XI. THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+
+PART III. THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+CHAPTER XII. PRECY-SUR-OISE
+CHAPTER XIII. THE INN
+CHAPTER XIV. THE RIVER
+CHAPTER XV. ALLIES
+CHAPTER XVI. THE ARDENNES
+
+
+PART IV. SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE STUFFED OWL
+CHAPTER XVIII. PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+CHAPTER XIX. PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+CHAPTER XX. THE LAST DAY
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+THE EVE
+
+Between the grey walls of its bath--so like its cradle and its
+coffin--lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the
+surface of the earth for seventy years.
+
+As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was
+rising.
+
+The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the
+bath.
+
+"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The
+earth itself is moving.
+
+"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head,
+saying--'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that
+is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.
+
+"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing--how do I know
+if I am equipped for a larger horizon!..."
+
+And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:--
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+        The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill,--
+        They lie within the breast!"
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+The war had stopped.
+
+The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States
+was hourly expected.
+
+Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing
+city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed
+corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in
+a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes
+were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.
+
+She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the
+following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.
+
+Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for
+sale held a bunch to her face.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+He pursued her and held it against her chin.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"But I give it to you! I _give_ it to you!"
+
+As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table
+of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them.
+But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the
+platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.
+
+"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute..." he panted.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Haven't you heard ... haven't you heard! The war is over!"
+
+She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
+"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"
+
+And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt
+and the violets accompanied her.
+
+At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc.
+The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines
+of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met
+she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that
+hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything,
+expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into
+the rain.
+
+She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a
+deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick
+mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for
+a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her
+coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the
+clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no
+one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the
+travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the
+pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face;
+down her sleeves and on to her hands.
+
+A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking
+towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she
+could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."
+
+She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard
+these letters--with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach
+with greed.
+
+Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved
+with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many
+American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a
+stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining
+each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.
+
+The eye of a captain opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she
+should.
+
+The eye of a lieutenant opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."
+
+"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"
+
+"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."
+
+Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two
+boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American
+thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his
+pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard
+noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind,
+unanswering stupor.
+
+"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the
+slit grew larger. The light went out.
+
+"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent
+the destruction of the board.
+
+Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon
+the pavement.
+
+"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.
+
+"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.
+
+"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"
+
+"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved
+towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders,
+who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.
+
+"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room
+alone."
+
+"I've a room ... If you're not American!"
+
+"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American
+wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here,
+what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"
+
+"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added
+"Bandits!"
+
+Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of
+her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it
+is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man
+stooped to the bolts of the door.)
+
+"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now _they've_ gone.
+Follow me."
+
+She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground
+floor.
+
+"I've no light to give you."
+
+"Yet I must have a light."
+
+Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.
+
+"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."
+
+The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and
+musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as
+well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning,
+slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no
+jug, no basin, no bell to pull.
+
+As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by
+waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark
+coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black
+coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.
+
+Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous.
+I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so
+well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of
+least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off
+down the street to find her companions.
+
+A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood
+a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a
+garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic
+used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and
+clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned
+officers--the _brigadier_ and the two _marechaux des logis_.
+
+A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream
+which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden
+bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon
+simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either
+hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper
+stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end was a
+small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
+
+This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one
+of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her
+intimate life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the
+eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny,
+in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then
+turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A
+bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
+
+"Food is in!"
+
+Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a
+tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread. The
+watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
+
+"Where is Stewart?"
+
+"She is not back yet."
+
+Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to
+read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the
+most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room
+remained empty.
+
+The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern
+in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.
+
+"Is there any food?"
+
+"It's on the stove."
+
+"Is it eatable?"
+
+"No."
+
+Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black
+mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the
+cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those
+who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept
+too well.
+
+"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are
+doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
+
+"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice through
+the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your
+hot-water bottle!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you
+will find the water has the chill off."
+
+Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with
+their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars
+in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of
+the battlefields.
+
+On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the
+test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car
+that had been assigned to her.
+
+Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain
+she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer.
+The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans
+did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a
+roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered
+down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the
+pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and
+hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
+
+"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her
+handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some
+desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them
+with respect.
+
+When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at
+his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day,
+calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she
+drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had
+need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop
+into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled
+himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went
+upon his way.
+
+She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its
+back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's
+eyes popping from his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When
+she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client
+cried to her: "Why do you wait?"
+
+Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys
+swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her
+like an egg-shell.
+
+Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced
+before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.
+
+In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a
+convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.
+
+Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of
+the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch
+the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she
+had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which
+she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator,
+striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from
+her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites
+who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.
+
+"What can I do?..." she said to them aloud, in distress.
+
+But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird
+language, "What can _we_ do ... what can _we_ do?..." ("And I..." she
+thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")
+
+But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended
+from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw
+the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching
+sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.
+
+"_Ne vous en faites pas, mademoiselle_! These poor devils sleep as they
+drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We
+were four when we met you--and now we are three!"
+
+On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no
+run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set
+to work on her car.
+
+"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.
+
+"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last
+night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of
+waste ground."
+
+She crossed to the wall with her bucket.
+
+Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine
+had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken,
+but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage,
+and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.
+
+The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed
+the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her.
+His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She
+stopped short with the bucket in her hand.
+
+"On est delivre de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she
+went a little nearer.
+
+"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into
+his coat.
+
+He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said
+clearly: "Je suis le president Wilson."
+
+"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and
+willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You
+must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me
+bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."
+
+Where have you come from?"
+
+"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for
+it's late, and ... I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.
+
+"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"
+
+"Only be quick."
+
+"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"
+
+"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."
+
+She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the
+box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into
+her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she
+approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked
+round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once,
+soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of
+voices and the smell of gravy.
+
+"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest
+her. The others looked up.
+
+"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning,"
+said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the
+brigadier, mademoiselle?"
+
+"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to
+telephone."
+
+"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"
+
+"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him
+by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the
+men stood up in groups.
+
+"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not
+use force if one can help it...."
+
+Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and
+wine?" called the man.
+
+"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."
+
+"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King
+waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the
+step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.
+
+"What's that you've got?"
+
+"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without
+letting it go from his hand.
+
+"Where did you find those?"
+
+"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.
+
+"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"
+
+"What's that? But I've no time...."
+
+"Do you know about cars?"
+
+"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.
+
+"I have trouble ... I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"
+
+"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."
+
+"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you
+go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.
+
+The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom
+one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."
+
+Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car,
+at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he
+grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The
+King expects me."
+
+He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate
+about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she
+called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.
+
+She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her
+collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her
+skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly
+into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them.
+At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he
+cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes
+that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened
+them when a man cried in triumph: "_We'll_ take you to the King!"
+
+"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.
+
+Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven
+upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day--interviewing mayors of
+ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French
+troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made
+offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts
+from the battlefields.
+
+The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long
+hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day
+after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read
+alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night
+after night.
+
+A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She
+found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men
+upon the road whom she would never see again became her social
+intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking
+whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise
+of a Chinese scavenger.
+
+Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could
+have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around
+her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of
+the earth.
+
+"Have you _got_ to be here?" asked an American.
+
+"No, I wanted to come."
+
+The eye of the American said "Fool!"
+
+"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.
+
+"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
+"Englishwoman!"
+
+Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after
+dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road
+by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and
+entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.
+
+But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character
+of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she
+could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain
+which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats;
+tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.
+
+The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but
+make it in the morning how different this room would look!"
+
+There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the
+stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew
+whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes
+the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it,
+and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no
+coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried:
+"Ask Madeleine!"
+
+And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with
+the men in the garage.
+
+Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling
+across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny,
+perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them
+to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her
+room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in
+comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never
+known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she
+prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not
+taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the
+branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.
+
+Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village,
+cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more
+picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one
+of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.
+
+Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude,
+she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the
+milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the
+lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.
+
+"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.
+
+"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of
+sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their
+stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom
+before them, unknown and bright.
+
+The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.
+
+"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting
+up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to
+make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been
+there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven
+the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and
+their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were
+tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better
+their condition.
+
+On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together
+and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in
+the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not
+even the night is sacred.
+
+On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made months, till all November
+was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in fresh torrents
+of rain.
+
+Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed on
+upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her "clients" left
+her for an hour while they inspected a barracks; sometimes it was an old
+woman who called from a doorway that she might come and warm her hands
+at the fire; sometimes an American who helped her to change a tyre.
+
+There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old
+women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends were
+mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.
+
+"My sister has a grand piano ..." said one American to her--opening
+thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.
+
+"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"
+
+He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to
+her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the
+pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.
+
+An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were
+busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.
+
+American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the
+daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and
+twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
+
+"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at
+their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of
+children."
+
+"They seem well-mannered."
+
+"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered.
+But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your
+house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in
+the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out
+of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the
+Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"
+
+"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure
+cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had
+fetched from his canteen.
+
+"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want
+other people's children always in one's life."
+
+"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village
+whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and
+ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of
+some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped
+open disclosing the rusting bones.
+
+"Pardon, madame?"
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I
+have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are
+discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
+
+"Then this is a park?"
+
+"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
+
+Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other,
+when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in
+Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor
+about her.
+
+She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she
+paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it
+travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it
+she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair
+escaped from her cap.
+
+A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as
+she entered.
+
+"Fanny...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.
+
+Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the
+Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen
+rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land
+like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had
+no inkling.
+
+Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned
+first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
+
+"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"There will be things to eat there?"
+
+"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed
+from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated
+land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that
+matter, never been there."
+
+"Then we are going for certain?"
+
+"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
+Headquarters Staff. Petain is there. It might even be gay."
+
+Fanny laughed. "Gay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."
+
+"You have silk stockings with you!"
+
+"Yes, I ... I am equipped for anything."
+
+There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and
+Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the
+edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any
+one had lived there so long.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+LORRAINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+METZ
+
+With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the
+desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of
+Lorraine like the gate to a new world.
+
+The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the
+battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry
+away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed
+garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier's restaurant, and join the dancing
+in the hall below.
+
+Not a night passed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty
+air. It burst into the narrow streets from _estaminets_ where the
+soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German
+houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier General" danced a triumph.
+Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in
+their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers
+danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because
+they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.
+
+It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a
+little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?
+
+In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Marechal Petain, and kept his
+eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the
+Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them balls--insufficiently
+fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France
+could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the
+cake-shops flowered with _eclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux a la
+creme_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.
+
+France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine,
+that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the
+benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while
+the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that
+they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and
+silk were hiding.
+
+Fetes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight
+processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town
+went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were
+sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously
+through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might
+sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the
+dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing
+white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in
+figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.
+
+The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand
+Quartier General, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom,
+having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills,
+found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of
+Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.
+
+"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.
+
+"I have--eight."
+
+"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."
+
+"Is there work, sir?"
+
+"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance
+all night! Englishwomen do dance, don't they?"
+
+"I have never been to England."
+
+"Get them here. Send for them."
+
+So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of
+women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-a-Mousson as dusk was
+falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.
+
+They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets
+flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of butter, bars of
+chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
+
+"Can you see the price on the butter?"
+
+"Twenty-four...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I can't see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Ah, is it possible, eclairs?"
+
+"Eclairs!"
+
+And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
+
+German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper
+balls into the back of the ambulance.
+
+"I heard, I heard...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I heard German spoken."
+
+"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"
+
+"No," but Fanny felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language
+spoken in a vanished town.
+
+They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du
+Theatre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for
+the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had
+waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.
+
+"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is
+and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"
+
+In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French
+tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they
+walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other
+side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth,
+with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited
+behind the chairs.
+
+"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...
+where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles,
+there's a jar left from yours."
+
+"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you,
+mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
+
+"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your
+responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey!
+For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is
+more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans
+yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
+
+"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You
+can't? Nor I either...."
+
+"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
+
+Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music
+stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
+
+A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in
+mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement.
+"To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had
+run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor
+lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without
+generosity, beauty, or privacy--in a hole, dirty and cold, plain
+and coarse.
+
+She glanced at her neighbour with wonder and appreciation, delight and
+envy. There was a light, clean scent upon his hair. She saw his hands,
+his nails. And her own.
+
+A young Jew opposite her had his hair curled, and a faint powdery bloom
+about his face.
+
+("But never mind! That is civilisation. There are people who turn from
+that and cry for nature, but I, since I've lived as a dog, when I see
+artifice, feel gay!")
+
+"You don't know with what interest you have been awaited."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Ah, yes! And were you pleased to come?"
+
+"We did not know to what we were coming!"
+
+"And now?..."
+
+She looked round the table peacefully, listened to the light voices
+talking a French she had never heard at Bar.
+
+"And now?..."
+
+"I could not make you understand how different...." (No, she would not
+tell him how they had lived at Bar. She was ashamed.) But as she was
+answering the servant gave him a message and he was called away. When he
+returned he said: "The Commandant Dormans is showing himself
+very anxious."
+
+The Jew laughed and said: "He wants to see these ladies this evening?"
+
+"No, he spares them that, knowing of their journey. He sends a message
+by the Capitaine Chatel to tell us that the _D.S.A._ gives a dance
+to-morrow night. The personal invitation will be sent by messenger in
+the morning. You dance, mademoiselle?"
+
+"There is a dance, and we are invited? Yes, yes, I dance! You asked if I
+was happy now that I am here. To us this might be Babylon, after
+the desert!"
+
+"Babylon, the wicked city?"
+
+"The gay, the light, beribboned city! What is the 'D.S.A.'?"
+
+"A power which governs our actions. We are but the C.R.A.... the
+regulating control. But they are the Direction. 'Direction Service
+Automobile.' They draw up all traffic rules for the Army, dispose of
+cars, withdraw them. On them you depend and I depend. But they are
+well-disposed towards you."
+
+"And the Commandant Dormans is the head?"
+
+"The head of all transport. He is a great man. Very peculiar."
+
+"The Capitaine Chatel?"
+
+"His aide, his right hand, the nearest to his ear."
+
+Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the
+garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars
+passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water
+gleam in the gulf below.
+
+"What river is that?"
+
+"The Moselle."
+
+A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in
+the outer town, the German quarter."
+
+In a narrow street whose houses overhung the river each of the section
+was put down at a different doorway, given a paper upon which was
+inscribed her right to billets, and introduced in Reherry's rapid German
+to her landlady.
+
+Fanny in her turn, following the young man through a dark doorway, found
+herself in a stone alley and climbed the windings of a stairway. A girl
+of twelve or thirteen received her on the upper landing, saying "Guten
+Abend," and looking at her with wonder.
+
+"Where is your mother?" said Reherry.
+
+"She is out with my eldest sister."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Elsa."
+
+"Then, Elsa, look after this lady. Take her to her room, the room I saw
+your mother about, give her hot water, and bring her breakfast in the
+morning. Take great care of her."
+
+"Jawohl, mein Herr."
+
+Reherry turned away and ran down the stairs. Elsa showed Fanny to a room
+prepared for her.
+
+"You are English?" said Elsa, and could not take her eyes off her.
+
+"Yes, I am English. And are you German?" (Question so impossible, so
+indiscreet in England...)
+
+"I am real German, from Coblentz. How did you come here, Fraeulein?"
+
+"In a car."
+
+"But from England! Is there not water?"
+
+"I crossed the water in a ship, and afterwards I came here in a car."
+
+"You have a motor car? But every one is rich in England."
+
+"Oh, not very..."
+
+"Yes, every one. Mother says so."
+
+The girl went away, then brought her a jug of hot water.
+
+"I hope," said Fanny, venturing upon a sea of forgotten German, "I hope
+I haven't turned you or your sister out of this room."
+
+"This is the strangers' room," said Elsa. "I thank you."
+
+When she had gone, Fanny looked round the room. It was too German to be
+true. The walls were dark red, the curtains dark red, the carpet,
+eiderdown, rep cover of the armchair, plush on the photograph frames,
+embroidered mats upon the washstand, tiles upon the stove, everything a
+deep, dark red. Four mugs stood upon the mantelpiece, and ... she rubbed
+her eyes ... was it possible that one had an iron cross upon its
+porcelain, one the legend "Got mit uns," the third the head of the
+Kaiser, the fourth the head of the Kaiserin? "That is too much! The
+people I shall write to won't believe it!"
+
+Her bed was overhung by a large branch of stag's horn fixed upon the
+wall.
+
+She felt the bed, counted the blankets, found matches on the
+mantelpiece, a candle in the candlestick, room in the stove to boil a
+kettle or a saucepan. Hot water steamed from her jug, a hot brick had
+been placed to warm her bed, a plate of rye bread cut in slices and
+covered with a cloth was upon the table.
+
+Foreign to her own, the eyes which had rejoiced in this room ... yet the
+smile of German comfort was upon it.
+
+She lay down beneath the branching antlers, and smiled before she went
+to sleep: "One pair of silk stockings ... to dance in Babylon ..."
+
+ *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning a thin woman dressed in black brought her breakfast--jam,
+rye bread, coffee and sugar.
+
+"Guten Morgen," said the woman, and looked at her curiously. But Fanny
+couldn't remember which language she ought to talk, and fumbled in her
+head so long that the woman went away.
+
+She dressed and went out, meeting Stewart by her doorway. Together they
+crossed the bridge, the theatre square, and went towards the Cathedral
+with eager faces. They did not look up at the Cathedral, at the statute
+of old David upon which the Kaiser had had his own head carved, and upon
+whose crossed hands the people had now hung chains fastened with a
+padlock--they did not glance at the Hotel de Ville in the square beyond,
+but, avoiding the tram which emerged from the narrow Serpenoise like a
+monster that had too long been oppressed, they hurried on up the street
+with a subdued and hungry gaiety.
+
+There was a Need to be satisfied before anything could be seen, done, or
+said. A Need four years old, now knocking at the doors of heaven,
+howling to be satisfied.
+
+Before the windows of a shop they paused, but Stewart, standing back and
+looking up the street, said: "There is a better further on!" and when
+they had gone on a few paces Fanny whispered, hurrying, "A better still
+beyond!" At the third shop, the Need, imperative, royal, would wait no
+longer, and drove them within.
+
+"How many?" asked the saleswoman at the end of ten minutes.
+
+"Seven _eclairs_ and a cream bun, said Stewart.
+
+"Just nine _eclairs_," said Fanny.
+
+"Seventeen francs," said the woman without moving an eyelash.
+
+This frenzy cooled, their pockets lighter, they walked for pleasure in
+the town. The narrow streets streamed with people--French soldiers and
+officers, Lorraine women in the costumes of pageantry, and German
+children who cried shrilly: "Amerikanerin, Amerikanerin!"
+
+An English major passed them. They recognised his flawless boots before
+they realised his nationality. And, following his, the worst boots in
+the world--worn by a couple of sauntering Italian officers, gay in olive
+and silver uniform. German men in black slouch hats hurried along
+the streets.
+
+It had been arranged that they should eat their meals in a room
+overlooking the canal, at the foot of the Cathedral--and there at eleven
+o'clock they went, to be a little dashed in spirit by the reappearance
+of the Bar-le-Duc crockery.
+
+The same yellow dish carried what seemed the same rationed jam; the
+square blocks of meat might have been cooked in the Bar cook-hut, and
+brought with them over the desert; two heavy loaves stood as usual on
+the wooden table. The French Army ration was the same in every town.
+
+"Mesdames," said the orderly assigned to them, "there are two
+sous-officers without who wish to speak with you."
+
+"Let them come in."
+
+Two blue figures appeared in the doorway and saluted. The first brought
+a card of invitation from the Commandant Dormans. The second was the
+brigadier from the garage with a list of the cars assigned to
+the drivers.
+
+"Perhaps these ladies would come down and try their cars after lunch?"
+he suggested, and lunch being over they walked with him through the
+winding streets. At the gates of a great yard he paused and a sentry
+swung them open. Behind the gates lay a sandy plain as large as a parade
+ground, which, except for gulleys or gangways crossing it at intervals,
+was packed from end to end with row after row of cars; cars in the worst
+possible condition, torn, twisted, wheelless, cars with less dramatic
+and yet fatal injuries; some squatting backwards upon their haunches,
+some inclined forwards upon their knees--one, lately fished up from a
+river, had slabs and crusts of ice still upon its seats--one, the last
+dragged in at the tail of a breakdown lorry, hung, fore-wheels in the
+air, helpless upon a crane. Here, in the yard, was nothing but broken
+iron and mouldering carriage work--the cemetery of the Transport of the
+Grand Quartier.
+
+Lining all one side of the yard ran a shed, closed and warmed and
+lighted, where living cars slept in long rows mudguard to mudguard, and
+bright lamps facing outward.
+
+As the Englishwomen walked in a soft rustle could be heard up and down
+the lighted shed, for each half-hidden driver working by his car turned
+and shot a glance, expectant and mocking, towards the door.
+
+"Ben quoi, i'parait qu'c'esst vrai! Tu vois!"
+
+"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, c'ui-la?"
+
+"C'est les Anglaises, pardi!"
+
+"Tu comprends, j'suis contre tout ca. I'y a des fois ou les femmes c'est
+bien. Mais ici ..."
+
+"Tu grognes? On va r'devenir homme, c'est tres bien!"
+
+"C'est idiot! Qu'est-ce qu'elles vont faire ici!"
+
+"On dirait--c'est du militarisme francais!"
+
+"Le militarisme francais j'm'en f----! Tu verra, cela va faire encore du
+travail pour nous."
+
+"Attends un peu!"... And murmurs filled the shed--glances threaded the
+shadows, chilling the spirit of the foreign women adventuring upon the
+threshold.
+
+"Four Rochets," said the _brigadier_, consulting his paper, "two
+Delages, two FIATS ... Mademoiselle, here is yours, and yours. The
+Lieutenant Denis will be here in a moment. He fears the Rochets will be
+too heavy for you, but we must see."
+
+The lieutenant who had been at dinner the night before entered the shed,
+greeted them, and turned to Stewart. "That car is too heavy for your
+strength, mademoiselle. It is not a car for a lady."
+
+"I like the make," she said stiffly, conscious of the ears which
+listened in the shed.
+
+"See if you can start her now, mademoiselle," said the _brigadier_,
+arranging the levers.
+
+There was a still hush in the shed as Stewart bent to the handle. Fanny,
+standing by the Rochet which had been assigned to her, felt her
+heart thumping.
+
+("Tu vas voir!" whispered the little soldiers watching brightly from
+behind the cars. "Attends, attends un peu! Pour les mettre en marche,
+les tacots, c'est autre chose!")
+
+Stewart, seizing the handle, could not turn it. In the false night of
+the shed the lights shone on polished lamps, on glass and brass, on
+French eyes which said: "That's what comes of it!"--which were ready to
+say--"March out again, Englishwomen, ridiculous and eager and defeated!"
+
+Fanny, looking neither to right nor left, prayed under her breath
+--"Stewart, Stewart we can never live in this shed if you can't start
+her. And if you can't, nobody else can...."
+
+There was a spurt of life from the engine as it back-fired, and Stewart
+sprang away holding her wrist with the other hand. The lieutenant, the
+brigadier, and a driver from a car near by crowded round her with
+exclamations.
+
+"You advanced the spark too much," said the driver to the _brigadier_.
+"_Tenez_! I will retard it."
+
+"She shan't touch the car again." said the lieutenant. "It is too
+heavy."
+
+"Leave the controls alone," said Stewart, scowling at the driver. "Give
+me room ..." She caught the handle with her injured hand, and with a
+gasp, swung the Rochet into throbbing life.
+
+There was a murmur of voices down the shed, and each man with a slight
+movement returned to the work he had been doing; the polishers polished,
+the cleaners swept, and a little chink of metal on metal filled the
+garage. The women were accepted.
+
+The day had vanished. Cars, yard and garage sank out of sight. Out in
+the streets the lamps woke one by one, and from the town came shouts and
+the stamp of feet marching. It was Saturday night and a torchlight
+procession of soldier and civilians wound down the street. The band
+passed first, and after it men carried fire-glares fastened upon sticks.
+
+The garage gates turned to rods and bars of gold till the light left
+them, and the glare upon the house-fronts opposite travelled slowly down
+the street.
+
+Fanny slipped out of the yard and crept along behind the flares like a
+shadow on the pavement. At the street corner she passed out on to the
+bridge over the Moselle, and leant against the stonework to watch the
+plumes of fire as they glittered up the riverside upon the tow-path. The
+lights vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that she could only
+feel her way over the bridge by holding to the stonework with her hand.
+A sentry challenged her and when she had passed him she had arrived at
+the door of her German lodging.
+
+Climbing the stairs a slow breeze of excitement filled out the sails of
+her spirit. "My silk stockings ... my gold links, and my benzene
+bottle!" she murmured happily. Now that of all her life she had the
+slenderest toilet to make--three hours was the time she had set
+aside for it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JULIEN
+
+Earth has her usual delights--which can be met with six days out of the
+seven. But here and there upon grey earth there exist, like the flying
+of sunlight, celestial pleasures also--and one of these is the heaven of
+success. When, puffed-up and glorious, the successful creature struts
+like a peacock, gilded in a passing radiance. And in a radiance, in a
+magic illumination, the newcomers danced in the drawing-room of the
+Commandant Dormans, and tasted that which cannot be found when sought,
+nor held when tasted.
+
+Old tapestries of tropical foliage hung around the walls, dusk upon one
+wall, dawn upon another. Trees climbed from floor to ceiling laden with
+lime-coloured flowers, with birds instead of fruits upon the branches.
+
+When at a touch the yellow dust flew out under the lamplight it seemed
+to the mazy eye of the dancer that the trees sent up a mist of
+pollen and song.
+
+In this happy summer, Fanny, turning her vain ear to spoken flattery,
+her vain eye to mute, danced like a golden gnat in fine weather.
+
+The Commandant Dormans spoke to her. If he was not young he had a quick
+voice that was not old. He said: "We welcome you. We have been waiting
+for you. We are glad you have come."
+
+Faces surrounded her which to her fresh eyes were not easy to read.
+Names which she had heard last night became young and old men to her
+--skins red and pale and dark-white--eyes blue and olive and black--gay,
+audacious and mocking features. She was dazzled, she did not hurry to
+understand. One could not choose, one floated free of preference, all
+men were strangers.
+
+"One day I shall know what they are, how they live, how they think." But
+she did not want that day to come.
+
+The Commandant Dormans said: "You do not regret Bar-le-Duc?"
+
+"No, no, no."
+
+"I hear you are all voracious for work. I hear that if you do not drive
+from morning to night we cannot hope to keep you with us!"
+
+Denis said to her: "Be careful of him! He believes there is no end to
+the human strength."
+
+She replied joyously: "There is no end to our strength!"
+
+When she had eyes to see, to watch, to choose, she found that there was
+in the room a man who was graceful and young, whose eyes were a peculiar
+shape, who laughed all the time gently as he danced. He never looked at
+her, never came near her. This young man was indifferent to her, he was
+indifferent to her ... Soon he became a trouble and a pleasure to her.
+With whom was he dancing now ... and now? Who was it that amused him?
+His eyes and his hair were bright ... but there were many around her
+whose eyes and hair were as bright. Before she had seen that young man
+laugh her pleasure had been more complete.
+
+While she was talking to Denis a voice said to her: "Won't you dance
+with me?"
+
+Looking up she saw who it was. His mouth smiled, his eyes were clever
+and gay.
+
+The moment she danced with him she began to grow proud, she began to
+find herself. Someone whispered to her: "The section must leave at such
+and such an hour...."
+
+She thought in a flash: "For me the section is dissolved ... I am I, and
+the others are the others!"
+
+The evening wore on. The musicians flagged and took up their courage
+again. It was late when Stewart, touching Fanny's arm, showed her that
+they were almost the only two women in the room.
+
+"Where are the others?"
+
+"In the hall, putting on their coats. We are all going."
+
+"Aren't they in a hurry?"
+
+"They have had orders, which were brought up just now, for runs early
+to-morrow morning. But you and I have nothing, and Denis has asked
+us ... if you are quick you can slip away ... to have supper with him
+at Moitriers."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"We can. The others go home in two cars which have been sent for us. No
+one will know that we are not in the other car. I'm so hungry."
+
+"So am I, starving. Very well."
+
+They joined the others, put on their coats, hunted ostentatiously for
+their gloves, then slipped ahead down the dark stairway into the square
+below. Denis joined them.
+
+"Splendid. I have my car round that corner. It will be only a matter of
+half an hour, but if you are both as hungry as I you will welcome it.
+Everything was finished upstairs, every crumb and cake. We must get a
+fourth. Who shall I get?"
+
+"Any one whom you would like to bring," said Stewart. "I don't think I
+have mastered the names yet. I really don't mind."
+
+"And you, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Nor I either," said Fanny, sniffing at the frosty air, at the fresh
+night.
+
+"Whom you like!"
+
+"Then I won't be a moment. I'll bring whom I can."
+
+"Monsieur!"... as he reached the corner. He turned back.
+
+"There is an artillery captain ... in a black uniform with silver."
+
+"An artillery captain ..." he paused enquiringly.
+
+"In black and silver. There was no other in the room."
+
+"Oh, yes, there were two in black and silver!"
+
+"Tall, with ..."
+
+"Ah, tall! The other is very short ... The tall one is the Commandant's
+aide, Captain Chatel. He may not be able.... But I will see!" He
+disappeared again.
+
+When he returned he had the young man beside him.
+
+"One moment," said Chatel, as they walked towards the car; "who asked
+for me, the girl with the fair hair, or with the dark?"
+
+"With the fair."
+
+Moitriers was closed when they reached it, and they drove on to the only
+other place where food could be bought past the hour of midnight--the
+station buffet.
+
+Pushing past the barriers at the entrance to the station they entered a
+long corridor filled with heavy civilian life. Men and women lay, slept
+and snored upon the stone ledges which lined the side of the tunnel,
+their bags and packets stacked around them. Small children lay asleep
+like cut corn, heads hanging and nodding in all directions, or propped
+against each other in such an intricate combination that if one should
+move the whole sheaf of tired heads slipped lower to the floor.
+
+Further on, swing doors of glass led to a waiting-room, and here the
+sleeping men and women were so packed upon the ground and around the
+little tables that it was difficult to walk between them. Men sat in
+groups of nine or ten around a table meant for four each with his head
+sunk down between his hands upon the marble surface. On one table a
+small child wrapped in shawls lay among the circle of heads, curled like
+a snail, its toe in its father's ear. At each end of the room stood
+soldiers with fixed bayonets.
+
+Denis paused at the entrance. "Walk round here," he said, "there is a
+gangway for the sentry."
+
+"If we talk too loud," said Fanny, "we shall wake them."
+
+"They must soon wake in any case. It must be near the time for the
+train. You know who they are?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Germans. Expelled from Metz. They leave in batches for Germany every
+night--by a train that comes in and goes out at some horrible hour."
+
+Passing through more glass doors they came to an inner room where,
+behind a buffet, a lady in black silk served them with beer and slices
+of raw ham and bread.
+
+The four sat down for a moment at a little table--Denis talking of the
+system by which the outgoing Germans were nightly weeded from those who
+had permission to remain behind in Metz. Julien Chatel joined in the
+conversation. He spoke with the others but he glanced at Fanny. For the
+briefest of seconds he thought as he looked at her face that he saw a
+new interest smile upon it. He did not know that his own face wore the
+same look. His look said as he looked at her: "You, you, you!" At one
+moment she thought: "Am I pretty?" At the next she was content only to
+breathe, and thought no more of herself. She took in now his eyes which
+seldom rested on her, now a movement of his lips which made her feel
+both happy and miserable, and suddenly she learnt how often his finger
+traced some letter upon his cheek.
+
+These things were important. They were like the opening sentences of a
+great play to which one must listen, absorbed, for fear of
+misunderstanding all the story.
+
+It was not long before they rose, threaded their way back between the
+sleeping Germans, regained the car, and drove down the silent streets
+towards the Cathedral.
+
+"Have you seen it?" said Julien in a low voice, addressing her directly.
+
+"The Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes. I want to show it to you. Will you meet me there to-morrow at
+three?"
+
+(The others talked and smiled and knew nothing. Whoever has a secret is
+stronger than they who know nothing. Fanny thought: "My companions, to
+be as you are is not to exist! Whatever you feel, you are feeling
+nothing ...")
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, and joined her hands tightly, for this was where
+the play really began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun shone gaily. Here was no mud, no unhappiness, here were no
+puzzled women, and touching mayors of ruined villages, but instead gay
+goblin houses, pointed churches like sugar cake, the old French theatre
+with its stone garlands glittering in the sun; sun everywhere, streaming
+over the Place du Theatre, over women shaking coloured rags from the
+windows, women washing linen by the river; everything that had been wet
+was drying, everything that had savoured of tears and age and sadness
+was burning up under the sun, and what moisture remained was brighter
+than jewels.
+
+"Suppose he never came!"
+
+"Why, then, be ready for that. Very likely he wouldn't come. Very likely
+he would think in daylight--' She is not a woman, but an English
+Amazon...'" Fanny glanced down at her clothes regretfully. She was
+ill-equipped for an assignation.
+
+"At least I might have better gloves," she thought, and walked into a
+small shop which advertised men's clothes in German across the window.
+She bought yellow washing-leather gloves at twenty-eight francs a pair,
+and would have paid a hundred had the salesman insisted.
+
+And now with yellow gloves, silk stockings, shining shoes and a heart
+as light as a leaf upon a wind she walked towards the Cathedral.
+
+"He won't come. He won't be there...." She pushed at the east door.
+
+He was under a Madonna, his black and silver hat in his hand, his eyes
+critical and pleased as he walked to meet her. They sat down together
+on a seat, without speaking. Then, each longing for the other to speak
+--"You have come...." he said first. (His face was oval and his hair
+was shining.)
+
+"Yes," she nodded, and noticed a peculiar glory in the Cathedral. The
+dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of
+a mourner.
+
+They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at
+each other's call.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't come."
+
+"Why, why did you think that?"
+
+Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their
+lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and
+answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.
+
+Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little
+words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled
+at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll
+go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her
+among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown
+her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except
+the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold
+light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of
+the carved fingers which prayed around them.
+
+They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very
+edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks
+buried in shrubberies of green.
+
+Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill
+in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon
+floated indefinitely like a cloud.
+
+A young doctor lounged beside them, putty-coloured under his red plush
+cap. "Why are all doctors plain in France?" she laughed.
+
+"Hush!" He wound his hand round and round like the player of a barrel
+-organ. "I have to stop you when you say silly things like a phonograph,
+at so much a metre."
+
+So he believed he might tease her.... Delighted, she stopped by the bank
+of the river and stared into the water. The sun ran over her shoulders
+and warmed her hands. The still shine of the river held both their eyes
+as movement in a train holds the mind.
+
+"I am enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a
+compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was
+sorry. "What a pity!"
+
+But she was not critical because she was looking for living happiness,
+and every moment she was more and more convinced that she would get it.
+But when he asked her her name and she repeated it, it sounded so much
+like an avowal that they both turned together down the tow-path with a
+quick movement and spoke of other things, for they were old enough to be
+afraid that the vague happiness that fluttered before them down the path
+would not be so beautiful when it was caught. And at this fear she said
+distinctly to herself: "In love!" and wondered that she had not said
+it before.
+
+Coming back to him with her words, she then began to wound and to delay
+him. "You mustn't be late for your office...."
+
+"When shall I see you again?"
+
+They dropped into a long silence. She summoned her coquetry that she
+called pride. The blue, blue forest at the edge of her sight tilted a
+little like a ship, the watery hill-country rolled towards it in
+mysterious kilometres.
+
+"It is beautiful," she said clumsily, avoiding his question, ignoring
+it. "Yet when I go there it is always more beautiful on the next hill.'
+
+"I must hurry," he said at once, "I shall be late at my office."
+
+"Where is your office?"
+
+He looked round vaguely. "There in that group of pines." They walked
+towards it, they were almost at the door, but he would not repeat his
+question. Would he not at the last moment? No. Had it not then been
+clear that the living happiness was at her lips? No. Could he let her
+go, could it have been a failure? He was holding out one of the stone
+hands. He was going.
+
+She looked up and the sun was streaming in his eyes, blinding him, and
+without seeing her he stared into the darkness that was her face. "I
+have so enjoyed my walk," he said. "Thank you for coming."
+
+All her face said "Oh!" in a hurt, frightened stare, but the sun only
+came round the edges of her hair and cap and left the panic in a
+shifting darkness. He was gone.
+
+She went back to her street. Reaching the big, populous house she
+followed the corridor that led from the stone courtyard, climbed to the
+first floor and opened the door of her own room. A bitter disillusion
+ran through her. The close-packed furniture seemed to say indifferently,
+"There's not much room for you!" and she knew quite well as she sat down
+on the bed that it was not her room at all, but had been as public to
+the birds of passage as the branch of a tree to the birds of the air.
+
+"I did so little. I did so little. It was such a little mistake!"
+Self-pity flooded her.
+
+"And why did he ask me to come to the Cathedral if such a little thing,
+such a little thing...." Indignation rose.
+
+"Things don't crumble like that, don't vanish like that!" She stared,
+astonished, at the scenes she had left behind her, the shining of the
+dark Cathedral, the ripple on the Moselle. "But they do, they do,
+they do...."
+
+Down in the street her own name caught her ear, and she went to the
+window.
+
+"Are you there, are you there?" cried the voice.
+
+Hanging waist-deep out of the window she received her orders for the
+next day.
+
+"I came down to tell you now," said the girl below on the pavement. "I
+thought you might have things to do to the car. You must be at the Hotel
+Royal, near the station, at half-past six to-morrow morning."
+
+"Have you any idea whom I'm to take? Or where?"
+
+"I don't know where, but the man is a Russian colonel."
+
+She drew her head back through the window, and the gay tumble of the
+street gave way to the impersonal, heavy room. Cramming her oil-stained
+overall into her haversack, she put on her leather coat and went up to
+the garage.
+
+The sun had disappeared. A cold wind struck the silk-clad ankles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+"Come in," she said in English, lifting her head and all her mind and
+spirit out of the pit of the pillow.
+
+Feet came further into the room and a shivering child held a candle in
+her face. "Halb sechs, Fraeulein," it said. But the Fraeulein continued to
+stare at him. He thought she was not yet awake--he could not tell that
+she was counting countries in her head to find which one she was in--or
+that she was inclining towards the theory that she was at school in
+Germany. He was very cold in his shirt and little trousers, and he
+pulled at her sheets. "Fraeulein!" he said again with chattering teeth,
+and when she nodded more collectedly the little ghost slipped out
+relieved by the door. "Russian colonel ... I must get up. Fancy making
+that boy call me! Why couldn't someone older ... I must get up."
+
+He had left the electric light burning in her room, but out in the
+corridor all was black and hushed as she had left it the night before
+when she had gone to bed. Behind the kitchen door there was a noise of
+water running in the sink. She opened the door, and there was the
+wretched child again, still in his shirt, rinsing out her coffee-pot by
+the light of one candle. Well, since he was doing it ... Poor child! But
+she must have her coffee. By the time she was dressed he tapped again
+and brought in the tray with coffee, bread and jam on it. Setting it
+down, he looked it over with an anxious face. "Zucker," he said, and
+disappeared to fetch it. She filled her thermos bottle with the rest of
+the coffee which she could not finish, and put two of the slices of grey
+bread into the haversack, then crept downstairs and out into the black
+street where the gas lamps still burnt and the night sentry still paced
+up and down in the spectral gloom. Over the river hung a woolly fog,
+imprisoning the water; but as she crossed the bridge she noticed where
+its solidity was incomplete and torn, and into the dark water which lay
+at the bottom of such crevasses a lamp upon the bridge struck its
+arrowed likeness. It was a good seven minutes' walk to the garage, and
+she tried to get warm by running, but the ice crackling in the gutters
+and between the cobble stones defied her, and her hands ached with cold
+though she put them in turn right through her blouse against her heart
+to warm them as she ran. Fetching her car she drove to the Hotel Royal,
+and settled down to wait.
+
+A porter came out and swept the steps of the hotel, and a puff of his
+dust caught her in the face. He laid a fibre mat on each stone step, and
+clipped them with little metal clips.
+
+"Are you for us?" asked a _sous-lieutenant_, looking first up and down
+the empty street and then at the car. He had blue eyes and a long, sad
+moustache that swept down the lower half of his face and even below his
+chin, making him look older than he should.
+
+"I am for a Russian colonel," she said, liking his mild face.
+
+"That's right. Yes, a Russian colonel. Colonel Dellahousse. But can you
+manage by yourself? Can you really? I will tell him...."
+
+He disappeared up the steps and through the swing door of the hotel. A
+moment later he was out again.
+
+"He will come to you himself, he will see you. But we want to go to
+Verdun! Could you drive so far? You could? Yes, yes, perhaps. Yet here
+he comes...."
+
+In dark civilian clothes the Russian came down the hotel steps. He was
+tall, serious, upright, rich. His face beneath his wide, black hat was
+grave and well cared for. The sombre glitter of his eye was grave, his
+small dark beard shone in the well-controlled prime of its growth. From
+the narrow line of white collar to the narrower thread of French
+watchchain--from the lean, long feet to the lean, white hands she took
+him in, and braced herself, adjusted herself, to meet his stately
+gravity. If there was something of the Mephistopheles in fancy dress
+about him, it was corrected by his considerate expression.
+
+"Have you had breakfast?" he began, speaking French with a softly nasal
+accent.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it! Yes, thank you, monsieur."
+
+"I have to go to Verdun," he put it to her. "I have business there." It
+was as though he expected that she would let him off without difficult
+explanations, would exclaim: "There is some mistake! Some other car,
+some other driver is intended for your work!"
+
+But she remained silent except for a smile of acknowledgment, and with a
+sigh he summoned the lieutenant and went back into the hotel. In a few
+minutes the Frenchman came out again. "Monsieur Dellahousse would like
+to know if you know the way?" he inquired.
+
+"He doesn't want to take me? Isn't that it?" asked Fanny, smiling but
+anxious.
+
+"He is a little doubtful," admitted the lieutenant. "You must
+excuse...."
+
+"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and
+I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know
+the way to Verdun."
+
+He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and
+Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care
+under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort
+of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure,
+too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their
+women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."
+
+She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
+met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
+drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
+apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
+bewilderment.
+
+She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
+and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
+and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
+of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
+at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
+crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
+gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
+of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
+ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out
+moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large
+upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's
+side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree
+across the road.
+
+"Halt--Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards
+which swung and creaked in the wind.
+
+"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone,
+pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the
+German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach
+Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one
+might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the
+arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."
+
+For miles and miles nothing living was to be seen, neither animal, nor
+motor, nor living man; only the stray fires of the Chinese fluttered
+here and there like blue and red marsh fires a mile or so back from the
+main road. Once as she flew along she shied like a horse and twisted the
+wheel as a wild screaming and twittering rose at the side of the car,
+and glancing back she saw three figures wriggle and laugh in mockery and
+astonishment. They had risen round the embers of a dead fire, and stood
+swaying on their feet and showing white teeth in orange faces. One had
+the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.
+
+They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with
+hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an
+arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first
+pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.
+
+Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the
+brow of a hill.
+
+"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it
+is a town!"
+
+"Wait, wait till you get nearer...."
+
+Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the
+suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful
+frailty--its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood
+upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry--not one house
+was whole.
+
+"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill
+which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was
+poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let
+out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still
+upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it
+should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet.
+Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the
+palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky. The
+Russian, who had stood up in the car, sat down. "Now go on...."
+
+The streets which circled the base of the hill had been partially
+cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way
+between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers,
+manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon
+fingers of stone already touched by moss.
+
+Here and there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But
+the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind
+--and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of the
+world's youth.
+
+Now and then with a crash the remains of a house fell, as the block of
+stonework which alone supported it was disarranged by the
+working soldiers.
+
+"Where am I to go?" asked Fanny, as the street wound round the base of
+the hill.
+
+"I will climb over beside you and direct you," said the French
+lieutenant, and dropped into the front seat.
+
+"Where do these soldiers sleep? Not among these ruins?"
+
+A block of masonry fell ahead of them and split its stones across the
+street.
+
+"Be careful! You can get round by this side street. Up here.... In these
+ruins. No living soul can sleep in Verdun now."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Don't you know? They sleep _beneath_ Verdun, in this hill around which
+we are circling. I am looking for the entrance."
+
+"Inside this hill? Under the town?"
+
+"But you've heard of the _citadelle?_"
+
+"Yes, but... this hill is so big."
+
+"There are fifteen kilometres of tunnel in this hollow hill, and
+hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a
+defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, here is the entrance."
+
+They left the car. Before them was a small dark hole in the side of the
+hill, an entrance not much higher than a man, into which ran a single
+rail line of narrow gauge. A sentry challenged them as they walked
+towards him.
+
+Entering the hill they found themselves in a tunnel lit by electric
+bulbs which hung in a dotted line ahead of them.
+
+"Wait!" ordered the deep voice of the Russian, and he strode from them
+into the depths of the tunnel with the Eastern swing of Ali Baba
+entering his cave.
+
+Fanny stood by the mild lieutenant, and they waited obediently.
+
+"I must tell you a secret," he said to her. "Monsieur Dellahousse is
+very glad to be here. He said this morning: 'The Governor has sent me a
+woman to break my neck!'"
+
+"But he took me...."
+
+"Could he refuse you?--For he felt that it was a glove of challenge
+thrown down by the Governor of Metz. They do not get on together.... He
+took you with dignity, but he was convinced that he placed himself in
+the jaws of death."
+
+"When do we go back? We cannot now be in Metz before dark."
+
+"But haven't they told you? Never warned you? How monstrous! We are
+staying here."
+
+"And I return alone?"
+
+"No, you stay too. You are lent to us for five days. They should have
+told you!"
+
+"Oh, I stay too. In this tunnel, here! How odd, how amusing!"
+
+"Monsieur Dellahousse has gone to ask the Commandant of the _citadelle_
+to house us all. Here he comes."
+
+The Russian returned under the chain of lights. "Follow me," he said,
+and led them further into his cavern.
+
+They followed him like children, and as they advanced the lieutenant
+whispered: "We are now well beneath the town. It lies like a crust above
+our heads. Exactly beneath the palace you will see the steps go up...."
+
+"What is the railway line for?"
+
+"Bread for the garrison. There are great bakeries in the _citadelle_."
+
+Further and further still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and
+took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were
+twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist
+floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally
+above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the _officers de
+passage_, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle
+held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a
+chair and a shelf, and each bore the name of its temporary owner written
+on a card upon the door.
+
+"Twenty ... twenty-one ... and twenty-two," read the Russian from a
+paper he carried, and threw open the door of twenty-two.
+
+"This is yours, mademoiselle"; he bowed and waved her toward it. Fanny
+entered the room, which, from his manner, might have been the gilded
+ante-chamber of his Tzar.
+
+She heard him enter his own room, and through the partition the very
+sighing of his breath was audible as it rustled upon his lips! He tried
+to give her the illusion of privacy, for, wishing to speak to her, he
+left his room again to tap at her door, though his voice was as near her
+ear whether at door or wall.
+
+"I hope you are content, mademoiselle?" he said through the woodwork.
+
+"Delighted, monsieur."
+
+"You will sleep here," he continued, as though he suspected her of
+sleeping anywhere but there, "and dine with us in the officers' mess at
+seven. Until then, please stay in the _citadelle_ in case I need you."
+
+She heard his footsteps go up the corridor, the lieutenant following
+him. "I will unpack," she thought, and from her knapsack drew what she
+had by chance brought with her. Upon the shelf she arranged a tin of
+_singe_--the French bully beef--a gilt box of powder, a toothbrush, a
+comb, a map, a packet of letters to be answered, and a magneto spanner.
+
+There was an hour yet before dinner and she wandered out into the
+corridors to explore the _citadelle_. A soldier stood upon a ladder
+changing the bulb of an electric light.
+
+Catching sight of her he hurried from his ladder, and passing her with
+a stiff face, saluted, and disappeared.
+
+Soon she began to think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the
+corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed
+behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on,
+and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about
+their duties.
+
+"Perhaps they are changing the guard...."
+
+Yet a face which had already passed her three times began to impress its
+features upon her, and she realised suddenly that it was curiosity, not
+duty, that called the soldiers from their burrows. The news was spreading,
+for out of the gloom ahead fresh parties of onlookers appeared, paused
+disconcerted as she wished them "good evening," nodded or saluted her in
+haste, then hurried by.
+
+An officer with grizzled hair stepped into the passage from a doorway.
+As she neared him she saw he wore the badges of a commandant.
+
+"Who is this?" he asked in a low voice of the soldier who followed at
+his heels.
+
+"J'n'en sais rien, mon commandant," The soldier stiffened as a watch-dog
+who sees a cat.
+
+Fanny hastened nearer. "I drive a Russian officer," she explained. "I
+hope I have your permission to stay here."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the officer, looking at her in surprise. "Colonel
+Dellahousse told me 'a driver'; he did not add that the driver was a
+lady. Where have they put you? Not in the cubicles of the _officiers de
+passage?_ No, no, that must be changed, that won't do. Come, you shall
+sleep in the room next to the bishop's room, as he is absent. It is in
+my corridor."
+
+Fanny followed him, and noticed that the corridor was now clear of
+soldiers. The commandant paused before a door decorated with flags and
+led her into another corridor lined with cubicles much larger than those
+she had seen at first.
+
+"Open number seven."
+
+The soldier took his bunch of keys and opened the door.
+
+"Now fetch mademoiselle's effects from the other corridor. Which number
+was your room, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Twenty-two. But I can fetch them ... I have really nothing."
+
+The soldier withdrew.
+
+"He will get them. You dine with us, I hope, to-night at seven. Are you
+English, mees?"
+
+"Yes, English--with the French Army. I am really so grateful...."
+
+"The other room was not possible. I like the English, mees. I have known
+them at my home near Biarritz. You and I must talk a little. Do you
+care to read?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if I get time...."
+
+"Any books you may want please take from my sitting-room, number
+sixteen in this corridor. _Tenez!_ I have an English book there--'The
+Light that Failed'--I will get it for you."
+
+"Oh! I have read ... But thank you."
+
+_"De rien, de rien!_ I will get it now." He hastened up the corridor and
+returned with the book in his hand.
+
+The soldier, too, returned, bearing the seven objects which had
+accompanied her travels.
+
+"You will clean mademoiselle's shoes, brush her uniform, and bring her
+hot water when she needs it," ordered the commandant, and the soldier
+saluted impassively--a watch-dog who had been told that it was the
+house-cat after all.
+
+Left alone, she searched all her pockets for some forgotten stick of
+chocolate, and finding nothing, sat down upon the bed to wait hungrily
+till seven. The air in the tunnels was heavy and dry, and throwing off
+her tunic she lay down on the bed and slept until footsteps passing her
+door awoke her.
+
+She became aware that the inhabitants of her corridor were washing their
+hands for dinner, and sitting up sleepily found that it was already
+seven. In a few minutes she hurried from her room and out into the main
+tunnel, glad to get nearer the fresh air which filtered in through the
+opening at the far end.
+
+Reaching a door which she had noticed before, marked "_popote_," she
+paused a second, listening to the hum of voices within, then pushed at
+the door and entered.
+
+Instantly there was a hush of astonishment as seventy or eighty
+officers, eating at a long trestle table, sharply turned their heads
+towards her, their forks poised for a second, their hands still. Then,
+with a quick recovery, all was as before, and the stream of talk
+flowed on.
+
+The first section of the table was reserved for strangers passing
+through Verdun, and here sat a party of young Russian officers in light
+blouse-tunics, an American or two, and a few French officers. At the
+next section sat the officers of the _citadelle_, a passing general, and
+at the left hand of the commandant, Monsieur Dellahousse and the mild
+lieutenant.
+
+Overhead the stone roof of the tunnel was arched with flags, and
+orderlies hurried up and down serving the diners.
+
+Fanny, halfway up the long table, wavered in doubt. Where, after all,
+was she supposed to sit? At the top section, as a guest--or, as a
+driver, among the whispering Russians at the "stranger" section? Her
+anxiety showed in her face as she glanced forwards and backwards and an
+orderly hurried towards her. "Par ici, mademoiselle, par ici!" and she
+followed him towards the head of the table. Her doubts dissolved as she
+saw the gap left for her by the friendly arm of the lieutenant, and,
+arrived at the long wooden bench upon which they sat, she bowed to the
+commandant, and lifting one leg beneath her skirt as a hen does beneath
+its feathers, she straddled the difficult bench and dropped
+into position.
+
+"Beer, mademoiselle? Or red wine?" asked the Russian, suddenly turning
+to her; and the commandant, released from his conversation, called out
+gaily: "The mees will say 'water'--but one must insist. Take the wine,
+mees, it is better for you." The idea of water had never crossed Fanny's
+mind, but having decided on beer she changed it politely to red wine,
+which she guessed to be no other than the everlasting _pinard_.
+
+"I know them...." continued the commandant, smiling at the general. "I
+know the English! My home is at Biarritz and there one meets so many."
+
+And this old man thus addressed, a great star blazing on his breast, and
+tears of age trembling in his blue eyes, lifted his hand to attract her
+attention, and said to Fanny in gentle English: "Verdun honours a
+charming guest, mademoiselle."
+
+_"Verdun ... honours...."_ His words lingered in her ear. She a guest,
+_she_ honoured ... _here_!
+
+Up till now the novelty of her situation had engrossed her, the little
+soldiers watching in the tunnels, the commandant so eager to air his
+stumbling English, these had amused her.
+
+And when she had perceived herself rare, unique, she had forgotten why
+she was thus rare, and what strange, romantic life she meddled in.
+
+Here in this womanless region, in this fortress, in this room, night
+after night, month after month, the commandant and his officers had sat
+at table; in this room, which, unlike the tomb, had held only the
+living, while the dead and the threatened-with-death inhabited the
+earth above.
+
+They had finished dinner and Monsieur Dellahousse signalled to Fanny
+that she might rise. She rose, and at the full sight of her uniform he
+remembered her duties and said stiffly: "Be good enough to wait up till
+ten to-night. I may need you."
+
+They passed out again down the length of the tables. Near the door the
+Russian paused to speak with his countrymen, who rose and stood
+respectfully round him. Fanny and the lieutenant went on alone to
+the corridor.
+
+"You have travelled with him before?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes. I am lent to him to help him through the country. He is on a
+tour of inspection for the Red Cross; he visits all the camps of Russian
+prisoners liberated from Germany."
+
+"But are there many round Verdun?"
+
+"Thousands. You will see to-morrow. And be prepared for early rising. If
+he doesn't send for you by ten to-night I will tell the orderly to let
+you know the hour at which you will be wanted to-morrow morning. The
+car is all ready to start again?"
+
+"I am going out to her now."
+
+He turned away to join the Russian, and Fanny passed the sentry at the
+tunnel's mouth, and stood in the road outside.
+
+Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.
+
+Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its
+bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came
+and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the
+tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:--with his left eye
+he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with
+his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.
+
+"Fait beau dehors." His voice startled her. She turned to him, but he
+stood immobile in the shadow as though he had never spoken. She could
+not be sure that he had indicated to her that every man has his taste
+and his choice.
+
+She set to work on her car which stood in the shelter of an archway
+opposite, and for half an hour the sky trembled unregarded above her
+head. When she had finished she stood back and gazed at the Rochet with
+an anxious friendly enmity--the friendship of an infant with a lion.
+"The garage is eighty miles away," she sighed, "with its friendly men
+who know all where I know so little.... Ah, do I know enough? What have
+I left undone?" For she felt, what was the truth, that the whole
+expedition depended on her, that the stately Russian had perhaps never
+known what it was to have a breakdown--that in Moscow, in Petrograd, in
+his faraway life, he had sat in town cars behind two chauffeurs, unaware
+of the deadly traps in rubber and metal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+Night was the same as day in the tunnels; the electric light was always
+on, and with the morning no daylight crept in to alter it. The orderly
+called her at half-past six and she took her "clients" to a barracks in
+the suburbs of Verdun, where Russian prisoners "liberated" from Germany
+crowded and jostled to see her from behind the bars of the barrack
+square, like wild animals in a cage. Armed sentries paced backwards and
+forwards across the gateway to the yard. As it came on to snow a French
+soldier came out of a guardroom and invited her in by the fire.
+
+Inside, the rest of the guard huddled about the stove, and behind them a
+Russian prisoner with a moon face swept up the crumbs from their last meal.
+
+"Why do Americans guard the gate?" she asked, "since you are a French
+guard?"
+
+"Because we don't shoot with enough goodwill," grinned a little man.
+
+"But who do you want to shoot?"
+
+"Those fellows!" said the little man, slapping the moon-faced Russian on
+the thigh. "We used to guard the gates a week ago. But the Russians were
+always escaping, and not enough were shot as they got over the wall. So
+they said: 'The Americans are the types for that!' and they put them on
+to guard the gates. Look outside! You are having a success,
+mademoiselle!"
+
+Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor,
+scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at
+Fanny in silence through the open doorway.
+
+"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they
+were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the
+Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look
+after these pigs!"
+
+A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to
+the doctor," he said sharply.
+
+"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the
+sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the
+bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.
+
+"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, _va-t'en_!" they all said,
+and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned
+towards the door.
+
+"Here, dress yourself!"
+
+"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
+
+He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and
+disappeared, buckling it on.
+
+"You have Russians in cells, too?"
+
+"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on
+bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."
+
+"But why won't they work?"
+
+"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they
+are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian,
+and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all
+useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are
+in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."
+
+An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
+French.
+
+"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly.
+"I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step
+across ... it isn't a stone's throw."
+
+She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and
+rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for
+they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes,
+and one sardine a man.
+
+After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him
+out of the hut.
+
+"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so
+we thought you'd better come and have some chips."
+
+"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to
+turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a
+shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling
+kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought
+Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she
+was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her
+a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat
+them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with
+coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only
+that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French
+that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
+
+Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had
+finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what
+remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of
+animals, they said:
+
+"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or
+they'd sure die."
+
+"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't
+get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
+
+"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
+"We wouldn't stand it."
+
+"You have no idea of poverty."
+
+Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a
+hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
+
+She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the
+Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet
+here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry,
+though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality
+they were....
+
+She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man
+standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish
+accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a
+souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."
+
+"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"
+
+"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
+Just as though you were a zebra."
+
+"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of
+silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other
+barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps
+of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_
+for lunch.
+
+At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in
+search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows,
+invisible from the main roads.
+
+And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to
+evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many
+thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them,
+and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with
+the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once
+he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you
+and interest me?"
+
+She looked round.
+
+"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is
+jealous of you."
+
+She did not know what to make of this.
+
+"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the
+_citadelle_."
+
+"But...."
+
+"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does,
+as _his woman_."
+
+"But, why...."
+
+"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman
+for miles around, and you belong to us!"
+
+"You too?"
+
+"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger
+because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great
+curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
+I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"
+
+"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
+
+"We talk of this and that."
+
+That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.
+
+"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
+
+"Oh, but that's not necessary ... mystery!"
+
+"It _is_ necessary to love."
+
+"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much,
+"does not believe that you can love what you know."
+
+The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory
+image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This
+poor lady will soon be used to everything."
+
+Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.
+
+"When do we go back?" she asked absently.
+
+The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that,
+and he smiled again.
+
+They left next day, after the midday meal.
+
+Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching
+corridors.
+
+"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."
+
+She waited.
+
+"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
+Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."
+
+Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:
+
+"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."
+
+"Let me pass...." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
+
+He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely
+ashamed of her refusal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you
+satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
+
+"My experience?"
+
+"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now,
+if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town
+where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends
+again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
+
+They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead
+violence of the plains--between trenches that wandered down from the
+side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion
+upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the
+semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
+
+The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and
+cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on
+the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the
+road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled
+with instruments. Depot after depot was piled between the trees and the
+notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them.
+"The drinking trough--the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no
+horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the...." but they
+flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued
+them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not
+smoke here ... _Nicht rauchen_," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "_Rauchen streng
+verboten_," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood
+chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made
+them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as
+it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of
+camouflage--small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with
+wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the
+moon--long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing
+undergrowth--and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its
+knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of
+the earth.
+
+When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out
+upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare.
+Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse
+villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow
+grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across
+village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure
+toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer
+a lift?"
+
+Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a
+murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom
+she had overtaken.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To Briey."
+
+"We, too. Get in, madame."
+
+The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing,
+climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her
+her basket and umbrella.
+
+"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her
+a rug.
+
+"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature
+against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."
+
+"You are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Cover yourself well, well."
+
+Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road,
+who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace
+they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word,
+though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears
+until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!"
+they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own
+doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing
+themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop...."
+
+They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the
+sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the
+Frenchman indicated.
+
+The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her
+handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out
+backwards, with feet feeling for the ground--"What do I owe you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"Ah, nothing, nothing."
+
+"_Mais si_! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny
+piece on the seat, she hurried away.
+
+Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny
+ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said,
+"remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of
+life is spoilt for you."
+
+"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.
+
+Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the
+foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just
+above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the
+moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed
+slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the
+window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who
+prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fraeulein," said Fanny, "would it
+matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry
+it afterwards."
+
+What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had
+nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room
+overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night
+full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the
+smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.
+
+When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open
+the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow
+and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out
+ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little
+boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed.
+The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again,
+between the grey walls of her bath--so like her cradle and her
+coffin--she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.
+
+"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to
+travel is not to move across the earth."
+
+Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten
+words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+      The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill--"
+
+But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her
+through the door.
+
+"You are well, Fraeulein?"
+
+Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
+I was ill?"
+
+"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we
+had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have
+just remembered her."
+
+"Well, I won't drown myself."
+
+"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."
+
+"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon
+the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to
+drown myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+
+"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and
+when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In
+the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it
+was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of
+chalk upon the pavement.
+
+"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage,
+to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"
+
+The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung
+in her mind.
+
+"Whom did you take?"
+
+She struggled with the confusing image of the Russian. Before she could
+reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this
+morning. You'll have to get something done to your car!"
+
+Outside in the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but
+in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty
+cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider,
+which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from
+wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with
+her until she had been under the hose.
+
+Out in the street, where the hose was fastened to the hydrant, the
+little pests of Metz clustered eagerly, standing on the hose pipe where
+the bursts were tied with string, and by dexterous pressure diverting
+the leaks into gay fountains that flew up and pierced the windows
+opposite. As the mud rolled off under the blast of the hose and left the
+car streaky and dripping, the little boys dipping their feet into the
+gutters and paddled.
+
+Soaked and bareheaded, Fanny drove the clean car slowly back into the
+garage and set her in her place in the long line.
+
+Stewart, beside her, whispered, "They've come, they've come! They're
+starting at the other end. Four officers."
+
+Fanny pulled her tin of English "Brasso" from a pocket-flap, and began
+to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
+standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
+tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
+on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
+clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
+all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
+curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
+ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
+and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
+lake of brass.
+
+Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
+and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
+comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
+garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
+then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
+motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.
+
+And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
+fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
+on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
+face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
+impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
+his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
+scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
+She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
+little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
+enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
+into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
+up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have
+swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."
+
+"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.
+
+The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
+beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
+Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
+that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
+back from the backs of those about him.
+
+To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
+with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
+gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
+nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
+on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
+of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
+chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
+drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
+sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
+had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
+she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
+This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
+bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
+endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
+table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
+by Pont-a-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
+in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
+new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
+the thunder out at Pont-a-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
+who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he
+had left on the household that they should frame him in velvet and keep
+him staring at his own bed for ever!) She all but saw spirits--and
+shivered at the procession of life. Outside in the street she heard a
+cry, and her name called under the window. How like the cry that
+afternoon a week ago which had sent her to Verdun! Standing in the
+shadow of the curtain she peered cautiously out.
+
+At sight of her, a voice cried up from the street: "There is a fancy
+dress dance next Tuesday night! I'm warning every one; it's so hard to
+get stuffs." The voice passed on to the house where Stewart lived.
+
+("How nice of her!") This was a good day. ("What shall I wear at the
+dance?") There, about the face of the clock, windless and steady, hung
+the hours. Not yet time to start, not yet.
+
+Through the lace of the curtain and the now closed window, the shadows
+hurried by upon the pavement, heads bobbed below upon the street.
+
+Oh Dark, and Pale, and Plain, walking soberly in hat and coat, what sign
+in these faces of the silver webbery within the brain, of the flashing
+fancies and merry plans, like birds gone mad in a cage! The tram, as
+antique as a sedan chair, clanked across the bridge over the river, and
+changing its note as it reached firmer land, roared and bumbled like a
+huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was
+assailed by little creatures who threw themselves as greedily within as
+if they were setting out upon a wild adventure.
+
+"All going to meet somebody," said Fanny, whose mind, drowned in her
+happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and
+hurry the little creatures in the glass cage were forced to unfold their
+newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
+driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
+conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
+even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
+mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
+downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
+wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
+well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
+of herself.
+
+"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
+to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
+"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
+across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
+are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."
+
+When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
+seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
+upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
+of the big drapery shop.
+
+They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
+know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
+thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
+again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
+than he.
+
+"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
+
+She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at
+least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the
+vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had
+brought them together.
+
+"How lucky...."
+
+"How lucky what?"
+
+How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He
+would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't
+like it."
+
+Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of
+talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just
+behind the mask of the face.
+
+"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her
+lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for
+her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in
+advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too
+clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she
+could not say.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?"
+
+Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like
+that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she
+said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had
+the impression of a whole conversation.
+
+"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that
+I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding
+inspections to find out."
+
+"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
+
+"Why, of course, of course!"
+
+"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say
+it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).
+
+"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car
+had returned."
+
+Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun
+that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz,
+and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.
+
+But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does
+that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it
+for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself--the
+khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The
+Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these
+human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?..."
+Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a
+fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the
+spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to
+do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to
+do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit
+assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle
+was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.
+
+She glanced at him from time to time, and would have grown more silent,
+but by his light questions he kept her talking briskly on, offering her
+no new proof, until she grew unsure and wondered whether she had been
+mistaken; and, the hour striking for her supper in the town, she went to
+it, filled anew with his charm and her anxiety. Other meetings came,
+when, thrilling with the see-saw of belief and doubt, they watched each
+other with absorbed attention, and in their fragile and unconfessed
+relationship sometimes one was the victor and sometimes the vanquished.
+Yet what was plain to the man who swept the mud from the streets was not
+plain to them.
+
+"Does he love me already?"
+
+"Will she love me soon?"
+
+When they saw other couples by the banks of the Moselle, Reason in a
+convinced and careless voice said: "That is love!" But on coming towards
+each other they were not sure at all, and each said of the other:
+"To-morrow he may not meet me...." "To-morrow she will say she is busy
+and it will not be true!"
+
+When Fanny said, "He may not meet me," she was mad. How could he fail to
+meet her when the rolling hours hung fire and buzzed about his head like
+loaded bees, unable to proceed; when in a lethargy of vision he signed
+his name at the bottom of the typewritten sheet, saying confusedly,
+"What does she think? Does she think of me?"
+
+When at last they met under the shadow of the Cathedral they would
+exclaim in their hearts: "What next?" and hurry off by the Moselle,
+looking into the future, looking into the future, and yet warding it
+off, aware of the open speech that must soon lie between them, and yet
+charmed by the beautiful, the merciful, the delay. And going home, each
+would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned
+from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with
+mountains and rivers.
+
+That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the
+town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till
+seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.
+
+"I'm going to Weile," he said.
+
+"I'm going there myself."
+
+"To get your dress?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once
+by a group of idle girls.
+
+"Stuffs ..." said Fanny, thinking vaguely.
+
+"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
+
+Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of
+empty shelves. They had no black bombazine.
+
+"Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black
+gauze, black cotton..."
+
+It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he
+had bought six yards at eight francs a yard.
+
+"White ... something ... for me."
+
+There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard. "But cheap, cheap,
+CHEAP stuff," she expostulated--"stuff you would make lampshades of,
+or dusters. It's only for a fancy dress." The idle little girls assumed
+a special air. Fanny looked round the shop in desperation. It was like
+all the shops in Metz--the window dressed, the saleswomen ready, the
+shelves scrubbed out and polished, the lady waiting at the pay desk--but
+the goods hadn't come!
+
+Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and
+eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven
+francs a yard.
+
+"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
+
+Fanny had an idea of her own.
+
+"_Wo_," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening,
+"_ist eine Schneiderin?_"
+
+"A dressmaker who speaks French...."
+
+Elsa took her out into the dark street again, and in at a neighbouring
+archway, till at the back of deep courtyards they found a tiny flat of a
+little old lady. "Like this," explained Fanny, drawing with her pencil.
+
+"Why, my mother had a dress like that!" said the little lady, pleased.
+"Before the last war." She nodded many times. "I know how to make a
+crinoline. But when do you want it?"
+
+"For Tuesday night."
+
+"Ah, dear mademoiselle! How can I! To-day is Saturday. I have only
+to-day and Monday. Unless.... Are you a Catholic?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you can sew on Sunday. You can do the frills."
+
+All Sunday Fanny sewed frills under the stag's horn, and when she went
+to meet Julien in the late afternoon, she had the frills still in a
+parcel. "What is that?" he asked, as she unfolded the parcel in the
+empty Cathedral, and began to thread her needle.
+
+"My dress for the dance."
+
+"What is it going to be?"
+
+"Frills. Hundreds of frills." She shook her lap a little, and yards and
+yards of white frills leapt on to the floor in a river.
+
+"Those flowers you bought, look, you have never put them in water!"
+
+He shook his head, and leaning from his chair, stretched out his arm for
+the parcel of white paper. "They are dying. Smell them! They yield more
+scent when they die." She sat holding the flowers near her face, and not
+thinking of him very distinctly, but not thinking of anything else.
+
+"But they won't last."
+
+"They will last this visit. I'll get new ones."
+
+"Oh, how extravagant you are with happiness!..."
+
+They looked startled and became silent. For every now and then among
+their talk some sentence which they had thought discreet rang out with
+a clarity which disturbed them.
+
+Between them there had been no avowal, and neither could count on the
+other's secret. She was not sure he loved her; and though he argued,
+"Why should she come if she does not care?" he watched her sit by him
+with as little confidence, with as much despair, as if she sat on the
+other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Is it raining again? How dark it
+gets. I must soon go." She made gaps in and scattered that alarming
+silence in which the image of each filled and fitted into the thoughts
+of the other like an orange into its close rind. Yet so dark and perfect
+is the mask of the face, so dull the inner ear, that each looked
+uncertainly about, half deaf to the song which issued so plainly from
+the other, distracted by the great gaps in the music.
+
+"Won't you stay with me till you have sewn to the end of that frill?"
+
+She sat down again without a word. And, greedy after his victory, he
+added: "But I oughtn't to keep you?"
+
+"I want to stay, too."
+
+The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an
+end.
+
+"Now I must go. It's supper--supper in the garage."
+
+He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the
+door of the house in the dark street by the river.
+
+"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps
+it's English."
+
+"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.
+
+"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room
+upstairs.
+
+"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them
+the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the
+street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night
+round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those
+uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"
+
+"Has every one had runs?"
+
+"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and
+the silence of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+
+"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the _brigadier_ and at
+the pink paper he offered her.
+
+"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night.
+You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as
+you can to the Hotel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be,
+but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and
+Pichot is getting you two spare tubes...."
+
+She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order
+and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy
+of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead,
+the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and
+accident, pure accident, had lighted on _her_, to sweep _her_ out of
+Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city
+like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold _Anywhere_.
+White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's
+cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something,
+anything--that she was ill--and stay.
+
+She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue
+tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and
+the funnel.
+
+"And if I said--(it is mad)--if I said, 'I am in love. _I can't go_.
+Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on
+the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver
+was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen
+bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with
+the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased
+stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of
+bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung
+about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some
+close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his
+mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.
+
+The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her
+skirt and feet.
+
+"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Coming. Where are the tubes?"
+
+"I have them."
+
+She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge
+to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder--hating
+every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.
+
+At the Hotel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded
+with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from
+which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days
+when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.
+
+She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and
+flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising,
+but intent only on her question.
+
+"And could you tell me--(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me
+very late at the garage)--and would you mind telling me which day you
+expect to get back?"
+
+He turned to the others.
+
+"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
+To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."
+
+"Where shall I drive you?"
+
+"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Treves."
+
+Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that
+the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was
+smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself
+and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and
+the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.
+
+In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel,
+unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat
+horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to
+the left and flat grass prairie to the right--little villages and
+clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its
+tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the
+road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before
+them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the
+grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards
+sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of
+beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again,
+and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot
+and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be
+touched to be relinquished.
+
+Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the
+corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was
+half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down
+by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car,
+but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped
+down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better
+than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of
+chamois-leather.
+
+At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose
+wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass.
+The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the
+landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village
+beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along
+the dry road.
+
+The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them,
+made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
+nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
+the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
+a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
+into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
+bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
+Bread, cheese, sausage, _pate_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
+and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
+from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
+dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
+break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
+bodies of the bottles.
+
+It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
+strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
+spreading _pate_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
+red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.
+
+"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
+thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
+morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.
+
+The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
+innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
+thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
+against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
+that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
+of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
+intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
+knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.
+
+The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked
+appreciatively together.
+
+"_He!_ The _pate_ is not bad."
+
+"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"
+
+"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the
+bottle is all warmed. Try some."
+
+"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.
+
+"He is in the army."
+
+"You have no brother--no one to take care of you?"
+
+"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they
+think it interesting for us."
+
+"Tiens!"
+
+They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But
+the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and,
+bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:
+
+"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"
+
+The others reconsidered her.
+
+"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do
+not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that
+fine leather coat?"
+
+"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.
+
+Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to
+appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.
+
+"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that
+cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than--Well, how much?"
+
+The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned
+her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.
+
+"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his
+cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very
+serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."
+
+But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider
+that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big
+Bearskin be her _impresario_ or their instructor.
+
+"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and
+turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him
+for his stay in Balham.
+
+When the lunch was over and the last fragment of _pate_ drawn off the
+last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes
+turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and
+the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with
+care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the
+last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.
+
+All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It
+grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that
+the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud
+moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with
+the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose
+simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.
+
+As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet
+and heavy, melted on her ear.
+
+"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"
+
+They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the
+back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."
+
+"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."
+
+"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.
+
+"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."
+
+And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny
+pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might
+lift the back seat and find the curtains.
+
+"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the
+car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been
+cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting
+on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight
+of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above
+them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky
+there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few
+yards ahead.
+
+As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow.
+Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily
+at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.
+
+They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at
+last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a
+voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which
+held so much discomfort.
+
+Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was
+keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back
+and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat
+was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs
+upon the floor.
+
+"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the
+big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours,
+running downhill in another mile."
+
+They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a
+querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they
+glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of
+fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed
+to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light
+which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of
+shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village--if village
+it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in
+the forest.
+
+The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and
+skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made
+slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a
+triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was
+written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses
+glittered in the snow with flags.
+
+A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow
+bridge brought her to a standstill.
+
+"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a
+safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.
+
+"We expect Petain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."
+
+"But Thionville is forty miles away--"
+
+"Still, he might pass here--"
+
+Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow
+behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they
+came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a
+board: "This is Germany."
+
+They pulled up. Germany it might be--but the road to Treves? He did not
+know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in
+Germany, and with his right in France.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+GERMANY
+
+Over the side of the next mountain all Hans Andersen was stretched
+before them--tracts of _little_ country, little wooden houses with
+pointed roofs, little hills covered with squares of different coloured
+woods, and a blue river at the bottom of the valley, white with geese
+upon its banks. They held their open mouths insultedly in the air as the
+motor passed. The narrow road became like marble, and the car hissed
+like a glass ball rolled on a stone step. On every little hill stood a
+castle made of brown chocolate, very small, but complete with turrets.
+Young horses with fat stomachs and arched necks bolted sideways off the
+road in fear, followed by gaily painted lattice-work carts, and plunged
+far into the grassland at the side. Old women with coloured hoods swore
+at them, and pulled the reins. Many pointed hills were grey with
+vine-sticks, and on the crest of each of these stood a small chapel as
+if to bless the wine. The countryside was wet and fresh--white, hardly
+yellow--with the winter sun; moss by the roadside still dripped from the
+night, and small bare orchard trees stood in brilliant grass.
+
+"Look! How the grass grows in Germany!"
+
+"Ah, it doesn't grow like that in the valley of the Meuse--"
+
+Every cottage in every village was different; many wore hats instead of
+roofs, wooden things like steeples, with deep eaves and carved fringes,
+in which were shadowy windows like old eyes. Some were pink and some
+were yellow.
+
+Soon they left the woods and came out upon an open plateau surrounded by
+wavy hills with castles on them. In the middle of the plateau was a
+Zeppelin shed which looked like the work of bigger men than the crawling
+peasants in the roads. One side of the shed was open, and the strange
+predatory bird within, insensible to the peering eye of an enemy, seemed
+lost in thought in this green valley. The camp of huts beside it was
+deserted, and there seemed to exist no hand to close the house door.
+They rose again on to a hillside, and on every horizon shone a far blue
+forest faint like sea or cloud.
+
+Nearer Treves the villages were filled with Americans--Americans mending
+the already perfect roads, and playing with the children.
+
+"This is a topsy-turvy country, as it would be in Hans Andersen,"
+thought Fanny. "I thought the Germans had to mend the broken roads
+in France!"
+
+They stayed that night in the Porta-Nigra hotel, which had been turned
+into an Allied hostel. The mess downstairs was chiefly filled with
+American officers, though a few Frenchmen sat together in one corner.
+The food was American--corn cakes, syrup, and white, flaky bread.
+
+"Well, what bread! It's like cake!"
+
+"Oh, the Americans eat well!"
+
+"I don't agree with you. They put money into their food, and they eat a
+lot of it, but they can't cook.
+
+"Isn't it astonishing what they eat! It's astonishing what all the
+armies eat compared with our soldiers."
+
+"Now this cake-bread! I should soon sicken of it. But _they_ will eat
+sweets and such things all day long."
+
+"Well, I told you they are children!"
+
+"The Americans here seem different. They behave better than those in
+France."
+
+"These are very _chics types_. Pershing is here. This is the
+Headquarters Staff."
+
+"Yes, one can see they are different."
+
+"It appears they get on very well with the Germans."
+
+"Hsh--not so loud."
+
+After dinner they strolled out into the town. The Bearskin was very
+anxious to get a "genuine iron cross."
+
+He was offered iron crosses worked on matchboxes, on cigarette lighters,
+on ladies' chains.
+
+"But are they genuine?"
+
+He did not know quite what he meant.
+
+"I don't suppose them to be taken from a dead man's neck, but are they
+genuine?"
+
+In the streets the Germans sold iron crosses from job lots on barrows
+for ten francs each.
+
+"But I will get one cheaper!" said the Bearskin, and clambered up the
+steps into shop after shop. He found an iron cross on a chain for seven
+francs. No one knew what the mark was worth, and the three men, with the
+German salesman, bent over the counter adding and subtracting on paper.
+
+"How can a goblin countryside breed people who sell iron crosses at ten
+francs each?" wondered Fanny.
+
+There was a notice on the other side of the street, "Y.M.C.A., two doors
+down the street on your left," and the thin man stood in the door of the
+shop beside Fanny and pointed to it.
+
+"Couldn't you go there and get me cigars? They will be very cheap. Have
+you money with you?"
+
+"I'll try," said Fanny, "I've money. We can settle afterwards," inwardly
+resolving to get as many cigarettes as she could to take back for the
+men in the garage. She crossed the street, but looked back to find the
+thin man creeping after her. She waited for him, irritated.
+
+"Go back. If the American salesman sees you he'll know it's for the
+French, and he won't sell."
+
+"Tiens?"
+
+"He knew that quite well," she thought impatiently to herself, "or he
+wouldn't have asked me to buy for him."
+
+The thin man turned back to the cover of the shop like an eager little
+dog which has jumped too quickly for biscuit and been snubbed.
+
+She went down the street and into the Y.M.C.A.
+
+Instantly she was among three or four hundred men, who stood with their
+backs to her, in queues up the long wooden hall. Far ahead on the
+improvised counter was a _guichet_ marked "Cigars." She placed herself
+at the tail of that queue.
+
+"Move up, lady," said the man in front of her, moving her forward. "Say
+here's a lady. Move her up."
+
+Men from the other queues looked round, and one or two whistled slyly
+beneath their breath, but her own queue adopted her protectingly, and
+moved her up to their head, against the counter.
+
+It was out of the question to get cigars now. She had become a guest,
+and to get cigars would imply that she was not buying for herself, but
+to supply an unknown man without. And the marks on her uniform showed
+that the unknown was French.
+
+"One carton of Camels, please," she said, used to the phraseology.
+
+"Take two if you like," said the salesman. "We've just got a dump in."
+
+She took two long cardboard packets of cigarettes, and put down ten
+francs.
+
+"Only marks taken here," said the salesman. "You got to make the change
+as you come in."
+
+"Oh, well--I'll--"
+
+"Put it down. Put it here. We don't get a lady in every day."
+
+He gave her the change in marks, which seemed countless.
+
+"I'm sure you've given me too much!"
+
+"Oh no. Marks is goin' just for love in this country. Makes you feel
+rich!"
+
+As she emerged from the hall with her two long cartons under her arm she
+found the thin man, the Bearskin and Blackberry-Eyes standing like
+children on the doorstep.
+
+It was too much--to give her away like that.
+
+Other Americans, coming out, looked at them as a gentleman coming out of
+his own house might look at a party of penguins on his doorstep.
+
+Fanny swept past her friends without a glance and walked on up the
+street with her head in the air. They turned and came after her
+guiltily. When they caught her up in the next street, she said to the
+thin man, "I asked you not to come near while I was buying--"
+
+"Have you got cigars, mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, I couldn't. Why did you come like that? Now I can go in no more.
+You'd only to wait two minutes."
+
+They looked crestfallen, while she held the cigarettes away from them as
+a nurse holds sweets from a naughty child.
+
+"I could only get two packets. I can give you one. I'm sorry, but I
+promised to get cigarettes for some people in Metz."
+
+The thin man brightened, and took the big carton of Camels with delight.
+
+"They're good, those!" he said knowingly to the others. "How much were
+they, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Five francs twenty the carton."
+
+"Is it possible? And we have to pay...."
+
+By his tone he made it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a
+country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult
+to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the
+floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been a bitter journey for
+them.
+
+After all--those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated
+down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three
+times a day to keep their spirits up--why shouldn't they let him have
+their cigarettes?
+
+"You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it.
+"I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."
+
+He thanked her, delighted, and they went back to the hotel.
+
+The problem of the kindness of the Americans, and her frequent abuse of
+it to benefit the French, puzzled her.
+
+"But, after all, it's very easy to be kind. It's much easier to be kind
+if you are American and pink than if you are French and anxious."
+
+Another difference between the two nations struck her.
+
+"The Americans treat me as if I were an amusing child. The French, no
+matter how peculiar their advances, always, always as a woman."
+
+Next morning, when she got down to breakfast at eight, she found that
+the three Frenchmen had already gone out about their work.
+
+"Perhaps I shall get home to-night, after all," she prayed. She sat in
+the hotel and watched the Americans, or wandered about the little town
+until eleven. The affair with the cigars was suitably arranged. The hall
+was nearly empty when she went in, and the few men who stood about in it
+did not disarm her with special kindness. On getting back to the hotel
+she found the Bearskin pushing breathlessly and anxiously through the
+glass doors.
+
+"Monsieur Raudel has left his cigarettes in his bedroom," he said,
+"unlocked up. He is anxious so I have come back."
+
+"Well, tell him that if he--tell him quite as a joke, you know--that if
+I can get home--"
+
+(Something in his little blue eye shone sympathetically, and she leant
+towards him.) "Well, I'll tell _you_! There is a dance to-night in Metz,
+and I am asked. And tell him that I have bought two boxes of cigars
+for him!"
+
+The Bearskin, enchanted, promised to do his best.
+
+By half-past twelve the three were back at lunch in the hotel. Over the
+coffee Monsieur Raudel looked reflectively at his well-shaped nails.
+
+"Well, mademoiselle, so this is what it is to have a woman chauffeur--"
+
+Fanny looked up nervously, regretting her confidence in the Bearskin.
+
+"Apart from the pleasure of your company with us, we get cheap cigars,
+and you get your dance, so every one is pleased."
+
+"Oh!" She was radiant. "But you haven't hurried too much? Are we really
+starting back?"
+
+Monsieur Raudel, who was a new man when he wasn't cold, reassured her,
+and soon they were all packed in the Renault, and running out of Treves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE CRINOLINE
+
+That same night as dusk fell she shook the snow from her feet and
+clothes and entered the dressmaker's kitchen. Four candles were burning
+beside the gas, and the tea-cups lay heaped and unwashed upon
+the dresser.
+
+"Good-evening, good-evening," murmured a number of voices, German and
+French, and the old dressmaker, standing up, her face haggard under the
+gas, took both Fanny's hands with a whimper:
+
+"It will never be done! Oh, dear child, it will _never_ be done!"
+
+The crinoline which they were preparing lay in white rags upon the
+table.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, that is good! Are you helping too?" Elsa had brought three of
+her friends with her, and the four bright, bullety heads bent over the
+long frills which moved slowly through their sewing fingers. "_Good_
+Conquered Children!" They were sewing like little machines.
+
+"The Fraeulein Schneiderin," explained Elsa, "is so upset."
+
+And this was evident and needed no explaining. The little lady twisted
+her fingers, grieved and scolded, snatching at this and that, and
+rapping with her scissors upon the table as though she were going to
+wear the dress herself.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I had to get them." She nodded towards the busy Conquered
+Children, apologising for them as though she feared Fanny might think
+she had done a deal with the devil for her sake.
+
+"Here are my frills," said Fanny, bringing from her pocket two paper
+parcels, one of which she laid in mystery upon the table, the other
+opened and shook out her two long frills. She drew off her leather coat
+and sat down to sew.
+
+"Oh, how calm you are!" burst out the dressmaker. "How can you be so
+calm? It won't be finished."
+
+"Yes, yes, yes. It's only half-past five. Can I have a needle?"
+
+"My mother had a dress like this before the last war." (This for the
+fiftieth time.) "And will your _amoureux_ be there?" she asked with the
+licence of the old.
+
+"Well, yes," said Fanny smiling, "he will."
+
+"And what will he wear?"
+
+"Oh, it's a secret. I don't know. But I chose this particular dress
+because it is so feminine, and it will be the first time he has seen me
+in the clothes of a woman."
+
+"Children, hurry, hurry!" cried the dressmaker, in a frenzy of sympathy.
+"Minette, get down!" She slapped the grey cat tenderly as she lifted him
+off the table. "Tell them in their language to hurry!" she exclaimed.
+"_I_ never learnt it!"
+
+But, after the breath of excitement, followed her poor despair, and she
+dropped her hands in her lap. "It will never be done. I can't do it."
+
+"Look, my dear, courage! The bodice is already done ... Have you had any
+tea?"
+
+"The children ate. I couldn't. I am too excited. But you are so calm.
+You have no nerves. It isn't natural!"
+
+Yet she ate a little piece of cake, scolding the cat and the children
+with her mouth full, prowling restlessly above their bent heads as they
+sewed and solidly sewed.
+
+At the end of an hour and a half the nine frills were on the skirt, the
+long hoops of wire had been run in, and the hooks and eyes on the belt.
+
+Often the door opened and shut; visitors came and went in the room; the
+milk woman put her head in, crying: "What a party!" and left the tiny
+can of milk upon the floor: Elsa's mother came to call her daughter to
+supper, but let her stay when she saw the dress still unfinished. Now
+and then some one would run out of the flat opposite, the flat above or
+the flat next door and, popping a head in at the door, wish them good
+luck. All the building seemed to know of the crinoline that was being
+made in the kitchen.
+
+"You do not smoke a pipe?..." said the dressmaker softly, with
+appreciation.
+
+"But none of us do!"
+
+"Oh, pardon, yes! I saw it yesterday. A great big girl dressed like you
+with her hands in her pockets and a pipe in her mouth. It made an effect
+on me--you can hardly believe how it startled me! I called Madame
+Coppet to see."
+
+"I know it wasn't one of us. And (it seems rude of me to say so) I even
+think the woman you saw was French."
+
+"Oh, my dear, French women never do that!"
+
+"Well, they do when they get free. They go beyond us in freedom when
+they get it The woman you saw (I have seen her, too) works with the men,
+shoulder to shoulder, eats with them, smokes with them, drinks with
+them, drives all night and all day, and they say she can change a tyre
+in two minutes.
+
+"There was a woman, too, who drove a lorry between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc,
+not a tender, you know, but a big lorry. She wore a bit of old ermine
+round her neck, knickerbockers, and yellow check stockings. One could
+imagine she had painted her face by the light of a candle at four in the
+morning. She never wore a hat, and her short yellow hair stuck out over
+her face which was as bright as a pink lamp shade."
+
+"Terrible."
+
+"She may have been, but she worked hard! She was always on that road. Or
+she would disappear for days with her lorry and come back caked in rouge
+and mud. I wish I could have got to know her and heard where she went
+and the things that happened to her."
+
+"But, my dear, I keep thinking what a strange life it is for you. Are
+you always alone on your car?"
+
+"Always alone."
+
+"You are with men alone then all the time?"
+
+"All the time."
+
+"Well, it's more than I can understand. It's part of the war."
+
+Elsa bent across the table and picked up the folded bodice, murmuring
+that it was done. The dressmaker rose, and reaching for the hooped
+skirt, held it up between her two arms. It was a thrilling moment.
+Fanny, too, rose. "Put it on a dummy," she commanded. Candles were
+placed around the dummy, who seemed to step forward out of the shades of
+the kitchen, and offer its headless body to be hooked and buttoned into
+the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schoen!" said
+Elsa's shiny-headed friends, peering with their mouths open.
+
+"Ah, dear child, you were so calm, and now it is done!" said the old
+dressmaker.
+
+The dress stood stiffly glittering at them, white as snow, the nine
+frills pricking away from the great hooped skirt.
+
+Fanny picked up the brown paper parcel she had laid on the dresser,
+taking from it a bottle of blue ink, a bottle of green, and a paint
+brush, and diluted the inks in a saucer under the tap. There was awe in
+the kitchen as she held the brush, filled with colour, in the air, and
+began to paint blue flowers on the dress.
+
+At the first touch of the brush the old dressmaker clasped her hands.
+"What is she doing, the English girl! And we who have kept it so
+white...."
+
+"Hush," said Fanny, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"
+
+The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that
+Fanny felt her hair stir on her neck. She covered the plain, tight-
+waisted bodice with dancing flowers in blue and green.
+
+On the frills of the skirt a dozen large flowers were painted as though
+fallen from the bodice. Soon it was done.
+
+"Like that! In five minutes!" groaned the dressmaker, troubled by the
+peculiar growth of the flowers.
+
+"Let it dry," said Fanny. "I'll go home and start doing my hair. Elsa
+will bring it round when it's dry."
+
+The old woman held out both her hands, in a gesture of mute
+congratulation and fatigue.
+
+"Now rest," said Fanny. "Now sleep--and in the morning I will come and
+tell you all about it," and ran out into the snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The top hook of the bodice would not meet. With her heart in her mouth,
+with despair, she pulled. Then sat down on the bed and stared blankly
+before her.
+
+"Then if _that_ won't meet, all, all the dress is wasted. I can't go.
+No, right in the front! There is nothing to be done, nothing to be
+done!" She sat alone in the room, the five candles she had lighted
+guttering and spilling wax. She was in the half-fastened painted bodice
+and a fine net petticoat she had bought at Nancy. Even the green silk
+bedroom slippers were on, tied round her ankles with ribbons, the only
+slippers she had found in Metz, and she had searched for them for hours.
+
+The room was icy cold, and the hand of the clock chasing towards the
+hour for the dance. Should she go in uniform? Not for the world.
+
+She would not meet him, and it seemed as though there could be no
+to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This
+meeting had had a peculiar significance--the flouncy, painted dress, the
+plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in
+absurd anguish she sat still on the bed.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, Elsa, look!" Better the child than no one, and the shiny head
+was hanging round the door. ("Wie schoen!")
+
+"But it isn't _schoen_! Look! It won't meet!"
+
+"Oh!..." Elsa's eyes grew round with horror, and she went to fetch her
+mother. "Tanzen!" They talked so much of "tanzen" in that household. The
+thin mother was all sympathy, and stood in helpless sorrow before the
+gap in the bodice.
+
+"What's all this?" and _der Vater_ stood in the doorway, heavy as lead,
+and red as a plum.
+
+"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident,
+and "Oh!..." said Elsa's mother, and disappeared. She came back with
+three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa's hat, and the gap in the
+bodice was hidden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_He was not there_. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows
+in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she
+could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the
+entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but
+others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into
+the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress
+chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she
+shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the
+personality of the Commandant Dormans.
+
+At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks,
+clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the
+room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer,
+clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval,
+who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the
+swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that
+her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was
+the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over
+Duval's head, she tried to see through the crowd.
+
+Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian,
+standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish
+colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this
+evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the
+shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a
+further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep's wool,
+which made him seem fantastically tall.
+
+When Fanny had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit
+feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned
+willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold
+her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of
+wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung
+backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
+
+Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and
+came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff
+that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body
+that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery
+of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval
+breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the
+Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled
+her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her
+own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her
+meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the
+admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and
+the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say,
+without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and,
+the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her
+ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive...." Her sense of
+triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the
+reproach in his voice.
+
+She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to
+forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close
+enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into
+his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep's wool and painted flowers
+went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding
+his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of
+the room, and heard the dimmed music and the scrape of feet.
+
+For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre.
+For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the
+glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the
+weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very
+furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.
+
+They danced on, not wearing away the shining boards with their feet half
+so much as they wore away the thin ice above the enchanted lake.
+
+The Commandant Dormans crossed the room to them.
+
+"She must be drawn. She must go for her portrait. Spare me your partner.
+Mademoiselle, we have an artist, a _poilu_, drawing some of the dresses.
+Will you come with me and sit for yours?"
+
+She went into the little room and stood for the drawing; the door shut
+on her, and she and the artist faced each other. Through the door the
+music came softly, and as she stood, hands resting without a breath's
+stir on fold, on frill, head bent and wandering eyes, the artist with
+twitching face and moving hand looked up and down, up and down, and she
+sank, swaying a little upon her rooted feet, into a hypnotised
+tranquillity. She did not care what the man put upon the white paper
+with his flying hands; he might draw the flowers upon her skirt, but not
+the tall blooming flowers within her, growing fabulously like the lilies
+in a dream. Her thoughts went out to meet the waves of music floating
+through the door; her rooted body held so still that she no longer felt
+it, and her spirit hung unbodied in an exaltation between love which
+she remembered and love which she expected. No one came through the
+door; they left her in silence, enclosed in the cell of the room and of
+her dreams, and she was content to stand without movement, without act
+or thought. The near chair, the wall hard by, the golden room which she
+had just left so suddenly were alike to her; her eyes and her
+imagination were tuned to the same level, and there was no distinction
+between what was on her horizon and beyond it. Across the face of the
+artist the scenes in the room behind her passed in unarrested
+procession, and the voice of an illusory lover in her ear startled her
+by its clearness. The music wandered about the room like visible
+movement, and the artist, God bless him, never opened his mouth between
+his shower of tiny glances.
+
+"Finished, mademoiselle!" and he held the drawing towards her as he
+leant back with a sigh. He had made too many drawings that evening, and
+any talent he had hung in his mind as wearily as a flag in an airless
+room. With an effort she broke her position and moved towards him,
+taking up the drawing in her hand with a forced interest. "Yes, thank
+you, thank you," she said, and he took it back and laid it with the pile
+he had made. "You don't like it? But I'm so tired. Look at these others
+I did earlier in the evening...."
+
+But while she bent over them the door burst open and Dormans came in,
+followed by Duval and Dennis. "Is it finished? Let me look! Yes, yes,
+very good! Quite good!" They were pleased enough, and drew the artist
+away with them to the buffet.
+
+Suddenly Julien was with her and had closed the door. He was hurried,
+excited, and it seemed as though he said what he could no longer contain,
+as though the thought biggest in his mind broke in a bound from him. He
+was white and he exclaimed: "It's terrible how _much_ you could hurt me
+if you would!"
+
+He seemed to close his eyes a little then and lean his head towards her.
+She looked at the drooping, half-lit head, and she knew that she had him
+without fear of escape. Knew too, that the moment was brief. Their recent,
+undeclared silence brooded as though still with them, half regretful and
+departing angel. "You will have other beauties," she said to her heart,
+"but none like this silence."
+
+They were breathless. The ice had gone from the lake and the ship had
+not yet set sail. In a dream she moved down to the beach. She saw him
+open his eyes and stare at her incredulously. "I am going to break this
+beauty," she breathed alone, and put out her hand and launched the ship.
+He was by her side, the silence broken, the voyage begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+
+Clouds, yellow, mauve and blue, hung ominously over the road to Nancy.
+The valley was filled with shades, but the road itself gleamed like a
+bleached bone in a ditch. Seated upon the dashboard of her wounded car,
+Fanny had drummed her heels for warmth since morning, and seemed likely
+soon to drum them upon a carpet of snow. Beneath the car a dark stream
+of oil marked the road, and the oil still dripped from the differential
+case, where the back axle lay in two halves.
+
+"I will telephone to your garage," her "client" had promised, as he
+climbed on to a passing lorry and continued his journey into Nancy. With
+that she had to be content, while she waited, first without her lunch,
+and then without her tea, for the breakdown lorry which his telephone
+message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four
+o'clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold
+made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve
+shades thickened upon the sky no flake of snow had fallen.
+
+Only last night, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been preparing for
+the dance; and only last night she had said to Julien ... What had she
+said to Julien? What had he said to her? Again she was deep in a reverie
+that had lasted all day, that had kept her warm, had fed her.
+
+She was almost asleep when a man's voice woke her, and she found a car
+with three Americans drawn up beside her.
+
+"I guess this is too bad," said the man who had woken her. "We passed
+you this morning on our way into Nancy, and here you are still looking
+as though you had never moved. 'Ain't you had any food since then?"
+
+"I haven't been so very hungry."
+
+"Not hungry? You're sure past being hungry! Lucky we've got food with us
+in the car. Pity we've got to hurry, but here's sandwiches and sandwiches,
+and cakes and candy, and bits of bunstuff, and an apple. And here's a
+cheese that's running out of its wrappin'. When's your show coming to
+fetch you? 'Ain't you coming home along with us?"
+
+"They won't be long now. Oh, you are good...." Fanny's hunger revived as
+she took the food, and now she was waiting ungratefully for them to be
+gone that she might start on her heavensent meal.
+
+"Good-bye, ma'am," they cried together.
+
+"Good-bye," she waved, and as their car passed onwards she climbed up on
+to the mudguard and spread the rug over her knees.
+
+The slow night grew out of nothing, expanded, and nearly enveloped the
+slopes of the hill below. The wind dropped in the cloudy, heavy
+twilight, and the papers of the sandwiches did no more than rustle upon
+her knees. Not prepared yet to light her car lamps, Fanny laid her torch
+upon her lap, and its patch of white light lit her hands and the piles
+of bread, cake, and fancy buns.
+
+Across the road in the deeper gloom that dyed the valley and spilt over
+its banks, a head rustled in the ragged border of twig and reed, and
+eyes watched the brightly-lighted meal which seemed to hang suspended
+above the vague shape of the motor car.
+
+With a sense of being perfectly alone, walled round by the gathering
+dusk, Fanny made a deep inroad upon her sandwiches and cake, finishing
+with the apple, and began to roll up what remained in case of further
+need, should no one come to fetch her.
+
+She reflected that her torch would not last her long and that she ought
+to put it and light her head and tail lamps instead, but, drowsy with
+pleasure in her lonely dinner, she sat on, prolonging the last moments
+before she must uncurl her feet and climb down on to the ground. The
+torch slipped from her knee on to a lower fold of the rug, lighting only
+the corner of a packet in which she had rolled the cake.
+
+Suddenly, while she watched it, the gleam of the corner disappeared. She
+stared at the spot intensely, and saw a hand, a shade lighter than the
+darkness, travel across the surface of the rug, cover with its fingers
+the second parcel and draw it backwards into what had now become dense
+night. Her skin stirred as though a million antennae were alive upon it;
+she could not breathe lest any movement should fling the unknown upon
+her; her eyes were glued to the third packet, and, in a moment, the hand
+advanced again. With horror she saw it creep along the rug, a small
+brown, fibrous hand, worn with work. The third packet was eclipsed by
+the fingers and receded as the others had done, but as it reached the
+edge of the rug, overflowing horror galvanised her into movement, and
+catching the corners of the rug she threw it violently after the package
+and over the hand, at the same moment jumping from her seat and on to
+the footboard, to grope wildly for the switch. Her heart was leaping
+like a fish just flung into a basket, and every inch of her body winced
+from an expected grasp upon it. She flung herself over the side and into
+the seat of the car, found the switch and pushed it.
+
+A dozen Chinese at least were caught in the two long beams that flew out
+across the darkness. For a second their wrinkled faces stared, eyes
+blinked, and short, unhollowed lips stretched over yellow teeth, then,
+with a flutter of dark garments, the Chinese started away from the fixed
+beams and were gone into the shadow. Except for the sudden twitter of a
+voice, the spurt of a stone flung up against the metal of the car, they
+melted silently out of sight and hearing. Sick with panic, Fanny leant
+down upon her knees and covered her head with her two arms, expecting a
+blow from above. Seconds passed, and ice-cold, with one leg gone to
+sleep, she lifted her head, switched off the lights and stared into the
+night. She could see nothing, and gradually becoming accustomed to the
+darkness, she found that they had completely disappeared. The rug, too,
+had gone, and all three packets of sandwiches. Cautiously, with
+trembling legs, she stepped upon the footboard.
+
+Something hit her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to
+suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in
+its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...."
+she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture
+them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were
+now far from her on their way to some encampment.
+
+Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she
+prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
+There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
+
+Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and
+curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road
+around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between
+the spokes of the wheels.
+
+Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car,
+and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the
+hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly
+bent, with a knob at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure,
+but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming
+out from Pont-a-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps
+glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his
+thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through
+the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
+
+The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and
+climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled
+about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the
+open valley on the left.
+
+"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
+
+"Hardly yet, _mon capitaine_. It was unlucky the _brigadier_ should be
+at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but
+it wants two men to tow in the car."
+
+"This is Marbache!"
+
+In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a
+handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately
+darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind
+burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the glass.
+
+"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the
+right here."
+
+The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes
+drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The
+left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and
+deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+A pale light hung in the dark ahead of them.
+
+"Is it a car? No."
+
+"Yes, lamps. With the beam broken by the snow."
+
+"Go slow."
+
+For fear of blinding the driver of a lighted vehicle which might, after
+all, be moving, one of the men put out his hand and switched off the
+headlights, and the car glided forward on its own momentum.
+
+Thus they came upon Fanny, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an
+obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her
+mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in
+her right hand, the torch ready as a signal in her left.
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Well, yes, my poor child!" And she saw the man behind him, and laughed.
+
+"Help me down. Within and without I am set in plaster."
+
+"You look like a poor, weather-chipped goddess, or an old stone pillar
+with a face."
+
+"Be careful, that leg will not stand.... Oh, look, look how the snow
+clings. It's frozen on my lap."
+
+"We must be quick. Everything must be quickly done, or we shall all stay
+here."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that now!"
+
+"What have you got in your hand? Give it to me."
+
+"That's a weapon. I almost needed it. Where is the lorry?"
+
+"The garage was empty. The _brigadier_ was at Thionville. The lorry had
+a spring broken."
+
+"And they told you?"
+
+"I did not call at the 'C.R.A.' office till late in the day, or you
+would have been fetched long ago. Come along! Have you got your things
+together? We must take them back in the other car. And the magneto too."
+
+"We're to leave the car after all my guarding care?"
+
+"No; here's Pichot volunteered to take your place."
+
+"Has he got food with him and rugs. My rug has gone...."
+
+"He has everything. Come along! Let's put everything of value into the
+other car."
+
+When they had finished the night air was clear of snowflakes; hill, road
+and valley were lit by the pallor of the fallen snow.
+
+Fanny followed Julien to the other car. He swung the handle and jumped
+into the driving seat. "Come...." he said, and held out a hand.
+
+"Good-night, Pichot. We'll send for you early in the morning."
+
+"Good-night, _mon capitaine._ Good-night, mademoiselle."
+
+They moved forward, and the moon like a wandering lamp lit their faces.
+
+"Blow out, old moon!" said Julien, turning his silvered face and hair up
+to the sky. The moon flew behind a cloud.
+
+"Quick!" he said.
+
+"What?"
+
+... and kissed her. The jacks and tyres and wheels and bolts fluttered
+out of Fanny's head like black ravens and disappeared. They flew on,
+over the bridge at Pont-a-Moussons, up the shining ruinous street.
+
+"Crouch lower!" said Julien. "If any one wanted to, they could count
+your eyelashes from the windows."
+
+"Ah, yes, if there was any one to count...." She glanced up at the
+fragmentary pronged chimneys, the dark, unstirring caves of brick.
+
+Soon the church clocks of Metz rang out, quarrelling, out of time with
+one another.
+
+"Do you know this isn't going to last?" said Julien suddenly, as if the
+clocks had reminded him.
+
+She turned swiftly towards him.
+
+"The Grand Quartier is moving?"
+
+"Ah, you knew? You had heard?"
+
+"No, no," she shook her head. "But do you think I haven't thought of it?
+I keep thinking, 'We can't stay here for ever. Some end will come.' And
+then--'It will come this way. The Grand Quartier will go.'"
+
+"But you are going with it."
+
+"Julien! Is that true?"
+
+"Certain. It was settled to-day. We are actually leaving in three days
+for Chantilly; and you, with all the garage, all the drivers, and the
+offices of the 'C.R.A.' are to be at Precy-sur-Oise, five miles away."
+
+"But you are at Precy too?"
+
+"No, I have to be at Chantilly. And worse than that ... The bridge over
+the Oise at Precy is blown up and all cars have to come sixteen miles
+round to Chantilly by another bridge. I am in despair about it. I have
+tried every means to get Dormans to fix upon another village, but he is
+obstinate, and Precy it must be for you, and Chantilly for me. But don't
+let's think of it now. Wait till you've eaten and are warm, and we can
+plan. Here are the gates!"
+
+He handed out the paper pass as a red light waved to and from upon the
+snow. First the Customs-men, Germans still, in their ancient civic
+uniform. "Nothing to declare?" Then the little soldier with the lantern
+in his hand: "Your pass, _ma belle!_" As he caught sight of Julien,
+"Pardon, mademoiselle!" Lastly, up the long road into the open square by
+the station, down the narrow street, splashing the melted snow-water
+against the shop windows, and under the shadow of the cathedral.
+
+"Put the car away and come and dine with me at Moitriers."
+
+She looked at him astonished. "The car? Whose car is it? Does it belong
+to our garage?"
+
+"It will in future. It arrived last night, fresh from Versailles. I am
+arranging with Dennis for you to take it over to-morrow."
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "A beautiful Renault! A brand new Renault!..."
+
+He laughed. "Hurry, or you will faint with hunger. Put it away and come,
+just as you are, to Moitriers, up into the balcony. I am going there
+first to order a wonderful dinner."
+
+In a quarter of an hour they were sitting behind the wooden balustrade
+of the balcony at Moitriers--the only diners on the little landing that
+overhung the one fashionable restaurant in Metz. It was a quarter to
+nine; down below, the room, which was lined with mirrors set in gilt
+frames, was filled with light; knives and forks still tapped upon the
+plates, but the hour being late many diners leant across the strewn
+tablecloths and talked, or sat a little askew in their chairs and
+listened. A hum filled the warm air, and what was garish below, here,
+behind the balustrade, became filtered and strained to delicate streaks
+and bars of light which crossed and recrossed their cloth, their hands,
+their faces--what was noisy below was here no more than a soft insect
+bustle, a murmurous background to their talk.
+
+The door of the balcony opened behind them, and Madame Berthe, the
+proprietress herself, moved at their side; her old-fashioned body,
+shaped like an hour-glass, was clothed in rucked black silk, which
+flowed over her like a pigment; flowed from her chin to the floor, upon
+which it lay stiffly in hills and valleys of braided hem. Her gay gold
+tooth gleamed, and the gold in her ears wagged, as she fed them gently
+on omelette, chicken and tinned peas, and a _souffle_ ice.
+
+They talked a little, sleepy after the wind, smiling at each other.
+
+"Don't you want more light than that?" said Madame Berthe, coming in
+again softly with the coffee.
+
+Fanny shook her head. "Not any more than this."
+
+Then they were left alone, stirring the coffee, gazing down between the
+wooden columns at the diners below.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked, as a sigh escaped her companion.
+
+"The move to Chantilly. I am so loth to break up all this."
+
+"Break up?"
+
+"Ah, well, it changes, doesn't it? Even if it is no longer the same
+landscape it changes!"
+
+After a silence he added: "How fragile it is!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You!" He covered her hand with both his. "You! What I think you are,
+and what you think I am. Love and illusion. Too fragile to be given to
+us with our blunders and our nonsense."
+
+She watched him, silent, and he went on:
+
+"I don't understand this life. That's why I keep quiet and smile, as you
+say I do. There are often things I don't say when I smile."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh, I wonder how much you believe me. And I listen to that immense
+interior life, which talks such a different language. I _hate_ to move
+on to Chantilly."
+
+Suddenly she recognised that they were at a corner which he had wanted
+her to turn for days. There had been something he had hinted at,
+something he wanted to tell her. He chafed at some knowledge he had
+which she did not share, which he wanted her to share.
+
+Once he had said: "I had letters this morning which worried me...."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"One in particular. It hurt me. It gave me pain."
+
+But she had not wanted to ask what was in the letter. Then he had grown
+restless, sighed and turned away, but soon they had talked again and it
+had passed.
+
+And now to-night he said:
+
+"Look how detached we are in this town, which is like an island in the
+middle of the sea. We behave as though we had no past lives, and never
+expected any future. Especially you."
+
+"Especially I?"
+
+"You behave as though I was born the day before you met me, and would
+die the day after you leave me. You never ask anything about me; you
+tell me nothing about yourself. We might be a couple of stars hanging in
+mid air shining at each other. And then I have the feeling that one
+might drop and the other wouldn't know where to look for it."
+
+But after a little silence the truth burst out, and he said with
+despair: "Don't you want to know _anything_ about me?"
+
+(Yes, that was all very well. She did, she did. But not just this that
+was coming!)
+
+And then he told her....
+
+     *     *     *     *     *
+
+"What is she like ... Violette?"
+
+"Fair."
+
+After several low questions she seemed to stand between them like a
+child, thin and fair, delicate and silent, innocently expecting to be
+spared all pain.
+
+"No, she doesn't go out very much. She stays indoors and does her hair,
+and her nails, and reads a little book."
+
+"And have you known her for a long time?"
+
+"A long time...."
+
+After this they pretended that she did not exist, and the little wraith
+floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when
+she had written him certain letters which had brought tears into
+his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+Fanny turned again to seek the lights of the town and the dagger points
+of the churches that climbed against the sky upon the hill behind her,
+but all that met her eyes was the blanket of wet darkness, and the
+shimmer of the snowflakes under the lamps.
+
+She slipped through the garage gates, touching the iron bars ... "almost
+for the last time."
+
+"But what does it matter? All towns are the same and we sing the same
+song in each and wear the same coloured feathers." She stirred the snow
+in the yard with her foot. "An inch already and the Renault has so
+little grip upon the snow. Shall we be able to start to-morrow?"
+
+Then she set out to look for a heap of snow chains which she had noticed
+before in a corner of the yard. Not far from her another little torch
+moved in the darkness, and under its downward ray she caught sight of a
+khaki skirt and a foot. "Someone else has thought of chains, too! And
+there are so few!" She clicked off her light and moved stealthily along
+the forest of cars, her fingers sweeping blankets of snow from the
+mudguards. Passing the first line of corpse-cars she saw the light
+again. "She's in the wrong place!" she thought, and hurried on. "Those
+bags of chains are just behind the Berliet they brought in backwards."
+Behind the Berliet little mounds showed in the snow. She stooped over
+them, shading her light with her knees, and dug in the light powder with
+her hand, pulling out a small canvas bag which she dusted and beat with
+her fingers.
+
+"Are you looking for chains?" she called to the other light, her bag
+safely in her arms.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"They are here. Here! In this corner!"
+
+"Who are you?" cried the voice.
+
+But she slipped away in silence to the garage door; for on this last
+black and white night in Metz she longed to creep about unspoken to,
+unquestioned. A little soldier sat on guard by a brazier of glowing
+charcoal near the door. She nodded to him as she moved down the long
+line of cars to her own.
+
+There it stood, the light of the brazier falling faintly upon it, the
+two points of the windscreen standing up like the ready ears of an
+interested dog, the beautiful lines of its body, long bonnet and
+mudguards stretched like a greyhound at a gallop, at rest until the
+dawn. She flung the bag of chains inside, and, patting the bonnet,
+slipped away and out into the street without attempting to try the fit
+of the chains upon the wheels.
+
+She slept a last night in the dark red German room three streets
+away--first making a little tour of the walls in her nightgown, the
+candle flame waving from her hand, the hot wax running in a cascade over
+her fingers--and looked at the stag's horn fastened to the bracket and
+the cluster of Christmas postcards pinned to the wall.
+
+The postcards arrested her attention, and a light darted in her mind.
+They were dark postcards, encrusted with shiny frosting, like the snow
+outside. Little birds and goblins, a wreath of holly, and a house with
+red mica windows were designed on them. She put out a finger and gently
+touched the rough, bright, common stuff; standing opposite them, almost
+breathless with a wave of memory. She could see herself no taller than
+the nursery fireguard, with round eyes to which every bright thing was a
+desire. She could feel herself very small amid the bustle and clatter of
+Christmas, blowing dark breath marks against the bright silver on the
+table, pulling the fringe round the iced cake, wetting her finger and
+picking up "hundreds and thousands" with it from a bag.
+
+These postcards now in front of her were made by some one with the mind
+of a child. It struck and shook her violently with memory to see them.
+"That's why the Germans write good fairy stories!" she thought, and her
+eyes passed to the framed photographs that hung near the postcards,
+pictures of soldiers in uniform, sitting at a table with the two
+daughters of the house. But these wooden faces, these bodies pressing
+through unwieldy clothes seemed unrelated to the childish postcards.
+
+She went contentedly to her bed, the room, bare of all her belongings,
+except the one bag that stood, filled and open, upon the table; sleeping
+for the last time in the strange bed in the strange town which she might
+never see again. It was time indeed to go.
+
+For days past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old
+horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk
+chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the
+strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture
+that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain
+was returning through all the roads of France, repacked and dusted, to
+set up the spirit of civilian life again.
+
+It was time to go, following all the other birds of passage that war had
+dragged through the town of Metz--time to make way for the toiling
+civilian with his impedimenta of civilisation.
+
+In the morning when she opened her eyes the room was darker than usual,
+and the opening of the window but the merest square of light. Snow was
+built up round the frame in thick rolls four inches high.
+
+She dressed hurriedly and rolled up the sleeping-sack with her few last
+things inside it. Out in the street the snow was dry and thick and
+beautifully untrodden. The garage gates looked strange, with a thick
+white banner blown down each side of the pillars. She looked inside the
+garage shed. Yes, all the cars had gone--hers stood alone, the suitcases
+inside, tyres pumped stiff and solid, the hood well buckled back.
+
+"Mademoiselle hasn't gone with the convoy?" said the _marechal des
+logis_, aghast.
+
+"Oh, I'm separate," she laughed.
+
+"But the convoy is gone."
+
+"I know it. But I'm not with them. It's an order. I'm going alone."
+
+"_Bien_. But do you know the route?"
+
+"I'm not going by it."
+
+He laughed, suddenly giving up all attempt at responsibility, and bent
+to catch her starting handle.
+
+"Oh, don't worry."
+
+"Yes, it's your last day, I may as well help you to go away."
+
+The engine started easily and she drove out of the garage into the yard,
+the wheels flying helplessly in the snow, and flinging up dry puffs like
+flour. "Haven't you chains?" said the _marechal des logis_. But she
+smiled and nodded and could not wait. "Good-bye--good-bye to all the
+garage," she nodded and waved. The sun broke out from behind a cloud,
+her brass and glass caught fire and twinkled gaily, the snow sparkled,
+the gate-posts shone at her. She left the garage without a regret in her
+heart, with not a thought in her head, save that in a minute she would
+be safe, no accident could stop her, she would be abroad upon the magic,
+the unbelievable journey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were in a small circular room, shaped like an English oasthouse,
+its roof running upwards in a funnel to meet the sky. At the apex was a
+round porthole of thick glass to let in the light, but as this was
+supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected
+only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the
+centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes
+were fine and black--her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever,
+lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her
+cheeks rose up and cut the black eyes into hoops.
+
+"We are on a long journey, madame, to Chantilly. We are cold; can we
+have coffee?"
+
+She drew out chairs and bade them sit, then placed two tall glasses of
+coffee in the ring of light from the lamp, sugar melting in a sandy heap
+at the bottom of each.
+
+"What an odd shape your house is!" said Julien, looking round him.
+
+"It's very old, like me. And the light is poor. You have to know it to
+get used to it," she replied.
+
+"You've only that one window?" He stared up the funnel to where he
+could see the grey underside of the cone of snow.
+
+"But I can make that one better than it is; and then the lady can see
+herself in this little glass!" The old woman moved to the side of the
+wall where a rope hung down. "_Elle a raison_; since she has a gentleman
+with her! I was the same--and even not so long ago!"
+
+She put up her thin arm and gave the rope a long pull. She must have
+been strong, for the skylight and all its burden opened on a hinge, and
+the snow could be seen sliding from it, could be heard in a heavy body
+rumbling on the roof. She closed the skylight, and now a wan light
+filtered down the funnel and turned their faces green. It was like life
+at the bottom of a well, and they felt as though the level of the earth
+was far above their heads, and its weighty walls pressing against
+their sides.
+
+"But why is it built this way?"
+
+"Many houses are," said the old woman with a shrug. "It's old, older
+than my mother." She sat down beside them. "Soldiers have been drunk in
+here many times in the war," she said. "And in the old war, too. But I
+never saw one like you." She pinched Fanny's sleeve. "Fine stuff," she
+said. "The Americans are rich!"
+
+"I'm not American."
+
+"Rich they are. But I don't care for them. They have no real feeling for
+a woman. You are not stupid, _ma belle_, to get a Frenchman for a lover."
+
+"Don't make him vain."
+
+"It is the truth. He knows it very well. Why should he be vain? An
+American loves a pretty face; but a Frenchman loves what is a woman."
+She rose and lifted the lamp, and let its ray search out a corner of the
+room wherein the great bed stood, wooden and square, its posts black
+with age, its bedding puffed about it and crowned with a scarlet
+eiderdown as solid and deep as the bed itself.
+
+"A fine bed; an old bed; it is possible that you will not believe me,
+but I shared that bed with a bishop not two years ago."
+
+Fanny's eyes were riveted on the bed.
+
+Julien laughed. "In the worst sense, mother?"
+
+"In the best, my son," bragged the old woman, sliding a skinny finger to
+the tip of her nose. "You don't believe me?"
+
+Coming nearer, she stood with the lamp held in her two hands resting on
+the table, so that she towered over them in fluttering shawl and shadow.
+
+"He arrived in the village one night in a great storm. It was past the
+New Year and soldiers had been coming through the street all day to go
+up to the lines beyond Pont-a-Moussons. I've had them sleeping in here
+on the floor in rows, clearing away the table and lying from wall to
+wall so thick that I had to step on them when I crossed the room with my
+lamp. But that night there were none; they were all passing through up
+to the front lines, and though the other end of the village was full, no
+one knocked here. There was snow as there is to-day, but not lying still
+on the ground. It was rushing through the air and choking people and
+lying heavy on everything that moved outside. That glass of mine up
+there was too heavy for me to move so I let it be. A knock came at the
+door in the middle of the night, and when I got up to unbar the door
+there was a soldier on the doorstep. I said: 'Are you going to wake me
+up every night to fill the room with men?' And he said: 'Not to-night,
+mother, only one. Pass in, monsieur.'
+
+"It was a bishop, as I told you. _Un eveque_. A great big man with a red
+face shining with the snow. If he had not been white with snow he would
+have been as black as a rook. He stamped on the cobbles by the door and
+the snow went down off him in heaps, and there he was in his beautiful
+long clothes, and I said to myself: 'Whatever shall I do with him? Not
+the floor for such a man!' So there we were, I in my red shawl that
+hangs on the hook there, and he in his long clothes like a black baby
+in arms, and his big man's face staring at me over the top.
+
+"'I can't put you anywhere but in my bed,' I told him. I told him like
+that, quickly, that he might know. And he answered like a gentleman, the
+Lord save his soul: 'Madame, what lady could do more!'
+
+"'But there's only one bed' I told him (I told him to make it clear),
+'and I'm not young enough to sleep on the floor.' Not that I'm an old
+woman. And he answered like a gentleman, the Lord save him...."
+
+"I will tell _you_ the end," said the old woman, drawing near to Julien
+as he took some money from his pocket to pay for the coffee.
+
+Two hours later they drew up at a _cafe_ in the main square at Ligny.
+
+Within was a gentle murmur of voices, a smell of soup and baking bread;
+warm steam, the glow of oil lamps and reddened faces.
+
+Sitting at a small table, with a white cloth, among the half-dozen
+American soldiers who, having long finished their lunch, were playing
+cards and dominoes, they ordered bread-soup, an omelette, white wine,
+brille cheese and their own ration of bully beef which they had brought
+in tins to be fried with onions.
+
+A woman appeared from the door of the kitchen, carrying their bowl of
+bread-soup. Across the plains of her great chest shone a white satin
+waistcoat fastened with blue glass studs, and above her handsome face
+rose a crown of well-brushed hair dyed in two shades of scarlet. A
+little maid followed, and they covered the table with dishes, knives and
+forks, bread and wine. The woman beamed upon Fanny and Julien, and
+laying her hand upon Fanny's shoulder begged them not to eat till she
+had fetched them a glass of her own wine.
+
+"You bet it's good, ma'am," advised a big American sergeant at a table
+near them. "You take it."
+
+She brought them a wine which shone like dark amber in a couple of
+glasses, and stood over them listening with pleasure to their
+appreciation while each slight movement of her shoulders sent ripples
+and rivers of heaving light over the waistcoat of satin.
+
+The butter round the omelette was bubbling in the dish, the brille had
+had its red rind removed and replaced by fried breadcrumbs, the white
+wine was light and sweet, and with the coffee afterwards they were given
+as much sugar as they wished.
+
+"I have seen her before somewhere," said Julien, as the scarlet head
+receded among the shadows of the back room. "I wonder where?"
+
+"One wouldn't forget her."
+
+"No. It might have been in Paris; it might have been anywhere."
+
+The little maid was at his elbow. "Madame would be glad if you would
+come to her store and make your choice of a cigar, monsieur."
+
+"Well, I shall know where I met her. Do you mind if I go?"
+
+He followed the girl into the back room. Fanny, searching in her pocket
+for her handkerchief, scattered a couple of German iron pennies on the
+floor; an American from the table behind picked them up and returned
+them to her. "These things are just a weight and a trouble," he said.
+"I think I shall throw mine away?"
+
+"You've come down from Germany, then?"
+
+"Been up at Treves. They do you well up there."
+
+"Not better than here!"
+
+"No, this is an exception. It's a good place."
+
+"Madame is a great manager."
+
+"Hev' you got more German pennies than you know what to do with?" said
+the American sergeant who had advised her to drink the wine. "Because,
+if you hev' so hev' I and I'll play you at dominoes for them."
+
+As Julien did not return at once, Fanny moved to his table and piled her
+German pennies beside her, and they picked out their dominoes from
+the pile.
+
+"I want to go home," said the American, and lifted up his big face and
+looked at her.
+
+"You all do."
+
+"That's right. We all do," assented another and another. They would make
+this statement to her at every village where she met them, in every
+_estaminet_, at any puncture on the road over which they helped her
+--simply, and because it was the only thing in their minds.
+
+"Do you hev' to come out here?" he enquired.
+
+"Oh, no. We come because we like to."
+
+Thinking this a trumpery remark he made no answer, but put out another
+domino--then as though something about her still intrigued his heavy
+curiosity: "You with the French, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like that too?"
+
+He sat a little back into his chair as though he felt he had put her in
+a corner now, and when she said she even liked that too, twitched his
+cheek a little in contempt for such a lie and went on playing.
+
+But the remark worked something in him, for five minutes later he
+pursued:
+
+"I don't see anything in the French. They ain't clean. They ain't
+generous. They ain't up-to-date nor comfortable."
+
+Fanny played out her domino.
+
+"They don't know how to _live_," he said more violently than he had
+spoken yet.
+
+"What's living?" she said quickly. "What is it to live, if _you_ know?"
+
+"You want to put yourself at something, an' build up. Build up your
+fortune and spread it out and about, and have your house so's people
+know you've got it. I want to get home and be doing it."
+
+"Mademoiselle actually knows it!" said Julien in the doorway to the
+red-haired woman in the back room, and Fanny jumped up.
+
+The American passed four iron coins across the table. "'Tisn't going to
+hinder that fortune I'm going to make," he said, smiling at last.
+
+"What do I know?" she asked, approaching the doorway, and moving with
+him into the back room.
+
+"Madame owns a house in Verdun," said Julien, "and I tell her you know
+it."
+
+"_I_ know it?"
+
+"Come and drink this little glass of my wine, mademoiselle," said the
+red-haired woman good-humouredly, "and tell me about my poor little
+house. I had a house on the crown of the hill ... with a good view
+... and a good situation (she laughed) by the Cathedral."
+
+"Had you? Well, there are a great many by the Cathedral," Fanny answered
+cautiously, for she thought she knew the house that was meant.
+
+"But my house looked out on the _citadelle_, and stood very high on a
+rock. Below it there was a drop and steep steps went down to a street
+below."
+
+"Had you pink curtains in the upper windows?"
+
+"Is it not then so damaged?" demanded the woman eagerly, dropping her
+smile. "The curtains are left? You can see the curtains?"
+
+"No, no, it is terribly damaged. If it is the house you mean I found a
+piece of pink satin and a curtain ring under a brick, and there is a sad
+piece which still waves on a high window. But wait a minute, excuse me,
+I'll be back." She passed through the cafe and ran out to the car,
+returning in a moment with something in her hand.
+
+"I fear I looted your house, madame," she said, offering her a small
+cylindrical pot made of coarse clouded glass, and half filled with a
+yellowish paste. "I found that inside on the ground floor; I don't know
+why I took it."
+
+The woman held it in her hand. "Oh!" she wailed, and sliding down upon
+the sofa, found her handkerchief.
+
+"_Mais non!_" said Julien, "you who have so much courage!"
+
+"But it was my own _face_!" she cried incoherently, holding out the
+little pot. "My poor little cream pot!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It was my face cream!"
+
+"How strange!"
+
+"I had not used it for a week because they had recommended me a new one.
+Ah! miraculous! that so small a thing should follow me!"
+
+She touched her eyes carefully with her handkerchief, but a live tear
+had fallen on the waistcoat.
+
+"Tell me, mademoiselle ... sit down beside me, my dear ... the poor
+little house is no more good to me? I couldn't live there? Is there
+a roof?"
+
+"You couldn't live in it."
+
+"But the roof?"
+
+"It was on the point of sliding off; it was worn like a hat over one
+ear. The front of the house is gone. Only on the frame of one window
+which sticks to the wall could I see your piece of pink curtain
+which waves."
+
+"My poor, pretty house!" she mused. "My first, you know," she said in an
+undertone to Julien. "Ah, well, courage, as you say!"
+
+"But you are very well here."
+
+"True, but this isn't my vocation. I shall start again elsewhere. And
+Verdun itself, Mademoiselle, can one live in it?"
+
+"No, not yet. Perhaps never."
+
+"Well, well...."
+
+"Madame, we must move on again," interrupted Julien. "We have a long way
+to go before night."
+
+The woman rose, and turning to a drawer, pulled out a heap of soiled
+papers, bills and letters. "Wait," she said, "wait an instant!"
+
+Turning them over she sought and found a couple of old sheets pinned
+together, and unpinning them she handed one to Fanny.
+
+"It is the receipt for the cream," she said, "that I want to give you.
+It is a good cream though I left the pot behind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun sank and the forests around Chantilly grew vague and deep. White
+statues stood by the roadside, and among the trees chateaux with closed
+eyes slept through the winter. Every tree hung down beneath its load of
+snow; the telephone wires drooped like worsted threads across the road.
+
+Fanny, who had left Julien at his new billets in Chantilly, drove on
+alone to the little village on the Oise which was to be her home. It was
+not long before she could make out the posts and signals of the railway
+on her left, and the river appeared in a broad band below her. The moon
+rose, and in the river the reeds hung head downwards, staring up at the
+living reeds upon the bank.
+
+"PRECY."
+
+It gleamed upon a signpost, and turning down a lane on the left she came
+on a handful of unlighted cottages, and beyond them a single village
+street, soundless and asleep. A chemist's shop full of coloured glasses
+was lit from within by a single candle; upon the step the chemist stood,
+a skull cap above his large, pitted face.
+
+Somewhere in the shuttered village a roof already sheltered her
+companions, but before looking for them she drew up and gazed out beyond
+the river and the railway line to where the moon was slowly lighting
+hill after hill. But the spectral summer town which she sought was
+veiled in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+PRECY-SUR-OISE
+
+The light of dawn touched Paris, the wastes of snow surrounding her,
+forests, villages scattered in the forest and plains around Senlis,
+Chantilly, Boran, Precy. The dark receded in the west; in the east a
+green light spread upwards from the horizon, touched the banks of the
+black Oise, the roofs of the houses of Precy, the dark window panes, and
+the flanks of the granite piers that stood beheaded in the water--all
+that was left of the great bridge that had crossed from bank to bank.
+
+Above the river stood the station hut and the wooden gates of the level
+crossing, upon which the night lantern still hung; above again a strip
+of snow divided the railway line from the road, at the other side of
+whose stone wall the village itself began, and stretched backwards up
+a hill.
+
+Upon a patch of snow above the river and below the road stood a
+flourishing little house covered with gables and turrets; and odd shapes
+like the newel-posts of staircases climbed unexpectedly about the roof.
+In summer, fresh with paint, the outside of the house must wave its
+vulgar little hands into the sky, but now, everything that bristled upon
+it served only as a fresh support for the snow which hung in deep
+drifts on its roof, and around its balconied windows. It stood in its
+own symmetrical walled garden, like a cup in a deep saucer, and within
+the wall a variety of humps and hillocks showed where the bushes
+crouched beneath their unusual blanket. One window, facing towards the
+railway and the river, had no balcony clinging to its stonework, and in
+the dark room behind it the light of the dawn pressed faintly between
+the undrawn curtains. A figure stirred upon the bed within, and Fanny,
+not clearly aware whether she had slept or not, longed to search the
+room for some heavier covering which, warming her, would let her sink
+into unconsciousness. Her slowly gathering wits, together with the
+nagging cold, forced her at last from the high bed on to the floor, and
+she crossed the room towards the light. In the walled garden below
+strange lights of dawn played, red, green and amber, like a crop of
+flowers. The railway lines beyond the garden wall disappeared in fiery
+bands north and south, lights flashed down from the sky above and winked
+in the black and polished river; at the limit of the white plain beyond,
+a window caught the sun and turned its burning-glass upon the snow.
+
+"Chantilly...." A word like the dawn, filled with light and the promise
+of light! Turning back into the dim room, she flung her coat upon the
+bed, climbed in and fell asleep. Three hours later something pressed
+against her bed and she opened her eyes again. The room was fresh with
+daylight, and Stewart standing beside her carried a rug on her arm and
+wore a coat over her nightgown. "I'm coming down to have chocolate in
+your room...."
+
+Fanny watched her. Stewart climbed up beside her wrapped in the rug. A
+knock at the door heralded the entry of a woman carrying a tray. Fanny
+watched her too, and saw that she was fresh, smiling, clean and big, and
+that steam flew up in puffs from the tray she carried. The woman pulled
+a little table towards the bed and set the tray on it.
+
+"This is Madame Boujan!" said Stewart's voice.
+
+Fanny tried to smile and say "Good morning," and succeeded. She was not
+awake but knew she was in clover. The cups holding the steaming
+chocolate were as large as bowls, and painted cherries and leaves
+glistened beneath their lustre surface. Beside the cups was a plate with
+rolls, four rolls; and there were knives and two big pots which must be
+butter and jam.
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+Fanny rolled nearer to the chocolate, sniffed it and pulled herself up
+in bed. The woman, still smiling beside them, turned and hunted among
+the clothes upon the chair; then held a jersey towards her shoulders and
+guided her arms into its sleeves. Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other
+similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery
+wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of
+a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned figure as this,
+by a smile on just such a pink face; or wakings after illness when her
+freshening life had leapt in her at the sound of a blind drawn up, at
+the sight of the white-cuffed hand that pulled the cord.
+
+Oh, heavenly woman, who stood beside the tray, who fed her and warmed
+her while she was yet weak and babyish from sleep! Beyond her the white
+plains of beauty shone outside the window.... She sat up and smiled:
+"I'm awake," she said.
+
+And Madame Boujan, having seen that her feet were set upon the threshold
+of day, went out of the door and closed it softly.
+
+They held the lustre bowls cupped in their hands and sipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During lunch in the little villa, while they were all recounting their
+experiences, Madame Boujan came softly to Fanny's side and whispered:
+
+"A soldier has brought you a note from Chantilly."
+
+"Keep it for me in the kitchen," Fanny answered, under her breath,
+helping herself to potatoes.
+
+"Will you come and cut wood for the bedroom fire?" said Stewart, when
+lunch was over. "I bought a hatchet in the village this morning."
+
+"Come down by the river first," insisted Fanny, who had her note in her
+hand.
+
+"Why? And it gets dark so soon!"
+
+"I want to find a boat."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To cross the river."
+
+"To cross the river! Do you want to see what's on the other side?"
+
+"Julien will be on the other side.... I have had a letter from him. I am
+to dine in Chantilly. He will send a car at seven to wait for me in the
+fields at the other side of the broken bridge, and trusts to me to find
+a boat. Come over the level crossing to the river."
+
+They passed the station hut and came to a little landing stage near
+which a boat was tied.
+
+"There's a boat," said Stewart. "Shall we ask at that hut?"
+
+The wooden hut stood above their heads on a pedestal of stone; from its
+side the haunch of the stone bridge sprang away into the air, but
+stopped abruptly where it had been broken off. The hut, once perhaps a
+toll-house, was on a level with what had been the height of the bridge,
+and now it could be reached by stone steps which wound up to a small
+platform in front of the door. From within came men's voices singing.
+
+"Look in here!"
+
+A flickering light issued from a small window, and having climbed the
+steps they could see inside. Two boys, about sixteen, a soldier and an
+old man, sat round a table beneath a hanging lamp, and sang from scraps
+of paper which they held in their hands. Behind the old man a girl stood
+cleaning a cup with a cloth.
+
+"They are practising something. Knock!"
+
+But there was no need, for a dog chained in a barrel close to them set
+up a wild barking.
+
+"Is he chained? Keep this side. The old man is coming."
+
+The door opened. The voices ceased; the girl stood by the old man's
+side.
+
+"Yes, it could be arranged. People still crossed that way; their boat
+was a sort of ferry and there was a charge.
+
+"There might be a little fog to-night, but it didn't matter. Margot
+knows the way across blindfold--Margot would row the lady. She would be
+waiting with a lantern at five minutes to seven; and again at half-past
+nine. Not too late at all! But Margot would not wait on the other side,
+it was too cold. They would lend the lady a whistle, and she must blow
+on it from the far bank."
+
+"There's romance!" said Fanny, as they came away.
+
+"Not if you are caught."
+
+"There's my magic luck!"
+
+"How dare you ask like that? Even if you are not superstitious, even if
+you don't believe a word of it, why be so defiant--why not set the
+signs right!"
+
+"Oh, my dear Stewart, I hardly care! And to the creature who doesn't
+care no suspicion clings. Haven't I an honest face? Would you think it
+was me, me, of all the Section, to cross the river to-night, in a little
+boat with a lantern, to creep out of the house, out of the village, to
+dine forbidden in Chantilly, with some one who enchants me! You
+wouldn't. Why, do you know, if I lived up in their house, under their
+eyes, I would go out just the same, to cross the river. I wouldn't climb
+by windows or invent a wild tale to soothe them, but open the door and
+shut the door, and be gone. And would anybody say: 'Where's Fanny?'"
+
+"They might."
+
+"They might. But they would answer their own question: 'Innocently
+sleeping. Innocently working. Innocently darning, reading, writing.'
+I don't suspect myself so why should any one else suspect me!"
+
+Fanny broke off and laughed.
+
+"Come along and cut wood!"
+
+They moved off into the woods as people with not a care in the world,
+and coming upon a snow-covered stack of great logs which had been piled
+by some one else, began to steal one or two and drag them away into a
+deep woodland drive where they could cut them up without fear of
+being noticed.
+
+They worked on for an hour, and then Stewart drew a packet of cake from
+her coat pocket, and sitting upon the logs they had their tea.
+
+Soon Fanny, wringing her hands, cried:
+
+"I'm blue again, stiff again, letting the cold in, letting the snow
+gnaw. Where's the hatchet?"
+
+For a time she chopped and hacked, and Stewart, shepherding the
+splinters which flew into the snow, piled them--splinters, most precious
+of all--_petit bois_ to set a fire alight; and the afternoon grew bluer,
+deeper. Stewart worked in a reverie--Fanny in a heat of expectation. One
+mused reposedly on life--the other warmly of the immediate hours
+before her.
+
+"Now I'm going to fetch the car," said Stewart at last. "Will you stay
+here and go on cutting till I come? There are two more logs."
+
+She walked away up the drive, and Fanny picked the hatchet out of the
+snow and started on the leathery, damp end of a fresh log. It would not
+split, the tapping marred the white silence, and yet again she let the
+hatchet fall and sat down on the log instead. It was nearly six--they
+had spent the whole afternoon splitting up the logs, and making a fine
+pile of short pieces for firewood; the forest was darkening rapidly,
+blue deepened above the trees to indigo, and black settled among the
+trunks. Only the snow sent up its everlasting shine. Her thoughts fell
+and rose. Now they were upon the ground busy with a multitude of small
+gleams and sparkles--now they were up and away through the forest
+tunnels to Chantilly. What would he say first? How look when he met her?
+
+"Ah, I am a silly woman in a fever! Yet happy--for I see beauty in
+everything, in the world, upon strange faces, in nights and days. Upon
+what passes behind the glassy eyes" (she pressed her own) "depends
+sight, or no sight. There is a life within life, and only I" (she
+thought arrogantly, her peopled world bounded by her companions) "am
+living in it. We are afraid, we are ashamed, but when one dares talk of
+this strange ecstasy, other people nod their heads and say: 'Ah, yes, we
+know about that! They are in love.' And they smile. But what a
+convention--tradition--that smile!"
+
+There was no sound in the forest at all--not the cry of a bird, not the
+rustle of snow falling from a branch--but there was something deeper and
+remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the
+face of the forest--an effective silence which was not blankness--a
+voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his
+place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of
+receiving a guest.
+
+"Oh, what wretched earnest I am in," she thought, suddenly chilled. "And
+it can only have one end--parting." But she had a power to evade these
+moods. She could slip round them and say to herself: "I am old enough--I
+have learnt again and again--that there is only one joy--the Present;
+only one Perfection--the Present. If I look into the future it is lost."
+
+She heard the returning car far up the forest drive, and in a moment saw
+the gleam of its two lamps as they rocked and swayed. It drew up, and
+Stewart put out the lamps, ever remembering that their logs were stolen.
+There was still light enough by which they could pack the car with wood.
+As they finished Stewart caught her arm: "Look, a fire!" she said,
+pointing into the forest. Through a gap in the trees they could see a
+red glow which burst up over the horizon.
+
+"And look behind the trees--the whole sky is illumined--What a fire!" As
+they watched, the glare grew stronger and brighter, and seemed about to
+lift the very tongue of its flame over the horizon.
+
+"It's the moon!" they cried together.
+
+The cold moon it was who had come up red and angry from some Olympic
+quarrel and hung like a copper fire behind the forest branches. Up and
+up she sailed, but paling as she rose from red to orange, from orange to
+the yellow of hay; and at yellow she remained, when the last branch had
+dropped past her face of light, and she was drifting in the height
+of the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE INN
+
+They drove back to the village and down to their isolated villa, and
+here on the road they passed ones and twos of the Section walking
+into supper.
+
+"How little we have thought out your evasion!" whispered Stewart at the
+wheel, as they drew up at the door: "Get out, and go and dress. I will
+take the car up to the garage and come back."
+
+Fanny slipped in through the garden. What they called "dressing" was a
+clean skirt and silk stockings--but silk stockings she dared not put on
+before her brief appearance at supper. Stuffing the little roll into her
+pocket she determined to change her stockings on the boat.
+
+Soon, before supper was ended, she had risen from the table,
+unquestioned by the others, had paused a moment to meet Stewart's eye
+full of mystery and blessing, had closed the door and was gone.
+
+She slipped down the road and across the field to the railway. There was
+a train standing, glowing and breathing upon the lines, and the driver
+called to her as she ran round the buffers of the engine. Soon she was
+down by the riverside and looking for Margot. Though there was moonlight
+far above her the river banks were wrapped in fog that smelt of water,
+and Margot's face at the hut window was white, and her wool dress white,
+too. She came down and they rowed out into the fog, in an upward circle
+because of the stream. Fanny could just see her companion's little blunt
+boots, the stretched laces across her instep, and above, her pretty face
+and slant eyes. Hurriedly, in the boat she pulled off the thick stockings,
+rolled them up, and drew on the silk. A chill struck her feet. She wrapped
+the ends of her coat lightly round her knees and as she did so the roll
+of thick stockings sprang out of her lap and fell overboard into the fog
+and the river.
+
+"Mademoiselle goes to a party?" said Margot, who had not noticed. The
+soft sympathetic voice was as full of blessing as Stewart's eyes had
+been.
+
+"Yes, to a party. And you will fetch me back to-night when I whistle?"
+
+"Yes. Blow three times, for sometimes in the singing at home I lose the
+sound."
+
+The opposite bank seemed to drift in under the motionless boat, and she
+sprang out.
+
+"A tout a l'heure, mademoiselle."
+
+At the top of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker
+on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious
+eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up
+the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by
+Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed
+along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched form of
+a tree.
+
+Strange that the fog should reach so much further inland on this side of
+the river. Perhaps the ground was lower. Standing still her ear caught a
+rich, high, throaty sound, a choking complaint which travelled in the air.
+
+"It is the car," she thought. Far away a patch of light floated in the
+sky, like an uprooted searchlight.
+
+"That is the fog, bending the headlights upward."
+
+She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew
+nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky
+and pierced her--she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.
+
+Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red,
+wooden face like a Hindoo god made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said:
+"We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed
+car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.
+
+"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop
+a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly
+and the street is very full."
+
+"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."
+
+Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted
+this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt
+antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both
+with his cynical impassivity.
+
+"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from
+Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!
+
+In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug--her expectations closing,
+unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the glass of the car
+and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man
+could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of
+the Grand Conde. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty
+car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of
+the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as
+the car stopped.
+
+"Now mademoiselle!"
+
+And there stood Julien, at the end of the passage, he whom she had left,
+sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She
+saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited,
+he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.
+
+"Fanny, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous etes en beaute!"
+
+Within, a table was laid for three--three chairs, three plates, three
+covers. He saw her looking at this.
+
+"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.
+My old friend--Where is Alfred?"
+
+"I am here."
+
+"My old friend--four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.
+He has heard--"
+
+("----Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend;
+he is against me!")
+
+"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand.
+She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he
+beheld it too.
+
+"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But
+he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.
+
+"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to
+the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I
+am not allowed."
+
+The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little
+eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has
+made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly
+decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man,
+how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him.
+Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said,
+and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not
+perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk,
+Fanny, talk, Fanny, you have an audience. To-night you have two to
+dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might
+as easily dazzle a mahogany god, a little god alive beneath its casing
+with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined
+to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe
+her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should
+she want to be praised, she had it from his eye--or be assured of love,
+it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of
+Alfred, he could put nothing into words--because he must be dumb she
+could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.
+
+She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an
+addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk
+with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.
+
+When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back
+with the car in half an hour, to take Fanny to the river.
+
+"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.
+Fanny said she would. "And _do_ you like him?" Fanny said she did.
+
+"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time
+through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."
+
+"Did she treat him badly?"
+
+"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"
+
+"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.
+
+"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over
+life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her
+was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never
+still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and
+carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the
+horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated
+upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him
+this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat
+beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had
+been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan-
+Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage
+into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and
+coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared,
+and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note
+for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the
+roses, she never has written one since."
+
+"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"
+
+"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was
+distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.
+He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next
+morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't
+be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country
+where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself,
+'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later
+in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing
+all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and
+the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had
+taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the
+remaining horse."
+
+"It was then he grew cool about women!"
+
+"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who
+insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not
+understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'
+
+"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
+'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
+What shall I do?'
+
+'Why _shouldn't_ you marry her?' I said.
+
+And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that
+he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he
+said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much.
+You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'
+
+"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the
+girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as
+tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of
+courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her
+alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl
+herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her
+to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the
+house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and
+then to England."
+
+"But why did the girl--?"
+
+"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to
+anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct,
+but it was inexplicable."
+
+"He should have asked her twice."
+
+"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused
+him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was
+a whim."
+
+"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest
+run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we
+are flawed?"
+
+"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in
+women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold
+he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a
+creature half-lunatic, half-snake."
+
+"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"
+
+"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of
+putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much
+heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says
+is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."
+
+"But--(alas, poor Alfred)--you have made a charming confidante for us!"
+
+"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"To anything, to any one I care for."
+
+"Not to me. What you have told me is the key to his expression when he
+looks at me. If he is devoted to you it is not an unreasoning devotion,
+and he is judging me poisonous to you. As he has himself been hurt, he
+will not have you hurt. I wish he had never come. I wish he might never
+be my driver to the river, and your friend, and our enemy."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"I wish it. I am unhappy about him, and unhappiness is always punished.
+While we were in Metz every one smiled at us; here every one will spy
+us out, scold, frown, punish--"
+
+"And your magic luck?"
+
+"Alfred threatens my luck," she said. Then, with another look, "Are you
+angry with me? Can you love such a character?"
+
+"I love it now."
+
+"You have never heard me when I scold, or cry or am sulky?..."
+
+"Never."
+
+"But if I make the experiment?"
+
+"I could make a hundred experiments, but I make none of them. We cannot
+know what to-morrow may bring."
+
+This she remembered suddenly with all her heart.
+
+"Come nearer to me, Fanny. Why are you sitting so far away?"
+
+She sat down nearer to him; she put all her fingers tightly round his
+wrist.
+
+"I am not always sure that you are there, Julien; that you exist."
+
+"Yet I am substantial enough."
+
+"No, you are most phantom-like. It is the thought of parting that checks
+my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the
+thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with;
+that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in
+me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it,
+steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short
+a time. I have had nothing but pleasure from you; isn't it possible that
+I can escape without pain?"
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"No, no, no!" She laid her cheek upon his hand. "Do something to make it
+easier. Must it be that when you go you go completely? Promise me at
+least that it will be gradual, that you will try to see me when you have
+taken up your other life."
+
+"But if I can't? If you are ordered back to Metz?"
+
+"Why should I be? But, if I am, promise me that you will try. If it is
+only an artifice, beguile me with it; I will believe in any promise."
+
+"You don't need to ask me to promise; you know you don't need to make me
+promise. Wherever you are sent I will try to come. _Wherever_--do you
+hear? Do you think that that 'other' life is a dragon to eat me up? That
+it will be such bliss to me that I shall forget you completely? It isn't
+to be bliss, but work, hard work, and competition. It is the work that
+will keep me to Paris, not my happiness, my gaiety, my content with
+other faces. That would comfort me if I were listener, and you the
+speaker. But, Fanny, Fanny, I never met any one with such joy as you--it
+is you who change the forest and the inns we meet in, make the journeys
+a miracle. Don't show me another face. We have been in love without a
+cloud, without scenes, without tears. You have laughed at everything.
+Don't change, don't show me someone whom I don't know; _not that
+sad face_!"
+
+"This then!" She held up a face in whose eyes and smile was the hasty
+radiance his fervour had brought her--and at sight of it the words broke
+from him--"Are you happy so quickly?"
+
+"Yes, yes, already happy."
+
+"Because I speak aloud of what I feel? What a doubting heart you have
+within you! And I believe you only pretend to distress yourself, that
+you may test whether I am sensitive enough to show the reflection of it.
+Come! Well--am I right?"
+
+"Partly. But I need not think. Oh, I am glad your feeling is so like
+mine, and mine like yours! I will let the parting take care of itself
+--yet there is one thing about which I cannot tell. What does your
+heart do in absence, what kind of man are you when there is no one but
+Alfred, who will say: 'Forget her'?"
+
+"What kind do you think?"
+
+"While I am here beside you, you cannot even imagine how dim I might
+become. Can I tell? Can you assure me?"
+
+Dim she might become to him, but dim she was not now as she besought him
+with eyes that showed a quick and eager heart, eyes fixed on his face
+full of enquiry, sure of its answer, feigning doubt that did not
+distress her.
+
+"And I to you, and I to you?" he said, speaking in her ear when he had
+made her an answer. "Dim, too? Why do we never talk of your inconstancy?
+We must discuss it."
+
+"Inconstancy! That word had not occurred to me. It was _your_
+forgetfulness that I dreaded."
+
+"I shall not be unforgetful until I am inconstant."
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"My love!"
+
+"You can afford to tease me now you have me in such a mood!"
+
+"In such a mood! Have I, indeed? Yet you will forget me before I forget
+you."
+
+"You tell me to my face that I shall change?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. And since you are bound to forget me, I insist at least that there
+shall be a reason for doing so. I would rather be a king dethroned than
+allowed to lapse like a poor idiot."
+
+"You would? You can say that?" Her voice rose.
+
+"One instant, Fanny. Even when my teasing is out of taste, learn to
+distinguish it from what I say in earnest. My dear, my dear, why should
+you have to listen to the matter of _my_ philosophy and _my_ experience
+which tells me all creatures forget and are forgotten! No! I wipe out!
+You will not vanish--"
+
+The door opened and Alfred entered the room.
+
+"The car is ready," he said. "I have had trouble in getting here."
+
+Fanny turned to him. "I am ready," she said. "It is dreadful to have to
+trouble you to take me so late at night to the river."
+
+"No, no--" Alfred, glowing from the exercise in the snowy night outside,
+was inclined to be more friendly, or at least less sparing of his words.
+"Here are some letters that were at your lodging." He handed three
+to Julien.
+
+"When do you dine with me again?" Julien, holding the letters, placed
+his hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"I cannot tell what the work will be. Perhaps little, as the snow is
+deep."
+
+"It is snowing again outside," said Alfred.
+
+"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."
+
+"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.
+I will send you a note, Fanny."
+
+"That is quite easy, is it?"
+
+"Easy. But compromising."
+
+"Oh, surely--not very?"
+
+"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But
+he will find a way to send it."
+
+Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are
+going?" as though it distressed him.
+
+"I must."
+
+"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here--"
+
+He found it.
+
+"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper
+with the final date. I will look--"
+
+"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the passage. "It is
+snowing wildly."
+
+"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large
+unfolded document.
+
+"When, when--?" Fanny, hanging on his words, watched him.
+
+"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"
+
+"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the
+paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say--ah, wait,
+did I register at Charleville or Paris?"
+
+"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."
+
+"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges
+of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.
+
+"Fanny, it has come sooner than I expected."
+
+She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.
+
+"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her
+in a minute."
+
+"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany god, grown wooden again
+under the light, and retreated.
+
+"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those
+days I didn't know you--"
+
+"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me--only tell me _which_ day!
+To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.
+
+"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better
+than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before
+me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. Fanny,
+it is only a change, not a parting!"
+
+Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!
+Julien, bring her!"
+
+"One instant. She is coming. Fanny, I must think it out. Until I go--I
+shall have time--we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I
+must come often to see my land and my factory."
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Often, I must--"
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"
+
+"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is
+absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."
+
+"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry,
+good-night, good-night!"
+
+She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he
+pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"
+
+At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed
+her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and
+the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE RIVER
+
+The indifferent Alfred drove his unhappy burden towards the river.
+Walled in by the rush of snowflakes about him he made what way he could,
+but it was well-nigh impossible to see. The lamps gave no light, for the
+flakes had built a shutter across the glass like a policeman's dark
+lantern. The flying multitudes in the air turned him dizzy; he could not
+tell upon which side of the road he drove, and he could not tell what he
+would do when the wall beyond the outskirts of Chantilly forsook him. As
+to what was happening below him, what ruts, ditches, pits or hillocks he
+was navigating, he had no idea; his ship was afloat upon the snow,
+sluggishly rolling and heaving as it met with soft, mysterious
+obstacles.
+
+Heaviness and gloom sat upon the velvet seat behind him. The white, wild
+night outside was playful and waggish compared with the black dejection
+behind the opaque glass windows.
+
+Fanny, who could not see her hand move in the darkness, saw clearly with
+other miserable and roving eyes the road that lay before her.
+
+"Julien, good-bye. Don't forget me!" That she would say to him in a few
+days; that was the gate, the black portal which would lead her into the
+road. That she would say, with entreaty, yet no painful tones of hers
+would represent enough the entreaty of her heart that _neither would
+forget the other_. She thought of this.
+
+Not in wilful unreason, or in disbelief of his promise, she looked at
+this parting as though it might be final. Without him she could see no
+charm ahead. And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner
+she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this
+enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work
+upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving
+comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.
+
+Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently
+employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of
+Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide,
+second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter
+storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the
+forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him
+with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the
+illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung
+on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He
+turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the
+centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night
+was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the
+most resolved and native traveller.
+
+He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are
+filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself
+wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or
+melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the
+true road from the false. He chose a road which instantly he saw to be
+no road. Too late. He pitched, this time not to recover. "A river--a
+river-bed!" was his horrified thought. Down went the nose of the car
+before him, the steering-wheel hitting him in the chest. Down came Fanny
+and all her black thoughts against the glass at his back. The car had
+not fallen very far; it had slid forward into a snow-lined dyke, and
+remained, resting on its radiator, its front wheels thrust into the
+steep walls of the bank, its back wheels in the air. Alfred climbed down
+from a seat which had lost its seating power; Fanny opened the door and
+stepped from the black interior into the deep snow. The front lamps were
+extinguished and buried in the opposite bank, the little red light at
+the back shone upwards to heaven.
+
+"Well--"
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Are you hurt?"
+
+"Not at all. And you?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+Their cold relations did not seem one whit changed from what they had
+been in the inn. Nothing had intervened but a little reflection, a
+little effort, and a vigorous jerk. Why should they change? They stood
+side by side in the noisy violence of the storm, and one shouted to the
+other: "Can you get her out!" and the other answered, "No."
+
+"I will walk on to the river."
+
+"You would never find it."
+
+The truth of this she saw as she looked round.
+
+Alfred left her and descending into the dyke, went on his knees by the
+radiator and fumbled deep in the snow with his hand. A hissing arose as
+the heated water ran from the tap he had turned. He emptied the water
+from the generator; the tail light sank and went out.
+
+"No one will run into her," he remarked. "No one will pass."
+
+Aie--screamed the wind and created a pillar of white powder. Fanny,
+losing her balance, one foot sank on the edge of a rut, and she went
+down on her hands; to the knees her silk-clad legs met the cold bite
+of the snow.
+
+"You must come back with me," shouted Alfred in her ear.
+
+That seemed true and necessary; she could not reach the river; she could
+not stay where she was. She followed him. At the next ditch he put out
+his hand and helped her across. They had no lamp. By the light of the
+snow she watched his blue-clad legs as they sank and rose; her own
+sinking and rising in the holes he left for her, the buffets of wind
+un-steadying her at every step. She followed him. And because she was as
+green as a green bough which bursts into leaf around a wound, the
+disturbing, the exciting menace of her discovery brightened her heart,
+set her mind whirling, and overgrew her dejection.
+
+They gained the Chantilly wall, and experienced at once its protection.
+The howling wind passed overhead and left them in a lew; the dancing
+snowflakes steadied and dropped more like rain upon them; she moved up
+abreast of Alfred.
+
+"I will take you back to the inn," he said. "They will have a room
+there."
+
+"Julien will have left and gone to his lodging."
+
+"Yes, at the other end of the town," answered Alfred, she fancied with
+grim satisfaction. ("Though it is as well," she thought; "there will be
+less scandal in the eyes of the innkeeper.")
+
+"To-morrow morning, mademoiselle, I will fetch you at six with another
+car and its driver, Foss, a man whom I can trust. We will take you to
+the river, and on the return journey drag the car from the ditch. It
+should be easy; she has not heeled over on her side."
+
+"That will be marvellous. I cannot tell you how I apologise."
+
+This, she began to see, was serious; her debt to the enemy Alfred was
+growing hourly.
+
+"No, no," he said, as though he saw the thing in the light of common
+justice. "You have come over to dine with Julien; we must get you back
+to the river."
+
+"Nevertheless it's monstrous," she thought, "what he has to do for me."
+
+But Alfred regarded it less as a friendly office towards Julien than as
+a duty, an order given by an officer. He was a sergeant, and four years
+of war had changed him from an irritable and independent friend to a
+dogged and careful subordinate. He did not like Fanny any the more for
+the trouble she was giving him; but he did not hold her responsible for
+his discomforts. She must be got to the river and to the river he
+would get her.
+
+Pray heaven she never crossed it again.
+
+When they arrived on the pavement outside the inn, he said: "Knock,
+mademoiselle, and ask if there is a room. It would be better that I
+should not be seen. Explain that the snow prevented you from returning.
+If there is a room do not come back to tell me, I shall watch you enter,
+and fetch you at six in the morning."
+
+She thanked him again, and following his instructions, found herself
+presently in a small room under the eaves--pitied by the innkeeper's
+wife, given a hot brick wrapped in flannel by the innkeeper's daughter,
+warmed and cheered and, in a very short time, asleep. At half-past five
+she was called, dressed herself, and drank a cup of coffee; paying a
+fabulous bill which included two francs for the hot brick.
+
+At six came Alfred, in another car, seated beside Foss, the new driver,
+a pale man with a grave face. They moved off in the grey dawn which
+brightened as they drove. Beyond the Chantilly wall the plain stretched,
+and on it the labouring wheel-marks of the night before were plainly
+marked. Alfred, beside the driver, let down a pane of glass to tell her
+that he had already been out with Foss and towed in the other car. She
+saw the ditch into which they had sunk, the scrambled marks upon the
+bank where she had been towed out. In ten minutes they were in the midst
+of the forest.
+
+Now, Fate the bully, punishing the unlucky, tripping up the hurried,
+stepped in again. This car, which had been seized in a hurry by cold and
+yawning men, was not as she should be.
+
+"Is she oiled?" Foss had called to the real driver of the car.
+
+"She is ... everything!" answered the man, in a hurry, going off to his
+coffee. She was not.
+
+Just as the approaching sun began to clear the air, just as with a
+spring at her heart Fanny felt that to be present at the opening of a
+fine day was worth all the trouble in the world, the engine began to
+knock. She saw Foss's head tilt a little sideways, like a keen dog who
+is listening. The knock increased. The engine laboured, a grinding set
+in; Foss pulled up at the side of the road and muttered to Alfred. He
+opened the bonnet, stared a second, then tried the starting handle. It
+would not move. Fanny let down the pane of glass and watched them in
+silence. "Not a drop," said Foss's low voice. And later, "Oil, yes,
+but--find me the tin!"
+
+"Do you mean there is no oil, no spare oil--" Alfred hunted vainly round
+the car, under the seats, in the tool box. There was no tin of oil.
+
+"If I had some oil," said Foss, "and if I let her cool a little, I could
+manage--with a syringe."
+
+They consulted together. Alfred nodded, and approached the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I am going on to the next village to get a tin
+of oil. There is a garage. Cars will be passing soon; I must ask you to
+lie covered with the rug in the bottom of the car; your uniform is very
+visible. Foss will remain with you."
+
+Fanny lay down in the bottom of the car, fitting her legs among a couple
+of empty petrol tins; Foss covered her with the rug. A quarter of an
+hour went by, and above her she began to hear the voices of birds; below
+her the cold crept up. She had no idea how far the village might be, and
+it is possible that Alfred had had no idea either. A bicycle bell rang
+at her side; later she heard the noise of a car, which passed her with
+a rush. Lying with her ear so close to the poor body of the motor she
+felt it to be but cold bones in a cemetery, dead, dead.
+
+Outside in the road, Foss shaded his eyes and looked up the now sparkling
+road a hundred times. The motors increased; the morning traffic between
+Precy and Chantilly awoke; the cars were going in to the offices of the
+G.Q.G. Now and then Foss would come to the window of the car. "Don't
+move," he would say. The floor-boards were rattled by an icy wind that
+blew over the face of the snow and up under the car; the brown, silk legs
+lay prone and stiff between the petrol cans, lifeless now to the knee.
+She was seized with fits of violent shivering. At one moment she had
+planned in her despair to call to Foss and tell him she would walk--but
+she had let the moment pass and now she put away the thought of walking
+on those lifeless feet. Besides, she would be seen--that well-known cap,
+bobbing back between the trees from Chantilly so early in the morning!
+
+"Oh, Honour of the Section, I am guarding you like my life!" She tried
+to raise her head a little to ease her neck.
+
+"Don't move," said Foss.
+
+Feet pattered past her; motors swept by; bicycle bells rang.
+
+"Foss," she said.
+
+The soldier leant towards her and listened.
+
+"Choose your own time, but you must let me sit up a moment. I am in
+pain."
+
+"Then, now, mademoiselle!"
+
+She sat up, flinging the rug back, dazzled by the splendour of the
+forest, the climbing sun, the heavy-burdened trees. Behind her was a
+cart coming up slowly; far ahead a cyclist swayed in the ruts of the
+road. As they approached her she pleaded: "They can't know me! Let
+me sit up--"
+
+But Foss knew only one master, his sergeant.
+
+"Better go down, mademoiselle."
+
+She went down again under the black rug, close against the wind that
+lifted the floor-boards, wrapping her coat more tightly round her,
+folding her arms about her knees.
+
+"It must be nearly eight. I have an hour more before they come in to
+breakfast. Ah, and when they do, will one of them go into my bedroom
+with my letters?"
+
+She tried to pick out in her mind that one most friendly to her, that
+one who was to destroy her. She heard in spirit her cry: "Fanny
+_isn't there!_"
+
+She thought of Stewart who would have woken early, planning anxiously to
+save her. The faces of the Guardians of the Honour of the Section began
+to visit her one by one, and horror spread in her. Then, pushing them
+from her, attempting to escape: "They are not all the world--" But they
+_were_ all the world--if in a strange land they were all to frown
+together. The thought was horrible. Time to get there yet! Alas, that
+the car was not facing _towards_ Chantilly--so early in the morning!
+
+"Foss, Foss, don't you see him coming?"
+
+"The road is full of people."
+
+A car rushed by them, yet never seemed to pass. The engine slowed down
+and a voice called: "What's up? Anything you want?"
+
+It was the voice of Roland Vauclin. Ah, she knew him--that fat, childish
+man, who loved gossip as he loved his food. To Fanny it seemed but a
+question of seconds before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good
+morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village
+spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay
+still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could not hear.
+
+Then she heard him clear his throat and speak.
+
+"The Captain asked me to get a bit of wood for his fire, sir. I have a
+man in there gathering branches, while I do a bit of 'business' with
+the car."
+
+"Oh, right!... Go on!" said Vauclin to his own chauffeur. Again they were
+left alone. Talk between them was almost impossible; Fanny was so
+muffled, Foss so anxiously watched for Alfred. The reedy singing between
+the boards where the wind attacked her occupied all her attention. The
+very core of warmth seemed extinguished in her body, never to be lit
+again. She remembered their last _fourier_, or special body-servant, who
+had gone on leave upon an open truck, and who had grown colder and
+colder--"and he never got warm again and he died, madame," the letter
+from his wife had told them.
+
+"I think he is coming! There is no one else on the road, mademoiselle.
+Will you look? I don't see very well--"
+
+She tried to throw off the rug and sit up, but her frozen elbow slipped
+and she fell again on the floor of the car. Pulling herself up she
+stared with him through the glass. Far up the white road a little figure
+toiled towards them, carrying something, wavering as though the ice-ruts
+were deep, picking its way from side to side. Neither of them was sure
+whether it was Alfred; they watched in silence. Before she knew it was
+upon her a car went by; she dived beneath the rug, striking her forehead
+on the corner of the folding seat.
+
+"Did they see? Was any one inside?"
+
+"It was an empty car. Please be careful."
+
+Foss was cold with rebuke. After that she lay still, isolated even from
+Foss. Ten minutes went by and suddenly Foss spoke--"Did you have to go
+far?"
+
+And Alfred's hard voice answered "Yes."
+
+Then she heard the two men working, tools clattering, murmured voices,
+and in ten minutes Foss said: "Try the starting handle."
+
+She heard the efforts, the labour of Alfred at the handle.
+
+"He will kill himself--he will break a blood-vessel," she thought as she
+listened to him. Every few minutes someone seized the handle and wound
+and wound--as she had never wound in her life--on and on, past the very
+limit of endurance. And under her ear, in the cold bones of the car, not
+a sign of life! Not a sign of life, and, as though she could hear them,
+all the clocks in the world struck nine.
+
+The Guardians of the Honour would be in at breakfast now! they would be
+sitting, sitting--discussing her absence. Stewart, upstairs, would be
+looking out of the window, watching the river, perhaps answering
+questions indifferently with her cool look. "Oh, in the garage--or
+walking in the forest. I don't know." Cough! She jumped as the bones in
+the bottom of the car moved under her, and the engine breathed. The
+noise died out, Foss leapt to the handle and wound and wound, fiercely,
+like a man who meant to make her breathe again or die. Again she
+struggled to life, lived for a few minutes, choked and was silent.
+
+"How is the handle?"
+
+"Pretty stiff," said Foss, "but getting better. Give me the oil squirt."
+
+Alfred took his place at the handle. Suddenly the car sprang to life
+again on a full deep note. Fanny lifted her head a little. Foss was
+leaning over the carburettor with his thin anxious look: Alfred stood
+in the snow, dark red in the face, and covered with oil. Soon they were
+moving along the road, slowly at first, and with difficulty: then faster
+and more freely. A little thin warmth began to creep up through the
+boards and play about her legs.
+
+She was carried along under her dark rug for another twenty minutes,
+then fell against the seat as the car turned sharply into the forsaken
+road that led to the broken bridge. In five minutes more the car had
+stopped and Alfred was at the door saying: "At last, mademoiselle!" She
+stammered her thanks as she tried to step from the car to the ground
+--but fell on her knees on the dashboard.
+
+"Have you hurt your foot?" said Alfred, who was hot.
+
+"I am only cold," she said humbly, unwilling to intrude her puny
+endurances on their gigantic labours.
+
+She sat on the step of the car rubbing her ankles, and stared at the
+meadows of thawing snow, at the open porches of stone which led the road
+straight into the river, at the church and the sunlit houses on the
+other side.
+
+Bidding them good-bye she reached the bank, and climbed down it,
+stumbling in the frozen mud and pits of ice till she reached the stiff
+reeds at the bank.
+
+The river had floes of ice upon it, green ice which swung and caught
+among the reeds at the edge. "It is thin," she thought, pushing her
+shoe through it, "it can't prevent the boat from crossing the river."
+Yet she was anxious.
+
+There on the other side was the little hut, the steps, the boat tied to
+the stone and held rigid in the ice. A shaggy dog ran by her feet to the
+river's edge and barked. Feet came clambering down the bank and a
+workman followed the dog, with a bag of tools and a basket. He walked up
+to the river, and putting his hands in a trumpet to his mouth called in
+a huge voice: "Un passant, Margot! Margot!" Fanny remembered her whistle
+and blew that too.
+
+There was no sign of life, and the little hut looked as before, like a
+brown dog asleep in the sun. Fanny turned to the man, ready to share her
+anxiety with him, but he had sat down on the bank and was retying a
+bootlace that had come undone.
+
+Margot never showed herself at the hut window, at the hut door. When
+Fanny turned back to whistle again she saw her standing up in the boat,
+which, freed, was drifting out towards them--saw her scatter the ice
+with her oar--and the boat, pushed upstream, came drifting down towards
+them in a curve to hit the bank at their feet. The girl stepped out,
+smiling, happy, pretty, undimmed by the habit of trade. The man got in
+and sat down, the dog beside him.
+
+"I would stand," said Margot to Fanny, "it's so wet."
+
+She made no allusion to the broken appointment for the night before.
+Fanny, noticing the dripping boards of the boat, stood up, her hand upon
+Margot's shoulder to steady herself. The thin, illusory ice shivered and
+broke and sank as the oar dipped in sideways.
+
+Cocks were crowing on the other side--the sun drew faint colours from
+the ice, the river clattered at the side of the boat, wind twisted and
+shook her skirt, and stirred her hair. All was forgotten in the glory of
+the passage of the river.
+
+Margot, smiling up under her damp, brown hair, took her five sous,
+pressed her town boots against the wooden bar, and shot the boat up
+against the bank.
+
+Fanny went up the bank, over the railway lines, and out into the road.
+Two hundred yards of road lay before her, leading straight up to the
+house. On the left was a high wall, on the right the common covered with
+snow--should some one come out of the house there was no chance of
+hiding. She glanced down at her tell-tale silk stockings; yet she could
+not hurry on those stiff and painful feet. She was near the door in
+the wall.
+
+She passed in--the dog did not bark; came to the foot of the steps--nobody
+looked out of the window; walked into the hall among their hanging coats
+and macintoshes, touched them, moved them with her shoulder; heard voices
+behind the door of the breakfast room, was on the stairs, up out of sight
+past the first bend, up, up, into Stewart's room.
+
+"_Do you know_...?"
+
+"_No one knows_!"
+
+"Oh ... oh...." All her high nerves came scudding and shuddering down
+into the meadows of content. Eternal luck.... She crept under Stewart's
+eiderdown and shivered.
+
+"Here's the chocolate. I will boil it again on my cooker. Oh, you have
+a sort of ague...."
+
+Good friend ... kind friend! She had pictured her like that, anxious,
+unquestioning and warm!
+
+Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon
+the Guardians of the Honour.
+
+As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes
+of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a
+gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud
+from her hands, her feet.
+
+"Had your breakfast?" said some one.
+
+"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
+
+She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form
+the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds
+of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her.
+Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
+
+But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third
+breakfast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+ALLIES
+
+A thaw set in.
+
+All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks,
+sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered,
+breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise,
+which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under
+its banks.
+
+With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and
+fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the
+dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet,
+and towers of wood.
+
+In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of
+aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a
+paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her
+mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the
+demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the
+familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
+
+She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She
+could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic
+forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but
+closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the
+lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving
+for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
+
+All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the
+villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the
+bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her,
+followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of
+wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a
+thawing forest.
+
+There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a
+bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of
+farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more
+for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly
+was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced
+at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.
+
+She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to
+accompany her on her journey only to turn back.
+
+All the way to Amiens he reassured himself and her: "In a week I will
+come to Charleville."
+
+And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week
+you will come."
+
+(Why then this dread?)
+
+"In a week--in a week," ran the refrain.
+
+"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"
+
+"No, I shall write to the 'Silver Lion.' You will find in the middle of
+the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window
+sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."
+
+"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said
+'Good-bye' to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."
+
+And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not
+contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered
+once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.
+
+"It isn't that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn't that I
+fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."
+
+"I, too, know that."
+
+They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.
+
+The rain poured.
+
+"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is
+mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I
+have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to
+think of that."
+
+"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."
+
+"Yes--oh, you will see it easily--on the banks of the Meuse. I was born
+there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time--I will come, too."
+
+She stopped the car in a side street of the town.
+
+Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed
+them back on the wheel. "They can't," she said, and shook her head.
+
+He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.
+
+"You take the three o'clock train back to Paris when the papers are
+through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh,
+we've said everything! Oh, let's get it over--"
+
+He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
+She drove down the street without looking back.
+
+There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that
+if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from
+her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was
+done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She
+had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she
+felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted
+her all the morning.
+
+She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond
+the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly,
+violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if
+I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
+
+But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in
+trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen
+that violent pain.
+
+She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small
+cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusee. Wherever
+her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within
+her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do
+instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went
+moving off down the street of her endless thought.
+
+"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out
+in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
+She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone
+behind her.
+
+Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
+
+Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were
+gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on
+each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through
+it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards
+ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
+
+Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white
+letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as
+everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins,
+carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
+
+At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
+
+"Will you give me a lift?"
+
+He sat down beside her.
+
+"What do you do?" she asked.
+
+"I look after Chinamen."
+
+"Ah, how lonely!"
+
+"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army
+gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up
+the crumbs."
+
+She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground
+indistinguishable from the rest.
+
+"Is that where you live?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to
+this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a
+friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the
+rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like
+action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving
+ground; passing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.
+
+Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and
+could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron,
+brown grass--brown grass and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway
+lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far
+between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing
+grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of
+five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand
+grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends
+together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood
+erect for miles and miles--when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon!
+Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life
+stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of
+village bones?
+
+She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of
+dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a
+father or mother below--" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up
+into the air; the child was gone.
+
+A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. Fanny held
+out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.
+
+"Have you been here long?" she asked.
+
+"A month, mademoiselle."
+
+"Are there many of you in this--village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of
+bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)
+
+"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."
+
+"But how are you fed?"
+
+"A lorry passes once a week for all the people in this district--within
+fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two
+in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don't come.
+We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got
+water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the
+radiators of other lorries."
+
+"What have you got down there?"
+
+"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still,
+and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can't build
+anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep
+between the ten of us."
+
+"Take my hammer," said Fanny. "I can get another in the garage."
+
+He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of
+recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his
+banner of blue smoke.
+
+Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.
+
+"This _was_ Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads
+ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the
+village--not a brick lay where the signpost stood.
+
+Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered--and suddenly, out
+of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little
+horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.
+
+"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face.
+His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his
+springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the
+tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung
+out beyond the mudguards.
+
+"Dandy car you've got!" he said with envy. "French?"
+
+Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with
+the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round
+in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she
+stood by the signpost in the desert.
+
+Then she took the road to Peronne.
+
+"I won't have my lunch yet--" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch
+had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She
+passed Peronne--uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into
+the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted
+village, oddly untouched by shell or fire. Here the doors swung and
+banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with
+curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.
+
+The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the
+henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.
+
+With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their
+handle spread it on the bread.
+
+"Lord, how lonely it is--surely some door might open, some face look
+out--" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat,
+for a front door slammed and blew back again.
+
+"I couldn't stay here the night--" with a shiver--and the bird on the
+branch sang louder than ever. "It's all very well," she addressed him.
+"You're with your own civilisation. I'm right _out_ of mine!"
+
+The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the
+sky, came down upon the other.
+
+Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village,
+talked a little to him, and set him down.
+
+A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion
+for half an hour.
+
+"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"
+
+"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question,
+when all France meant Julien!)
+
+"Don't you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he
+grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to
+be French!"
+
+"Little Belgium--jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the
+elder woman of the world!"
+
+A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.
+
+"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of
+severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English
+could do this--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."
+
+She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words
+were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that
+theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor
+would she have known how had she wished it.
+
+They passed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green
+bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came,
+and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I'll teach you to
+meddle with my daughter--"
+
+"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning
+from the car to watch.
+
+A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.
+
+"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed
+wire, fenced round with armed sentries.
+
+She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.
+
+"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don't much like
+driving Americans."
+
+"But I am English."
+
+"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the
+French Mission."
+
+"Why don't you like Americans?"
+
+"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"
+
+"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"
+
+"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I
+don't like them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her
+bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"
+
+"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes
+no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion--and each told
+his women tales of the other's shortcomings.
+
+Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of
+the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did
+not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese,
+Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they
+were in amity or enmity.
+
+Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. _There_ the Allies
+walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. _There_
+were no epithets to fling--they had all been flung long ago.
+
+And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as
+souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different
+languages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE ARDENNES
+
+The day wore on--
+
+The sun came lower and nearer, till the half-light ran with her half-
+thought, dropping, sinking, dying. "Guise," said the signpost, and
+a battlement stared down and threw its shadow across her face. "Is that
+where the dukes lived?" She was a speck in the landscape, moving on
+wheels that were none of her invention, covering distances of hundreds
+of miles without amazement, upon a magic mount unknown to her
+forefathers. Dark and light moved across the face of the falling day.
+Sometimes when she lifted her eyes great clouds full of rain were
+crossing the sky; and now, when she looked again the wind had torn them
+to shreds and hunted them away. The shadows lengthened--those of the few
+trees falling in bars across the road. A turn of the road brought the
+setting sun in her face, and blinded with light, she drove into it. When
+it had gone it left rays enough behind to colour everything, gilding the
+road itself, the air, the mists that hung in the ditches.
+
+Before the light was gone she saw the Ardennes forests begin upon her
+left.
+
+When it was gone, wood and road, air and earth, were alike stone-coloured.
+Then the definite night, creeping forward on all sides, painted out all
+but the road and the margin of the road--and with the side lights on all
+vision narrowed down to the grey snout of the bonnet, the two hooped
+mudguards stretched like divers' arms, and the blanched dead leaves which
+floated above from the unseen branches of the trees.
+
+Four crazy Fords were drawn up in one village street, and as her lights
+flashed on the door she caught sight of the word "Cafe" written on it.
+Placing the Renault beside the Fords she opened the door. Within five
+Frenchmen were drinking at one table, and four Americans at another. The
+Americans sprang up and claimed her, first as their own kin, and then at
+least as a blood sister. They gave her coffee, and would not let her
+pay; but she sat uneasily with them.
+
+"For which nation do you work? There are no English here," they said.
+
+"I am in the French Army."
+
+"Gee, what a rotten job!" they murmured sympathetically.
+
+"Where have you come from?"
+
+"We've just come back from Germany, and you bet it's good up there!"
+
+"Good?"
+
+"Every darn thing you want. Good beds, good food, and, thank God, one
+can speak the lingo."
+
+"You don't speak French then?"
+
+"You bet not."
+
+"Why don't you learn? Mightn't it be useful to you?"
+
+"Useful?"
+
+"Oh, when you get back home. In business perhaps--"
+
+"Ma'am," said the biggest American, leaning earnestly towards her, "let
+me tell you one thing. If any man comes up to me back in the States and
+starts on me with that darn language--I'll drop him one."
+
+"And German is easier?"
+
+"Oh, well, German we learn in the schools, you see. How far do you make
+it to St. Quentin?"
+
+"Are you going there on those Fords?"
+
+"We hope to, ma'am. But we started a convoy of twenty this morning, and
+these here four cars are all we've seen since lunch."
+
+"I hardly think you'll get as far as St. Quentin to-night. And there's
+little enough to sleep in on the way. I should stay here." She rose. "I
+wish you luck. Good-bye."
+
+She thanked them for their coffee, nodded to the quiet French table and
+went out.
+
+One American followed her.
+
+"Can you buzz her round?" he asked kindly, and taking the handle, buzzed
+her round.
+
+"I bet you don't get any one to do that for you in your army, do you?"
+he asked, as he straightened himself from the starting handle. She put
+her gear in with a little bang of anger.
+
+"You're kind," she said, "and they are kind. That you can't see it is
+all a question of language. Every village is full of bored Americans
+with nothing to do, and never one of them buys a dictionary!"
+
+"If it's villages you speak of, ma'am, it isn't dictionaries is needed,"
+he answered, "'tis plumbing!"
+
+She had not left him ten minutes before one of her tyres punctured.
+
+"Alas! I could have found a better use for them than arguing," she
+thought ruefully, regretting the friendly Americans, as she changed the
+tyre by the roadside under the beam from her own lamps.
+
+When it was done she sat for a few minutes in the silent car. The moon
+came up and showed her the battlements of the Ardennes forest standing
+upon the crest of the mountains to her left. "That is to be my home--"
+
+Julien was in Paris by now, divested of his uniform, sitting by a great
+fire, eating civilised food. A strange young man in dark clothes--she
+wondered what he would wear.
+
+He seemed a great many difficult miles away. That he should be in a
+heated room with lights, and flowers, and a spread table--and she under
+the shadow of the forest watching the moon rise, lengthened the miles
+between them; yet though she would have given much to have him with her,
+she would have given nothing to change places with him.
+
+The road left the forest for a time and passed over bare grass hills
+beneath a windy sky. Then back into the forest again, hidden from the
+moon. And here her half-stayed hunger made her fanciful, and she started
+at the noise of a moving bough, blew her horn at nothing, and seemed to
+hear the overtaking hum of a car that never drew near her.
+
+Suddenly, on the left, in a ditch, a dark form appeared, then another
+and another. Down there in a patch of grass below the road she caught
+sight of the upturned wheels of a lorry, and stopping, got down, walked
+to the ditch and looked over. There, in wild disorder, lay thirty or
+forty lorries and cars, burnt, twisted, wheelless, broken, ravaged,
+while on the wooden sides the German eagle, black on white, was marked.
+
+"What--what--can have happened here!"
+
+She climbed back into the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights
+came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and
+die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up
+by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to
+firm land on the other side. Some of the planks were missing, and moving
+carefully around the crater she heard others tip and groan beneath her.
+
+"Could that have been a convoy caught by the mine? Or was it a dumping
+ground for the cars unable to follow in the retreat?"
+
+The mine crater, which was big enough to hold a small villa, was
+overgrown now at the bottom with a little grass and moss.
+
+On and on and on--till she fancied the moon, too, had turned as the sun
+had done, and started a downward course. It grew no colder, she grew no
+hungrier--but losing count of time, slipped on between the flying tree
+trunks, full of unwearied content. At last a light shone through the
+trees, and by a wooden bridge which led over another crater she came on
+a lonely house. "Cafe" was written on the door, but the shutters were
+tight shut, and only a line of light shone from a crack.
+
+From within came sounds of laughter and men's voices. She knocked, and
+there was an instant silence, but no one came to answer. At length the
+bolts were withdrawn and the head of an old woman appeared through the
+door, which was cautiously opened a little.
+
+"An omelette? Coffee?"
+
+"You don't know what you speak of! We have no eggs."
+
+"Then coffee?"
+
+"No, no, nothing at all. Go on to Charleville. We have nothing."
+
+"How far is Charleville?"
+
+But the door shut again, the bolts were shot, and a man's voice growled
+in the hidden room behind.
+
+"Dubious hole. Yet it looks as though a big town were near----" And down
+the next slope she ran into Charleville. The town had been long abed,
+the street lamps were out, the cobbles wet and shining.
+
+On the main boulevard one dark figure hurried along.
+
+"Which is the 'Silver Lion'?" she called, her voice echoing in the empty
+street.
+
+Soon, between rugs on a bed in the "Silver Lion," between a single sheet
+doubled in two, she slept--propping the lockless door with her suitcase.
+
+The Renault slept or watched below in the courtyard, the moon sank, the
+small hours passed, the day broke, the first day in Charleville.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE STUFFED OWL
+
+A stuffed bird stood upon a windless branch and through a window of blue
+and orange squares of glass a broken moon stared in.
+
+A bedroom, formed from a sitting-room, a basin to wash in upon a red
+plush table--no glass, no jug, no lock upon the door. Instead, gilt
+mirrors, three bell ropes and a barometer. A bed with a mattress upon it
+and nothing more.
+
+This was her kingdom.
+
+Beyond, a town without lights, without a station, without a milkshop,
+without a meat shop, without sheets, without blankets, crockery, cooking
+pans, or locks upon the doors. A population half-fed and poor. A sky
+black as ink and liquid as a river.
+
+Prisoners in the streets, moving in green-coated gangs; prisoners in the
+gutters, pushing long scoops to stay the everlasting tide of mud; thin,
+hungry, fierce and sad, green-coated prisoners like bedraggled parrots,
+out-numbered the population.
+
+The candle of the world was snuffed out--and the wick smoked.
+
+The light was gone--the blinding light of the Chantilly snows, the
+lights on the Precy river--moonlight, sunlight--the little boat
+crossing at moonrise, sunrise.
+
+"Ah, that long journey! How I pressed on, how I fled from Amiens!"
+
+"What, not Charleville yet?" I said. "Isn't it Charleville soon? What
+hurry was there then to get there?"
+
+The stuffed bird eyed her from his unstirring branch, and that yellow
+eye seemed to answer: "None, none..."
+
+"This is his home; his country. He told me it was beautiful. But I
+cannot see beauty. I am empty of happiness. Where is the beauty?"
+
+And the vile bird, winking in the candle's light, replied: "Nowhere."
+
+But he lied.
+
+Perhaps she had been sent, stuffed as he was, from Paris. Perhaps he had
+never flown behind the town, and seen the wild mountains that began at
+the last house on the other bank of the river. Or the river itself,
+greener than any other which flowed over black rocks, in cold gulleys
+--the jade-green Meuse flowing to Dinant, to Namur. Perhaps from his
+interminable boulevard he had never seen the lovely Spanish Square of red
+and yellow, its steep-roofed houses standing upon arches--or the proud
+Duc Charles de Gonzague who strutted for ever upon his pedestal, his
+stone cape slipping from one shoulder, his gay Spaniard's hat upon his
+head--holding back a smile from his handsome lips, lest the town which he
+had come over the mountains to found should see him tolerant and sin
+beneath his gaze.
+
+That bird knew the rain would stop--knew it in his dusty feathers,
+but he would not kindle hope. He knew there was a yellow spring at
+hand--but he left her to mourn for the white lustre of Chantilly.
+Vile bird!... She blew out the candle that he might wink no more.
+
+"To-morrow I will buy a padlock and a key. If among these gilt mirrors I
+can have no other charm, I will have solitude!" And having hung a
+thought, a plan, a hope before her in the future, she slept till day
+broke--the second day in Charleville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke, a mixture of courage and philosophy.
+
+"I can stand anything, and beyond a certain limit misfortune makes me
+laugh. But there's no reason why I should stand this!" The key and
+padlock idea was rejected as a compromise with happiness.
+
+"No, no, let us see if we can get something better to lock up than that
+bird." He looked uncommonly dead by daylight.
+
+"I would rather lock up an empty room, and leave it pure when I must
+leave it!"
+
+Dressing, she went quickly down the street to the Bureau de la Place.
+The clerks and secretaries nodded and smiled at each other, and bent
+their heads over their typewriters when she looked at them.
+
+"Can I see the billeting lieutenant?"
+
+"He is not here."
+
+"I saw him enter."
+
+"We will go and see...."
+
+She drummed upon the table with her fingers and the clerks and
+secretaries winked and nodded more meaningly than ever.
+
+"_Entrez_, mademoiselle. He will see you."
+
+The red-haired lieutenant with pince-nez was upon his feet looking at
+her curiously as she entered the adjoining room.
+
+"Good morning, mademoiselle. There is something wrong with the billet
+that I found you yesterday?"
+
+She looked at him. In his pale-blue eyes there was a beam; in his
+creased mouth there was an upward curve. The story of legitimate
+complaint that she had prepared drooped in her mind; she looked at
+him a little longer, hesitated, then, risking everything:
+
+"Monsieur, there is a stuffed owl in the room."
+
+He did not wince. "Take it out, mademoiselle."
+
+"H'm, yes. I cannot see heaven except through orange glass."
+
+"Open the window."
+
+"It is fixed."
+
+Then he failed her; he was a busy, sensible man.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I find you a billet, I instal you, and you come to me in
+the middle of the morning with this ridiculous story of an owl. It isn't
+reasonable...."
+
+The door opened and his superior officer walked in, a stern captain with
+no crease about his mouth, no beam in his olive eye.
+
+Ah, now ... Now the lieutenant had but to turn to his superior officer
+and she would indeed be rent, and reasonably so.
+
+"What is the matter?" said the newcomer. "Is something fresh needed?"
+
+The billeting lieutenant never hesitated a second.
+
+"_Mon capitaine_, unfortunately the billet found yesterday for this lady
+is unsuitable. The owner of the house returns this week, and needs
+the room."
+
+"Have you some other lodging for her?"
+
+"Yes, _mon capitaine_, in the Rue de Cleves."
+
+"Good. Then there is no difficulty?"
+
+"None. Follow me, mademoiselle, the street is near. I will take you to
+the _concierge_."
+
+She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.
+
+"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and
+susceptible."
+
+"Oh, no, no...."
+
+"Indeed, I _am_ young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I
+came to Charleville...."
+
+"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the
+window. Here is the street."
+
+"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and
+how delighted. Is the house here?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. _It is an empty house._"
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But you are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"
+
+"Very little. We will see."
+
+He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful
+face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "_Eh bien!
+More_ officers? I told you, _mon lieutenant_, we have not room for
+one more."
+
+"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this
+time. Have you the key?"
+
+"But the house opposite is empty."
+
+"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+The young _concierge,_ under the impression that he was certainly
+installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with
+a look of impish reproof in her eyes.
+
+Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron
+door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard,
+leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led
+up into the house.
+
+"All this ... all this mine?"
+
+"All yours, mademoiselle."
+
+The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues,
+arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high
+wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the
+staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows
+and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed
+through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and
+mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.
+
+"Who lived here?"
+
+"Who lived here?" echoed the _concierge_, and a strange look passed over
+her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans...."
+
+"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
+
+"All the time. I knew them all."
+
+In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to
+her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house
+opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what
+you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this
+dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take
+that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems
+hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."
+
+"Who is the owner?"
+
+"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She
+has turned _mechante_. She will abuse me when she comes here to see
+this--as though _I_ could have saved it. Her husband and her son were
+killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the
+war, and Phillippe ... I don't know when, but somewhere near here."
+
+"You think she will come back?"
+
+"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her
+daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the
+sun ... was the good God to her."
+
+"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here
+in this empty house? There will be rats...."
+
+"I can be very happy--and so grateful. I will move my things across
+to-day. My companions ... that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy
+from Chantilly to-morrow."
+
+"Six more! Had you told me that before ... But what more simple! I can
+put them all in here. There is room for twenty."
+
+"Oh...." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house
+for myself. And I was so happy!"
+
+"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your sex
+every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you
+cannot lodge with your compatriots!..."
+
+"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"
+
+"I was joking. Take the house--the rats and the rubbish included with
+it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a
+better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I
+must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"
+
+"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."
+
+He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the _concierge._
+
+"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your
+sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life."
+Fanny agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the
+garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of
+brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak
+bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of
+open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other
+furniture.
+
+"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the
+house opposite."
+
+She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the
+road. Fanny fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six
+logs and some twigs from the _concierge,_ promising to fetch her an
+ample store from the hills around.
+
+All day she rummaged in the empty house--finding now a three-legged
+armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian glass
+scrolled in gold for her tooth glass.
+
+In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay
+rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its
+blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.
+
+It covered her oak bed exactly--and by removing the pillows it looked
+like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon
+burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her
+room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale
+afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.
+
+A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey
+of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for
+her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over
+floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for
+cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron
+lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.
+
+But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy's things were
+everywhere, the father's and the son's. Her eyes took in the host of
+relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their
+youth, pressing among phantoms.
+
+"Irons ... For ironing! For my collars!"
+
+But they were so small, too small. His again--the son's. "Yet why
+shouldn't I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon
+one finger.
+
+Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as
+though nothing had ever been packed up--dolls' houses, rocking-horses,
+slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and
+guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.
+
+Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers
+and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom
+she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here
+... how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter
+to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this
+perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had
+changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah ...
+inhuman... was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not
+weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the
+branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed
+in a thin glass upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the
+house, from her solitude?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+
+What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn't burn in the
+open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage,
+but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn't
+proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and
+had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches.
+All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by
+the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains
+on trays slung on ropes.
+
+Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then,
+when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle.
+"I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
+
+The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down,
+leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
+
+Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the
+Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in
+the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up
+to the attics again.
+
+"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of
+broken white wood from the floor.
+
+It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your
+name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The
+place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse
+cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle
+scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of
+things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it
+away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of
+dried modelling clay....
+
+"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless
+fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had
+"P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
+
+Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any
+use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still
+in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright
+treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of
+a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written
+and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German
+as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of
+difficult questions.
+
+Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished
+chair-back in her hand.
+
+"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am
+doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't
+or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at.
+Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
+
+She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his
+mother's initials on it in gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the
+"Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien's voice
+would call to her.
+
+"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down
+at her from her high seat behind the mugs and glasses.
+
+"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn't written," and
+even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and
+turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her
+and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.
+
+"I am in no hurry," she said, sure that he would come, and walked on
+into the Spanish Square, to stare in the shops behind the arcaded
+pillars. Merchandise trickled back into the empty town in odd ways. By
+lorry, train, and touring car, merchants penetrated and filled the
+shops with provisions, amongst which there were distressing lacks.
+
+The trains, which had now been extended from Rheims over many laborious
+wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the
+bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a
+railroad. To the passenger train, which left Paris twice a week, one
+goods truck full of merchandise was attached--and it seemed as though
+the particular truck to arrive was singled out casually, without any
+regard to the needs of the town. As yet no dusters, sheets or kitchen
+pans could be bought, but to-day in the Spanish Square every shop was
+filled to overflowing with rolls of ladies' stays; even the chemist had
+put a pair in the corner of his window. Fanny inquired the cause. A
+truck had arrived filled with nothing but stays. It was very unfortunate
+as they had expected condensed milk, but they had accepted the truck,
+as, no doubt, they would find means of selling them--for there were
+women in the country round who had not seen a pair for years.
+
+A man appeared in the Square selling boots from Paris--the first to come
+to the town with leather soles instead of wooden ones. Instantly there
+was a crowd round him.
+
+It was dark now and the electric street lamps were lit round the
+pedestal of the Spanish Duke. The organisation of the town was jerky,
+and often the lights would come on when it was daylight and often
+disappear when it was dark. Where Germans had been there were always
+electric light and telephones. No matter how sparse the furniture in the
+houses, how ragged the roof, how patched the windows--what tin cans,
+paper and rubbish lay heaped upon the floors, the electric light
+unfailingly illumined all, the telephone hung upon the wall among the
+peeling paper.
+
+A little rain began to fall lightly and she hurried to her rooms. There,
+once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire
+lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet
+showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece,
+the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.
+
+"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it
+fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.
+
+"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open
+her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the
+street below.
+
+She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop
+which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so
+powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated
+red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He
+would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought
+well of.
+
+"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had
+said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other
+times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold
+meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.
+
+"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"
+She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The days passed.
+
+Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the
+battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.
+Changes passed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying
+clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest,
+shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in
+the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and grass itself, as
+rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.
+
+A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the
+borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey
+carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and
+tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and
+pill-boxes, in wooden shelters scraped together from the _debris_ of
+their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families
+the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a
+patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a
+fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little
+notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the
+earth. "Vin-Cafe" or "Small motor repairs done here."
+
+All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side
+roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars,
+no one set up his habitation.
+
+A certain lawlessness was abroad in the lonelier areas of the
+battlefields. Odds and ends of all the armies, deserters, well hidden
+during many months, lived under the earth in holes and cellars and used
+strange means to gain a living.
+
+There had been rumours of lonely cars which had been stopped and
+robbed--and among the settlers a couple of murders had taken place in a
+single district. The mail from Charleville to Montmedy was held up at
+last by men in masks armed with revolvers. "We will go out armed!"
+exclaimed the drivers in the garage, and polished up their rifles.
+
+After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the
+French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and
+whisky sold in subterranean _estaminets_ of ruined villages, picked a
+quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They
+must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath
+upon the homesick Americans.
+
+Somewhere beyond Rheims the wreck of a cindery village sprawled along a
+side road. Not a chimney, not a pile of bricks, not a finger of wood or
+stone reached three feet high, but in the middle, a little wooden stake
+rose above the rubbish, a cross-bar pointing into the ground, and the
+words "Vin-Cafe" written in chalk upon it. Fanny, who was thirsty, drew
+up her car and climbed across the village to a hole down which the board
+pointed. Steps of pressed earth led down, and from the hole rose the
+quarrelling, fierce voices of three men. She fled back to the car,
+determined to find a more genial _cafe_ upon a national road.
+
+The same day, upon another side road, she came on the remains of a
+village, where the road, instead of leading through it, paused at the
+brink of the river, over which hung the end spars of a broken bridge.
+
+"I will make a meal here," she thought, profiting by the check--and
+pulled out a packet of sandwiches, driving her car round the corner of a
+wall out of the wind. Here, across the road, a donkey cart was standing,
+and a donkey was tied to a brick in the gutter.
+
+Upon the steps of a doorway which was but an aperture leading to
+nothing, for the house itself lay flat behind it and the courtyard was
+filled with trestles of barbed wire, a figure was seated writing
+earnestly upon its knees. She went nearer and saw an old man, who
+looked up as she approached.
+
+"Sir ..." she began, meaning to inquire about the road--and the wind
+through the doorway blew her skirt tight against her.
+
+"I am identifying the houses," he said, as though he expected to be
+asked his business. She saw by his face that he was very old--eighty
+perhaps. The book upon his knee contained quavering drawings, against
+each of which a name was written.
+
+"This is mine," he said, pointing through the doorway on whose step he
+sat. "And all these other houses belong to people whom I know. When they
+come back here to live they have only to come to me and I can show them
+which house to go to. Without me it might be difficult, but I was the
+oldest man here and I know all the streets, and all the houses. I carry
+the village in my head."
+
+"That is your donkey cart, then?"
+
+"It is my son's. I drive here from Rheims on Saturdays, when he doesn't
+want it."
+
+He showed his book, the cheap paper filled with already-fading maps,
+blurred names and vague sketches. The old man was in his dotage and
+would soon die and the book be lost.
+
+"I carry the village in my head," he repeated. It was the only life the
+village had.
+
+So the days went on, day after day, and with each its work, and still no
+letter at the "Silver Lion," Though vaguely ashamed at her mood, she
+could not be oppressed by this. Each cold, fine, blooming day in the
+mountains made him less necessary to her, and only the delicate memory
+of him remained to gild the town. When hopes wither other hopes spring
+up. When the touch of charm trembles no more upon the heart it can no
+longer be imagined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+
+The horn of a two days' moon was driving across the window; then stars,
+darkness, dawn and sunrise painted the open square; till rustling, and
+turning towards the light, she awoke. At the top of the window a magpie
+wiped his beak on a branch, bent head, and tail bent to balance him
+--then dropped like a mottled pebble out of sight. She sat up, drew the
+table prepared overnight towards her, lit the lamp for the chocolate
+--thinking of the dim Julien who might pay his beautiful visit in turn
+with the moon and the sun.
+
+She got up and dressed, and walked in the spring morning, first to the
+bread shop to buy a pound of bread from the woman who wouldn't smile
+... so serious and puzzling was this defect that Fanny had once asked
+her: "Would you rather I didn't buy my bread here?"
+
+"No, I don't mind."
+
+Then to the market for a bunch of violets and an egg.
+
+And at last through the "Silver Lion"--for luck, opening one door of
+black wood, passing through the hot, sunny room, ignoring the thrilled
+glances of soldiers drinking at the tables, looking towards the girl at
+the bar, who shook her head, saying: "No, no letter for you!" and out
+again into the street by the other black door (which was gold inside).
+
+She passed the morning in the garage working on the Renault, cleaning
+her, oiling her--then ate her lunch in the garage room with the Section.
+
+Among them there ran a rumour of England--of approaching demobilisation,
+of military driving that must come to an end, to give place to civilian
+drivers who, in Paris, were thronging the steps of the Ministry of the
+Liberated Regions.
+
+"Already," said one, "our khaki seems as old-fashioned as a crinoline.
+A man said to me yesterday: 'It is time mademoiselle bought her dress
+for the summer!'"
+
+(What dream was that of Julien, and of a summer spent in Charleville!
+The noise of England burst upon her ears. She heard the talk at
+parties--faces swam so close to hers that she looked in their eyes and
+spoke to them.)
+
+And how the town is filling with men in new black coats, and women in
+shawls! Every day more and more arrive. And the civilians come first
+now! Down in the Co-operative I asked for a tin of milk, and I was told:
+'We are keeping the milk for the "Civils."' 'For the "Civils"?' I said,
+for we are all accustomed to the idea that the army feeds first."
+
+"Oh, that's all gone! We are losing importance now. It is time to go
+home."
+
+As they spoke there came a shrill whistle which sounded through
+Charleville.
+
+"Ecoute!" said a man down the street, and the Section, moving to the
+window, heard it again, nameless, and yet familiar.
+
+Unseen Charleville lifted its head and said, "Ecoute."
+
+The first train had crawled over the new bridge, and stood whistling its
+triumph in the station.
+
+As spring became more than a bright light over the mountains so the town
+in the hollow blossomed and functioned. The gate bells rang, the electric
+light ceased to glow in the daytime, great cranes came up on the trains
+and fished in the river for the wallowing bridges. Workmen arrived in the
+streets. In the early summer mornings tapping could be heard all about
+the town. Civilians in new black suits, civilians more or less damaged,
+limping or one-eyed, did things that made them happy with a hammer and
+a nail. They whistled as they tapped, nailed up shutters that had hung
+for four years by one hinge, climbed about the roofs and fixed a tile or
+two where a hundred were needed, brought little ladders on borrowed
+wheelbarrows and set them against the house-wall. In the house opposite,
+in the Rue de Cleves, a man was using his old blue puttees to nail up his
+fruit-trees.
+
+All the men worked in new Sunday clothes; they had, as yet, nothing old
+to work in. Every day brought more of them to the town, lorries and
+horse carts set them down by the "Silver Lion," and they walked along
+the street carrying black bags and rolls of carpet, boxes of tools, and
+sometimes a well-oiled carbine.
+
+"Yes, we must go home," said the Englishwomen. "It's time to leave the
+town."
+
+The "Civils" seemed to drive them out. They knew they were birds of
+passage as they walked in the sun in their khaki coats.
+
+The "Civils" were blind to them, never looked at them, hurried on,
+longing to grasp the symbolic hammer, to dust, sweep out the German rags
+and rubbish, nail talc over the gaping windows, set their homes going,
+start their factories in the surrounding mountains, people the houses so
+long the mere shelter for passing troops, light the civilian life of the
+town, and set it burning after the ashes and dust of war.
+
+There were days when every owner, black-trousered and in his shirt-
+sleeves, seemed to be burning the contents of his house in a bonfire in
+the gutter. Poor men burned things that seemed useful to the casual eye
+--mattresses, bolsters, all soiled, soiled again and polluted by four
+years of soldiery.
+
+Idling over the fire in the evening, Fanny's eye was caught by a stain
+upon her armchair. It was sticky; it might well be champagne--the
+champagne which stuck even now to the bottoms of the glasses downstairs.
+
+"I wonder if they will burn the chair--when _they_ come back." Some one
+must come back, some day, even if Philippe's mother never came. She
+seemed to see the figure of the Turkish officer seated in her chair,
+just as the _concierge_ had described him, stout, fezzed, resting his
+legs before her fire--or of the German, stretched back in the chair in
+the evening reading the copy of the _Westfaelisches Volksblatt_ she had
+found stuffed down in the corner of the seat.
+
+How, how did that splash of wax come to be so high up on the face of the
+mirror? Had someone, some predecessor, thrown a candle in a temper? It
+puzzled her in the morning as she lay in bed.
+
+On the polished wooden foot of the bed was burnt the outline of a face
+with a funny nose. A child's drawing. That was Philippe's. The nurse had
+cried at him in a rage, perhaps, and snatched the hot poker with which
+he drew--and that had made the long rushing burn that flew angrily
+across the wood from the base of the face's chin. "Oh, you've made it
+worse!" Philippe must have gibed.
+
+("B"--who wrote "B" on the wall? The Bulgarian--)
+
+She fell asleep.
+
+The first bird, waking early, threw the image of the world across her
+lonely sleep. He squeaked alone, minute after minute, from his tree
+outside the window, thrusting forests, swamps, meadows, mountains in
+among her dreams. Then a fellow joined him, and soon all the birds were
+shouting from their trees. Slowly the room lightened till on the
+mantelpiece the buds of the apple blossom shone, till upon the wall the
+dark patch became an oil painting, till the painting showed its features
+--a castle, a river and a hill.
+
+In the night the last yellow down had fallen from the palm upon the
+floor.
+
+The common voice of the tin clock struck seven. And with it came women's
+voices--women's voices on the landing outside the door--the voice of
+the _concierge_ and another's.'
+
+Some instinct, some strange warning, sent the sleeper on the bed flying
+from it, dazed as she was. Snatching at the initialled cup of gold
+veining she thrust it behind the curtain on the window sill. An act of
+panic merely, for a second glance round the room convinced her that
+there was too much to be hidden, if hidden anything should be. With a
+leap she was back in bed, and drew the bedclothes up to her neck.
+
+Then came the knock at the door.
+
+"I am in bed," she called.
+
+"Nevertheless, can I come in?" asked the _concierge_.
+
+"You may come in."
+
+The young woman came in and closed the door after her. She approached
+the bed and whispered--then glancing round the room with a shrug she
+picked up a dressing-gown and held it that Fanny might slip her
+arms into it.
+
+"But what a time to come!"
+
+"She has travelled all night. She is unfit to move."
+
+"Must I see her now? I am hardly awake."
+
+"I cannot keep her any longer. She was for coming straight here when the
+train came in at five. I have kept her at coffee at my house. _Tant
+pis!_ You have a right to be here!"
+
+The _concierge_ drew the curtain a little wider and the cup was exposed.
+She thrust it back into the shadow; the door opened and Philippe's
+mother walked in. She was very tall, in black, and a deep veil hung
+before her face.
+
+"_Bonjour_, madame," she said, and her veiled face dipped in a faint
+salute.
+
+"Will you sit down?"
+
+She took no notice of this, but leaning a little on a stick she carried,
+said, "I understand that it is right that I should find my house
+occupied. They told me it would be by an officer. Such occupation I
+believe ceases on the return of the owner."
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I am the owner of this house."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask of what nationality you are?"
+
+The _concierge_ standing behind her, shrugged her shoulders impatiently,
+as if she would say, "I have explained, and explained again!"
+
+"I am English, madame."
+
+The lady seemed to sink into a stupor, and bending her head in silence
+stared at the floor. Fanny, sitting upright in bed, waited for her to
+speak. The _>concierge_, her face still as an image, waited too.
+
+Philippe's mother began to sway upon her stick.
+
+"Do please sit down," said Fanny, breaking the silence at last.
+
+"When will you go?" demanded the old lady, suddenly.
+
+"Go?"
+
+"Who gave you that lamp? That is mine." She pointed to a glass lamp
+which stood upon the table.
+
+"It is all yours," said Fanny, humbly.
+
+"Mademoiselle borrowed it," said the voice of the _concierge_. "I lent
+it to her."
+
+"Why are my things lent when I am absent? My armchair--dirty, soiled,
+torn! Paul's picture--there is a hole in the corner. Who made that hole
+in the corner?"
+
+"I didn't," said Fanny feebly, wishing that she were dressed and upon
+her feet.
+
+"Madame, a Turkish officer made the hole. I spoke to him about it; he
+said it was the German colonel who was here before him. But I am sure it
+was the Turk."
+
+"A Turk!" said Philippe's mother in bewilderment. "So you have allowed a
+Turk to come in here!"
+
+"Madame does not understand."
+
+"Oh, I understand well enough that my house has been a den! The house
+where I was born--All my things, all my things--You must give that
+lamp back!"
+
+"Dear madame, I will give everything back, I have hurt nothing--"
+
+"Not ruined my carpet, my mother's carpet! Not soiled my walls, written
+your name upon them, cracked my windows, filled my room downstairs with
+rubbish, broken my furniture--But I am told this is what I must expect!"
+Fanny looked at her, petrified. "But I--" she began.
+
+"You don't understand," said the young _concierge_ fiercely. "Don't you
+know who has lived here? In this room, in this bed, Turks, Bulgars,
+Germans. Four years of soldiers, coming in one week and gone the next. I
+could not stop it! When other houses were burnt I would say to myself,
+'Madame is lucky.' When all your china was broken and your chairs used
+for firewood, could I help it? Can _she_ help it? She is your last
+soldier, and she has taken nothing. So much has gone from this house it
+is not worth while to worry about what remains. When you wrote to me
+last month to send you the barometer, it made me smile. Your barometer!"
+
+"Begone, Elsie."
+
+"No, madame, no! Not till you come back with me. They should not have
+let you come alone. But you were always wilful. You cannot mean to
+live here?"
+
+"I wish this woman gone to-day. I wish to sleep here to-night."
+
+"No, madame, no. Sleep in the house opposite to-night. Give her time to
+find a lodging--"
+
+"A lodging! She will find a lodging soon enough. A town full of
+soldiers--" muttered the old woman.
+
+"I think this is a question for the billeting lieutenant," said Fanny.
+"He will explain to you that I am billeted here exactly as a soldier,
+that I have a right to be here until your arrival. It will be kind of
+you to give me a day in which to find another room."
+
+"Where are _his_ things?" said the old woman unheedingly. "I must go up
+to the attics."
+
+A vision of those broken toys came to Fanny, the dusty heap of horses,
+dolls and boxes--the poor disorder.
+
+"You mustn't, yet!" she cried with feeling. "Rest first. Sit here longer
+first. Or go another day!"
+
+"Have you touched _them_?" cried Philippe's mother, rising from the
+chair. "I must go at once, at once----" but even as she tried to cross
+the room she leant heavily upon the table and put her hand to her heart.
+"Get me water, Elsie," she said, and threw up her veil. Her ruined face
+was grey even at the lips; her eyes were caverns, worn by the dropping
+of water, her mouth was folded tightly that nothing kind or hopeful, or
+happy might come out of it again. Elsie ran to the washing-stand.
+Unfortunately she seized the glass with the golden scrolling, and when
+she held it to the lips of her mistress those lips refused it.
+
+"_That_, too, that glass of mine! Elsie, I wish this woman gone. Why
+don't you get up? Where are your clothes? Why don't you dress and go--"
+
+"Madame, hush, hush, you are ill."
+
+"Ah!" dragging herself weakly to the door, "I must take an inventory.
+That is what I should have done before! If I don't make a list at once I
+shall lose something!"
+
+"Take an inventory!" exclaimed the _concierge_ mockingly, as she
+followed her. "The house won't change! After four years--it isn't now
+that it will change!" She paused at the door and looked back at Fanny.
+"Don't worry about the room, mademoiselle. She is like that--_elle a des
+crises._ She cannot possibly sleep here. Keep the room for a day or two
+till you find another."
+
+"In a very few days I shall be going to England."
+
+"Keep it a week if necessary. She will be persuaded when she is calmer.
+Why did they let her come when they wrote me that she was a dying woman!
+But no--_elle est comme toujours--mechante pour tout le monde._"
+
+"You told me she thought only of Philippe."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, she is like many of us! She has still her sense of
+property."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+Around the Spanish Square the first sun-awnings had been put up in the
+night, awnings red and yellow, flapping in the mountain wind.
+
+In the shops under the arches, in the market in the centre of the
+Square, they were selling anemones.
+
+"But have you any eggs?"
+
+"No eggs this morning."
+
+"Any butter?"
+
+"None. There has been none these three days."
+
+"A pot of condensed milk?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, the train did not bring any."
+
+"Must I eat anemones? Give me two bunches."
+
+And round the Spanish Square the orange awnings protecting the empty
+shop-fronts shuddered and flapped, like a gay hat worn unsteadily when
+the stomach is empty.
+
+What was there to do on a last day but look and note, and watch, and
+take one's leave? The buds against the twig-laced sky were larger than
+ever. To-morrow--the day after to-morrow ... it would be spring in
+England, too!
+
+"_Tenez_, mademoiselle," said the market woman, "there is a little
+ounce of butter here that you may have!"
+
+The morning passed and on drifted the day, and all was finished, all was
+done, and love gone, too. And with love gone the less divine but wider
+world lay open.
+
+In the "Silver Lion" the patient girl behind the counter shook her head.
+
+"There is no letter for you."
+
+"And to-morrow I leave for England."
+
+"If a letter comes where shall I send it on?"
+
+"Thank you, but there will come no letter now. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+It was the afternoon. Now such a tea, a happy, lonely tea--the last, the
+best, in Charleville! Crossing the road from the "Silver Lion" Fanny
+bought a round, flat, sandwich cake, and carried it to the house which
+was her own for one more night, placed it in state upon the biggest of
+the green and gold porcelain plates, and the anemones in a sugar-bowl
+beside it. She lit the fire, made tea, and knelt upon the floor to toast
+her bread. There was a half-conscious hurry in her actions.
+
+("So long as nobody comes!" she whispered. "So long as I am left
+alone!") she feared the good-byes of the _concierge_, the threatened
+inventory of Philippe's mother, a call of state farewell from the
+billeting lieutenant.
+
+When the toast was done and the tea made, some whim led her to change
+her tunic for a white jersey newly back from the wash, to put on the
+old dancing shoes of Metz--and not until her hair was carefully brushed
+to match this gaiety did she draw up the armchair with the broken leg,
+and prop it steadily beside the tea-table.
+
+But--
+
+Who was that knocking on the door in the street?
+
+One of the Section coming on a message? The _brigadier_ to tell her that
+she had some last duty still?
+
+"Shall I go to the window?" (creeping nearer to it). Then, with a glance
+back at the tea-table, "No, let them knock!"
+
+But how they knocked! Persistent, gentle--could one sit peacefully at
+tea so called and so besought! She went up to the blue curtains, and
+standing half-concealed, saw the _concierge_ brooding in the sunlight of
+her window-sill.
+
+"Is _nobody_ there?" said a light voice in the hidden street below, and
+at that she peered cautiously over the edge of the stonework, and saw a
+pale young man in grey before the door.
+
+She watched him. She watched him gravely, for he had come too late. But
+tenderly, for she had been in love with him. The _concierge_ raised her
+two black brows in her expressive face and looked upwards. Her look
+said: "Why don't you let him in?"
+
+Yet Fanny stood inactive, her hands resting on the sun-warmed stone.
+
+"Julien is here--is here! And does not know that I go to-morrow!"
+
+But she put _to-morrow_ from her, and in the stillness she felt her
+spirit smiling for pleasure in him. She had mourned him once; she never
+would again.
+
+In her pocket lay the key of the street door, and the curtain-cord, long
+rotted and useless, dangled at her cheek. With a quick wrench she
+brought its length tumbling beside her on the sill, then knotted it to
+the key and let it down into the street.
+
+The young man saw it hang before his eyes.
+
+"Are you coming in?" said a voice above him. "Tea is ready."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"It has been ready for six weeks."
+
+"Only wait--" He was trying the key in the door.
+
+"What--still longer?" said the voice.
+
+He was gone from the pavement, he had entered her house, he was on her
+stair--the grey ghost of the soldier!
+
+She had a minute's grace. Slipping her hand into the cupboard she drew
+out another cup and saucer, and laid the table for two.
+
+There was his face--his hands--at her door! But what a foreign grey
+body!
+
+"Come in, Ghost!" she said, and held out her hands--for now she cared at
+least for "he who cared"--lest that, too, be lost! Does a ghost kiss?
+Yes, sometimes. Sometimes they are ghosts who kiss.
+
+"Oh, Fanny!" Then, with a quick glance at the table, "You are expecting
+someone?"
+
+"You. How late you come to tea with me!"
+
+"But I--You didn't know."
+
+"I waited tea for you," she said, and turning to a calendar upon a
+wooden wheel, she rolled it back a month.
+
+She made him sit, she made him drink and eat. He filled the room with
+his gaiety. He had no reasons upon his tongue, and no excuses; she no
+reproaches, no farewell.
+
+A glance round the room had shown her that there were no signs of her
+packing; her heavy kitbag was at the station, her suitcase packed and in
+the cupboard. She put her gravest news away till later.
+
+"You came by the new train--that has arrived at last in Charleville?"
+
+"Yes, and I go up to Revins to-night."
+
+She paused at that. "But how?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, smiling at her.
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "Could I?" (She had that morning delivered the car to
+its new driver.) "Of course. I could! I will, I will, I'll manage! You
+counted on me to drive you to Revins?"
+
+"Will it be difficult to manage?"
+
+"No--o--But I must get the car out before dark or there will be no
+excuse--" She pushed back her chair and went to the window. The sun was
+sinking over the mountains and the scenery in the western sky was
+reflected in the fiery pools between the cobbles in the street.
+
+"I must go soon and get it. But how--"
+
+She paused and thought. "How do you come down to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't. I go on to Brussels. There is a car at Revins belonging to my
+agent. He will take me to Dinant for the Brussels train."
+
+"You are bound for Brussels? Yet you could have gone straight from Paris
+to Brussels?"
+
+"Yet I didn't because I wanted to see you!"
+
+She took down her cap and coat from the nail on which they were hanging.
+
+"Need you go yet?" he said, withdrawing the clothes from her arm, and
+laying them upon a chair. She sat down again.
+
+"The sun is sinking. The town gets dark so quickly here, though it's
+light enough in the mountains. If I leave it later the men will be gone
+home, and the garage key with them."
+
+"You're right," he said. "Put them on," and he held the coat for her.
+"But once you have the car there's no hurry over our drive. Yes, fetch
+it quickly, and then we'll go up above Revins and I'll show you the
+things I have in mind."
+
+"What things?"
+
+He drew out a fat, red note-book and held it up.
+
+"It's full of my thoughts," he said. "Quick with the car, and we'll get
+up there while it's light enough to show you!"
+
+She slipped out under the apple-red sky, through the streets where the
+shadows of the houses lay black as lacquer.
+
+Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking
+his little, dry cigarettes.
+
+"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What
+an evening!"
+
+"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
+
+"But you've given up the car."
+
+"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!
+And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the
+key!"
+
+He gave her the key.
+
+"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come
+in hang the key on the nail in the office."
+
+Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
+Rue de Cleves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
+
+"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would
+have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started
+on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed
+excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil
+their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him
+as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance
+from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in
+which to fight with her disinclination.
+
+"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I
+can't tell him in the street!"
+
+For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the
+_concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched
+the town.
+
+"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened
+and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself,
+when it will be easy and natural."
+
+By back streets they left the town, and soon upon the step road had
+climbed through the belt of trees and out on to bare slopes.
+
+As they wound up the mountain, sitting so dose together, she felt how
+familiar his company was to her, and how familiar his silence. Their
+thoughts, running together, would meet presently, as they had often met,
+at the juncture when his hand was laid upon hers at the wheel: But when
+he spoke he startled her.
+
+"How long has the railway been extended to Charleville?"
+
+"A fortnight," she answered upon reflection.
+
+"How about the big stone bridge on this side? The railway bridge?"
+
+"Why that lies at the bottom of the river as usual."
+
+"And haven't they replaced it yet by a wooden one?"
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"And no one is even working there?"
+
+"I haven't been there lately," she answered. "Maybe they are by now. Is
+it your railway to Revin you are thinking of?"
+
+He was fingering his big note book.
+
+"I can't start anything till the railway runs," he answered, tapping on
+the book, "but when it runs--I'll show you when we get up there."
+
+They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient
+trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small
+branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its shaking
+holes.
+
+"You see," he said, pursuing his thought, "lorries wouldn't do here.
+They'd sink."
+
+"They would," she agreed, and found that his innocence of her secret
+locked her words more tightly in her throat. Far above, from an iron
+peak, the light of the heavy sun was slipping. Beneath it they ran in
+shadow, through rock and moss. Before the light had gone they had
+reached the first crest and drew up for a moment at a movement of
+his hand.
+
+Looking back to Charleville, he said, "See where the river winds. The
+railway crosses it three times. Can we see from here if the bridges are
+all down?" And he stood up and, steadying himself upon her shoulder,
+peered down at Charleville, to where man lived in the valleys. But
+though the slopes ahead of them were still alight, depths, distance, the
+crowding and thickening of twilight in the hollows behind them offered
+no detail.
+
+"I fear they are," she said, gazing with him. "I think they are. I think
+I can remember that they are."
+
+Soon they would be at the top of the long descent on Revins. Should she
+tell him, he who sat so close, so unsuspecting? An arrowy temptation
+shot through her mind.
+
+"Is it possible--Why not write a letter when he is gone!"
+
+She saw its beauty, its advantages, and she played with it like someone
+who knew where to find strength to withstand it.
+
+"He is so happy, so gay," urged the voice, "so full of his plans! And
+you have left it so late. How painful now, just as he is going, to bid
+him think: 'I will never see her face again!'"
+
+(How close he sat beside her! How close her secret sat within her!)
+
+"Think how it is with you," pursued the tempting voice. "It is hard to
+part from a face, but not so hard to part from the writer of a letter."
+
+Over the next crest the Belgian Ardennes showed blue and dim in the
+distance.
+
+"Stop!" he said, holding up his hand again.
+
+They were on the top of a high plateau; she drew up. A large bird with
+red under its wings flapped out and hung in the air over the precipice.
+
+"See--the Meuse!" he said. "See, on its banks, do you see down there?
+Come to the edge."
+
+Hundreds of feet below lay a ribbon-loop of dark, unstirring water. They
+stood at the edge of the rock looking down together. She saw he was
+excited. His usually pale face was flushed.
+
+"Do you see down there, do you see in this light--a village?"
+
+She could see well enough a village.
+
+"That's Revins. And those dark dots beyond----"
+
+"I see them."
+
+"My factories. Before the summer you'll see smoke down there! They are
+partially destroyed. One can't see well, one can't see how much--"
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you never been back? Have you never seen what's happened?"
+
+She had not guessed this: she was not prepared for this. This was the
+secret, then of his absorption.
+
+"I've not seen it yet. I've not been able to get away. And the Paris
+factories have held me every minute. But now I'm here, I'm--I'm
+wondering--You see that dot beyond, standing separate?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's where I sleep to-night. That's the house."
+
+"But can you sleep there?" she asked, still shocked that she had not
+realised what this journey was to him.
+
+"Can I?"
+
+"I mean is the house ruined?"
+
+"Oh, the house is in bad order," he said. "Not ruined. 'Looted,' my old
+_concierge_ writes. She was my nurse a hundred years ago. She has been
+there through the occupation. I wrote to her, and she expects me
+to-night. To-night it will be too dark, but to-morrow before I leave I
+shall see what they have done to the factories."
+
+"Don't you know at all how bad they are?"
+
+"I've had letters. The agent went on ahead five days ago and he has
+settled there already. But letters don't tell one enough. There are
+little things in the factories--things I put in myself--" He broke off
+and drew her to another side of the plateau. "See down there! That
+unfortunate railway crosses two more bridges. I can't see now, but
+they're blown up, since all the others are. And such a time for
+business! It hurts me to think of the things I can't set going till that
+railway works. Every one is crying out for the things that I can
+make here."
+
+On and on he talked in his excitement, absorbed and planning, leading
+her from one point of view on the plateau to another. Her eyes followed
+his pointing hands from crest to crest of the mountains their neighbours,
+till the valleys were full of creeping shadows. Even when the shades
+filmed his eager hand he held it out to point here and there as though
+the whole landscape of the mountains was printed in immortal daylight on
+his mind.
+
+"I can't see," she said. "It's so dark down there. I can't see it," as
+he pointed to the spot where the Brussels railway once ran.
+
+"Well, it's there," he said, staring at the spot with eyes that knew.
+
+The blue night deepened in the sky; from east, west, north, south,
+sprang the stars.
+
+"Fanny, look! There's a light in my house!"
+
+Fathoms of shade piled over the village and in the heart of it a light
+had appeared. "Marie has lit the lamp on the steps. I mustn't be too
+late for her--I must soon go down."
+
+"What, you walk? Is there a footpath down?"
+
+"I shall go down this mountain path below. It's a path I know, shooting
+hares. Soon I shall be back again. Brussels one week; then Paris; then
+here again. I'll see what builders can be spared from the Paris
+factories. They can walk out here from Charleville. Ten miles, that's
+nothing! Then we'll get the stone cut ready in the quarries. Do you
+know, during the war, I thought (when I thought of it), 'If the Revins
+factories are destroyed it won't be I who'll start them again. I won't
+take up that hard mountain life any more. If they're destroyed, it's too
+discouraging, so let them lie!' But now I don't feel discouraged at
+all. I've new ideas, bigger ones. I'm older, I'm going to be richer. And
+then, since they're partly knocked down I'll rebuild them in a better
+way. And it's not only that--See!" He was carried away by his resolves,
+shaken by excitement, and pulling out his note-book he tilted it this
+way and that under the starlight, but he could not read it, and all the
+stars in that sky were no use to him. He struck a match and held the
+feeble flame under that heavenly magnificence, and a puff of wind
+blew it out.
+
+"But I don't need to see!" he exclaimed, and pointing into the night he
+continued to unfold his plans, to build in the unmeaning darkness,
+which, to his eyes, was mountain valleys where new factories arose,
+mountain slopes whose sides were to be quarried for their stony ribs,
+rivers to move power-stations, railways to Paris and to Brussels. As she
+followed his finger her eyes lit upon the stars instead, and now he
+said, "There, there!" pointing to Orion, and now "Here, here!" lighting
+upon Aldebrande.
+
+As she followed his finger her thoughts were on their own paths,
+thinking, "This is Julien as he will be, not as I have known him." The
+soldier had been a wanderer like herself, a half-fantastic being. But
+here beside her in the darkness stood the civilian, the Julien-to-come,
+the solid man, the builder, plotting to capture the future.
+
+For him, too, she could no longer remain as she had been. Here, below
+her was the face, the mountain face, of her rival. Unless she became one
+with his plans and lived in the same blazing light with them, she would
+be a separate landscape, a strain upon his focus.
+
+Then she saw him looking at her. Her face, silver-bright in the
+starlight, was as unreadable as his own note-book.
+
+"Are you sure," he was saying, "that you won't be blamed about the car?"
+
+"Sure, quite sure. The men have all gone home."
+
+"But to-morrow morning? When they see it has been out?"
+
+"Not--to-morrow morning. No, they won't say anything to-morrow morning.
+Oh, dear Julien--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think, I hope you are going to have a great success here. And don't
+forget--me--when you--"
+
+"--When I come back in a week!"
+
+"But your weeks--are so long."
+
+"Yet you will be happy without me," he said suddenly.
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"You've some solace, some treasure of your own." He nodded. "In a way,"
+he said, "I've sometimes thought you half out of reach of pain."
+
+She caught her breath, and the starry sky whirled over her head.
+
+"You're a happy foreigner!" he finished. "Did you know? Dormans called
+you that after the first dance. He said to me: 'I wonder if they are all
+so happy in England! I must go and see.'"
+
+"You too, you too!" she said, eagerly, and she wanted him to admit it.
+"See how happy, how busy, how full of the affairs of life you soon will
+be! Difficulties of every sort, and hard work and triumph--"
+
+"And you'll see, you'll see, I'll do it," he said, catching fire again.
+"I'll grow rich on these bony mountains--it isn't only the riches, mind
+you, but they are the proof--I'll wring it out in triumph, not in water,
+but in gold--from the rock!"
+
+He stood at the edge of the path, a little above her, blotting out the
+sky with his darker shape, then turning, kissed her.
+
+"For the little time!" he said, and disappeared.
+
+The noise of his footsteps descended in the night below. Ten minutes
+passed, and as each step trod innocently away from her for ever she
+continued motionless and silent to listen from her rock. The noises all
+but faded, yet, loth to put an end to the soft rustle, she listened
+while it grew fainter and less human to her ear, till it mingled at last
+with the rustle of nature, with the whine of the wind and the pit-pat of
+a little creature close at hand.
+
+She stirred at last, and turned; and found herself alone with that
+flock of enormous companions, the hog-backed mountains, like cattle
+feeding about her. Above, uniting craggy horn to horn, was an
+architrave of stars.
+
+"Good-bye"--to the light in the valley, and starting the car she began
+the descent on Charleville. There are moments when the roll of the world
+is perceptible to the extravagant senses. There are moments when the
+glamour of man thins away into oblivion before the magic of night, when
+his face fades and his voice is silenced before that wind of excited
+perception that blows out of nowhere to shake the soul.
+
+In such a mood, in such a giddy hour, seated in person upon her car, in
+spirit upon her imagination, Fanny rode down the mountain into the night.
+
+She was invincible, inattentive to the voice of absent man, a hard,
+hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven--composing and chanting
+unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven,
+protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her
+down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought
+her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot
+of the last hill.
+
+Recalled to earth by the light of Charleville she drove slowly up the
+main street, replaced the car in the garage, and returned to her house
+in the Rue de Cleves.
+
+"It is true," she whispered, as she entered the room, "that I am half
+out of reach of pain--" and long, in plans for the future, she hung over
+the embers.
+
+The gradual sinking of the light before her reminded her of the present.
+"The last night that the fire burns for me!" She heaped on all her logs.
+
+"Little pannikin of chocolate, little companion!" Hunger, too, awoke,
+and she dropped two sticks of chocolate into the water. "The fire dies
+down to-night. To-morrow I shall be gone." A petal from the apple
+blossom on the mantelpiece fell against her hand.
+
+"To-morrow I shall be gone. The apple blossom is spread to large wax
+flowers, and the flowers will fall and never breed apples. They will
+sweep this room, and Philippe's mother will come and sit in it and make
+it sad. So many things happen in the evening. So many unripe thoughts
+ripen before the fire. Turk, Bulgar, German--Me. Never to return. When
+she comes into this room the apple flowers will stare at her across the
+desert of _my_ absence, and wonder who _she_ is! I wonder if I can teach
+her anything. Will she keep the grid on the wood fire? And the blue
+birds flying on the bed? It is like going out of life--tenderly leaving
+one's little arrangements to the next comer--"
+
+And drawing her chair up to the table, she lit the lamp, and sat down to
+write her letter.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+***** This file should be named 9978.txt or 9978.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/9/9/7/9978/
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/9978.zip b/9978.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..98d6e0c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/9978.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fea32c4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #9978 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9978)
diff --git a/old/7hpfr10.txt b/old/7hpfr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ed9cc0f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7hpfr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8577 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Happy Foreigner
+
+Author: Enid Bagnold
+
+Release Date: March, 2006 [EBook #9978]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 7, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY FOREIGNER
+
+by
+
+ENID BAGNOLD
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PROLOGUE: THE EVE
+
+
+PART I. THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+CHAPTER I. THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+PART II. LORRAINE
+
+CHAPTER II. METZ
+CHAPTER III. JULIEN
+CHAPTER IV. VERDUN
+CHAPTER V. VERDUN
+CHAPTER VI. THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+CHAPTER VII. THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+CHAPTER VIII. GERMANY
+CHAPTER IX. THE CRINOLINE
+CHAPTER X. FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+CHAPTER XI. THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+
+PART III. THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+CHAPTER XII. PRECY-SUR-OISE
+CHAPTER XIII. THE INN
+CHAPTER XIV. THE RIVER
+CHAPTER XV. ALLIES
+CHAPTER XVI. THE ARDENNES
+
+
+PART IV. SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE STUFFED OWL
+CHAPTER XVIII. PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+CHAPTER XIX. PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+CHAPTER XX. THE LAST DAY
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+THE EVE
+
+Between the grey walls of its bath--so like its cradle and its
+coffin--lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the
+surface of the earth for seventy years.
+
+As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was
+rising.
+
+The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the
+bath.
+
+"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The
+earth itself is moving.
+
+"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head,
+saying--'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that
+is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.
+
+"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing--how do I know
+if I am equipped for a larger horizon!..."
+
+And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:--
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+        The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill,--
+        They lie within the breast!"
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+The war had stopped.
+
+The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States
+was hourly expected.
+
+Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing
+city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed
+corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in
+a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes
+were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.
+
+She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the
+following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.
+
+Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for
+sale held a bunch to her face.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+He pursued her and held it against her chin.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"But I give it to you! I _give_ it to you!"
+
+As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table
+of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them.
+But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the
+platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.
+
+"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute..." he panted.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Haven't you heard ... haven't you heard! The war is over!"
+
+She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
+"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"
+
+And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt
+and the violets accompanied her.
+
+At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc.
+The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines
+of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met
+she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that
+hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything,
+expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into
+the rain.
+
+She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a
+deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick
+mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for
+a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her
+coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the
+clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no
+one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the
+travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the
+pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face;
+down her sleeves and on to her hands.
+
+A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking
+towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she
+could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."
+
+She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard
+these letters--with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach
+with greed.
+
+Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved
+with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many
+American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a
+stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining
+each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.
+
+The eye of a captain opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she
+should.
+
+The eye of a lieutenant opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."
+
+"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"
+
+"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."
+
+Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two
+boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American
+thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his
+pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard
+noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind,
+unanswering stupor.
+
+"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the
+slit grew larger. The light went out.
+
+"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent
+the destruction of the board.
+
+Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon
+the pavement.
+
+"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.
+
+"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.
+
+"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"
+
+"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved
+towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders,
+who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.
+
+"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room
+alone."
+
+"I've a room ... If you're not American!"
+
+"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American
+wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here,
+what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"
+
+"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added
+"Bandits!"
+
+Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of
+her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it
+is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man
+stooped to the bolts of the door.)
+
+"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now _they've_ gone.
+Follow me."
+
+She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground
+floor.
+
+"I've no light to give you."
+
+"Yet I must have a light."
+
+Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.
+
+"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."
+
+The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and
+musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as
+well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning,
+slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no
+jug, no basin, no bell to pull.
+
+As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by
+waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark
+coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black
+coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.
+
+Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous.
+I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so
+well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of
+least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off
+down the street to find her companions.
+
+A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood
+a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a
+garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic
+used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and
+clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned
+officers--the _brigadier_ and the two _marechaux des logis_.
+
+A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream
+which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden
+bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon
+simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either
+hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper
+stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end was a
+small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
+
+This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one
+of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her
+intimate life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the
+eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny,
+in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then
+turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A
+bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
+
+"Food is in!"
+
+Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a
+tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread. The
+watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
+
+"Where is Stewart?"
+
+"She is not back yet."
+
+Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to
+read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the
+most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room
+remained empty.
+
+The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern
+in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.
+
+"Is there any food?"
+
+"It's on the stove."
+
+"Is it eatable?"
+
+"No."
+
+Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black
+mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the
+cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those
+who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept
+too well.
+
+"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are
+doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
+
+"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice through
+the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your
+hot-water bottle!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you
+will find the water has the chill off."
+
+Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with
+their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars
+in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of
+the battlefields.
+
+On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the
+test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car
+that had been assigned to her.
+
+Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain
+she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer.
+The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans
+did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a
+roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered
+down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the
+pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and
+hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
+
+"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her
+handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some
+desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them
+with respect.
+
+When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at
+his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day,
+calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she
+drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had
+need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop
+into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled
+himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went
+upon his way.
+
+She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its
+back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's
+eyes popping from his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When
+she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client
+cried to her: "Why do you wait?"
+
+Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys
+swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her
+like an egg-shell.
+
+Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced
+before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.
+
+In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a
+convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.
+
+Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of
+the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch
+the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she
+had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which
+she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator,
+striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from
+her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites
+who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.
+
+"What can I do?..." she said to them aloud, in distress.
+
+But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird
+language, "What can _we_ do ... what can _we_ do?..." ("And I..." she
+thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")
+
+But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended
+from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw
+the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching
+sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.
+
+"_Ne vous en faites pas, mademoiselle_! These poor devils sleep as they
+drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We
+were four when we met you--and now we are three!"
+
+On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no
+run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set
+to work on her car.
+
+"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.
+
+"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last
+night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of
+waste ground."
+
+She crossed to the wall with her bucket.
+
+Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine
+had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken,
+but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage,
+and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.
+
+The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed
+the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her.
+His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She
+stopped short with the bucket in her hand.
+
+"On est delivre de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she
+went a little nearer.
+
+"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into
+his coat.
+
+He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said
+clearly: "Je suis le president Wilson."
+
+"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and
+willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You
+must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me
+bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."
+
+Where have you come from?"
+
+"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for
+it's late, and ... I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.
+
+"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"
+
+"Only be quick."
+
+"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"
+
+"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."
+
+She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the
+box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into
+her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she
+approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked
+round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once,
+soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of
+voices and the smell of gravy.
+
+"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest
+her. The others looked up.
+
+"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning,"
+said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the
+brigadier, mademoiselle?"
+
+"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to
+telephone."
+
+"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"
+
+"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him
+by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the
+men stood up in groups.
+
+"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not
+use force if one can help it...."
+
+Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and
+wine?" called the man.
+
+"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."
+
+"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King
+waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the
+step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.
+
+"What's that you've got?"
+
+"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without
+letting it go from his hand.
+
+"Where did you find those?"
+
+"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.
+
+"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"
+
+"What's that? But I've no time...."
+
+"Do you know about cars?"
+
+"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.
+
+"I have trouble ... I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"
+
+"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."
+
+"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you
+go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.
+
+The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom
+one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."
+
+Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car,
+at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he
+grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The
+King expects me."
+
+He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate
+about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she
+called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.
+
+She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her
+collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her
+skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly
+into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them.
+At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he
+cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes
+that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened
+them when a man cried in triumph: "_We'll_ take you to the King!"
+
+"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.
+
+Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven
+upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day--interviewing mayors of
+ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French
+troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made
+offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts
+from the battlefields.
+
+The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long
+hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day
+after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read
+alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night
+after night.
+
+A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She
+found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men
+upon the road whom she would never see again became her social
+intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking
+whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise
+of a Chinese scavenger.
+
+Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could
+have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around
+her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of
+the earth.
+
+"Have you _got_ to be here?" asked an American.
+
+"No, I wanted to come."
+
+The eye of the American said "Fool!"
+
+"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.
+
+"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
+"Englishwoman!"
+
+Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after
+dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road
+by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and
+entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.
+
+But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character
+of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she
+could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain
+which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats;
+tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.
+
+The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but
+make it in the morning how different this room would look!"
+
+There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the
+stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew
+whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes
+the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it,
+and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no
+coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried:
+"Ask Madeleine!"
+
+And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with
+the men in the garage.
+
+Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling
+across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny,
+perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them
+to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her
+room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in
+comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never
+known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she
+prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not
+taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the
+branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.
+
+Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village,
+cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more
+picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one
+of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.
+
+Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude,
+she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the
+milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the
+lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.
+
+"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.
+
+"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of
+sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their
+stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom
+before them, unknown and bright.
+
+The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.
+
+"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting
+up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to
+make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been
+there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven
+the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and
+their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were
+tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better
+their condition.
+
+On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together
+and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in
+the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not
+even the night is sacred.
+
+On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made months, till all November
+was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in fresh torrents
+of rain.
+
+Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed on
+upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her "clients" left
+her for an hour while they inspected a barracks; sometimes it was an old
+woman who called from a doorway that she might come and warm her hands
+at the fire; sometimes an American who helped her to change a tyre.
+
+There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old
+women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends were
+mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.
+
+"My sister has a grand piano ..." said one American to her--opening
+thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.
+
+"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"
+
+He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to
+her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the
+pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.
+
+An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were
+busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.
+
+American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the
+daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and
+twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
+
+"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at
+their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of
+children."
+
+"They seem well-mannered."
+
+"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered.
+But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your
+house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in
+the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out
+of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the
+Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"
+
+"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure
+cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had
+fetched from his canteen.
+
+"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want
+other people's children always in one's life."
+
+"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village
+whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and
+ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of
+some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped
+open disclosing the rusting bones.
+
+"Pardon, madame?"
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I
+have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are
+discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
+
+"Then this is a park?"
+
+"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
+
+Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other,
+when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in
+Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor
+about her.
+
+She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she
+paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it
+travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it
+she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair
+escaped from her cap.
+
+A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as
+she entered.
+
+"Fanny...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.
+
+Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the
+Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen
+rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land
+like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had
+no inkling.
+
+Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned
+first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
+
+"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"There will be things to eat there?"
+
+"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed
+from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated
+land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that
+matter, never been there."
+
+"Then we are going for certain?"
+
+"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
+Headquarters Staff. Petain is there. It might even be gay."
+
+Fanny laughed. "Gay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."
+
+"You have silk stockings with you!"
+
+"Yes, I ... I am equipped for anything."
+
+There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and
+Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the
+edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any
+one had lived there so long.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+LORRAINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+METZ
+
+With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the
+desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of
+Lorraine like the gate to a new world.
+
+The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the
+battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry
+away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed
+garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier's restaurant, and join the dancing
+in the hall below.
+
+Not a night passed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty
+air. It burst into the narrow streets from _estaminets_ where the
+soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German
+houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier General" danced a triumph.
+Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in
+their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers
+danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because
+they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.
+
+It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a
+little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?
+
+In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Marechal Petain, and kept his
+eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the
+Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them balls--insufficiently
+fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France
+could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the
+cake-shops flowered with _eclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux a la
+creme_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.
+
+France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine,
+that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the
+benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while
+the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that
+they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and
+silk were hiding.
+
+Fetes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight
+processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town
+went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were
+sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously
+through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might
+sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the
+dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing
+white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in
+figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.
+
+The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand
+Quartier General, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom,
+having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills,
+found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of
+Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.
+
+"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.
+
+"I have--eight."
+
+"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."
+
+"Is there work, sir?"
+
+"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance
+all night! Englishwomen do dance, don't they?"
+
+"I have never been to England."
+
+"Get them here. Send for them."
+
+So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of
+women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-a-Mousson as dusk was
+falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.
+
+They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets
+flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of butter, bars of
+chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
+
+"Can you see the price on the butter?"
+
+"Twenty-four...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I can't see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Ah, is it possible, eclairs?"
+
+"Eclairs!"
+
+And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
+
+German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper
+balls into the back of the ambulance.
+
+"I heard, I heard...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I heard German spoken."
+
+"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"
+
+"No," but Fanny felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language
+spoken in a vanished town.
+
+They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du
+Theatre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for
+the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had
+waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.
+
+"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is
+and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"
+
+In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French
+tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they
+walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other
+side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth,
+with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited
+behind the chairs.
+
+"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...
+where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles,
+there's a jar left from yours."
+
+"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you,
+mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
+
+"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your
+responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey!
+For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is
+more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans
+yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
+
+"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You
+can't? Nor I either...."
+
+"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
+
+Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music
+stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
+
+A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in
+mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement.
+"To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had
+run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor
+lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without
+generosity, beauty, or privacy--in a hole, dirty and cold, plain
+and coarse.
+
+She glanced at her neighbour with wonder and appreciation, delight and
+envy. There was a light, clean scent upon his hair. She saw his hands,
+his nails. And her own.
+
+A young Jew opposite her had his hair curled, and a faint powdery bloom
+about his face.
+
+("But never mind! That is civilisation. There are people who turn from
+that and cry for nature, but I, since I've lived as a dog, when I see
+artifice, feel gay!")
+
+"You don't know with what interest you have been awaited."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Ah, yes! And were you pleased to come?"
+
+"We did not know to what we were coming!"
+
+"And now?..."
+
+She looked round the table peacefully, listened to the light voices
+talking a French she had never heard at Bar.
+
+"And now?..."
+
+"I could not make you understand how different...." (No, she would not
+tell him how they had lived at Bar. She was ashamed.) But as she was
+answering the servant gave him a message and he was called away. When he
+returned he said: "The Commandant Dormans is showing himself
+very anxious."
+
+The Jew laughed and said: "He wants to see these ladies this evening?"
+
+"No, he spares them that, knowing of their journey. He sends a message
+by the Capitaine Chatel to tell us that the _D.S.A._ gives a dance
+to-morrow night. The personal invitation will be sent by messenger in
+the morning. You dance, mademoiselle?"
+
+"There is a dance, and we are invited? Yes, yes, I dance! You asked if I
+was happy now that I am here. To us this might be Babylon, after
+the desert!"
+
+"Babylon, the wicked city?"
+
+"The gay, the light, beribboned city! What is the 'D.S.A.'?"
+
+"A power which governs our actions. We are but the C.R.A.... the
+regulating control. But they are the Direction. 'Direction Service
+Automobile.' They draw up all traffic rules for the Army, dispose of
+cars, withdraw them. On them you depend and I depend. But they are
+well-disposed towards you."
+
+"And the Commandant Dormans is the head?"
+
+"The head of all transport. He is a great man. Very peculiar."
+
+"The Capitaine Chatel?"
+
+"His aide, his right hand, the nearest to his ear."
+
+Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the
+garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars
+passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water
+gleam in the gulf below.
+
+"What river is that?"
+
+"The Moselle."
+
+A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in
+the outer town, the German quarter."
+
+In a narrow street whose houses overhung the river each of the section
+was put down at a different doorway, given a paper upon which was
+inscribed her right to billets, and introduced in Reherry's rapid German
+to her landlady.
+
+Fanny in her turn, following the young man through a dark doorway, found
+herself in a stone alley and climbed the windings of a stairway. A girl
+of twelve or thirteen received her on the upper landing, saying "Guten
+Abend," and looking at her with wonder.
+
+"Where is your mother?" said Reherry.
+
+"She is out with my eldest sister."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Elsa."
+
+"Then, Elsa, look after this lady. Take her to her room, the room I saw
+your mother about, give her hot water, and bring her breakfast in the
+morning. Take great care of her."
+
+"Jawohl, mein Herr."
+
+Reherry turned away and ran down the stairs. Elsa showed Fanny to a room
+prepared for her.
+
+"You are English?" said Elsa, and could not take her eyes off her.
+
+"Yes, I am English. And are you German?" (Question so impossible, so
+indiscreet in England...)
+
+"I am real German, from Coblentz. How did you come here, Fraeulein?"
+
+"In a car."
+
+"But from England! Is there not water?"
+
+"I crossed the water in a ship, and afterwards I came here in a car."
+
+"You have a motor car? But every one is rich in England."
+
+"Oh, not very..."
+
+"Yes, every one. Mother says so."
+
+The girl went away, then brought her a jug of hot water.
+
+"I hope," said Fanny, venturing upon a sea of forgotten German, "I hope
+I haven't turned you or your sister out of this room."
+
+"This is the strangers' room," said Elsa. "I thank you."
+
+When she had gone, Fanny looked round the room. It was too German to be
+true. The walls were dark red, the curtains dark red, the carpet,
+eiderdown, rep cover of the armchair, plush on the photograph frames,
+embroidered mats upon the washstand, tiles upon the stove, everything a
+deep, dark red. Four mugs stood upon the mantelpiece, and ... she rubbed
+her eyes ... was it possible that one had an iron cross upon its
+porcelain, one the legend "Got mit uns," the third the head of the
+Kaiser, the fourth the head of the Kaiserin? "That is too much! The
+people I shall write to won't believe it!"
+
+Her bed was overhung by a large branch of stag's horn fixed upon the
+wall.
+
+She felt the bed, counted the blankets, found matches on the
+mantelpiece, a candle in the candlestick, room in the stove to boil a
+kettle or a saucepan. Hot water steamed from her jug, a hot brick had
+been placed to warm her bed, a plate of rye bread cut in slices and
+covered with a cloth was upon the table.
+
+Foreign to her own, the eyes which had rejoiced in this room ... yet the
+smile of German comfort was upon it.
+
+She lay down beneath the branching antlers, and smiled before she went
+to sleep: "One pair of silk stockings ... to dance in Babylon ..."
+
+ *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning a thin woman dressed in black brought her breakfast--jam,
+rye bread, coffee and sugar.
+
+"Guten Morgen," said the woman, and looked at her curiously. But Fanny
+couldn't remember which language she ought to talk, and fumbled in her
+head so long that the woman went away.
+
+She dressed and went out, meeting Stewart by her doorway. Together they
+crossed the bridge, the theatre square, and went towards the Cathedral
+with eager faces. They did not look up at the Cathedral, at the statute
+of old David upon which the Kaiser had had his own head carved, and upon
+whose crossed hands the people had now hung chains fastened with a
+padlock--they did not glance at the Hotel de Ville in the square beyond,
+but, avoiding the tram which emerged from the narrow Serpenoise like a
+monster that had too long been oppressed, they hurried on up the street
+with a subdued and hungry gaiety.
+
+There was a Need to be satisfied before anything could be seen, done, or
+said. A Need four years old, now knocking at the doors of heaven,
+howling to be satisfied.
+
+Before the windows of a shop they paused, but Stewart, standing back and
+looking up the street, said: "There is a better further on!" and when
+they had gone on a few paces Fanny whispered, hurrying, "A better still
+beyond!" At the third shop, the Need, imperative, royal, would wait no
+longer, and drove them within.
+
+"How many?" asked the saleswoman at the end of ten minutes.
+
+"Seven _eclairs_ and a cream bun, said Stewart.
+
+"Just nine _eclairs_," said Fanny.
+
+"Seventeen francs," said the woman without moving an eyelash.
+
+This frenzy cooled, their pockets lighter, they walked for pleasure in
+the town. The narrow streets streamed with people--French soldiers and
+officers, Lorraine women in the costumes of pageantry, and German
+children who cried shrilly: "Amerikanerin, Amerikanerin!"
+
+An English major passed them. They recognised his flawless boots before
+they realised his nationality. And, following his, the worst boots in
+the world--worn by a couple of sauntering Italian officers, gay in olive
+and silver uniform. German men in black slouch hats hurried along
+the streets.
+
+It had been arranged that they should eat their meals in a room
+overlooking the canal, at the foot of the Cathedral--and there at eleven
+o'clock they went, to be a little dashed in spirit by the reappearance
+of the Bar-le-Duc crockery.
+
+The same yellow dish carried what seemed the same rationed jam; the
+square blocks of meat might have been cooked in the Bar cook-hut, and
+brought with them over the desert; two heavy loaves stood as usual on
+the wooden table. The French Army ration was the same in every town.
+
+"Mesdames," said the orderly assigned to them, "there are two
+sous-officers without who wish to speak with you."
+
+"Let them come in."
+
+Two blue figures appeared in the doorway and saluted. The first brought
+a card of invitation from the Commandant Dormans. The second was the
+brigadier from the garage with a list of the cars assigned to
+the drivers.
+
+"Perhaps these ladies would come down and try their cars after lunch?"
+he suggested, and lunch being over they walked with him through the
+winding streets. At the gates of a great yard he paused and a sentry
+swung them open. Behind the gates lay a sandy plain as large as a parade
+ground, which, except for gulleys or gangways crossing it at intervals,
+was packed from end to end with row after row of cars; cars in the worst
+possible condition, torn, twisted, wheelless, cars with less dramatic
+and yet fatal injuries; some squatting backwards upon their haunches,
+some inclined forwards upon their knees--one, lately fished up from a
+river, had slabs and crusts of ice still upon its seats--one, the last
+dragged in at the tail of a breakdown lorry, hung, fore-wheels in the
+air, helpless upon a crane. Here, in the yard, was nothing but broken
+iron and mouldering carriage work--the cemetery of the Transport of the
+Grand Quartier.
+
+Lining all one side of the yard ran a shed, closed and warmed and
+lighted, where living cars slept in long rows mudguard to mudguard, and
+bright lamps facing outward.
+
+As the Englishwomen walked in a soft rustle could be heard up and down
+the lighted shed, for each half-hidden driver working by his car turned
+and shot a glance, expectant and mocking, towards the door.
+
+"Ben quoi, i'parait qu'c'esst vrai! Tu vois!"
+
+"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, c'ui-la?"
+
+"C'est les Anglaises, pardi!"
+
+"Tu comprends, j'suis contre tout ca. I'y a des fois ou les femmes c'est
+bien. Mais ici ..."
+
+"Tu grognes? On va r'devenir homme, c'est tres bien!"
+
+"C'est idiot! Qu'est-ce qu'elles vont faire ici!"
+
+"On dirait--c'est du militarisme francais!"
+
+"Le militarisme francais j'm'en f----! Tu verra, cela va faire encore du
+travail pour nous."
+
+"Attends un peu!"... And murmurs filled the shed--glances threaded the
+shadows, chilling the spirit of the foreign women adventuring upon the
+threshold.
+
+"Four Rochets," said the _brigadier_, consulting his paper, "two
+Delages, two FIATS ... Mademoiselle, here is yours, and yours. The
+Lieutenant Denis will be here in a moment. He fears the Rochets will be
+too heavy for you, but we must see."
+
+The lieutenant who had been at dinner the night before entered the shed,
+greeted them, and turned to Stewart. "That car is too heavy for your
+strength, mademoiselle. It is not a car for a lady."
+
+"I like the make," she said stiffly, conscious of the ears which
+listened in the shed.
+
+"See if you can start her now, mademoiselle," said the _brigadier_,
+arranging the levers.
+
+There was a still hush in the shed as Stewart bent to the handle. Fanny,
+standing by the Rochet which had been assigned to her, felt her
+heart thumping.
+
+("Tu vas voir!" whispered the little soldiers watching brightly from
+behind the cars. "Attends, attends un peu! Pour les mettre en marche,
+les tacots, c'est autre chose!")
+
+Stewart, seizing the handle, could not turn it. In the false night of
+the shed the lights shone on polished lamps, on glass and brass, on
+French eyes which said: "That's what comes of it!"--which were ready to
+say--"March out again, Englishwomen, ridiculous and eager and defeated!"
+
+Fanny, looking neither to right nor left, prayed under her breath
+--"Stewart, Stewart we can never live in this shed if you can't
+start her. And if you can't, nobody else can...."
+
+There was a spurt of life from the engine as it back-fired, and Stewart
+sprang away holding her wrist with the other hand. The lieutenant, the
+brigadier, and a driver from a car near by crowded round her with
+exclamations.
+
+"You advanced the spark too much," said the driver to the _brigadier_.
+"_Tenez_! I will retard it."
+
+"She shan't touch the car again." said the lieutenant. "It is too
+heavy."
+
+"Leave the controls alone," said Stewart, scowling at the driver. "Give
+me room ..." She caught the handle with her injured hand, and with a
+gasp, swung the Rochet into throbbing life.
+
+There was a murmur of voices down the shed, and each man with a slight
+movement returned to the work he had been doing; the polishers polished,
+the cleaners swept, and a little chink of metal on metal filled the
+garage. The women were accepted.
+
+The day had vanished. Cars, yard and garage sank out of sight. Out in
+the streets the lamps woke one by one, and from the town came shouts and
+the stamp of feet marching. It was Saturday night and a torchlight
+procession of soldier and civilians wound down the street. The band
+passed first, and after it men carried fire-glares fastened upon sticks.
+
+The garage gates turned to rods and bars of gold till the light left
+them, and the glare upon the house-fronts opposite travelled slowly down
+the street.
+
+Fanny slipped out of the yard and crept along behind the flares like a
+shadow on the pavement. At the street corner she passed out on to the
+bridge over the Moselle, and leant against the stonework to watch the
+plumes of fire as they glittered up the riverside upon the tow-path. The
+lights vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that she could only
+feel her way over the bridge by holding to the stonework with her hand.
+A sentry challenged her and when she had passed him she had arrived at
+the door of her German lodging.
+
+Climbing the stairs a slow breeze of excitement filled out the sails of
+her spirit. "My silk stockings ... my gold links, and my benzene
+bottle!" she murmured happily. Now that of all her life she had the
+slenderest toilet to make--three hours was the time she had set
+aside for it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JULIEN
+
+Earth has her usual delights--which can be met with six days out of the
+seven. But here and there upon grey earth there exist, like the flying
+of sunlight, celestial pleasures also--and one of these is the heaven of
+success. When, puffed-up and glorious, the successful creature struts
+like a peacock, gilded in a passing radiance. And in a radiance, in a
+magic illumination, the newcomers danced in the drawing-room of the
+Commandant Dormans, and tasted that which cannot be found when sought,
+nor held when tasted.
+
+Old tapestries of tropical foliage hung around the walls, dusk upon one
+wall, dawn upon another. Trees climbed from floor to ceiling laden with
+lime-coloured flowers, with birds instead of fruits upon the branches.
+
+When at a touch the yellow dust flew out under the lamplight it seemed
+to the mazy eye of the dancer that the trees sent up a mist of
+pollen and song.
+
+In this happy summer, Fanny, turning her vain ear to spoken flattery,
+her vain eye to mute, danced like a golden gnat in fine weather.
+
+The Commandant Dormans spoke to her. If he was not young he had a quick
+voice that was not old. He said: "We welcome you. We have been waiting
+for you. We are glad you have come."
+
+Faces surrounded her which to her fresh eyes were not easy to read.
+Names which she had heard last night became young and old men to her
+--skins red and pale and dark-white--eyes blue and olive and black--gay,
+audacious and mocking features. She was dazzled, she did not hurry to
+understand. One could not choose, one floated free of preference, all
+men were strangers.
+
+"One day I shall know what they are, how they live, how they think." But
+she did not want that day to come.
+
+The Commandant Dormans said: "You do not regret Bar-le-Duc?"
+
+"No, no, no."
+
+"I hear you are all voracious for work. I hear that if you do not drive
+from morning to night we cannot hope to keep you with us!"
+
+Denis said to her: "Be careful of him! He believes there is no end to
+the human strength."
+
+She replied joyously: "There is no end to our strength!"
+
+When she had eyes to see, to watch, to choose, she found that there was
+in the room a man who was graceful and young, whose eyes were a peculiar
+shape, who laughed all the time gently as he danced. He never looked at
+her, never came near her. This young man was indifferent to her, he was
+indifferent to her ... Soon he became a trouble and a pleasure to her.
+With whom was he dancing now ... and now? Who was it that amused him?
+His eyes and his hair were bright ... but there were many around her
+whose eyes and hair were as bright. Before she had seen that young man
+laugh her pleasure had been more complete.
+
+While she was talking to Denis a voice said to her: "Won't you dance
+with me?"
+
+Looking up she saw who it was. His mouth smiled, his eyes were clever
+and gay.
+
+The moment she danced with him she began to grow proud, she began to
+find herself. Someone whispered to her: "The section must leave at such
+and such an hour...."
+
+She thought in a flash: "For me the section is dissolved ... I am I, and
+the others are the others!"
+
+The evening wore on. The musicians flagged and took up their courage
+again. It was late when Stewart, touching Fanny's arm, showed her that
+they were almost the only two women in the room.
+
+"Where are the others?"
+
+"In the hall, putting on their coats. We are all going."
+
+"Aren't they in a hurry?"
+
+"They have had orders, which were brought up just now, for runs early
+to-morrow morning. But you and I have nothing, and Denis has asked
+us ... if you are quick you can slip away ... to have supper with him
+at Moitriers."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"We can. The others go home in two cars which have been sent for us. No
+one will know that we are not in the other car. I'm so hungry."
+
+"So am I, starving. Very well."
+
+They joined the others, put on their coats, hunted ostentatiously for
+their gloves, then slipped ahead down the dark stairway into the square
+below. Denis joined them.
+
+"Splendid. I have my car round that corner. It will be only a matter of
+half an hour, but if you are both as hungry as I you will welcome it.
+Everything was finished upstairs, every crumb and cake. We must get a
+fourth. Who shall I get?"
+
+"Any one whom you would like to bring," said Stewart. "I don't think I
+have mastered the names yet. I really don't mind."
+
+"And you, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Nor I either," said Fanny, sniffing at the frosty air, at the fresh
+night.
+
+"Whom you like!"
+
+"Then I won't be a moment. I'll bring whom I can."
+
+"Monsieur!"... as he reached the corner. He turned back.
+
+"There is an artillery captain ... in a black uniform with silver."
+
+"An artillery captain ..." he paused enquiringly.
+
+"In black and silver. There was no other in the room."
+
+"Oh, yes, there were two in black and silver!"
+
+"Tall, with ..."
+
+"Ah, tall! The other is very short ... The tall one is the Commandant's
+aide, Captain Chatel. He may not be able.... But I will see!" He
+disappeared again.
+
+When he returned he had the young man beside him.
+
+"One moment," said Chatel, as they walked towards the car; "who asked
+for me, the girl with the fair hair, or with the dark?"
+
+"With the fair."
+
+Moitriers was closed when they reached it, and they drove on to the only
+other place where food could be bought past the hour of midnight--the
+station buffet.
+
+Pushing past the barriers at the entrance to the station they entered a
+long corridor filled with heavy civilian life. Men and women lay, slept
+and snored upon the stone ledges which lined the side of the tunnel,
+their bags and packets stacked around them. Small children lay asleep
+like cut corn, heads hanging and nodding in all directions, or propped
+against each other in such an intricate combination that if one should
+move the whole sheaf of tired heads slipped lower to the floor.
+
+Further on, swing doors of glass led to a waiting-room, and here the
+sleeping men and women were so packed upon the ground and around the
+little tables that it was difficult to walk between them. Men sat in
+groups of nine or ten around a table meant for four each with his head
+sunk down between his hands upon the marble surface. On one table a
+small child wrapped in shawls lay among the circle of heads, curled like
+a snail, its toe in its father's ear. At each end of the room stood
+soldiers with fixed bayonets.
+
+Denis paused at the entrance. "Walk round here," he said, "there is a
+gangway for the sentry."
+
+"If we talk too loud," said Fanny, "we shall wake them."
+
+"They must soon wake in any case. It must be near the time for the
+train. You know who they are?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Germans. Expelled from Metz. They leave in batches for Germany every
+night--by a train that comes in and goes out at some horrible hour."
+
+Passing through more glass doors they came to an inner room where,
+behind a buffet, a lady in black silk served them with beer and slices
+of raw ham and bread.
+
+The four sat down for a moment at a little table--Denis talking of the
+system by which the outgoing Germans were nightly weeded from those who
+had permission to remain behind in Metz. Julien Chatel joined in the
+conversation. He spoke with the others but he glanced at Fanny. For the
+briefest of seconds he thought as he looked at her face that he saw a
+new interest smile upon it. He did not know that his own face wore the
+same look. His look said as he looked at her: "You, you, you!" At one
+moment she thought: "Am I pretty?" At the next she was content only to
+breathe, and thought no more of herself. She took in now his eyes which
+seldom rested on her, now a movement of his lips which made her feel
+both happy and miserable, and suddenly she learnt how often his finger
+traced some letter upon his cheek.
+
+These things were important. They were like the opening sentences of a
+great play to which one must listen, absorbed, for fear of
+misunderstanding all the story.
+
+It was not long before they rose, threaded their way back between the
+sleeping Germans, regained the car, and drove down the silent streets
+towards the Cathedral.
+
+"Have you seen it?" said Julien in a low voice, addressing her directly.
+
+"The Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes. I want to show it to you. Will you meet me there to-morrow at
+three?"
+
+(The others talked and smiled and knew nothing. Whoever has a secret is
+stronger than they who know nothing. Fanny thought: "My companions, to
+be as you are is not to exist! Whatever you feel, you are feeling
+nothing ...")
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, and joined her hands tightly, for this was where
+the play really began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun shone gaily. Here was no mud, no unhappiness, here were no
+puzzled women, and touching mayors of ruined villages, but instead gay
+goblin houses, pointed churches like sugar cake, the old French theatre
+with its stone garlands glittering in the sun; sun everywhere, streaming
+over the Place du Theatre, over women shaking coloured rags from the
+windows, women washing linen by the river; everything that had been wet
+was drying, everything that had savoured of tears and age and sadness
+was burning up under the sun, and what moisture remained was brighter
+than jewels.
+
+"Suppose he never came!"
+
+"Why, then, be ready for that. Very likely he wouldn't come. Very likely
+he would think in daylight--' She is not a woman, but an English
+Amazon...'" Fanny glanced down at her clothes regretfully. She was
+ill-equipped for an assignation.
+
+"At least I might have better gloves," she thought, and walked into a
+small shop which advertised men's clothes in German across the window.
+She bought yellow washing-leather gloves at twenty-eight francs a pair,
+and would have paid a hundred had the salesman insisted.
+
+And now with yellow gloves, silk stockings, shining shoes and a heart
+as light as a leaf upon a wind she walked towards the Cathedral.
+
+"He won't come. He won't be there...." She pushed at the east door.
+
+He was under a Madonna, his black and silver hat in his hand, his eyes
+critical and pleased as he walked to meet her. They sat down together
+on a seat, without speaking. Then, each longing for the other to speak
+--"You have come...." he said first. (His face was oval and his hair
+was shining.)
+
+"Yes," she nodded, and noticed a peculiar glory in the Cathedral. The
+dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of
+a mourner.
+
+They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at
+each other's call.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't come."
+
+"Why, why did you think that?"
+
+Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their
+lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and
+answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.
+
+Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little
+words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled
+at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll
+go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her
+among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown
+her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except
+the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold
+light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of
+the carved fingers which prayed around them.
+
+They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very
+edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks
+buried in shrubberies of green.
+
+Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill
+in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon
+floated indefinitely like a cloud.
+
+A young doctor lounged beside them, putty-coloured under his red plush
+cap. "Why are all doctors plain in France?" she laughed.
+
+"Hush!" He wound his hand round and round like the player of a barrel-
+organ. "I have to stop you when you say silly things like a phonograph,
+at so much a metre."
+
+So he believed he might tease her.... Delighted, she stopped by the bank
+of the river and stared into the water. The sun ran over her shoulders
+and warmed her hands. The still shine of the river held both their eyes
+as movement in a train holds the mind.
+
+"I am enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a
+compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was
+sorry. "What a pity!"
+
+But she was not critical because she was looking for living happiness,
+and every moment she was more and more convinced that she would get it.
+But when he asked her her name and she repeated it, it sounded so much
+like an avowal that they both turned together down the tow-path with a
+quick movement and spoke of other things, for they were old enough to be
+afraid that the vague happiness that fluttered before them down the path
+would not be so beautiful when it was caught. And at this fear she said
+distinctly to herself: "In love!" and wondered that she had not said
+it before.
+
+Coming back to him with her words, she then began to wound and to delay
+him. "You mustn't be late for your office...."
+
+"When shall I see you again?"
+
+They dropped into a long silence. She summoned her coquetry that she
+called pride. The blue, blue forest at the edge of her sight tilted a
+little like a ship, the watery hill-country rolled towards it in
+mysterious kilometres.
+
+"It is beautiful," she said clumsily, avoiding his question, ignoring
+it. "Yet when I go there it is always more beautiful on the next hill.'
+
+"I must hurry," he said at once, "I shall be late at my office."
+
+"Where is your office?"
+
+He looked round vaguely. "There in that group of pines." They walked
+towards it, they were almost at the door, but he would not repeat his
+question. Would he not at the last moment? No. Had it not then been
+clear that the living happiness was at her lips? No. Could he let her
+go, could it have been a failure? He was holding out one of the stone
+hands. He was going.
+
+She looked up and the sun was streaming in his eyes, blinding him, and
+without seeing her he stared into the darkness that was her face. "I
+have so enjoyed my walk," he said. "Thank you for coming."
+
+All her face said "Oh!" in a hurt, frightened stare, but the sun only
+came round the edges of her hair and cap and left the panic in a
+shifting darkness. He was gone.
+
+She went back to her street. Reaching the big, populous house she
+followed the corridor that led from the stone courtyard, climbed to the
+first floor and opened the door of her own room. A bitter disillusion
+ran through her. The close-packed furniture seemed to say indifferently,
+"There's not much room for you!" and she knew quite well as she sat down
+on the bed that it was not her room at all, but had been as public to
+the birds of passage as the branch of a tree to the birds of the air.
+
+"I did so little. I did so little. It was such a little mistake!"
+Self-pity flooded her.
+
+"And why did he ask me to come to the Cathedral if such a little thing,
+such a little thing...." Indignation rose.
+
+"Things don't crumble like that, don't vanish like that!" She stared,
+astonished, at the scenes she had left behind her, the shining of the
+dark Cathedral, the ripple on the Moselle. "But they do, they do,
+they do...."
+
+Down in the street her own name caught her ear, and she went to the
+window.
+
+"Are you there, are you there?" cried the voice.
+
+Hanging waist-deep out of the window she received her orders for the
+next day.
+
+"I came down to tell you now," said the girl below on the pavement. "I
+thought you might have things to do to the car. You must be at the Hotel
+Royal, near the station, at half-past six to-morrow morning."
+
+"Have you any idea whom I'm to take? Or where?"
+
+"I don't know where, but the man is a Russian colonel."
+
+She drew her head back through the window, and the gay tumble of the
+street gave way to the impersonal, heavy room. Cramming her oil-stained
+overall into her haversack, she put on her leather coat and went up to
+the garage.
+
+The sun had disappeared. A cold wind struck the silk-clad ankles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+"Come in," she said in English, lifting her head and all her mind and
+spirit out of the pit of the pillow.
+
+Feet came further into the room and a shivering child held a candle in
+her face. "Halb sechs, Fraeulein," it said. But the Fraeulein continued
+to stare at him. He thought she was not yet awake--he could not tell that
+she was counting countries in her head to find which one she was in--or
+that she was inclining towards the theory that she was at school in
+Germany. He was very cold in his shirt and little trousers, and he
+pulled at her sheets. "Fraeulein!" he said again with chattering teeth,
+and when she nodded more collectedly the little ghost slipped out
+relieved by the door. "Russian colonel ... I must get up. Fancy making
+that boy call me! Why couldn't someone older ... I must get up."
+
+He had left the electric light burning in her room, but out in the
+corridor all was black and hushed as she had left it the night before
+when she had gone to bed. Behind the kitchen door there was a noise of
+water running in the sink. She opened the door, and there was the
+wretched child again, still in his shirt, rinsing out her coffee-pot by
+the light of one candle. Well, since he was doing it ... Poor child! But
+she must have her coffee. By the time she was dressed he tapped again
+and brought in the tray with coffee, bread and jam on it. Setting it
+down, he looked it over with an anxious face. "Zucker," he said, and
+disappeared to fetch it. She filled her thermos bottle with the rest of
+the coffee which she could not finish, and put two of the slices of grey
+bread into the haversack, then crept downstairs and out into the black
+street where the gas lamps still burnt and the night sentry still paced
+up and down in the spectral gloom. Over the river hung a woolly fog,
+imprisoning the water; but as she crossed the bridge she noticed where
+its solidity was incomplete and torn, and into the dark water which lay
+at the bottom of such crevasses a lamp upon the bridge struck its
+arrowed likeness. It was a good seven minutes' walk to the garage, and
+she tried to get warm by running, but the ice crackling in the gutters
+and between the cobble stones defied her, and her hands ached with cold
+though she put them in turn right through her blouse against her heart
+to warm them as she ran. Fetching her car she drove to the Hotel Royal,
+and settled down to wait.
+
+A porter came out and swept the steps of the hotel, and a puff of his
+dust caught her in the face. He laid a fibre mat on each stone step, and
+clipped them with little metal clips.
+
+"Are you for us?" asked a _sous-lieutenant_, looking first up and down
+the empty street and then at the car. He had blue eyes and a long, sad
+moustache that swept down the lower half of his face and even below his
+chin, making him look older than he should.
+
+"I am for a Russian colonel," she said, liking his mild face.
+
+"That's right. Yes, a Russian colonel. Colonel Dellahousse. But can you
+manage by yourself? Can you really? I will tell him...."
+
+He disappeared up the steps and through the swing door of the hotel. A
+moment later he was out again.
+
+"He will come to you himself, he will see you. But we want to go to
+Verdun! Could you drive so far? You could? Yes, yes, perhaps. Yet here
+he comes...."
+
+In dark civilian clothes the Russian came down the hotel steps. He was
+tall, serious, upright, rich. His face beneath his wide, black hat was
+grave and well cared for. The sombre glitter of his eye was grave, his
+small dark beard shone in the well-controlled prime of its growth. From
+the narrow line of white collar to the narrower thread of French
+watchchain--from the lean, long feet to the lean, white hands she took
+him in, and braced herself, adjusted herself, to meet his stately
+gravity. If there was something of the Mephistopheles in fancy dress
+about him, it was corrected by his considerate expression.
+
+"Have you had breakfast?" he began, speaking French with a softly nasal
+accent.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it! Yes, thank you, monsieur."
+
+"I have to go to Verdun," he put it to her. "I have business there." It
+was as though he expected that she would let him off without difficult
+explanations, would exclaim: "There is some mistake! Some other car,
+some other driver is intended for your work!"
+
+But she remained silent except for a smile of acknowledgment, and with a
+sigh he summoned the lieutenant and went back into the hotel. In a few
+minutes the Frenchman came out again. "Monsieur Dellahousse would like
+to know if you know the way?" he inquired.
+
+"He doesn't want to take me? Isn't that it?" asked Fanny, smiling but
+anxious.
+
+"He is a little doubtful," admitted the lieutenant. "You must
+excuse...."
+
+"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and
+I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know
+the way to Verdun."
+
+He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and
+Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care
+under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort
+of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure,
+too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their
+women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."
+
+She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
+met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
+drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
+apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
+bewilderment.
+
+She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
+and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
+and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
+of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
+at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
+crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
+gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
+of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
+ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out
+moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large
+upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's
+side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree
+across the road.
+
+"Halt--Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards
+which swung and creaked in the wind.
+
+"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone,
+pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the
+German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach
+Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one
+might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the
+arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."
+
+For miles and miles nothing living was to be seen, neither animal, nor
+motor, nor living man; only the stray fires of the Chinese fluttered
+here and there like blue and red marsh fires a mile or so back from the
+main road. Once as she flew along she shied like a horse and twisted the
+wheel as a wild screaming and twittering rose at the side of the car,
+and glancing back she saw three figures wriggle and laugh in mockery and
+astonishment. They had risen round the embers of a dead fire, and stood
+swaying on their feet and showing white teeth in orange faces. One had
+the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.
+
+They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with
+hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an
+arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first
+pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.
+
+Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the
+brow of a hill.
+
+"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it
+is a town!"
+
+"Wait, wait till you get nearer...."
+
+Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the
+suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful
+frailty--its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood
+upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry--not one house
+was whole.
+
+"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill
+which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was
+poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let
+out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still
+upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it
+should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet.
+Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the
+palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky. The
+Russian, who had stood up in the car, sat down. "Now go on...."
+
+The streets which circled the base of the hill had been partially
+cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way
+between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers,
+manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon
+fingers of stone already touched by moss.
+
+Here and there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But
+the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind
+--and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of the
+world's youth.
+
+Now and then with a crash the remains of a house fell, as the block
+of stonework which alone supported it was disarranged by the working
+soldiers.
+
+"Where am I to go?" asked Fanny, as the street wound round the base of
+the hill.
+
+"I will climb over beside you and direct you," said the French
+lieutenant, and dropped into the front seat.
+
+"Where do these soldiers sleep? Not among these ruins?"
+
+A block of masonry fell ahead of them and split its stones across the
+street.
+
+"Be careful! You can get round by this side street. Up here.... In these
+ruins. No living soul can sleep in Verdun now."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Don't you know? They sleep _beneath_ Verdun, in this hill around which
+we are circling. I am looking for the entrance."
+
+"Inside this hill? Under the town?"
+
+"But you've heard of the _citadelle?_"
+
+"Yes, but... this hill is so big."
+
+"There are fifteen kilometres of tunnel in this hollow hill, and
+hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a
+defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, here is the entrance."
+
+They left the car. Before them was a small dark hole in the side of the
+hill, an entrance not much higher than a man, into which ran a single
+rail line of narrow gauge. A sentry challenged them as they walked
+towards him.
+
+Entering the hill they found themselves in a tunnel lit by electric
+bulbs which hung in a dotted line ahead of them.
+
+"Wait!" ordered the deep voice of the Russian, and he strode from them
+into the depths of the tunnel with the Eastern swing of Ali Baba
+entering his cave.
+
+Fanny stood by the mild lieutenant, and they waited obediently.
+
+"I must tell you a secret," he said to her. "Monsieur Dellahousse is
+very glad to be here. He said this morning: 'The Governor has sent me a
+woman to break my neck!'"
+
+"But he took me...."
+
+"Could he refuse you?--For he felt that it was a glove of challenge
+thrown down by the Governor of Metz. They do not get on together.... He
+took you with dignity, but he was convinced that he placed himself in
+the jaws of death."
+
+"When do we go back? We cannot now be in Metz before dark."
+
+"But haven't they told you? Never warned you? How monstrous! We are
+staying here."
+
+"And I return alone?"
+
+"No, you stay too. You are lent to us for five days. They should have
+told you!"
+
+"Oh, I stay too. In this tunnel, here! How odd, how amusing!"
+
+"Monsieur Dellahousse has gone to ask the Commandant of the _citadelle_
+to house us all. Here he comes."
+
+The Russian returned under the chain of lights. "Follow me," he said,
+and led them further into his cavern.
+
+They followed him like children, and as they advanced the lieutenant
+whispered: "We are now well beneath the town. It lies like a crust above
+our heads. Exactly beneath the palace you will see the steps go up...."
+
+"What is the railway line for?"
+
+"Bread for the garrison. There are great bakeries in the _citadelle_."
+
+Further and further still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and
+took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were
+twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist
+floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally
+above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the _officers de
+passage_, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle
+held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a
+chair and a shelf, and each bore the name of its temporary owner written
+on a card upon the door.
+
+"Twenty ... twenty-one ... and twenty-two," read the Russian from a
+paper he carried, and threw open the door of twenty-two.
+
+"This is yours, mademoiselle"; he bowed and waved her toward it. Fanny
+entered the room, which, from his manner, might have been the gilded
+ante-chamber of his Tzar.
+
+She heard him enter his own room, and through the partition the very
+sighing of his breath was audible as it rustled upon his lips! He tried
+to give her the illusion of privacy, for, wishing to speak to her, he
+left his room again to tap at her door, though his voice was as near her
+ear whether at door or wall.
+
+"I hope you are content, mademoiselle?" he said through the woodwork.
+
+"Delighted, monsieur."
+
+"You will sleep here," he continued, as though he suspected her of
+sleeping anywhere but there, "and dine with us in the officers' mess at
+seven. Until then, please stay in the _citadelle_ in case I need you."
+
+She heard his footsteps go up the corridor, the lieutenant following
+him. "I will unpack," she thought, and from her knapsack drew what she
+had by chance brought with her. Upon the shelf she arranged a tin of
+_singe_--the French bully beef--a gilt box of powder, a toothbrush, a
+comb, a map, a packet of letters to be answered, and a magneto spanner.
+
+There was an hour yet before dinner and she wandered out into the
+corridors to explore the _citadelle_. A soldier stood upon a ladder
+changing the bulb of an electric light.
+
+Catching sight of her he hurried from his ladder, and passing her with
+a stiff face, saluted, and disappeared.
+
+Soon she began to think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the
+corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed
+behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on,
+and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about
+their duties.
+
+"Perhaps they are changing the guard...."
+
+Yet a face which had already passed her three times began to impress its
+features upon her, and she realised suddenly that it was curiosity, not
+duty, that called the soldiers from their burrows. The news was spreading,
+for out of the gloom ahead fresh parties of onlookers appeared, paused
+disconcerted as she wished them "good evening," nodded or saluted her in
+haste, then hurried by.
+
+An officer with grizzled hair stepped into the passage from a doorway.
+As she neared him she saw he wore the badges of a commandant.
+
+"Who is this?" he asked in a low voice of the soldier who followed at
+his heels.
+
+"J'n'en sais rien, mon commandant," The soldier stiffened as a watch-dog
+who sees a cat.
+
+Fanny hastened nearer. "I drive a Russian officer," she explained. "I
+hope I have your permission to stay here."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the officer, looking at her in surprise. "Colonel
+Dellahousse told me 'a driver'; he did not add that the driver was a
+lady. Where have they put you? Not in the cubicles of the _officiers de
+passage?_ No, no, that must be changed, that won't do. Come, you shall
+sleep in the room next to the bishop's room, as he is absent. It is in
+my corridor."
+
+Fanny followed him, and noticed that the corridor was now clear of
+soldiers. The commandant paused before a door decorated with flags and
+led her into another corridor lined with cubicles much larger than those
+she had seen at first.
+
+"Open number seven."
+
+The soldier took his bunch of keys and opened the door.
+
+"Now fetch mademoiselle's effects from the other corridor. Which number
+was your room, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Twenty-two. But I can fetch them ... I have really nothing."
+
+The soldier withdrew.
+
+"He will get them. You dine with us, I hope, to-night at seven. Are you
+English, mees?"
+
+"Yes, English--with the French Army. I am really so grateful..."
+
+"The other room was not possible. I like the English, mees. I have known
+them at my home near Biarritz. You and I must talk a little. Do you
+care to read?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if I get time...."
+
+"Any books you may want please take from my sitting-room, number
+sixteen in this corridor. _Tenez!_ I have an English book there--'The
+Light that Failed'--I will get it for you."
+
+"Oh! I have read ... But thank you."
+
+_"De rien, de rien!_ I will get it now." He hastened up the corridor and
+returned with the book in his hand.
+
+The soldier, too, returned, bearing the seven objects which had
+accompanied her travels.
+
+"You will clean mademoiselle's shoes, brush her uniform, and bring her
+hot water when she needs it," ordered the commandant, and the soldier
+saluted impassively--a watch-dog who had been told that it was the
+house-cat after all.
+
+Left alone, she searched all her pockets for some forgotten stick of
+chocolate, and finding nothing, sat down upon the bed to wait hungrily
+till seven. The air in the tunnels was heavy and dry, and throwing off
+her tunic she lay down on the bed and slept until footsteps passing her
+door awoke her.
+
+She became aware that the inhabitants of her corridor were washing their
+hands for dinner, and sitting up sleepily found that it was already
+seven. In a few minutes she hurried from her room and out into the main
+tunnel, glad to get nearer the fresh air which filtered in through the
+opening at the far end.
+
+Reaching a door which she had noticed before, marked "_popote_," she
+paused a second, listening to the hum of voices within, then pushed at
+the door and entered.
+
+Instantly there was a hush of astonishment as seventy or eighty
+officers, eating at a long trestle table, sharply turned their heads
+towards her, their forks poised for a second, their hands still. Then,
+with a quick recovery, all was as before, and the stream of talk
+flowed on.
+
+The first section of the table was reserved for strangers passing
+through Verdun, and here sat a party of young Russian officers in light
+blouse-tunics, an American or two, and a few French officers. At the
+next section sat the officers of the _citadelle_, a passing general, and
+at the left hand of the commandant, Monsieur Dellahousse and the mild
+lieutenant.
+
+Overhead the stone roof of the tunnel was arched with flags, and
+orderlies hurried up and down serving the diners.
+
+Fanny, halfway up the long table, wavered in doubt. Where, after all,
+was she supposed to sit? At the top section, as a guest--or, as a
+driver, among the whispering Russians at the "stranger" section? Her
+anxiety showed in her face as she glanced forwards and backwards and an
+orderly hurried towards her. "Par ici, mademoiselle, par ici!" and she
+followed him towards the head of the table. Her doubts dissolved as she
+saw the gap left for her by the friendly arm of the lieutenant, and,
+arrived at the long wooden bench upon which they sat, she bowed to the
+commandant, and lifting one leg beneath her skirt as a hen does beneath
+its feathers, she straddled the difficult bench and dropped
+into position.
+
+"Beer, mademoiselle? Or red wine?" asked the Russian, suddenly turning
+to her; and the commandant, released from his conversation, called out
+gaily: "The mees will say 'water'--but one must insist. Take the wine,
+mees, it is better for you." The idea of water had never crossed Fanny's
+mind, but having decided on beer she changed it politely to red wine,
+which she guessed to be no other than the everlasting _pinard_.
+
+"I know them..." continued the commandant, smiling at the general. "I
+know the English! My home is at Biarritz and there one meets so many."
+
+And this old man thus addressed, a great star blazing on his breast, and
+tears of age trembling in his blue eyes, lifted his hand to attract her
+attention, and said to Fanny in gentle English: "Verdun honours a
+charming guest, mademoiselle."
+
+_"Verdun ... honours...."_ His words lingered in her ear. She a guest,
+_she_ honoured ... _here_!
+
+Up till now the novelty of her situation had engrossed her, the little
+soldiers watching in the tunnels, the commandant so eager to air his
+stumbling English, these had amused her.
+
+And when she had perceived herself rare, unique, she had forgotten why
+she was thus rare, and what strange, romantic life she meddled in.
+
+Here in this womanless region, in this fortress, in this room, night
+after night, month after month, the commandant and his officers had sat
+at table; in this room, which, unlike the tomb, had held only the
+living, while the dead and the threatened-with-death inhabited the
+earth above.
+
+They had finished dinner and Monsieur Dellahousse signalled to Fanny
+that she might rise. She rose, and at the full sight of her uniform he
+remembered her duties and said stiffly: "Be good enough to wait up till
+ten to-night. I may need you."
+
+They passed out again down the length of the tables. Near the door the
+Russian paused to speak with his countrymen, who rose and stood
+respectfully round him. Fanny and the lieutenant went on alone to
+the corridor.
+
+"You have travelled with him before?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes. I am lent to him to help him through the country. He is on a
+tour of inspection for the Red Cross; he visits all the camps of Russian
+prisoners liberated from Germany."
+
+"But are there many round Verdun?"
+
+"Thousands. You will see to-morrow. And be prepared for early rising. If
+he doesn't send for you by ten to-night I will tell the orderly to let
+you know the hour at which you will be wanted to-morrow morning. The
+car is all ready to start again?"
+
+"I am going out to her now."
+
+He turned away to join the Russian, and Fanny passed the sentry at the
+tunnel's mouth, and stood in the road outside.
+
+Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.
+
+Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its
+bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came
+and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the
+tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:--with his left eye
+he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with
+his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.
+
+"Fait beau dehors." His voice startled her. She turned to him, but he
+stood immobile in the shadow as though he had never spoken. She could
+not be sure that he had indicated to her that every man has his taste
+and his choice.
+
+She set to work on her car which stood in the shelter of an archway
+opposite, and for half an hour the sky trembled unregarded above her
+head. When she had finished she stood back and gazed at the Rochet with
+an anxious friendly enmity--the friendship of an infant with a lion.
+"The garage is eighty miles away," she sighed, "with its friendly men
+who know all where I know so little.... Ah, do I know enough? What have
+I left undone?" For she felt, what was the truth, that the whole
+expedition depended on her, that the stately Russian had perhaps never
+known what it was to have a breakdown--that in Moscow, in Petrograd, in
+his faraway life, he had sat in town cars behind two chauffeurs, unaware
+of the deadly traps in rubber and metal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+Night was the same as day in the tunnels; the electric light was always
+on, and with the morning no daylight crept in to alter it. The orderly
+called her at half-past six and she took her "clients" to a barracks in
+the suburbs of Verdun, where Russian prisoners "liberated" from Germany
+crowded and jostled to see her from behind the bars of the barrack
+square, like wild animals in a cage. Armed sentries paced backwards and
+forwards across the gateway to the yard. As it came on to snow a French
+soldier came out of a guardroom and invited her in by the fire.
+
+Inside, the rest of the guard huddled about the stove, and behind them
+a Russian prisoner with a moon face swept up the crumbs from their last
+meal.
+
+"Why do Americans guard the gate?" she asked, "since you are a French
+guard?"
+
+"Because we don't shoot with enough goodwill," grinned a little man.
+
+"But who do you want to shoot?"
+
+"Those fellows!" said the little man, slapping the moon-faced Russian on
+the thigh. "We used to guard the gates a week ago. But the Russians were
+always escaping, and not enough were shot as they got over the wall. So
+they said: 'The Americans are the types for that!' and they put them on
+to guard the gates. Look outside! You are having a success,
+mademoiselle!"
+
+Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor,
+scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at
+Fanny in silence through the open doorway.
+
+"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they
+were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the
+Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look
+after these pigs!"
+
+A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to
+the doctor," he said sharply.
+
+"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the
+sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the
+bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.
+
+"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, _va-t'en_!" they all said,
+and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned
+towards the door.
+
+"Here, dress yourself!"
+
+"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
+
+He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and
+disappeared, buckling it on.
+
+"You have Russians in cells, too?"
+
+"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on
+bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."
+
+"But why won't they work?"
+
+"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they
+are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian,
+and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all
+useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are
+in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."
+
+An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
+French.
+
+"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly.
+"I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step
+across ... it isn't a stone's throw."
+
+She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and
+rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for
+they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes,
+and one sardine a man.
+
+After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him
+out of the hut.
+
+"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so
+we thought you'd better come and have some chips."
+
+"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to
+turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a
+shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling
+kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought
+Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she
+was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her
+a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat
+them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with
+coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only
+that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French
+that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
+
+Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had
+finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what
+remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of
+animals, they said:
+
+"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or
+they'd sure die."
+
+"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't
+get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
+
+"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
+"We wouldn't stand it."
+
+"You have no idea of poverty."
+
+Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a
+hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
+
+She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the
+Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet
+here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry,
+though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality
+they were....
+
+She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man
+standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish
+accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a
+souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."
+
+"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"
+
+"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
+Just as though you were a zebra."
+
+"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of
+silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other
+barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps
+of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_
+for lunch.
+
+At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in
+search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows,
+invisible from the main roads.
+
+And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to
+evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many
+thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them,
+and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with
+the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once
+he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you
+and interest me?"
+
+She looked round.
+
+"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is
+jealous of you."
+
+She did not know what to make of this.
+
+"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the
+_citadelle_."
+
+"But...."
+
+"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does,
+as _his woman_."
+
+"But, why...."
+
+"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman
+for miles around, and you belong to us!"
+
+"You too?"
+
+"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger
+because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great
+curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
+I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"
+
+"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
+
+"We talk of this and that."
+
+That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.
+
+"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
+
+"Oh, but that's not necessary ... mystery!"
+
+"It _is_ necessary to love."
+
+"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much,
+"does not believe that you can love what you know."
+
+The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory
+image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This
+poor lady will soon be used to everything."
+
+Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.
+
+"When do we go back?" she asked absently.
+
+The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that,
+and he smiled again.
+
+They left next day, after the midday meal.
+
+Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching
+corridors.
+
+"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."
+
+She waited.
+
+"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
+Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."
+
+Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:
+
+"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."
+
+"Let me pass...." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
+
+He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely
+ashamed of her refusal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you
+satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
+
+"My experience?"
+
+"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now,
+if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town
+where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends
+again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
+
+They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead
+violence of the plains--between trenches that wandered down from the
+side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion
+upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the
+semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
+
+The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and
+cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on
+the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the
+road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled
+with instruments. Depot after depot was piled between the trees and the
+notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them.
+"The drinking trough--the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no
+horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the...." but they
+flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued
+them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not
+smoke here ... _Nicht rauchen_," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "_Rauchen streng
+verboten_," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood
+chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made
+them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as
+it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of
+camouflage--small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with
+wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the
+moon--long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing
+undergrowth--and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its
+knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of
+the earth.
+
+When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out
+upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare.
+Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse
+villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow
+grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across
+village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure
+toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer
+a lift?"
+
+Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a
+murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom
+she had overtaken.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To Briey."
+
+"We, too. Get in, madame."
+
+The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing,
+climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her
+her basket and umbrella.
+
+"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her
+a rug.
+
+"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature
+against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."
+
+"You are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Cover yourself well, well."
+
+Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road,
+who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace
+they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word,
+though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears
+until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!"
+they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own
+doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing
+themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop...."
+
+They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the
+sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the
+Frenchman indicated.
+
+The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her
+handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out
+backwards, with feet feeling for the ground--"What do I owe you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"Ah, nothing, nothing."
+
+"_Mais si_! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny
+piece on the seat, she hurried away.
+
+Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny
+ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said,
+"remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of
+life is spoilt for you."
+
+"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.
+
+Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the
+foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just
+above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the
+moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed
+slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the
+window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who
+prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fraeulein," said Fanny, "would it
+matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry
+it afterwards."
+
+What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had
+nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room
+overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night
+full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the
+smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.
+
+When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open
+the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow
+and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out
+ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little
+boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed.
+The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again,
+between the grey walls of her bath--so like her cradle and her
+coffin--she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.
+
+"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to
+travel is not to move across the earth."
+
+Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten
+words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+      The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill--"
+
+But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her
+through the door.
+
+"You are well, Fraeulein?"
+
+Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
+I was ill?"
+
+"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we
+had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have
+just remembered her."
+
+"Well, I won't drown myself."
+
+"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."
+
+"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon
+the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to
+drown myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+
+"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and
+when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In
+the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it
+was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of
+chalk upon the pavement.
+
+"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage,
+to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"
+
+The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung
+in her mind.
+
+"Whom did you take?"
+
+She struggled with the confusing image of the Russian. Before she could
+reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this
+morning. You'll have to get something done to your car!"
+
+Outside in the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but
+in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty
+cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider,
+which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from
+wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with
+her until she had been under the hose.
+
+Out in the street, where the hose was fastened to the hydrant, the
+little pests of Metz clustered eagerly, standing on the hose pipe where
+the bursts were tied with string, and by dexterous pressure diverting
+the leaks into gay fountains that flew up and pierced the windows
+opposite. As the mud rolled off under the blast of the hose and left the
+car streaky and dripping, the little boys dipping their feet into the
+gutters and paddled.
+
+Soaked and bareheaded, Fanny drove the clean car slowly back into the
+garage and set her in her place in the long line.
+
+Stewart, beside her, whispered, "They've come, they've come! They're
+starting at the other end. Four officers."
+
+Fanny pulled her tin of English "Brasso" from a pocket-flap, and began
+to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
+standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
+tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
+on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
+clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
+all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
+curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
+ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
+and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
+lake of brass.
+
+Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
+and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
+comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
+garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
+then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
+motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.
+
+And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
+fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
+on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
+face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
+impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
+his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
+scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
+She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
+little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
+enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
+into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
+up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have
+swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."
+
+"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.
+
+The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
+beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
+Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
+that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
+back from the backs of those about him.
+
+To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
+with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
+gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
+nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
+on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
+of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
+chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
+drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
+sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
+had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
+she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
+This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
+bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
+endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
+table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
+by Pont-a-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
+in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
+new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
+the thunder out at Pont-a-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
+who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he
+had left on the household that they should frame him in velvet and keep
+him staring at his own bed for ever!) She all but saw spirits--and
+shivered at the procession of life. Outside in the street she heard a
+cry, and her name called under the window. How like the cry that
+afternoon a week ago which had sent her to Verdun! Standing in the
+shadow of the curtain she peered cautiously out.
+
+At sight of her, a voice cried up from the street: "There is a fancy
+dress dance next Tuesday night! I'm warning every one; it's so hard to
+get stuffs." The voice passed on to the house where Stewart lived.
+
+("How nice of her!") This was a good day. ("What shall I wear at the
+dance?") There, about the face of the clock, windless and steady, hung
+the hours. Not yet time to start, not yet.
+
+Through the lace of the curtain and the now closed window, the shadows
+hurried by upon the pavement, heads bobbed below upon the street.
+
+Oh Dark, and Pale, and Plain, walking soberly in hat and coat, what sign
+in these faces of the silver webbery within the brain, of the flashing
+fancies and merry plans, like birds gone mad in a cage! The tram, as
+antique as a sedan chair, clanked across the bridge over the river, and
+changing its note as it reached firmer land, roared and bumbled like a
+huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was
+assailed by little creatures who threw themselves as greedily within as
+if they were setting out upon a wild adventure.
+
+"All going to meet somebody," said Fanny, whose mind, drowned in her
+happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and
+hurry the little creatures in the glass cage were forced to unfold their
+newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
+driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
+conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
+even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
+mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
+downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
+wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
+well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
+of herself.
+
+"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
+to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
+"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
+across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
+are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."
+
+When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
+seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
+upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
+of the big drapery shop.
+
+They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
+know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
+thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
+again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
+than he.
+
+"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
+
+She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at
+least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the
+vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had
+brought them together.
+
+"How lucky...."
+
+"How lucky what?"
+
+How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He
+would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't
+like it."
+
+Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of
+talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just
+behind the mask of the face.
+
+"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her
+lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for
+her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in
+advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too
+clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she
+could not say.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?"
+
+Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like
+that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she
+said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had
+the impression of a whole conversation.
+
+"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that
+I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding
+inspections to find out."
+
+"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
+
+"Why, of course, of course!"
+
+"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say
+it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).
+
+"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car
+had returned."
+
+Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun
+that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz,
+and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.
+
+But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does
+that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it
+for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself--the
+khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The
+Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these
+human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?..."
+Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a
+fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the
+spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to
+do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to
+do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit
+assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle
+was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.
+
+She glanced at him from time to time, and would have grown more silent,
+but by his light questions he kept her talking briskly on, offering her
+no new proof, until she grew unsure and wondered whether she had been
+mistaken; and, the hour striking for her supper in the town, she went to
+it, filled anew with his charm and her anxiety. Other meetings came,
+when, thrilling with the see-saw of belief and doubt, they watched each
+other with absorbed attention, and in their fragile and unconfessed
+relationship sometimes one was the victor and sometimes the vanquished.
+Yet what was plain to the man who swept the mud from the streets was not
+plain to them.
+
+"Does he love me already?"
+
+"Will she love me soon?"
+
+When they saw other couples by the banks of the Moselle, Reason in a
+convinced and careless voice said: "That is love!" But on coming towards
+each other they were not sure at all, and each said of the other:
+"To-morrow he may not meet me...." "To-morrow she will say she is busy
+and it will not be true!"
+
+When Fanny said, "He may not meet me," she was mad. How could he fail to
+meet her when the rolling hours hung fire and buzzed about his head like
+loaded bees, unable to proceed; when in a lethargy of vision he signed
+his name at the bottom of the typewritten sheet, saying confusedly,
+"What does she think? Does she think of me?"
+
+When at last they met under the shadow of the Cathedral they would
+exclaim in their hearts: "What next?" and hurry off by the Moselle,
+looking into the future, looking into the future, and yet warding it
+off, aware of the open speech that must soon lie between them, and yet
+charmed by the beautiful, the merciful, the delay. And going home, each
+would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned
+from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with
+mountains and rivers.
+
+That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the
+town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till
+seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.
+
+"I'm going to Weile," he said.
+
+"I'm going there myself."
+
+"To get your dress?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once
+by a group of idle girls.
+
+"Stuffs ..." said Fanny, thinking vaguely.
+
+"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
+
+Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of
+empty shelves. They had no black bombazine.
+
+"Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black
+gauze, black cotton..."
+
+It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he
+had bought six yards at eight francs a yard.
+
+"White ... something ... for me."
+
+There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard. "But cheap, cheap,
+CHEAP stuff," she expostulated--"stuff you would make lampshades of,
+or dusters. It's only for a fancy dress." The idle little girls assumed
+a special air. Fanny looked round the shop in desperation. It was like
+all the shops in Metz--the window dressed, the saleswomen ready, the
+shelves scrubbed out and polished, the lady waiting at the pay desk--but
+the goods hadn't come!
+
+Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and
+eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven
+francs a yard.
+
+"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
+
+Fanny had an idea of her own.
+
+"_Wo_," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening,
+"_ist eine Schneiderin?_"
+
+"A dressmaker who speaks French...."
+
+Elsa took her out into the dark street again, and in at a neighbouring
+archway, till at the back of deep courtyards they found a tiny flat of a
+little old lady. "Like this," explained Fanny, drawing with her pencil.
+
+"Why, my mother had a dress like that!" said the little lady, pleased.
+"Before the last war." She nodded many times. "I know how to make a
+crinoline. But when do you want it?"
+
+"For Tuesday night."
+
+"Ah, dear mademoiselle! How can I! To-day is Saturday. I have only
+to-day and Monday. Unless.... Are you a Catholic?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you can sew on Sunday. You can do the frills."
+
+All Sunday Fanny sewed frills under the stag's horn, and when she went
+to meet Julien in the late afternoon, she had the frills still in a
+parcel. "What is that?" he asked, as she unfolded the parcel in the
+empty Cathedral, and began to thread her needle.
+
+"My dress for the dance."
+
+"What is it going to be?"
+
+"Frills. Hundreds of frills." She shook her lap a little, and yards and
+yards of white frills leapt on to the floor in a river.
+
+"Those flowers you bought, look, you have never put them in water!"
+
+He shook his head, and leaning from his chair, stretched out his arm for
+the parcel of white paper. "They are dying. Smell them! They yield more
+scent when they die." She sat holding the flowers near her face, and not
+thinking of him very distinctly, but not thinking of anything else.
+
+"But they won't last."
+
+"They will last this visit. I'll get new ones."
+
+"Oh, how extravagant you are with happiness!..."
+
+They looked startled and became silent. For every now and then among
+their talk some sentence which they had thought discreet rang out with
+a clarity which disturbed them.
+
+Between them there had been no avowal, and neither could count on the
+other's secret. She was not sure he loved her; and though he argued,
+"Why should she come if she does not care?" he watched her sit by him
+with as little confidence, with as much despair, as if she sat on the
+other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Is it raining again? How dark it
+gets. I must soon go." She made gaps in and scattered that alarming
+silence in which the image of each filled and fitted into the thoughts
+of the other like an orange into its close rind. Yet so dark and perfect
+is the mask of the face, so dull the inner ear, that each looked
+uncertainly about, half deaf to the song which issued so plainly from
+the other, distracted by the great gaps in the music.
+
+"Won't you stay with me till you have sewn to the end of that frill?"
+
+She sat down again without a word. And, greedy after his victory, he
+added: "But I oughtn't to keep you?"
+
+"I want to stay, too."
+
+The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an
+end.
+
+"Now I must go. It's supper--supper in the garage."
+
+He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the
+door of the house in the dark street by the river.
+
+"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps
+it's English."
+
+"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.
+
+"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room
+upstairs.
+
+"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them
+the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the
+street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night
+round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those
+uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"
+
+"Has every one had runs?"
+
+"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and
+the silence of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+
+"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the _brigadier_ and at
+the pink paper he offered her.
+
+"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night.
+You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as
+you can to the Hotel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be,
+but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and
+Pichot is getting you two spare tubes...."
+
+She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order
+and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy
+of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead,
+the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and
+accident, pure accident, had lighted on _her_, to sweep _her_ out of
+Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city
+like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold _Anywhere_.
+White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's
+cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something,
+anything--that she was ill--and stay.
+
+She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue
+tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and
+the funnel.
+
+"And if I said--(it is mad)--if I said, 'I am in love. _I can't go_.
+Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on
+the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver
+was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen
+bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with
+the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased
+stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of
+bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung
+about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some
+close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his
+mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.
+
+The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her
+skirt and feet.
+
+"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Coming. Where are the tubes?"
+
+"I have them."
+
+She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge
+to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder--hating
+every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.
+
+At the Hotel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded
+with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from
+which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days
+when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.
+
+She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and
+flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising,
+but intent only on her question.
+
+"And could you tell me--(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me
+very late at the garage)--and would you mind telling me which day you
+expect to get back?"
+
+He turned to the others.
+
+"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
+To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."
+
+"Where shall I drive you?"
+
+"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Treves."
+
+Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that
+the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was
+smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself
+and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and
+the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.
+
+In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel,
+unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat
+horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to
+the left and flat grass prairie to the right--little villages and
+clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its
+tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the
+road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before
+them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the
+grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards
+sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of
+beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again,
+and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot
+and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be
+touched to be relinquished.
+
+Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the
+corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was
+half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down
+by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car,
+but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped
+down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better
+than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of
+chamois-leather.
+
+At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose
+wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass.
+The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the
+landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village
+beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along
+the dry road.
+
+The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them,
+made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
+nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
+the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
+a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
+into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
+bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
+Bread, cheese, sausage, _pate_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
+and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
+from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
+dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
+break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
+bodies of the bottles.
+
+It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
+strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
+spreading _pate_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
+red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.
+
+"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
+thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
+morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.
+
+The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
+innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
+thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
+against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
+that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
+of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
+intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
+knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.
+
+The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked
+appreciatively together.
+
+"_He!_ The _pate_ is not bad."
+
+"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"
+
+"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the
+bottle is all warmed. Try some."
+
+"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.
+
+"He is in the army."
+
+"You have no brother--no one to take care of you?"
+
+"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they
+think it interesting for us."
+
+"Tiens!"
+
+They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But
+the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and,
+bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:
+
+"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"
+
+The others reconsidered her.
+
+"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do
+not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that
+fine leather coat?"
+
+"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.
+
+Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to
+appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.
+
+"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that
+cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than--Well, how much?"
+
+The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned
+her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.
+
+"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his
+cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very
+serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."
+
+But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider
+that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big
+Bearskin be her _impresario_ or their instructor.
+
+"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and
+turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him
+for his stay in Balham.
+
+When the lunch was over and the last fragment of _pate_ drawn off the
+last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes
+turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and
+the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with
+care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the
+last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.
+
+All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It
+grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that
+the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud
+moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with
+the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose
+simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.
+
+As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet
+and heavy, melted on her ear.
+
+"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"
+
+They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the
+back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."
+
+"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."
+
+"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.
+
+"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."
+
+And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny
+pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might
+lift the back seat and find the curtains.
+
+"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the
+car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been
+cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting
+on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight
+of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above
+them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky
+there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few
+yards ahead.
+
+As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow.
+Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily
+at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.
+
+They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at
+last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a
+voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which
+held so much discomfort.
+
+Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was
+keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back
+and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat
+was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs
+upon the floor.
+
+"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the
+big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours,
+running downhill in another mile."
+
+They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a
+querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they
+glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of
+fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed
+to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light
+which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of
+shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village--if village
+it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in
+the forest.
+
+The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and
+skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made
+slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a
+triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was
+written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses
+glittered in the snow with flags.
+
+A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow
+bridge brought her to a standstill.
+
+"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a
+safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.
+
+"We expect Petain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."
+
+"But Thionville is forty miles away--"
+
+"Still, he might pass here--"
+
+Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow
+behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they
+came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a
+board: "This is Germany."
+
+They pulled up. Germany it might be--but the road to Treves? He did not
+know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in
+Germany, and with his right in France.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+GERMANY
+
+Over the side of the next mountain all Hans Andersen was stretched
+before them--tracts of _little_ country, little wooden houses with
+pointed roofs, little hills covered with squares of different coloured
+woods, and a blue river at the bottom of the valley, white with geese
+upon its banks. They held their open mouths insultedly in the air as the
+motor passed. The narrow road became like marble, and the car hissed
+like a glass ball rolled on a stone step. On every little hill stood a
+castle made of brown chocolate, very small, but complete with turrets.
+Young horses with fat stomachs and arched necks bolted sideways off the
+road in fear, followed by gaily painted lattice-work carts, and plunged
+far into the grassland at the side. Old women with coloured hoods swore
+at them, and pulled the reins. Many pointed hills were grey with
+vine-sticks, and on the crest of each of these stood a small chapel as
+if to bless the wine. The countryside was wet and fresh--white, hardly
+yellow--with the winter sun; moss by the roadside still dripped from the
+night, and small bare orchard trees stood in brilliant grass.
+
+"Look! How the grass grows in Germany!"
+
+"Ah, it doesn't grow like that in the valley of the Meuse--"
+
+Every cottage in every village was different; many wore hats instead of
+roofs, wooden things like steeples, with deep eaves and carved fringes,
+in which were shadowy windows like old eyes. Some were pink and some
+were yellow.
+
+Soon they left the woods and came out upon an open plateau surrounded by
+wavy hills with castles on them. In the middle of the plateau was a
+Zeppelin shed which looked like the work of bigger men than the crawling
+peasants in the roads. One side of the shed was open, and the strange
+predatory bird within, insensible to the peering eye of an enemy, seemed
+lost in thought in this green valley. The camp of huts beside it was
+deserted, and there seemed to exist no hand to close the house door.
+They rose again on to a hillside, and on every horizon shone a far blue
+forest faint like sea or cloud.
+
+Nearer Treves the villages were filled with Americans--Americans mending
+the already perfect roads, and playing with the children.
+
+"This is a topsy-turvy country, as it would be in Hans Andersen,"
+thought Fanny. "I thought the Germans had to mend the broken roads
+in France!"
+
+They stayed that night in the Porta-Nigra hotel, which had been turned
+into an Allied hostel. The mess downstairs was chiefly filled with
+American officers, though a few Frenchmen sat together in one corner.
+The food was American--corn cakes, syrup, and white, flaky bread.
+
+"Well, what bread! It's like cake!"
+
+"Oh, the Americans eat well!"
+
+"I don't agree with you. They put money into their food, and they eat a
+lot of it, but they can't cook.
+
+"Isn't it astonishing what they eat! It's astonishing what all the
+armies eat compared with our soldiers."
+
+"Now this cake-bread! I should soon sicken of it. But _they_ will eat
+sweets and such things all day long."
+
+"Well, I told you they are children!"
+
+"The Americans here seem different. They behave better than those in
+France."
+
+"These are very _chics types_. Pershing is here. This is the
+Headquarters Staff."
+
+"Yes, one can see they are different."
+
+"It appears they get on very well with the Germans."
+
+"Hsh--not so loud."
+
+After dinner they strolled out into the town. The Bearskin was very
+anxious to get a "genuine iron cross."
+
+He was offered iron crosses worked on matchboxes, on cigarette lighters,
+on ladies' chains.
+
+"But are they genuine?"
+
+He did not know quite what he meant.
+
+"I don't suppose them to be taken from a dead man's neck, but are they
+genuine?"
+
+In the streets the Germans sold iron crosses from job lots on barrows
+for ten francs each.
+
+"But I will get one cheaper!" said the Bearskin, and clambered up the
+steps into shop after shop. He found an iron cross on a chain for seven
+francs. No one knew what the mark was worth, and the three men, with the
+German salesman, bent over the counter adding and subtracting on paper.
+
+"How can a goblin countryside breed people who sell iron crosses at ten
+francs each?" wondered Fanny.
+
+There was a notice on the other side of the street, "Y.M.C.A., two doors
+down the street on your left," and the thin man stood in the door of the
+shop beside Fanny and pointed to it.
+
+"Couldn't you go there and get me cigars? They will be very cheap. Have
+you money with you?"
+
+"I'll try," said Fanny, "I've money. We can settle afterwards," inwardly
+resolving to get as many cigarettes as she could to take back for the
+men in the garage. She crossed the street, but looked back to find the
+thin man creeping after her. She waited for him, irritated.
+
+"Go back. If the American salesman sees you he'll know it's for the
+French, and he won't sell."
+
+"Tiens?"
+
+"He knew that quite well," she thought impatiently to herself, "or he
+wouldn't have asked me to buy for him."
+
+The thin man turned back to the cover of the shop like an eager little
+dog which has jumped too quickly for biscuit and been snubbed.
+
+She went down the street and into the Y.M.C.A.
+
+Instantly she was among three or four hundred men, who stood with their
+backs to her, in queues up the long wooden hall. Far ahead on the
+improvised counter was a _guichet_ marked "Cigars." She placed herself
+at the tail of that queue.
+
+"Move up, lady," said the man in front of her, moving her forward. "Say
+here's a lady. Move her up."
+
+Men from the other queues looked round, and one or two whistled slyly
+beneath their breath, but her own queue adopted her protectingly, and
+moved her up to their head, against the counter.
+
+It was out of the question to get cigars now. She had become a guest,
+and to get cigars would imply that she was not buying for herself, but
+to supply an unknown man without. And the marks on her uniform showed
+that the unknown was French.
+
+"One carton of Camels, please," she said, used to the phraseology.
+
+"Take two if you like," said the salesman. "We've just got a dump in."
+
+She took two long cardboard packets of cigarettes, and put down ten
+francs.
+
+"Only marks taken here," said the salesman. "You got to make the change
+as you come in."
+
+"Oh, well--I'll--"
+
+"Put it down. Put it here. We don't get a lady in every day."
+
+He gave her the change in marks, which seemed countless.
+
+"I'm sure you've given me too much!"
+
+"Oh no. Marks is goin' just for love in this country. Makes you feel
+rich!"
+
+As she emerged from the hall with her two long cartons under her arm she
+found the thin man, the Bearskin and Blackberry-Eyes standing like
+children on the doorstep.
+
+It was too much--to give her away like that.
+
+Other Americans, coming out, looked at them as a gentleman coming out of
+his own house might look at a party of penguins on his doorstep.
+
+Fanny swept past her friends without a glance and walked on up the
+street with her head in the air. They turned and came after her
+guiltily. When they caught her up in the next street, she said to the
+thin man, "I asked you not to come near while I was buying--"
+
+"Have you got cigars, mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, I couldn't. Why did you come like that? Now I can go in no more.
+You'd only to wait two minutes."
+
+They looked crestfallen, while she held the cigarettes away from them as
+a nurse holds sweets from a naughty child.
+
+"I could only get two packets. I can give you one. I'm sorry, but I
+promised to get cigarettes for some people in Metz."
+
+The thin man brightened, and took the big carton of Camels with delight.
+
+"They're good, those!" he said knowingly to the others. "How much were
+they, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Five francs twenty the carton."
+
+"Is it possible? And we have to pay...."
+
+By his tone he made it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a
+country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult
+to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the
+floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been a bitter journey for
+them.
+
+After all--those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated
+down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three
+times a day to keep their spirits up--why shouldn't they let him have
+their cigarettes?
+
+"You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it.
+"I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."
+
+He thanked her, delighted, and they went back to the hotel.
+
+The problem of the kindness of the Americans, and her frequent abuse of
+it to benefit the French, puzzled her.
+
+"But, after all, it's very easy to be kind. It's much easier to be kind
+if you are American and pink than if you are French and anxious."
+
+Another difference between the two nations struck her.
+
+"The Americans treat me as if I were an amusing child. The French, no
+matter how peculiar their advances, always, always as a woman."
+
+Next morning, when she got down to breakfast at eight, she found that
+the three Frenchmen had already gone out about their work.
+
+"Perhaps I shall get home to-night, after all," she prayed. She sat in
+the hotel and watched the Americans, or wandered about the little town
+until eleven. The affair with the cigars was suitably arranged. The hall
+was nearly empty when she went in, and the few men who stood about in it
+did not disarm her with special kindness. On getting back to the hotel
+she found the Bearskin pushing breathlessly and anxiously through the
+glass doors.
+
+"Monsieur Raudel has left his cigarettes in his bedroom," he said,
+"unlocked up. He is anxious so I have come back."
+
+"Well, tell him that if he--tell him quite as a joke, you know--that if
+I can get home--"
+
+(Something in his little blue eye shone sympathetically, and she leant
+towards him.) "Well, I'll tell _you_! There is a dance to-night in Metz,
+and I am asked. And tell him that I have bought two boxes of cigars
+for him!"
+
+The Bearskin, enchanted, promised to do his best.
+
+By half-past twelve the three were back at lunch in the hotel. Over the
+coffee Monsieur Raudel looked reflectively at his well-shaped nails.
+
+"Well, mademoiselle, so this is what it is to have a woman chauffeur--"
+
+Fanny looked up nervously, regretting her confidence in the Bearskin.
+
+"Apart from the pleasure of your company with us, we get cheap cigars,
+and you get your dance, so every one is pleased."
+
+"Oh!" She was radiant. "But you haven't hurried too much? Are we really
+starting back?"
+
+Monsieur Raudel, who was a new man when he wasn't cold, reassured her,
+and soon they were all packed in the Renault, and running out of Treves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE CRINOLINE
+
+That same night as dusk fell she shook the snow from her feet and
+clothes and entered the dressmaker's kitchen. Four candles were burning
+beside the gas, and the tea-cups lay heaped and unwashed upon
+the dresser.
+
+"Good-evening, good-evening," murmured a number of voices, German and
+French, and the old dressmaker, standing up, her face haggard under the
+gas, took both Fanny's hands with a whimper:
+
+"It will never be done! Oh, dear child, it will _never_ be done!"
+
+The crinoline which they were preparing lay in white rags upon the
+table.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, that is good! Are you helping too?" Elsa had brought three of
+her friends with her, and the four bright, bullety heads bent over the
+long frills which moved slowly through their sewing fingers. "_Good_
+Conquered Children!" They were sewing like little machines.
+
+"The Fraeulein Schneiderin," explained Elsa, "is so upset."
+
+And this was evident and needed no explaining. The little lady twisted
+her fingers, grieved and scolded, snatching at this and that, and
+rapping with her scissors upon the table as though she were going to
+wear the dress herself.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I had to get them." She nodded towards the busy Conquered
+Children, apologising for them as though she feared Fanny might think
+she had done a deal with the devil for her sake.
+
+"Here are my frills," said Fanny, bringing from her pocket two paper
+parcels, one of which she laid in mystery upon the table, the other
+opened and shook out her two long frills. She drew off her leather coat
+and sat down to sew.
+
+"Oh, how calm you are!" burst out the dressmaker. "How can you be so
+calm? It won't be finished."
+
+"Yes, yes, yes. It's only half-past five. Can I have a needle?"
+
+"My mother had a dress like this before the last war." (This for the
+fiftieth time.) "And will your _amoureux_ be there?" she asked with the
+licence of the old.
+
+"Well, yes," said Fanny smiling, "he will."
+
+"And what will he wear?"
+
+"Oh, it's a secret. I don't know. But I chose this particular dress
+because it is so feminine, and it will be the first time he has seen me
+in the clothes of a woman."
+
+"Children, hurry, hurry!" cried the dressmaker, in a frenzy of sympathy.
+"Minette, get down!" She slapped the grey cat tenderly as she lifted him
+off the table. "Tell them in their language to hurry!" she exclaimed.
+"_I_ never learnt it!"
+
+But, after the breath of excitement, followed her poor despair, and she
+dropped her hands in her lap. "It will never be done. I can't do it."
+
+"Look, my dear, courage! The bodice is already done ... Have you had any
+tea?"
+
+"The children ate. I couldn't. I am too excited. But you are so calm.
+You have no nerves. It isn't natural!"
+
+Yet she ate a little piece of cake, scolding the cat and the children
+with her mouth full, prowling restlessly above their bent heads as they
+sewed and solidly sewed.
+
+At the end of an hour and a half the nine frills were on the skirt, the
+long hoops of wire had been run in, and the hooks and eyes on the belt.
+
+Often the door opened and shut; visitors came and went in the room; the
+milk woman put her head in, crying: "What a party!" and left the tiny
+can of milk upon the floor: Elsa's mother came to call her daughter to
+supper, but let her stay when she saw the dress still unfinished. Now
+and then some one would run out of the flat opposite, the flat above or
+the flat next door and, popping a head in at the door, wish them good
+luck. All the building seemed to know of the crinoline that was being
+made in the kitchen.
+
+"You do not smoke a pipe?..." said the dressmaker softly, with
+appreciation.
+
+"But none of us do!"
+
+"Oh, pardon, yes! I saw it yesterday. A great big girl dressed like you
+with her hands in her pockets and a pipe in her mouth. It made an effect
+on me--you can hardly believe how it startled me! I called Madame
+Coppet to see."
+
+"I know it wasn't one of us. And (it seems rude of me to say so) I even
+think the woman you saw was French."
+
+"Oh, my dear, French women never do that!"
+
+"Well, they do when they get free. They go beyond us in freedom when
+they get it The woman you saw (I have seen her, too) works with the men,
+shoulder to shoulder, eats with them, smokes with them, drinks with
+them, drives all night and all day, and they say she can change a tyre
+in two minutes.
+
+"There was a woman, too, who drove a lorry between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc,
+not a tender, you know, but a big lorry. She wore a bit of old ermine
+round her neck, knickerbockers, and yellow check stockings. One could
+imagine she had painted her face by the light of a candle at four in the
+morning. She never wore a hat, and her short yellow hair stuck out over
+her face which was as bright as a pink lamp shade."
+
+"Terrible."
+
+"She may have been, but she worked hard! She was always on that road. Or
+she would disappear for days with her lorry and come back caked in rouge
+and mud. I wish I could have got to know her and heard where she went
+and the things that happened to her."
+
+"But, my dear, I keep thinking what a strange life it is for you. Are
+you always alone on your car?"
+
+"Always alone."
+
+"You are with men alone then all the time?"
+
+"All the time."
+
+"Well, it's more than I can understand. It's part of the war."
+
+Elsa bent across the table and picked up the folded bodice, murmuring
+that it was done. The dressmaker rose, and reaching for the hooped
+skirt, held it up between her two arms. It was a thrilling moment.
+Fanny, too, rose. "Put it on a dummy," she commanded. Candles were
+placed around the dummy, who seemed to step forward out of the shades of
+the kitchen, and offer its headless body to be hooked and buttoned into
+the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schoen!" said
+Elsa's shiny-headed friends, peering with their mouths open.
+
+"Ah, dear child, you were so calm, and now it is done!" said the old
+dressmaker.
+
+The dress stood stiffly glittering at them, white as snow, the nine
+frills pricking away from the great hooped skirt.
+
+Fanny picked up the brown paper parcel she had laid on the dresser,
+taking from it a bottle of blue ink, a bottle of green, and a paint
+brush, and diluted the inks in a saucer under the tap. There was awe in
+the kitchen as she held the brush, filled with colour, in the air, and
+began to paint blue flowers on the dress.
+
+At the first touch of the brush the old dressmaker clasped her hands.
+"What is she doing, the English girl! And we who have kept it so
+white...."
+
+"Hush," said Fanny, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"
+
+The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that
+Fanny felt her hair stir on her neck. She covered the plain, tight-
+waisted bodice with dancing flowers in blue and green.
+
+On the frills of the skirt a dozen large flowers were painted as though
+fallen from the bodice. Soon it was done.
+
+"Like that! In five minutes!" groaned the dressmaker, troubled by the
+peculiar growth of the flowers.
+
+"Let it dry," said Fanny. "I'll go home and start doing my hair. Elsa
+will bring it round when it's dry."
+
+The old woman held out both her hands, in a gesture of mute
+congratulation and fatigue.
+
+"Now rest," said Fanny. "Now sleep--and in the morning I will come and
+tell you all about it," and ran out into the snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The top hook of the bodice would not meet. With her heart in her mouth,
+with despair, she pulled. Then sat down on the bed and stared blankly
+before her.
+
+"Then if _that_ won't meet, all, all the dress is wasted. I can't go.
+No, right in the front! There is nothing to be done, nothing to be
+done!" She sat alone in the room, the five candles she had lighted
+guttering and spilling wax. She was in the half-fastened painted bodice
+and a fine net petticoat she had bought at Nancy. Even the green silk
+bedroom slippers were on, tied round her ankles with ribbons, the only
+slippers she had found in Metz, and she had searched for them for hours.
+
+The room was icy cold, and the hand of the clock chasing towards the
+hour for the dance. Should she go in uniform? Not for the world.
+
+She would not meet him, and it seemed as though there could be no
+to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This
+meeting had had a peculiar significance--the flouncy, painted dress, the
+plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in
+absurd anguish she sat still on the bed.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, Elsa, look!" Better the child than no one, and the shiny head
+was hanging round the door. ("Wie schoen!")
+
+"But it isn't _schoen_! Look! It won't meet!"
+
+"Oh!..." Elsa's eyes grew round with horror, and she went to fetch her
+mother. "Tanzen!" They talked so much of "tanzen" in that household. The
+thin mother was all sympathy, and stood in helpless sorrow before the
+gap in the bodice.
+
+"What's all this?" and _der Vater_ stood in the doorway, heavy as lead,
+and red as a plum.
+
+"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident,
+and "Oh!..." said Elsa's mother, and disappeared. She came back with
+three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa's hat, and the gap in the
+bodice was hidden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_He was not there_. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows
+in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she
+could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the
+entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but
+others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into
+the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress
+chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she
+shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the
+personality of the Commandant Dormans.
+
+At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks,
+clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the
+room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer,
+clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval,
+who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the
+swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that
+her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was
+the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over
+Duval's head, she tried to see through the crowd.
+
+Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian,
+standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish
+colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this
+evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the
+shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a
+further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep's wool,
+which made him seem fantastically tall.
+
+When Fanny had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit
+feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned
+willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold
+her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of
+wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung
+backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
+
+Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and
+came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff
+that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body
+that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery
+of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval
+breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the
+Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled
+her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her
+own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her
+meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the
+admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and
+the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say,
+without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and,
+the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her
+ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive...." Her sense of
+triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the
+reproach in his voice.
+
+She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to
+forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close
+enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into
+his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep's wool and painted flowers
+went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding
+his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of
+the room, and heard the dimmed music and the scrape of feet.
+
+For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre.
+For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the
+glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the
+weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very
+furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.
+
+They danced on, not wearing away the shining boards with their feet half
+so much as they wore away the thin ice above the enchanted lake.
+
+The Commandant Dormans crossed the room to them.
+
+"She must be drawn. She must go for her portrait. Spare me your partner.
+Mademoiselle, we have an artist, a _poilu_, drawing some of the dresses.
+Will you come with me and sit for yours?"
+
+She went into the little room and stood for the drawing; the door shut
+on her, and she and the artist faced each other. Through the door the
+music came softly, and as she stood, hands resting without a breath's
+stir on fold, on frill, head bent and wandering eyes, the artist with
+twitching face and moving hand looked up and down, up and down, and she
+sank, swaying a little upon her rooted feet, into a hypnotised
+tranquillity. She did not care what the man put upon the white paper
+with his flying hands; he might draw the flowers upon her skirt, but not
+the tall blooming flowers within her, growing fabulously like the lilies
+in a dream. Her thoughts went out to meet the waves of music floating
+through the door; her rooted body held so still that she no longer felt
+it, and her spirit hung unbodied in an exaltation between love which
+she remembered and love which she expected. No one came through the
+door; they left her in silence, enclosed in the cell of the room and of
+her dreams, and she was content to stand without movement, without act
+or thought. The near chair, the wall hard by, the golden room which she
+had just left so suddenly were alike to her; her eyes and her
+imagination were tuned to the same level, and there was no distinction
+between what was on her horizon and beyond it. Across the face of the
+artist the scenes in the room behind her passed in unarrested
+procession, and the voice of an illusory lover in her ear startled her
+by its clearness. The music wandered about the room like visible
+movement, and the artist, God bless him, never opened his mouth between
+his shower of tiny glances.
+
+"Finished, mademoiselle!" and he held the drawing towards her as he
+leant back with a sigh. He had made too many drawings that evening, and
+any talent he had hung in his mind as wearily as a flag in an airless
+room. With an effort she broke her position and moved towards him,
+taking up the drawing in her hand with a forced interest. "Yes, thank
+you, thank you," she said, and he took it back and laid it with the pile
+he had made. "You don't like it? But I'm so tired. Look at these others
+I did earlier in the evening...."
+
+But while she bent over them the door burst open and Dormans came in,
+followed by Duval and Dennis. "Is it finished? Let me look! Yes, yes,
+very good! Quite good!" They were pleased enough, and drew the artist
+away with them to the buffet.
+
+Suddenly Julien was with her and had closed the door. He was hurried,
+excited, and it seemed as though he said what he could no longer
+contain, as though the thought biggest in his mind broke in a bound from
+him. He was white and he exclaimed: "It's terrible how _much_ you could
+hurt me if you would!"
+
+He seemed to close his eyes a little then and lean his head towards her.
+She looked at the drooping, half-lit head, and she knew that she had him
+without fear of escape. Knew too, that the moment was brief. Their recent,
+undeclared silence brooded as though still with them, half regretful and
+departing angel. "You will have other beauties," she said to her heart,
+"but none like this silence."
+
+They were breathless. The ice had gone from the lake and the ship had
+not yet set sail. In a dream she moved down to the beach. She saw him
+open his eyes and stare at her incredulously. "I am going to break this
+beauty," she breathed alone, and put out her hand and launched the ship.
+He was by her side, the silence broken, the voyage begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+
+Clouds, yellow, mauve and blue, hung ominously over the road to Nancy.
+The valley was filled with shades, but the road itself gleamed like a
+bleached bone in a ditch. Seated upon the dashboard of her wounded car,
+Fanny had drummed her heels for warmth since morning, and seemed likely
+soon to drum them upon a carpet of snow. Beneath the car a dark stream
+of oil marked the road, and the oil still dripped from the differential
+case, where the back axle lay in two halves.
+
+"I will telephone to your garage," her "client" had promised, as he
+climbed on to a passing lorry and continued his journey into Nancy. With
+that she had to be content, while she waited, first without her lunch,
+and then without her tea, for the breakdown lorry which his telephone
+message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four
+o'clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold
+made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve
+shades thickened upon the sky no flake of snow had fallen.
+
+Only last night, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been preparing for
+the dance; and only last night she had said to Julien ... What had she
+said to Julien? What had he said to her? Again she was deep in a reverie
+that had lasted all day, that had kept her warm, had fed her.
+
+She was almost asleep when a man's voice woke her, and she found a car
+with three Americans drawn up beside her.
+
+"I guess this is too bad," said the man who had woken her. "We passed
+you this morning on our way into Nancy, and here you are still looking
+as though you had never moved. 'Ain't you had any food since then?"
+
+"I haven't been so very hungry."
+
+"Not hungry? You're sure past being hungry! Lucky we've got food with us
+in the car. Pity we've got to hurry, but here's sandwiches and sandwiches,
+and cakes and candy, and bits of bunstuff, and an apple. And here's a
+cheese that's running out of its wrappin'. When's your show coming to
+fetch you? 'Ain't you coming home along with us?"
+
+"They won't be long now. Oh, you are good...." Fanny's hunger revived as
+she took the food, and now she was waiting ungratefully for them to be
+gone that she might start on her heavensent meal.
+
+"Good-bye, ma'am," they cried together.
+
+"Good-bye," she waved, and as their car passed onwards she climbed up on
+to the mudguard and spread the rug over her knees.
+
+The slow night grew out of nothing, expanded, and nearly enveloped the
+slopes of the hill below. The wind dropped in the cloudy, heavy
+twilight, and the papers of the sandwiches did no more than rustle upon
+her knees. Not prepared yet to light her car lamps, Fanny laid her torch
+upon her lap, and its patch of white light lit her hands and the piles
+of bread, cake, and fancy buns.
+
+Across the road in the deeper gloom that dyed the valley and spilt over
+its banks, a head rustled in the ragged border of twig and reed, and
+eyes watched the brightly-lighted meal which seemed to hang suspended
+above the vague shape of the motor car.
+
+With a sense of being perfectly alone, walled round by the gathering
+dusk, Fanny made a deep inroad upon her sandwiches and cake, finishing
+with the apple, and began to roll up what remained in case of further
+need, should no one come to fetch her.
+
+She reflected that her torch would not last her long and that she ought
+to put it and light her head and tail lamps instead, but, drowsy with
+pleasure in her lonely dinner, she sat on, prolonging the last moments
+before she must uncurl her feet and climb down on to the ground. The
+torch slipped from her knee on to a lower fold of the rug, lighting only
+the corner of a packet in which she had rolled the cake.
+
+Suddenly, while she watched it, the gleam of the corner disappeared. She
+stared at the spot intensely, and saw a hand, a shade lighter than the
+darkness, travel across the surface of the rug, cover with its fingers
+the second parcel and draw it backwards into what had now become dense
+night. Her skin stirred as though a million antennae were alive upon it;
+she could not breathe lest any movement should fling the unknown upon
+her; her eyes were glued to the third packet, and, in a moment, the hand
+advanced again. With horror she saw it creep along the rug, a small
+brown, fibrous hand, worn with work. The third packet was eclipsed by
+the fingers and receded as the others had done, but as it reached the
+edge of the rug, overflowing horror galvanised her into movement, and
+catching the corners of the rug she threw it violently after the package
+and over the hand, at the same moment jumping from her seat and on to
+the footboard, to grope wildly for the switch. Her heart was leaping
+like a fish just flung into a basket, and every inch of her body winced
+from an expected grasp upon it. She flung herself over the side and into
+the seat of the car, found the switch and pushed it.
+
+A dozen Chinese at least were caught in the two long beams that flew out
+across the darkness. For a second their wrinkled faces stared, eyes
+blinked, and short, unhollowed lips stretched over yellow teeth, then,
+with a flutter of dark garments, the Chinese started away from the fixed
+beams and were gone into the shadow. Except for the sudden twitter of a
+voice, the spurt of a stone flung up against the metal of the car, they
+melted silently out of sight and hearing. Sick with panic, Fanny leant
+down upon her knees and covered her head with her two arms, expecting a
+blow from above. Seconds passed, and ice-cold, with one leg gone to
+sleep, she lifted her head, switched off the lights and stared into the
+night. She could see nothing, and gradually becoming accustomed to the
+darkness, she found that they had completely disappeared. The rug, too,
+had gone, and all three packets of sandwiches. Cautiously, with
+trembling legs, she stepped upon the footboard.
+
+Something hit her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to
+suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in
+its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...."
+she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture
+them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were
+now far from her on their way to some encampment.
+
+Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she
+prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
+There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
+
+Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and
+curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road
+around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between
+the spokes of the wheels.
+
+Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car,
+and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the
+hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly
+bent, with a knob at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure,
+but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming
+out from Pont-a-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps
+glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his
+thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through
+the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
+
+The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and
+climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled
+about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the
+open valley on the left.
+
+"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
+
+"Hardly yet, _mon capitaine_. It was unlucky the _brigadier_ should be
+at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but
+it wants two men to tow in the car."
+
+"This is Marbache!"
+
+In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a
+handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately
+darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind
+burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the glass.
+
+"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the
+right here."
+
+The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes
+drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The
+left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and
+deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+A pale light hung in the dark ahead of them.
+
+"Is it a car? No."
+
+"Yes, lamps. With the beam broken by the snow."
+
+"Go slow."
+
+For fear of blinding the driver of a lighted vehicle which might, after
+all, be moving, one of the men put out his hand and switched off the
+headlights, and the car glided forward on its own momentum.
+
+Thus they came upon Fanny, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an
+obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her
+mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in
+her right hand, the torch ready as a signal in her left.
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Well, yes, my poor child!" And she saw the man behind him, and laughed.
+
+"Help me down. Within and without I am set in plaster."
+
+"You look like a poor, weather-chipped goddess, or an old stone pillar
+with a face."
+
+"Be careful, that leg will not stand.... Oh, look, look how the snow
+clings. It's frozen on my lap."
+
+"We must be quick. Everything must be quickly done, or we shall all stay
+here."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that now!"
+
+"What have you got in your hand? Give it to me."
+
+"That's a weapon. I almost needed it. Where is the lorry?"
+
+"The garage was empty. The _brigadier_ was at Thionville. The lorry had
+a spring broken."
+
+"And they told you?"
+
+"I did not call at the 'C.R.A.' office till late in the day, or you
+would have been fetched long ago. Come along! Have you got your things
+together? We must take them back in the other car. And the magneto too."
+
+"We're to leave the car after all my guarding care?"
+
+"No; here's Pichot volunteered to take your place."
+
+"Has he got food with him and rugs. My rug has gone...."
+
+"He has everything. Come along! Let's put everything of value into the
+other car."
+
+When they had finished the night air was clear of snowflakes; hill, road
+and valley were lit by the pallor of the fallen snow.
+
+Fanny followed Julien to the other car. He swung the handle and jumped
+into the driving seat. "Come...." he said, and held out a hand.
+
+"Good-night, Pichot. We'll send for you early in the morning."
+
+"Good-night, _mon capitaine._ Good-night, mademoiselle."
+
+They moved forward, and the moon like a wandering lamp lit their faces.
+
+"Blow out, old moon!" said Julien, turning his silvered face and hair up
+to the sky. The moon flew behind a cloud.
+
+"Quick!" he said.
+
+"What?"
+
+... and kissed her. The jacks and tyres and wheels and bolts fluttered
+out of Fanny's head like black ravens and disappeared. They flew on,
+over the bridge at Pont-a-Moussons, up the shining ruinous street.
+
+"Crouch lower!" said Julien. "If any one wanted to, they could count
+your eyelashes from the windows."
+
+"Ah, yes, if there was any one to count...." She glanced up at the
+fragmentary pronged chimneys, the dark, unstirring caves of brick.
+
+Soon the church clocks of Metz rang out, quarrelling, out of time with
+one another.
+
+"Do you know this isn't going to last?" said Julien suddenly, as if the
+clocks had reminded him.
+
+She turned swiftly towards him.
+
+"The Grand Quartier is moving?"
+
+"Ah, you knew? You had heard?"
+
+"No, no," she shook her head. "But do you think I haven't thought of it?
+I keep thinking, 'We can't stay here for ever. Some end will come.' And
+then--'It will come this way. The Grand Quartier will go.'"
+
+"But you are going with it."
+
+"Julien! Is that true?"
+
+"Certain. It was settled to-day. We are actually leaving in three days
+for Chantilly; and you, with all the garage, all the drivers, and the
+offices of the 'C.R.A.' are to be at Precy-sur-Oise, five miles away."
+
+"But you are at Precy too?"
+
+"No, I have to be at Chantilly. And worse than that ... The bridge over
+the Oise at Precy is blown up and all cars have to come sixteen miles
+round to Chantilly by another bridge. I am in despair about it. I have
+tried every means to get Dormans to fix upon another village, but he is
+obstinate, and Precy it must be for you, and Chantilly for me. But don't
+let's think of it now. Wait till you've eaten and are warm, and we can
+plan. Here are the gates!"
+
+He handed out the paper pass as a red light waved to and from upon the
+snow. First the Customs-men, Germans still, in their ancient civic
+uniform. "Nothing to declare?" Then the little soldier with the lantern
+in his hand: "Your pass, _ma belle!_" As he caught sight of Julien,
+"Pardon, mademoiselle!" Lastly, up the long road into the open square by
+the station, down the narrow street, splashing the melted snow-water
+against the shop windows, and under the shadow of the cathedral.
+
+"Put the car away and come and dine with me at Moitriers."
+
+She looked at him astonished. "The car? Whose car is it? Does it belong
+to our garage?"
+
+"It will in future. It arrived last night, fresh from Versailles. I am
+arranging with Dennis for you to take it over to-morrow."
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "A beautiful Renault! A brand new Renault!..."
+
+He laughed. "Hurry, or you will faint with hunger. Put it away and come,
+just as you are, to Moitriers, up into the balcony. I am going there
+first to order a wonderful dinner."
+
+In a quarter of an hour they were sitting behind the wooden balustrade
+of the balcony at Moitriers--the only diners on the little landing that
+overhung the one fashionable restaurant in Metz. It was a quarter to
+nine; down below, the room, which was lined with mirrors set in gilt
+frames, was filled with light; knives and forks still tapped upon the
+plates, but the hour being late many diners leant across the strewn
+tablecloths and talked, or sat a little askew in their chairs and
+listened. A hum filled the warm air, and what was garish below, here,
+behind the balustrade, became filtered and strained to delicate streaks
+and bars of light which crossed and recrossed their cloth, their hands,
+their faces--what was noisy below was here no more than a soft insect
+bustle, a murmurous background to their talk.
+
+The door of the balcony opened behind them, and Madame Berthe, the
+proprietress herself, moved at their side; her old-fashioned body,
+shaped like an hour-glass, was clothed in rucked black silk, which
+flowed over her like a pigment; flowed from her chin to the floor, upon
+which it lay stiffly in hills and valleys of braided hem. Her gay gold
+tooth gleamed, and the gold in her ears wagged, as she fed them gently
+on omelette, chicken and tinned peas, and a _souffle_ ice.
+
+They talked a little, sleepy after the wind, smiling at each other.
+
+"Don't you want more light than that?" said Madame Berthe, coming in
+again softly with the coffee.
+
+Fanny shook her head. "Not any more than this."
+
+Then they were left alone, stirring the coffee, gazing down between the
+wooden columns at the diners below.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked, as a sigh escaped her companion.
+
+"The move to Chantilly. I am so loth to break up all this."
+
+"Break up?"
+
+"Ah, well, it changes, doesn't it? Even if it is no longer the same
+landscape it changes!"
+
+After a silence he added: "How fragile it is!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You!" He covered her hand with both his. "You! What I think you are,
+and what you think I am. Love and illusion. Too fragile to be given to
+us with our blunders and our nonsense."
+
+She watched him, silent, and he went on:
+
+"I don't understand this life. That's why I keep quiet and smile, as you
+say I do. There are often things I don't say when I smile."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh, I wonder how much you believe me. And I listen to that immense
+interior life, which talks such a different language. I _hate_ to move
+on to Chantilly."
+
+Suddenly she recognised that they were at a corner which he had wanted
+her to turn for days. There had been something he had hinted at,
+something he wanted to tell her. He chafed at some knowledge he had
+which she did not share, which he wanted her to share.
+
+Once he had said: "I had letters this morning which worried me...."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"One in particular. It hurt me. It gave me pain."
+
+But she had not wanted to ask what was in the letter. Then he had grown
+restless, sighed and turned away, but soon they had talked again and it
+had passed.
+
+And now to-night he said:
+
+"Look how detached we are in this town, which is like an island in the
+middle of the sea. We behave as though we had no past lives, and never
+expected any future. Especially you."
+
+"Especially I?"
+
+"You behave as though I was born the day before you met me, and would
+die the day after you leave me. You never ask anything about me; you
+tell me nothing about yourself. We might be a couple of stars hanging in
+mid air shining at each other. And then I have the feeling that one
+might drop and the other wouldn't know where to look for it."
+
+But after a little silence the truth burst out, and he said with
+despair: "Don't you want to know _anything_ about me?"
+
+(Yes, that was all very well. She did, she did. But not just this that
+was coming!)
+
+And then he told her....
+
+     *     *     *     *     *
+
+"What is she like ... Violette?"
+
+"Fair."
+
+After several low questions she seemed to stand between them like a
+child, thin and fair, delicate and silent, innocently expecting to be
+spared all pain.
+
+"No, she doesn't go out very much. She stays indoors and does her hair,
+and her nails, and reads a little book."
+
+"And have you known her for a long time?"
+
+"A long time...."
+
+After this they pretended that she did not exist, and the little wraith
+floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when
+she had written him certain letters which had brought tears into
+his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+Fanny turned again to seek the lights of the town and the dagger points
+of the churches that climbed against the sky upon the hill behind her,
+but all that met her eyes was the blanket of wet darkness, and the
+shimmer of the snowflakes under the lamps.
+
+She slipped through the garage gates, touching the iron bars ... "almost
+for the last time."
+
+"But what does it matter? All towns are the same and we sing the same
+song in each and wear the same coloured feathers." She stirred the snow
+in the yard with her foot. "An inch already and the Renault has so
+little grip upon the snow. Shall we be able to start to-morrow?"
+
+Then she set out to look for a heap of snow chains which she had noticed
+before in a corner of the yard. Not far from her another little torch
+moved in the darkness, and under its downward ray she caught sight of a
+khaki skirt and a foot. "Someone else has thought of chains, too! And
+there are so few!" She clicked off her light and moved stealthily along
+the forest of cars, her fingers sweeping blankets of snow from the
+mudguards. Passing the first line of corpse-cars she saw the light
+again. "She's in the wrong place!" she thought, and hurried on. "Those
+bags of chains are just behind the Berliet they brought in backwards."
+Behind the Berliet little mounds showed in the snow. She stooped over
+them, shading her light with her knees, and dug in the light powder with
+her hand, pulling out a small canvas bag which she dusted and beat with
+her fingers.
+
+"Are you looking for chains?" she called to the other light, her bag
+safely in her arms.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"They are here. Here! In this corner!"
+
+"Who are you?" cried the voice.
+
+But she slipped away in silence to the garage door; for on this last
+black and white night in Metz she longed to creep about unspoken to,
+unquestioned. A little soldier sat on guard by a brazier of glowing
+charcoal near the door. She nodded to him as she moved down the long
+line of cars to her own.
+
+There it stood, the light of the brazier falling faintly upon it, the
+two points of the windscreen standing up like the ready ears of an
+interested dog, the beautiful lines of its body, long bonnet and
+mudguards stretched like a greyhound at a gallop, at rest until the
+dawn. She flung the bag of chains inside, and, patting the bonnet,
+slipped away and out into the street without attempting to try the fit
+of the chains upon the wheels.
+
+She slept a last night in the dark red German room three streets
+away--first making a little tour of the walls in her nightgown, the
+candle flame waving from her hand, the hot wax running in a cascade over
+her fingers--and looked at the stag's horn fastened to the bracket and
+the cluster of Christmas postcards pinned to the wall.
+
+The postcards arrested her attention, and a light darted in her mind.
+They were dark postcards, encrusted with shiny frosting, like the snow
+outside. Little birds and goblins, a wreath of holly, and a house with
+red mica windows were designed on them. She put out a finger and gently
+touched the rough, bright, common stuff; standing opposite them, almost
+breathless with a wave of memory. She could see herself no taller than
+the nursery fireguard, with round eyes to which every bright thing was a
+desire. She could feel herself very small amid the bustle and clatter of
+Christmas, blowing dark breath marks against the bright silver on the
+table, pulling the fringe round the iced cake, wetting her finger and
+picking up "hundreds and thousands" with it from a bag.
+
+These postcards now in front of her were made by some one with the mind
+of a child. It struck and shook her violently with memory to see them.
+"That's why the Germans write good fairy stories!" she thought, and her
+eyes passed to the framed photographs that hung near the postcards,
+pictures of soldiers in uniform, sitting at a table with the two
+daughters of the house. But these wooden faces, these bodies pressing
+through unwieldy clothes seemed unrelated to the childish postcards.
+
+She went contentedly to her bed, the room, bare of all her belongings,
+except the one bag that stood, filled and open, upon the table; sleeping
+for the last time in the strange bed in the strange town which she might
+never see again. It was time indeed to go.
+
+For days past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old
+horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk
+chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the
+strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture
+that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain
+was returning through all the roads of France, repacked and dusted, to
+set up the spirit of civilian life again.
+
+It was time to go, following all the other birds of passage that war had
+dragged through the town of Metz--time to make way for the toiling
+civilian with his impedimenta of civilisation.
+
+In the morning when she opened her eyes the room was darker than usual,
+and the opening of the window but the merest square of light. Snow was
+built up round the frame in thick rolls four inches high.
+
+She dressed hurriedly and rolled up the sleeping-sack with her few last
+things inside it. Out in the street the snow was dry and thick and
+beautifully untrodden. The garage gates looked strange, with a thick
+white banner blown down each side of the pillars. She looked inside the
+garage shed. Yes, all the cars had gone--hers stood alone, the suitcases
+inside, tyres pumped stiff and solid, the hood well buckled back.
+
+"Mademoiselle hasn't gone with the convoy?" said the _marechal des
+logis_, aghast.
+
+"Oh, I'm separate," she laughed.
+
+"But the convoy is gone."
+
+"I know it. But I'm not with them. It's an order. I'm going alone."
+
+"_Bien_. But do you know the route?"
+
+"I'm not going by it."
+
+He laughed, suddenly giving up all attempt at responsibility, and bent
+to catch her starting handle.
+
+"Oh, don't worry."
+
+"Yes, it's your last day, I may as well help you to go away."
+
+The engine started easily and she drove out of the garage into the yard,
+the wheels flying helplessly in the snow, and flinging up dry puffs like
+flour. "Haven't you chains?" said the _marechal des logis_. But she
+smiled and nodded and could not wait. "Good-bye--good-bye to all the
+garage," she nodded and waved. The sun broke out from behind a cloud,
+her brass and glass caught fire and twinkled gaily, the snow sparkled,
+the gate-posts shone at her. She left the garage without a regret in her
+heart, with not a thought in her head, save that in a minute she would
+be safe, no accident could stop her, she would be abroad upon the magic,
+the unbelievable journey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were in a small circular room, shaped like an English oasthouse,
+its roof running upwards in a funnel to meet the sky. At the apex was a
+round porthole of thick glass to let in the light, but as this was
+supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected
+only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the
+centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes
+were fine and black--her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever,
+lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her
+cheeks rose up and cut the black eyes into hoops.
+
+"We are on a long journey, madame, to Chantilly. We are cold; can we
+have coffee?"
+
+She drew out chairs and bade them sit, then placed two tall glasses of
+coffee in the ring of light from the lamp, sugar melting in a sandy heap
+at the bottom of each.
+
+"What an odd shape your house is!" said Julien, looking round him.
+
+"It's very old, like me. And the light is poor. You have to know it to
+get used to it," she replied.
+
+"You've only that one window?" He stared up the funnel to where he
+could see the grey underside of the cone of snow.
+
+"But I can make that one better than it is; and then the lady can see
+herself in this little glass!" The old woman moved to the side of the
+wall where a rope hung down. "_Elle a raison_; since she has a gentleman
+with her! I was the same--and even not so long ago!"
+
+She put up her thin arm and gave the rope a long pull. She must have
+been strong, for the skylight and all its burden opened on a hinge, and
+the snow could be seen sliding from it, could be heard in a heavy body
+rumbling on the roof. She closed the skylight, and now a wan light
+filtered down the funnel and turned their faces green. It was like life
+at the bottom of a well, and they felt as though the level of the earth
+was far above their heads, and its weighty walls pressing against
+their sides.
+
+"But why is it built this way?"
+
+"Many houses are," said the old woman with a shrug. "It's old, older
+than my mother." She sat down beside them. "Soldiers have been drunk in
+here many times in the war," she said. "And in the old war, too. But I
+never saw one like you." She pinched Fanny's sleeve. "Fine stuff," she
+said. "The Americans are rich!"
+
+"I'm not American."
+
+"Rich they are. But I don't care for them. They have no real feeling for
+a woman. You are not stupid, _ma belle_, to get a Frenchman for a lover."
+
+"Don't make him vain."
+
+"It is the truth. He knows it very well. Why should he be vain? An
+American loves a pretty face; but a Frenchman loves what is a woman."
+She rose and lifted the lamp, and let its ray search out a corner of the
+room wherein the great bed stood, wooden and square, its posts black
+with age, its bedding puffed about it and crowned with a scarlet
+eiderdown as solid and deep as the bed itself.
+
+"A fine bed; an old bed; it is possible that you will not believe me,
+but I shared that bed with a bishop not two years ago."
+
+Fanny's eyes were riveted on the bed.
+
+Julien laughed. "In the worst sense, mother?"
+
+"In the best, my son," bragged the old woman, sliding a skinny finger to
+the tip of her nose. "You don't believe me?"
+
+Coming nearer, she stood with the lamp held in her two hands resting on
+the table, so that she towered over them in fluttering shawl and shadow.
+
+"He arrived in the village one night in a great storm. It was past the
+New Year and soldiers had been coming through the street all day to go
+up to the lines beyond Pont-a-Moussons. I've had them sleeping in here
+on the floor in rows, clearing away the table and lying from wall to
+wall so thick that I had to step on them when I crossed the room with my
+lamp. But that night there were none; they were all passing through up
+to the front lines, and though the other end of the village was full, no
+one knocked here. There was snow as there is to-day, but not lying still
+on the ground. It was rushing through the air and choking people and
+lying heavy on everything that moved outside. That glass of mine up
+there was too heavy for me to move so I let it be. A knock came at the
+door in the middle of the night, and when I got up to unbar the door
+there was a soldier on the doorstep. I said: 'Are you going to wake me
+up every night to fill the room with men?' And he said: 'Not to-night,
+mother, only one. Pass in, monsieur.'
+
+"It was a bishop, as I told you. _Un eveque_. A great big man with a red
+face shining with the snow. If he had not been white with snow he would
+have been as black as a rook. He stamped on the cobbles by the door and
+the snow went down off him in heaps, and there he was in his beautiful
+long clothes, and I said to myself: 'Whatever shall I do with him? Not
+the floor for such a man!' So there we were, I in my red shawl that
+hangs on the hook there, and he in his long clothes like a black baby
+in arms, and his big man's face staring at me over the top.
+
+"'I can't put you anywhere but in my bed,' I told him. I told him like
+that, quickly, that he might know. And he answered like a gentleman, the
+Lord save his soul: 'Madame, what lady could do more!'
+
+"'But there's only one bed' I told him (I told him to make it clear),
+'and I'm not young enough to sleep on the floor.' Not that I'm an old
+woman. And he answered like a gentleman, the Lord save him...."
+
+"I will tell _you_ the end," said the old woman, drawing near to Julien
+as he took some money from his pocket to pay for the coffee.
+
+Two hours later they drew up at a _cafe_ in the main square at Ligny.
+
+Within was a gentle murmur of voices, a smell of soup and baking bread;
+warm steam, the glow of oil lamps and reddened faces.
+
+Sitting at a small table, with a white cloth, among the half-dozen
+American soldiers who, having long finished their lunch, were playing
+cards and dominoes, they ordered bread-soup, an omelette, white wine,
+brille cheese and their own ration of bully beef which they had brought
+in tins to be fried with onions.
+
+A woman appeared from the door of the kitchen, carrying their bowl of
+bread-soup. Across the plains of her great chest shone a white satin
+waistcoat fastened with blue glass studs, and above her handsome face
+rose a crown of well-brushed hair dyed in two shades of scarlet. A
+little maid followed, and they covered the table with dishes, knives and
+forks, bread and wine. The woman beamed upon Fanny and Julien, and
+laying her hand upon Fanny's shoulder begged them not to eat till she
+had fetched them a glass of her own wine.
+
+"You bet it's good, ma'am," advised a big American sergeant at a table
+near them. "You take it."
+
+She brought them a wine which shone like dark amber in a couple of
+glasses, and stood over them listening with pleasure to their
+appreciation while each slight movement of her shoulders sent ripples
+and rivers of heaving light over the waistcoat of satin.
+
+The butter round the omelette was bubbling in the dish, the brille had
+had its red rind removed and replaced by fried breadcrumbs, the white
+wine was light and sweet, and with the coffee afterwards they were given
+as much sugar as they wished.
+
+"I have seen her before somewhere," said Julien, as the scarlet head
+receded among the shadows of the back room. "I wonder where?"
+
+"One wouldn't forget her."
+
+"No. It might have been in Paris; it might have been anywhere."
+
+The little maid was at his elbow. "Madame would be glad if you would
+come to her store and make your choice of a cigar, monsieur."
+
+"Well, I shall know where I met her. Do you mind if I go?"
+
+He followed the girl into the back room. Fanny, searching in her pocket
+for her handkerchief, scattered a couple of German iron pennies on the
+floor; an American from the table behind picked them up and returned
+them to her. "These things are just a weight and a trouble," he said.
+"I think I shall throw mine away?"
+
+"You've come down from Germany, then?"
+
+"Been up at Treves. They do you well up there."
+
+"Not better than here!"
+
+"No, this is an exception. It's a good place."
+
+"Madame is a great manager."
+
+"Hev' you got more German pennies than you know what to do with?" said
+the American sergeant who had advised her to drink the wine. "Because,
+if you hev' so hev' I and I'll play you at dominoes for them."
+
+As Julien did not return at once, Fanny moved to his table and piled her
+German pennies beside her, and they picked out their dominoes from
+the pile.
+
+"I want to go home," said the American, and lifted up his big face and
+looked at her.
+
+"You all do."
+
+"That's right. We all do," assented another and another. They would make
+this statement to her at every village where she met them, in every
+_estaminet_, at any puncture on the road over which they helped her
+--simply, and because it was the only thing in their minds.
+
+"Do you hev' to come out here?" he enquired.
+
+"Oh, no. We come because we like to."
+
+Thinking this a trumpery remark he made no answer, but put out another
+domino--then as though something about her still intrigued his heavy
+curiosity: "You with the French, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like that too?"
+
+He sat a little back into his chair as though he felt he had put her in
+a corner now, and when she said she even liked that too, twitched his
+cheek a little in contempt for such a lie and went on playing.
+
+But the remark worked something in him, for five minutes later he
+pursued:
+
+"I don't see anything in the French. They ain't clean. They ain't
+generous. They ain't up-to-date nor comfortable."
+
+Fanny played out her domino.
+
+"They don't know how to _live_," he said more violently than he had
+spoken yet.
+
+"What's living?" she said quickly. "What is it to live, if _you_ know?"
+
+"You want to put yourself at something, an' build up. Build up your
+fortune and spread it out and about, and have your house so's people
+know you've got it. I want to get home and be doing it."
+
+"Mademoiselle actually knows it!" said Julien in the doorway to the
+red-haired woman in the back room, and Fanny jumped up.
+
+The American passed four iron coins across the table. "'Tisn't going to
+hinder that fortune I'm going to make," he said, smiling at last.
+
+"What do I know?" she asked, approaching the doorway, and moving with
+him into the back room.
+
+"Madame owns a house in Verdun," said Julien, "and I tell her you know
+it."
+
+"_I_ know it?"
+
+"Come and drink this little glass of my wine, mademoiselle," said the
+red-haired woman good-humouredly, "and tell me about my poor little
+house. I had a house on the crown of the hill ... with a good view
+... and a good situation (she laughed) by the Cathedral."
+
+"Had you? Well, there are a great many by the Cathedral," Fanny answered
+cautiously, for she thought she knew the house that was meant.
+
+"But my house looked out on the _citadelle_, and stood very high on a
+rock. Below it there was a drop and steep steps went down to a street
+below."
+
+"Had you pink curtains in the upper windows?"
+
+"Is it not then so damaged?" demanded the woman eagerly, dropping her
+smile. "The curtains are left? You can see the curtains?"
+
+"No, no, it is terribly damaged. If it is the house you mean I found a
+piece of pink satin and a curtain ring under a brick, and there is a sad
+piece which still waves on a high window. But wait a minute, excuse me,
+I'll be back." She passed through the cafe and ran out to the car,
+returning in a moment with something in her hand.
+
+"I fear I looted your house, madame," she said, offering her a small
+cylindrical pot made of coarse clouded glass, and half filled with a
+yellowish paste. "I found that inside on the ground floor; I don't know
+why I took it."
+
+The woman held it in her hand. "Oh!" she wailed, and sliding down upon
+the sofa, found her handkerchief.
+
+"_Mais non!_" said Julien, "you who have so much courage!"
+
+"But it was my own _face_!" she cried incoherently, holding out the
+little pot. "My poor little cream pot!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It was my face cream!"
+
+"How strange!"
+
+"I had not used it for a week because they had recommended me a new one.
+Ah! miraculous! that so small a thing should follow me!"
+
+She touched her eyes carefully with her handkerchief, but a live tear
+had fallen on the waistcoat.
+
+"Tell me, mademoiselle ... sit down beside me, my dear ... the poor
+little house is no more good to me? I couldn't live there? Is there
+a roof?"
+
+"You couldn't live in it."
+
+"But the roof?"
+
+"It was on the point of sliding off; it was worn like a hat over one
+ear. The front of the house is gone. Only on the frame of one window
+which sticks to the wall could I see your piece of pink curtain
+which waves."
+
+"My poor, pretty house!" she mused. "My first, you know," she said in an
+undertone to Julien. "Ah, well, courage, as you say!"
+
+"But you are very well here."
+
+"True, but this isn't my vocation. I shall start again elsewhere. And
+Verdun itself, Mademoiselle, can one live in it?"
+
+"No, not yet. Perhaps never."
+
+"Well, well...."
+
+"Madame, we must move on again," interrupted Julien. "We have a long way
+to go before night."
+
+The woman rose, and turning to a drawer, pulled out a heap of soiled
+papers, bills and letters. "Wait," she said, "wait an instant!"
+
+Turning them over she sought and found a couple of old sheets pinned
+together, and unpinning them she handed one to Fanny.
+
+"It is the receipt for the cream," she said, "that I want to give you.
+It is a good cream though I left the pot behind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun sank and the forests around Chantilly grew vague and deep. White
+statues stood by the roadside, and among the trees chateaux with closed
+eyes slept through the winter. Every tree hung down beneath its load of
+snow; the telephone wires drooped like worsted threads across the road.
+
+Fanny, who had left Julien at his new billets in Chantilly, drove on
+alone to the little village on the Oise which was to be her home. It was
+not long before she could make out the posts and signals of the railway
+on her left, and the river appeared in a broad band below her. The moon
+rose, and in the river the reeds hung head downwards, staring up at the
+living reeds upon the bank.
+
+"PRECY."
+
+It gleamed upon a signpost, and turning down a lane on the left she came
+on a handful of unlighted cottages, and beyond them a single village
+street, soundless and asleep. A chemist's shop full of coloured glasses
+was lit from within by a single candle; upon the step the chemist stood,
+a skull cap above his large, pitted face.
+
+Somewhere in the shuttered village a roof already sheltered her
+companions, but before looking for them she drew up and gazed out beyond
+the river and the railway line to where the moon was slowly lighting
+hill after hill. But the spectral summer town which she sought was
+veiled in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+PRECY-SUR-OISE
+
+The light of dawn touched Paris, the wastes of snow surrounding her,
+forests, villages scattered in the forest and plains around Senlis,
+Chantilly, Boran, Precy. The dark receded in the west; in the east a
+green light spread upwards from the horizon, touched the banks of the
+black Oise, the roofs of the houses of Precy, the dark window panes, and
+the flanks of the granite piers that stood beheaded in the water--all
+that was left of the great bridge that had crossed from bank to bank.
+
+Above the river stood the station hut and the wooden gates of the level
+crossing, upon which the night lantern still hung; above again a strip
+of snow divided the railway line from the road, at the other side of
+whose stone wall the village itself began, and stretched backwards up
+a hill.
+
+Upon a patch of snow above the river and below the road stood a
+flourishing little house covered with gables and turrets; and odd shapes
+like the newel-posts of staircases climbed unexpectedly about the roof.
+In summer, fresh with paint, the outside of the house must wave its
+vulgar little hands into the sky, but now, everything that bristled upon
+it served only as a fresh support for the snow which hung in deep
+drifts on its roof, and around its balconied windows. It stood in its
+own symmetrical walled garden, like a cup in a deep saucer, and within
+the wall a variety of humps and hillocks showed where the bushes
+crouched beneath their unusual blanket. One window, facing towards the
+railway and the river, had no balcony clinging to its stonework, and in
+the dark room behind it the light of the dawn pressed faintly between
+the undrawn curtains. A figure stirred upon the bed within, and Fanny,
+not clearly aware whether she had slept or not, longed to search the
+room for some heavier covering which, warming her, would let her sink
+into unconsciousness. Her slowly gathering wits, together with the
+nagging cold, forced her at last from the high bed on to the floor, and
+she crossed the room towards the light. In the walled garden below
+strange lights of dawn played, red, green and amber, like a crop of
+flowers. The railway lines beyond the garden wall disappeared in fiery
+bands north and south, lights flashed down from the sky above and winked
+in the black and polished river; at the limit of the white plain beyond,
+a window caught the sun and turned its burning-glass upon the snow.
+
+"Chantilly...." A word like the dawn, filled with light and the promise
+of light! Turning back into the dim room, she flung her coat upon the
+bed, climbed in and fell asleep. Three hours later something pressed
+against her bed and she opened her eyes again. The room was fresh with
+daylight, and Stewart standing beside her carried a rug on her arm and
+wore a coat over her nightgown. "I'm coming down to have chocolate in
+your room...."
+
+Fanny watched her. Stewart climbed up beside her wrapped in the rug. A
+knock at the door heralded the entry of a woman carrying a tray. Fanny
+watched her too, and saw that she was fresh, smiling, clean and big, and
+that steam flew up in puffs from the tray she carried. The woman pulled
+a little table towards the bed and set the tray on it.
+
+"This is Madame Boujan!" said Stewart's voice.
+
+Fanny tried to smile and say "Good morning," and succeeded. She was not
+awake but knew she was in clover. The cups holding the steaming
+chocolate were as large as bowls, and painted cherries and leaves
+glistened beneath their lustre surface. Beside the cups was a plate with
+rolls, four rolls; and there were knives and two big pots which must be
+butter and jam.
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+Fanny rolled nearer to the chocolate, sniffed it and pulled herself up
+in bed. The woman, still smiling beside them, turned and hunted among
+the clothes upon the chair; then held a jersey towards her shoulders and
+guided her arms into its sleeves. Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other
+similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery
+wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of
+a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned figure as this,
+by a smile on just such a pink face; or wakings after illness when her
+freshening life had leapt in her at the sound of a blind drawn up, at
+the sight of the white-cuffed hand that pulled the cord.
+
+Oh, heavenly woman, who stood beside the tray, who fed her and warmed
+her while she was yet weak and babyish from sleep! Beyond her the white
+plains of beauty shone outside the window.... She sat up and smiled:
+"I'm awake," she said.
+
+And Madame Boujan, having seen that her feet were set upon the threshold
+of day, went out of the door and closed it softly.
+
+They held the lustre bowls cupped in their hands and sipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During lunch in the little villa, while they were all recounting their
+experiences, Madame Boujan came softly to Fanny's side and whispered:
+
+"A soldier has brought you a note from Chantilly."
+
+"Keep it for me in the kitchen," Fanny answered, under her breath,
+helping herself to potatoes.
+
+"Will you come and cut wood for the bedroom fire?" said Stewart, when
+lunch was over. "I bought a hatchet in the village this morning."
+
+"Come down by the river first," insisted Fanny, who had her note in her
+hand.
+
+"Why? And it gets dark so soon!"
+
+"I want to find a boat."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To cross the river."
+
+"To cross the river! Do you want to see what's on the other side?"
+
+"Julien will be on the other side.... I have had a letter from him. I am
+to dine in Chantilly. He will send a car at seven to wait for me in the
+fields at the other side of the broken bridge, and trusts to me to find
+a boat. Come over the level crossing to the river."
+
+They passed the station hut and came to a little landing stage near
+which a boat was tied.
+
+"There's a boat," said Stewart. "Shall we ask at that hut?"
+
+The wooden hut stood above their heads on a pedestal of stone; from its
+side the haunch of the stone bridge sprang away into the air, but
+stopped abruptly where it had been broken off. The hut, once perhaps a
+toll-house, was on a level with what had been the height of the bridge,
+and now it could be reached by stone steps which wound up to a small
+platform in front of the door. From within came men's voices singing.
+
+"Look in here!"
+
+A flickering light issued from a small window, and having climbed the
+steps they could see inside. Two boys, about sixteen, a soldier and an
+old man, sat round a table beneath a hanging lamp, and sang from scraps
+of paper which they held in their hands. Behind the old man a girl stood
+cleaning a cup with a cloth.
+
+"They are practising something. Knock!"
+
+But there was no need, for a dog chained in a barrel close to them set
+up a wild barking.
+
+"Is he chained? Keep this side. The old man is coming."
+
+The door opened. The voices ceased; the girl stood by the old man's
+side.
+
+"Yes, it could be arranged. People still crossed that way; their boat
+was a sort of ferry and there was a charge.
+
+"There might be a little fog to-night, but it didn't matter. Margot
+knows the way across blindfold--Margot would row the lady. She would be
+waiting with a lantern at five minutes to seven; and again at half-past
+nine. Not too late at all! But Margot would not wait on the other side,
+it was too cold. They would lend the lady a whistle, and she must blow
+on it from the far bank."
+
+"There's romance!" said Fanny, as they came away.
+
+"Not if you are caught."
+
+"There's my magic luck!"
+
+"How dare you ask like that? Even if you are not superstitious, even if
+you don't believe a word of it, why be so defiant--why not set the
+signs right!"
+
+"Oh, my dear Stewart, I hardly care! And to the creature who doesn't
+care no suspicion clings. Haven't I an honest face? Would you think it
+was me, me, of all the Section, to cross the river to-night, in a little
+boat with a lantern, to creep out of the house, out of the village, to
+dine forbidden in Chantilly, with some one who enchants me! You
+wouldn't. Why, do you know, if I lived up in their house, under their
+eyes, I would go out just the same, to cross the river. I wouldn't climb
+by windows or invent a wild tale to soothe them, but open the door and
+shut the door, and be gone. And would anybody say: 'Where's Fanny?'"
+
+"They might."
+
+"They might. But they would answer their own question: 'Innocently
+sleeping. Innocently working. Innocently darning, reading, writing.'
+I don't suspect myself so why should any one else suspect me!"
+
+Fanny broke off and laughed.
+
+"Come along and cut wood!"
+
+They moved off into the woods as people with not a care in the world,
+and coming upon a snow-covered stack of great logs which had been piled
+by some one else, began to steal one or two and drag them away into a
+deep woodland drive where they could cut them up without fear of
+being noticed.
+
+They worked on for an hour, and then Stewart drew a packet of cake from
+her coat pocket, and sitting upon the logs they had their tea.
+
+Soon Fanny, wringing her hands, cried:
+
+"I'm blue again, stiff again, letting the cold in, letting the snow
+gnaw. Where's the hatchet?"
+
+For a time she chopped and hacked, and Stewart, shepherding the
+splinters which flew into the snow, piled them--splinters, most precious
+of all--_petit bois_ to set a fire alight; and the afternoon grew bluer,
+deeper. Stewart worked in a reverie--Fanny in a heat of expectation. One
+mused reposedly on life--the other warmly of the immediate hours
+before her.
+
+"Now I'm going to fetch the car," said Stewart at last. "Will you stay
+here and go on cutting till I come? There are two more logs."
+
+She walked away up the drive, and Fanny picked the hatchet out of the
+snow and started on the leathery, damp end of a fresh log. It would not
+split, the tapping marred the white silence, and yet again she let the
+hatchet fall and sat down on the log instead. It was nearly six--they
+had spent the whole afternoon splitting up the logs, and making a fine
+pile of short pieces for firewood; the forest was darkening rapidly,
+blue deepened above the trees to indigo, and black settled among the
+trunks. Only the snow sent up its everlasting shine. Her thoughts fell
+and rose. Now they were upon the ground busy with a multitude of small
+gleams and sparkles--now they were up and away through the forest
+tunnels to Chantilly. What would he say first? How look when he met her?
+
+"Ah, I am a silly woman in a fever! Yet happy--for I see beauty in
+everything, in the world, upon strange faces, in nights and days. Upon
+what passes behind the glassy eyes" (she pressed her own) "depends
+sight, or no sight. There is a life within life, and only I" (she
+thought arrogantly, her peopled world bounded by her companions) "am
+living in it. We are afraid, we are ashamed, but when one dares talk of
+this strange ecstasy, other people nod their heads and say: 'Ah, yes, we
+know about that! They are in love.' And they smile. But what a
+convention--tradition--that smile!"
+
+There was no sound in the forest at all--not the cry of a bird, not the
+rustle of snow falling from a branch--but there was something deeper and
+remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the
+face of the forest--an effective silence which was not blankness--a
+voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his
+place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of
+receiving a guest.
+
+"Oh, what wretched earnest I am in," she thought, suddenly chilled. "And
+it can only have one end--parting." But she had a power to evade these
+moods. She could slip round them and say to herself: "I am old enough--I
+have learnt again and again--that there is only one joy--the Present;
+only one Perfection--the Present. If I look into the future it is lost."
+
+She heard the returning car far up the forest drive, and in a moment saw
+the gleam of its two lamps as they rocked and swayed. It drew up, and
+Stewart put out the lamps, ever remembering that their logs were stolen.
+There was still light enough by which they could pack the car with wood.
+As they finished Stewart caught her arm: "Look, a fire!" she said,
+pointing into the forest. Through a gap in the trees they could see a
+red glow which burst up over the horizon.
+
+"And look behind the trees--the whole sky is illumined--What a fire!" As
+they watched, the glare grew stronger and brighter, and seemed about to
+lift the very tongue of its flame over the horizon.
+
+"It's the moon!" they cried together.
+
+The cold moon it was who had come up red and angry from some Olympic
+quarrel and hung like a copper fire behind the forest branches. Up and
+up she sailed, but paling as she rose from red to orange, from orange to
+the yellow of hay; and at yellow she remained, when the last branch had
+dropped past her face of light, and she was drifting in the height
+of the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE INN
+
+They drove back to the village and down to their isolated villa, and
+here on the road they passed ones and twos of the Section walking
+into supper.
+
+"How little we have thought out your evasion!" whispered Stewart at the
+wheel, as they drew up at the door: "Get out, and go and dress. I will
+take the car up to the garage and come back."
+
+Fanny slipped in through the garden. What they called "dressing" was a
+clean skirt and silk stockings--but silk stockings she dared not put on
+before her brief appearance at supper. Stuffing the little roll into her
+pocket she determined to change her stockings on the boat.
+
+Soon, before supper was ended, she had risen from the table,
+unquestioned by the others, had paused a moment to meet Stewart's eye
+full of mystery and blessing, had closed the door and was gone.
+
+She slipped down the road and across the field to the railway. There was
+a train standing, glowing and breathing upon the lines, and the driver
+called to her as she ran round the buffers of the engine. Soon she was
+down by the riverside and looking for Margot. Though there was moonlight
+far above her the river banks were wrapped in fog that smelt of water,
+and Margot's face at the hut window was white, and her wool dress white,
+too. She came down and they rowed out into the fog, in an upward circle
+because of the stream. Fanny could just see her companion's little blunt
+boots, the stretched laces across her instep, and above, her pretty face
+and slant eyes. Hurriedly, in the boat she pulled off the thick stockings,
+rolled them up, and drew on the silk. A chill struck her feet. She wrapped
+the ends of her coat lightly round her knees and as she did so the roll
+of thick stockings sprang out of her lap and fell overboard into the fog
+and the river.
+ 
+"Mademoiselle goes to a party?" said Margot, who had not noticed. The
+soft sympathetic voice was as full of blessing as Stewart's eyes had
+been.
+
+"Yes, to a party. And you will fetch me back to-night when I whistle?"
+
+"Yes. Blow three times, for sometimes in the singing at home I lose the
+sound."
+
+The opposite bank seemed to drift in under the motionless boat, and she
+sprang out.
+
+"A tout a l'heure, mademoiselle."
+
+At the top of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker
+on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious
+eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up
+the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by
+Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed
+along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched form of
+a tree.
+
+Strange that the fog should reach so much further inland on this side of
+the river. Perhaps the ground was lower. Standing still her ear caught a
+rich, high, throaty sound, a choking complaint which travelled in the air.
+
+"It is the car," she thought. Far away a patch of light floated in the
+sky, like an uprooted searchlight.
+
+"That is the fog, bending the headlights upward."
+
+She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew
+nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky
+and pierced her--she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.
+
+Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red,
+wooden face like a Hindoo god made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said:
+"We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed
+car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.
+
+"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop
+a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly
+and the street is very full."
+
+"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."
+
+Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted
+this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt
+antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both
+with his cynical impassivity.
+
+"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from
+Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!
+
+In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug--her expectations closing,
+unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the glass of the car
+and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man
+could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of
+the Grand Conde. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty
+car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of
+the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as
+the car stopped.
+
+"Now mademoiselle!"
+
+And there stood Julien, at the end of the passage, he whom she had left,
+sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She
+saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited,
+he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.
+
+"Fanny, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous etes en beaute!"
+
+Within, a table was laid for three--three chairs, three plates, three
+covers. He saw her looking at this.
+
+"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.
+My old friend--Where is Alfred?"
+
+"I am here."
+
+"My old friend--four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.
+He has heard--"
+
+("----Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend;
+he is against me!")
+
+"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand.
+She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he
+beheld it too.
+
+"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But
+he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.
+
+"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to
+the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I
+am not allowed."
+
+The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little
+eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has
+made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly
+decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man,
+how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him.
+Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said,
+and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not
+perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk,
+Fanny, talk, Fanny, you have an audience. To-night you have two to
+dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might
+as easily dazzle a mahogany god, a little god alive beneath its casing
+with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined
+to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe
+her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should
+she want to be praised, she had it from his eye--or be assured of love,
+it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of
+Alfred, he could put nothing into words--because he must be dumb she
+could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.
+
+She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an
+addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk
+with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.
+
+When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back
+with the car in half an hour, to take Fanny to the river.
+
+"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.
+Fanny said she would. "And _do_ you like him?" Fanny said she did.
+
+"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time
+through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."
+
+"Did she treat him badly?"
+
+"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"
+
+"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.
+
+"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over
+life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her
+was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never
+still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and
+carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the
+horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated
+upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him
+this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat
+beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had
+been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan-
+Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage
+into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and
+coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared,
+and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note for
+him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the roses,
+she never has written one since."
+
+"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"
+
+"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was
+distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.
+He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next
+morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't
+be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country
+where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself,
+'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later
+in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing
+all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and
+the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had
+taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the
+remaining horse."
+
+"It was then he grew cool about women!"
+
+"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who
+insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not
+understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'
+
+"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
+'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
+What shall I do?'
+
+'Why _shouldn't_ you marry her?' I said.
+
+And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that
+he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he
+said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much.
+You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'
+
+"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the
+girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as
+tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of
+courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her
+alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl
+herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her
+to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the
+house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and
+then to England."
+
+"But why did the girl--?"
+
+"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to
+anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct,
+but it was inexplicable."
+
+"He should have asked her twice."
+
+"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused
+him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was
+a whim."
+
+"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest
+run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we
+are flawed?"
+
+"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in
+women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold
+he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a
+creature half-lunatic, half-snake."
+
+"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"
+
+"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of
+putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much
+heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says
+is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."
+
+"But--(alas, poor Alfred)--you have made a charming confidante for us!"
+
+"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"To anything, to any one I care for."
+
+"Not to me. What you have told me is the key to his expression when he
+looks at me. If he is devoted to you it is not an unreasoning devotion,
+and he is judging me poisonous to you. As he has himself been hurt, he
+will not have you hurt. I wish he had never come. I wish he might never
+be my driver to the river, and your friend, and our enemy."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"I wish it. I am unhappy about him, and unhappiness is always punished.
+While we were in Metz every one smiled at us; here every one will spy
+us out, scold, frown, punish--"
+
+"And your magic luck?"
+
+"Alfred threatens my luck," she said. Then, with another look, "Are you
+angry with me? Can you love such a character?"
+
+"I love it now."
+
+"You have never heard me when I scold, or cry or am sulky?..."
+
+"Never."
+
+"But if I make the experiment?"
+
+"I could make a hundred experiments, but I make none of them. We cannot
+know what to-morrow may bring."
+
+This she remembered suddenly with all her heart.
+
+"Come nearer to me, Fanny. Why are you sitting so far away?"
+
+She sat down nearer to him; she put all her fingers tightly round his
+wrist.
+
+"I am not always sure that you are there, Julien; that you exist."
+
+"Yet I am substantial enough."
+
+"No, you are most phantom-like. It is the thought of parting that checks
+my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the
+thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with;
+that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in
+me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it,
+steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short
+a time. I have had nothing but pleasure from you; isn't it possible that
+I can escape without pain?"
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"No, no, no!" She laid her cheek upon his hand. "Do something to make it
+easier. Must it be that when you go you go completely? Promise me at
+least that it will be gradual, that you will try to see me when you have
+taken up your other life."
+
+"But if I can't? If you are ordered back to Metz?"
+
+"Why should I be? But, if I am, promise me that you will try. If it is
+only an artifice, beguile me with it; I will believe in any promise."
+
+"You don't need to ask me to promise; you know you don't need to make me
+promise. Wherever you are sent I will try to come. _Wherever_--do you
+hear? Do you think that that 'other' life is a dragon to eat me up? That
+it will be such bliss to me that I shall forget you completely? It isn't
+to be bliss, but work, hard work, and competition. It is the work that
+will keep me to Paris, not my happiness, my gaiety, my content with
+other faces. That would comfort me if I were listener, and you the
+speaker. But, Fanny, Fanny, I never met any one with such joy as you--it
+is you who change the forest and the inns we meet in, make the journeys
+a miracle. Don't show me another face. We have been in love without a
+cloud, without scenes, without tears. You have laughed at everything.
+Don't change, don't show me someone whom I don't know; _not that
+sad face_!"
+
+"This then!" She held up a face in whose eyes and smile was the hasty
+radiance his fervour had brought her--and at sight of it the words broke
+from him--"Are you happy so quickly?"
+
+"Yes, yes, already happy."
+
+"Because I speak aloud of what I feel? What a doubting heart you have
+within you! And I believe you only pretend to distress yourself, that
+you may test whether I am sensitive enough to show the reflection of it.
+Come! Well--am I right?"
+
+"Partly. But I need not think. Oh, I am glad your feeling is so like
+mine, and mine like yours! I will let the parting take care of itself
+--yet there is one thing about which I cannot tell. What does your
+heart do in absence, what kind of man are you when there is no one but
+Alfred, who will say: 'Forget her'?"
+
+"What kind do you think?"
+
+"While I am here beside you, you cannot even imagine how dim I might
+become. Can I tell? Can you assure me?"
+
+Dim she might become to him, but dim she was not now as she besought him
+with eyes that showed a quick and eager heart, eyes fixed on his face
+full of enquiry, sure of its answer, feigning doubt that did not
+distress her.
+
+"And I to you, and I to you?" he said, speaking in her ear when he had
+made her an answer. "Dim, too? Why do we never talk of your inconstancy?
+We must discuss it."
+
+"Inconstancy! That word had not occurred to me. It was _your_
+forgetfulness that I dreaded."
+
+"I shall not be unforgetful until I am inconstant."
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"My love!"
+
+"You can afford to tease me now you have me in such a mood!"
+
+"In such a mood! Have I, indeed? Yet you will forget me before I forget
+you."
+
+"You tell me to my face that I shall change?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. And since you are bound to forget me, I insist at least that there
+shall be a reason for doing so. I would rather be a king dethroned than
+allowed to lapse like a poor idiot."
+
+"You would? You can say that?" Her voice rose.
+
+"One instant, Fanny. Even when my teasing is out of taste, learn to
+distinguish it from what I say in earnest. My dear, my dear, why should
+you have to listen to the matter of _my_ philosophy and _my_ experience
+which tells me all creatures forget and are forgotten! No! I wipe out!
+You will not vanish--"
+
+The door opened and Alfred entered the room.
+
+"The car is ready," he said. "I have had trouble in getting here."
+
+Fanny turned to him. "I am ready," she said. "It is dreadful to have to
+trouble you to take me so late at night to the river."
+
+"No, no--" Alfred, glowing from the exercise in the snowy night outside,
+was inclined to be more friendly, or at least less sparing of his words.
+"Here are some letters that were at your lodging." He handed three
+to Julien.
+
+"When do you dine with me again?" Julien, holding the letters, placed
+his hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"I cannot tell what the work will be. Perhaps little, as the snow is
+deep."
+
+"It is snowing again outside," said Alfred.
+
+"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."
+
+"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.
+I will send you a note, Fanny."
+
+"That is quite easy, is it?"
+
+"Easy. But compromising."
+
+"Oh, surely--not very?"
+
+"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But
+he will find a way to send it."
+
+Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are
+going?" as though it distressed him.
+
+"I must."
+
+"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here--"
+
+He found it.
+
+"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper
+with the final date. I will look--"
+
+"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the passage. "It is
+snowing wildly."
+
+"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large
+unfolded document.
+
+"When, when--?" Fanny, hanging on his words, watched him.
+
+"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"
+
+"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the
+paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say--ah, wait,
+did I register at Charleville or Paris?"
+
+"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."
+
+"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges
+of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.
+
+"Fanny, it has come sooner than I expected."
+
+She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.
+
+"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her
+in a minute."
+
+"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany god, grown wooden again
+under the light, and retreated.
+
+"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those
+days I didn't know you--"
+
+"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me--only tell me _which_ day!
+To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.
+
+"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better
+than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before
+me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. Fanny,
+it is only a change, not a parting!"
+
+Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!
+Julien, bring her!"
+
+"One instant. She is coming. Fanny, I must think it out. Until I go--I
+shall have time--we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I
+must come often to see my land and my factory."
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Often, I must--"
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"
+
+"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is
+absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."
+
+"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry,
+good-night, good-night!"
+
+She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he
+pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"
+
+At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed
+her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and
+the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE RIVER
+
+The indifferent Alfred drove his unhappy burden towards the river.
+Walled in by the rush of snowflakes about him he made what way he could,
+but it was well-nigh impossible to see. The lamps gave no light, for the
+flakes had built a shutter across the glass like a policeman's dark
+lantern. The flying multitudes in the air turned him dizzy; he could not
+tell upon which side of the road he drove, and he could not tell what he
+would do when the wall beyond the outskirts of Chantilly forsook him. As
+to what was happening below him, what ruts, ditches, pits or hillocks he
+was navigating, he had no idea; his ship was afloat upon the snow,
+sluggishly rolling and heaving as it met with soft, mysterious
+obstacles.
+
+Heaviness and gloom sat upon the velvet seat behind him. The white, wild
+night outside was playful and waggish compared with the black dejection
+behind the opaque glass windows.
+
+Fanny, who could not see her hand move in the darkness, saw clearly with
+other miserable and roving eyes the road that lay before her.
+
+"Julien, good-bye. Don't forget me!" That she would say to him in a few
+days; that was the gate, the black portal which would lead her into the
+road. That she would say, with entreaty, yet no painful tones of hers
+would represent enough the entreaty of her heart that _neither would
+forget the other_. She thought of this.
+
+Not in wilful unreason, or in disbelief of his promise, she looked at
+this parting as though it might be final. Without him she could see no
+charm ahead. And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner
+she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this
+enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work
+upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving
+comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.
+
+Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently
+employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of
+Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide,
+second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter
+storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the
+forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him
+with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the
+illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung
+on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He
+turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the
+centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night
+was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the
+most resolved and native traveller.
+
+He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are
+filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself
+wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or
+melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the
+true road from the false. He chose a road which instantly he saw to be
+no road. Too late. He pitched, this time not to recover. "A river--a
+river-bed!" was his horrified thought. Down went the nose of the car
+before him, the steering-wheel hitting him in the chest. Down came Fanny
+and all her black thoughts against the glass at his back. The car had
+not fallen very far; it had slid forward into a snow-lined dyke, and
+remained, resting on its radiator, its front wheels thrust into the
+steep walls of the bank, its back wheels in the air. Alfred climbed down
+from a seat which had lost its seating power; Fanny opened the door and
+stepped from the black interior into the deep snow. The front lamps were
+extinguished and buried in the opposite bank, the little red light at
+the back shone upwards to heaven.
+
+"Well--"
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Are you hurt?"
+
+"Not at all. And you?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+Their cold relations did not seem one whit changed from what they had
+been in the inn. Nothing had intervened but a little reflection, a
+little effort, and a vigorous jerk. Why should they change? They stood
+side by side in the noisy violence of the storm, and one shouted to the
+other: "Can you get her out!" and the other answered, "No."
+
+"I will walk on to the river."
+
+"You would never find it."
+
+The truth of this she saw as she looked round.
+
+Alfred left her and descending into the dyke, went on his knees by the
+radiator and fumbled deep in the snow with his hand. A hissing arose as
+the heated water ran from the tap he had turned. He emptied the water
+from the generator; the tail light sank and went out.
+
+"No one will run into her," he remarked. "No one will pass."
+
+Aie--screamed the wind and created a pillar of white powder. Fanny,
+losing her balance, one foot sank on the edge of a rut, and she went
+down on her hands; to the knees her silk-clad legs met the cold bite
+of the snow.
+
+"You must come back with me," shouted Alfred in her ear.
+
+That seemed true and necessary; she could not reach the river; she could
+not stay where she was. She followed him. At the next ditch he put out
+his hand and helped her across. They had no lamp. By the light of the
+snow she watched his blue-clad legs as they sank and rose; her own
+sinking and rising in the holes he left for her, the buffets of wind
+un-steadying her at every step. She followed him. And because she was as
+green as a green bough which bursts into leaf around a wound, the
+disturbing, the exciting menace of her discovery brightened her heart,
+set her mind whirling, and overgrew her dejection.
+
+They gained the Chantilly wall, and experienced at once its protection.
+The howling wind passed overhead and left them in a lew; the dancing
+snowflakes steadied and dropped more like rain upon them; she moved up
+abreast of Alfred.
+
+"I will take you back to the inn," he said. "They will have a room
+there."
+
+"Julien will have left and gone to his lodging."
+
+"Yes, at the other end of the town," answered Alfred, she fancied with
+grim satisfaction. ("Though it is as well," she thought; "there will be
+less scandal in the eyes of the innkeeper.")
+
+"To-morrow morning, mademoiselle, I will fetch you at six with another
+car and its driver, Foss, a man whom I can trust. We will take you to
+the river, and on the return journey drag the car from the ditch. It
+should be easy; she has not heeled over on her side."
+
+"That will be marvellous. I cannot tell you how I apologise."
+
+This, she began to see, was serious; her debt to the enemy Alfred was
+growing hourly.
+
+"No, no," he said, as though he saw the thing in the light of common
+justice. "You have come over to dine with Julien; we must get you back
+to the river."
+
+"Nevertheless it's monstrous," she thought, "what he has to do for me."
+
+But Alfred regarded it less as a friendly office towards Julien than as
+a duty, an order given by an officer. He was a sergeant, and four years
+of war had changed him from an irritable and independent friend to a
+dogged and careful subordinate. He did not like Fanny any the more for
+the trouble she was giving him; but he did not hold her responsible for
+his discomforts. She must be got to the river and to the river he
+would get her.
+
+Pray heaven she never crossed it again.
+
+When they arrived on the pavement outside the inn, he said: "Knock,
+mademoiselle, and ask if there is a room. It would be better that I
+should not be seen. Explain that the snow prevented you from returning.
+If there is a room do not come back to tell me, I shall watch you enter,
+and fetch you at six in the morning."
+
+She thanked him again, and following his instructions, found herself
+presently in a small room under the eaves--pitied by the innkeeper's
+wife, given a hot brick wrapped in flannel by the innkeeper's daughter,
+warmed and cheered and, in a very short time, asleep. At half-past five
+she was called, dressed herself, and drank a cup of coffee; paying a
+fabulous bill which included two francs for the hot brick.
+
+At six came Alfred, in another car, seated beside Foss, the new driver,
+a pale man with a grave face. They moved off in the grey dawn which
+brightened as they drove. Beyond the Chantilly wall the plain stretched,
+and on it the labouring wheel-marks of the night before were plainly
+marked. Alfred, beside the driver, let down a pane of glass to tell her
+that he had already been out with Foss and towed in the other car. She
+saw the ditch into which they had sunk, the scrambled marks upon the
+bank where she had been towed out. In ten minutes they were in the midst
+of the forest.
+
+Now, Fate the bully, punishing the unlucky, tripping up the hurried,
+stepped in again. This car, which had been seized in a hurry by cold and
+yawning men, was not as she should be.
+
+"Is she oiled?" Foss had called to the real driver of the car.
+
+"She is ... everything!" answered the man, in a hurry, going off to his
+coffee. She was not.
+
+Just as the approaching sun began to clear the air, just as with a
+spring at her heart Fanny felt that to be present at the opening of a
+fine day was worth all the trouble in the world, the engine began to
+knock. She saw Foss's head tilt a little sideways, like a keen dog who
+is listening. The knock increased. The engine laboured, a grinding set
+in; Foss pulled up at the side of the road and muttered to Alfred. He
+opened the bonnet, stared a second, then tried the starting handle. It
+would not move. Fanny let down the pane of glass and watched them in
+silence. "Not a drop," said Foss's low voice. And later, "Oil, yes,
+but--find me the tin!"
+
+"Do you mean there is no oil, no spare oil--" Alfred hunted vainly round
+the car, under the seats, in the tool box. There was no tin of oil.
+
+"If I had some oil," said Foss, "and if I let her cool a little, I could
+manage--with a syringe."
+
+They consulted together. Alfred nodded, and approached the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I am going on to the next village to get a tin
+of oil. There is a garage. Cars will be passing soon; I must ask you to
+lie covered with the rug in the bottom of the car; your uniform is very
+visible. Foss will remain with you."
+
+Fanny lay down in the bottom of the car, fitting her legs among a couple
+of empty petrol tins; Foss covered her with the rug. A quarter of an
+hour went by, and above her she began to hear the voices of birds; below
+her the cold crept up. She had no idea how far the village might be, and
+it is possible that Alfred had had no idea either. A bicycle bell rang
+at her side; later she heard the noise of a car, which passed her with
+a rush. Lying with her ear so close to the poor body of the motor she
+felt it to be but cold bones in a cemetery, dead, dead.
+
+Outside in the road, Foss shaded his eyes and looked up the now sparkling
+road a hundred times. The motors increased; the morning traffic between
+Precy and Chantilly awoke; the cars were going in to the offices of the
+G.Q.G. Now and then Foss would come to the window of the car. "Don't
+move," he would say. The floor-boards were rattled by an icy wind that
+blew over the face of the snow and up under the car; the brown, silk legs
+lay prone and stiff between the petrol cans, lifeless now to the knee.
+She was seized with fits of violent shivering. At one moment she had
+planned in her despair to call to Foss and tell him she would walk--but
+she had let the moment pass and now she put away the thought of walking
+on those lifeless feet. Besides, she would be seen--that well-known cap,
+bobbing back between the trees from Chantilly so early in the morning!
+
+"Oh, Honour of the Section, I am guarding you like my life!" She tried
+to raise her head a little to ease her neck.
+
+"Don't move," said Foss.
+
+Feet pattered past her; motors swept by; bicycle bells rang.
+
+"Foss," she said.
+
+The soldier leant towards her and listened.
+
+"Choose your own time, but you must let me sit up a moment. I am in
+pain."
+
+"Then, now, mademoiselle!"
+
+She sat up, flinging the rug back, dazzled by the splendour of the
+forest, the climbing sun, the heavy-burdened trees. Behind her was a
+cart coming up slowly; far ahead a cyclist swayed in the ruts of the
+road. As they approached her she pleaded: "They can't know me! Let
+me sit up--"
+
+But Foss knew only one master, his sergeant.
+
+"Better go down, mademoiselle."
+
+She went down again under the black rug, close against the wind that
+lifted the floor-boards, wrapping her coat more tightly round her,
+folding her arms about her knees.
+
+"It must be nearly eight. I have an hour more before they come in to
+breakfast. Ah, and when they do, will one of them go into my bedroom
+with my letters?"
+
+She tried to pick out in her mind that one most friendly to her, that
+one who was to destroy her. She heard in spirit her cry: "Fanny
+_isn't there!_"
+
+She thought of Stewart who would have woken early, planning anxiously to
+save her. The faces of the Guardians of the Honour of the Section began
+to visit her one by one, and horror spread in her. Then, pushing them
+from her, attempting to escape: "They are not all the world--" But they
+_were_ all the world--if in a strange land they were all to frown
+together. The thought was horrible. Time to get there yet! Alas, that
+the car was not facing _towards_ Chantilly--so early in the morning!
+
+"Foss, Foss, don't you see him coming?"
+
+"The road is full of people."
+
+A car rushed by them, yet never seemed to pass. The engine slowed down
+and a voice called: "What's up? Anything you want?"
+
+It was the voice of Roland Vauclin. Ah, she knew him--that fat, childish
+man, who loved gossip as he loved his food. To Fanny it seemed but a
+question of seconds before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good
+morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village
+spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay
+still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could not hear.
+
+Then she heard him clear his throat and speak.
+
+"The Captain asked me to get a bit of wood for his fire, sir. I have a
+man in there gathering branches, while I do a bit of 'business' with
+the car."
+
+"Oh, right!... Go on!" said Vauclin to his own chauffeur. Again they were
+left alone. Talk between them was almost impossible; Fanny was so
+muffled, Foss so anxiously watched for Alfred. The reedy singing between
+the boards where the wind attacked her occupied all her attention. The
+very core of warmth seemed extinguished in her body, never to be lit
+again. She remembered their last _fourier_, or special body-servant, who
+had gone on leave upon an open truck, and who had grown colder and
+colder--"and he never got warm again and he died, madame," the letter
+from his wife had told them.
+
+"I think he is coming! There is no one else on the road, mademoiselle.
+Will you look? I don't see very well--"
+
+She tried to throw off the rug and sit up, but her frozen elbow slipped
+and she fell again on the floor of the car. Pulling herself up she
+stared with him through the glass. Far up the white road a little figure
+toiled towards them, carrying something, wavering as though the ice-ruts
+were deep, picking its way from side to side. Neither of them was sure
+whether it was Alfred; they watched in silence. Before she knew it was
+upon her a car went by; she dived beneath the rug, striking her forehead
+on the corner of the folding seat.
+
+"Did they see? Was any one inside?"
+
+"It was an empty car. Please be careful."
+
+Foss was cold with rebuke. After that she lay still, isolated even from
+Foss. Ten minutes went by and suddenly Foss spoke--"Did you have to go
+far?"
+
+And Alfred's hard voice answered "Yes."
+
+Then she heard the two men working, tools clattering, murmured voices,
+and in ten minutes Foss said: "Try the starting handle."
+
+She heard the efforts, the labour of Alfred at the handle.
+
+"He will kill himself--he will break a blood-vessel," she thought as she
+listened to him. Every few minutes someone seized the handle and wound
+and wound--as she had never wound in her life--on and on, past the very
+limit of endurance. And under her ear, in the cold bones of the car, not
+a sign of life! Not a sign of life, and, as though she could hear them,
+all the clocks in the world struck nine.
+
+The Guardians of the Honour would be in at breakfast now! they would be
+sitting, sitting--discussing her absence. Stewart, upstairs, would be
+looking out of the window, watching the river, perhaps answering
+questions indifferently with her cool look. "Oh, in the garage--or
+walking in the forest. I don't know." Cough! She jumped as the bones in
+the bottom of the car moved under her, and the engine breathed. The
+noise died out, Foss leapt to the handle and wound and wound, fiercely,
+like a man who meant to make her breathe again or die. Again she
+struggled to life, lived for a few minutes, choked and was silent.
+
+"How is the handle?"
+
+"Pretty stiff," said Foss, "but getting better. Give me the oil squirt."
+
+Alfred took his place at the handle. Suddenly the car sprang to life
+again on a full deep note. Fanny lifted her head a little. Foss was
+leaning over the carburettor with his thin anxious look: Alfred stood
+in the snow, dark red in the face, and covered with oil. Soon they were
+moving along the road, slowly at first, and with difficulty: then faster
+and more freely. A little thin warmth began to creep up through the
+boards and play about her legs.
+
+She was carried along under her dark rug for another twenty minutes,
+then fell against the seat as the car turned sharply into the forsaken
+road that led to the broken bridge. In five minutes more the car had
+stopped and Alfred was at the door saying: "At last, mademoiselle!" She
+stammered her thanks as she tried to step from the car to the ground
+--but fell on her knees on the dashboard.
+
+"Have you hurt your foot?" said Alfred, who was hot.
+
+"I am only cold," she said humbly, unwilling to intrude her puny
+endurances on their gigantic labours.
+
+She sat on the step of the car rubbing her ankles, and stared at the
+meadows of thawing snow, at the open porches of stone which led the road
+straight into the river, at the church and the sunlit houses on the
+other side.
+
+Bidding them good-bye she reached the bank, and climbed down it,
+stumbling in the frozen mud and pits of ice till she reached the stiff
+reeds at the bank.
+
+The river had floes of ice upon it, green ice which swung and caught
+among the reeds at the edge. "It is thin," she thought, pushing her
+shoe through it, "it can't prevent the boat from crossing the river."
+Yet she was anxious.
+
+There on the other side was the little hut, the steps, the boat tied to
+the stone and held rigid in the ice. A shaggy dog ran by her feet to the
+river's edge and barked. Feet came clambering down the bank and a
+workman followed the dog, with a bag of tools and a basket. He walked up
+to the river, and putting his hands in a trumpet to his mouth called in
+a huge voice: "Un passant, Margot! Margot!" Fanny remembered her whistle
+and blew that too.
+
+There was no sign of life, and the little hut looked as before, like a
+brown dog asleep in the sun. Fanny turned to the man, ready to share her
+anxiety with him, but he had sat down on the bank and was retying a
+bootlace that had come undone.
+
+Margot never showed herself at the hut window, at the hut door. When
+Fanny turned back to whistle again she saw her standing up in the boat,
+which, freed, was drifting out towards them--saw her scatter the ice
+with her oar--and the boat, pushed upstream, came drifting down towards
+them in a curve to hit the bank at their feet. The girl stepped out,
+smiling, happy, pretty, undimmed by the habit of trade. The man got in
+and sat down, the dog beside him.
+
+"I would stand," said Margot to Fanny, "it's so wet."
+
+She made no allusion to the broken appointment for the night before.
+Fanny, noticing the dripping boards of the boat, stood up, her hand upon
+Margot's shoulder to steady herself. The thin, illusory ice shivered and
+broke and sank as the oar dipped in sideways.
+
+Cocks were crowing on the other side--the sun drew faint colours from
+the ice, the river clattered at the side of the boat, wind twisted and
+shook her skirt, and stirred her hair. All was forgotten in the glory of
+the passage of the river.
+
+Margot, smiling up under her damp, brown hair, took her five sous,
+pressed her town boots against the wooden bar, and shot the boat up
+against the bank.
+
+Fanny went up the bank, over the railway lines, and out into the road.
+Two hundred yards of road lay before her, leading straight up to the
+house. On the left was a high wall, on the right the common covered with
+snow--should some one come out of the house there was no chance of
+hiding. She glanced down at her tell-tale silk stockings; yet she could
+not hurry on those stiff and painful feet. She was near the door in
+the wall.
+
+She passed in--the dog did not bark; came to the foot of the steps
+--nobody looked out of the window; walked into the hall among their
+hanging coats and macintoshes, touched them, moved them with her
+shoulder; heard voices behind the door of the breakfast room, was
+on the stairs, up out of sight past the first bend, up, up, into
+Stewart's room.
+
+"_Do you know_...?"
+
+"_No one knows_!"
+
+"Oh ... oh...." All her high nerves came scudding and shuddering down
+into the meadows of content. Eternal luck.... She crept under Stewart's
+eiderdown and shivered.
+
+"Here's the chocolate. I will boil it again on my cooker. Oh, you have
+a sort of ague...."
+
+Good friend ... kind friend! She had pictured her like that, anxious,
+unquestioning and warm!
+
+Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon
+the Guardians of the Honour.
+
+As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes
+of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a
+gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud
+from her hands, her feet.
+
+"Had your breakfast?" said some one.
+
+"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
+
+She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form
+the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds
+of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her.
+Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
+
+But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third
+breakfast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+ALLIES
+
+A thaw set in.
+
+All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks,
+sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered,
+breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise,
+which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under
+its banks.
+
+With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and
+fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the
+dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet,
+and towers of wood.
+
+In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of
+aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a
+paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her
+mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the
+demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the
+familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
+
+She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She
+could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic
+forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but
+closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the
+lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving
+for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
+
+All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the
+villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the
+bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her,
+followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of
+wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a
+thawing forest.
+
+There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a
+bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of
+farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more
+for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly
+was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced
+at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.
+
+She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to
+accompany her on her journey only to turn back.
+
+All the way to Amiens he reassured himself and her: "In a week I will
+come to Charleville."
+
+And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week
+you will come."
+
+(Why then this dread?)
+
+"In a week--in a week," ran the refrain.
+
+"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"
+
+"No, I shall write to the 'Silver Lion.' You will find in the middle of
+the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window
+sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."
+
+"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said
+'Good-bye' to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."
+
+And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not
+contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered
+once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.
+
+"It isn't that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn't that I
+fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."
+
+"I, too, know that."
+
+They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.
+
+The rain poured.
+
+"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is
+mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I
+have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to
+think of that."
+
+"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."
+
+"Yes--oh, you will see it easily--on the banks of the Meuse. I was born
+there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time--I will come, too."
+
+She stopped the car in a side street of the town.
+
+Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed
+them back on the wheel. "They can't," she said, and shook her head.
+
+He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.
+
+"You take the three o'clock train back to Paris when the papers are
+through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh,
+we've said everything! Oh, let's get it over--"
+
+He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
+She drove down the street without looking back.
+
+There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that
+if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from
+her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was
+done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She
+had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she
+felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted
+her all the morning.
+
+She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond
+the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly,
+violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if
+I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
+
+But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in
+trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen
+that violent pain.
+
+She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small
+cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusee. Wherever
+her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within
+her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do
+instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went
+moving off down the street of her endless thought.
+
+"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out
+in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
+She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone
+behind her.
+
+Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
+
+Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were
+gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on
+each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through
+it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards
+ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
+
+Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white
+letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as
+everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins,
+carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
+
+At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
+
+"Will you give me a lift?"
+
+He sat down beside her.
+
+"What do you do?" she asked.
+
+"I look after Chinamen."
+
+"Ah, how lonely!"
+
+"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army
+gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up
+the crumbs."
+
+She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground
+indistinguishable from the rest.
+
+"Is that where you live?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to
+this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a
+friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the
+rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like
+action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving
+ground; passing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.
+
+Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and
+could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron,
+brown grass--brown grass and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway
+lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far
+between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing
+grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of
+five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand
+grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends
+together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood
+erect for miles and miles--when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon!
+Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life
+stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of
+village bones?
+
+She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of
+dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a
+father or mother below--" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up
+into the air; the child was gone.
+
+A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. Fanny held
+out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.
+
+"Have you been here long?" she asked.
+
+"A month, mademoiselle."
+
+"Are there many of you in this--village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of
+bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)
+
+"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."
+
+"But how are you fed?"
+
+"A lorry passes once a week for all the people in this district--within
+fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two
+in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don't come.
+We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got
+water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the
+radiators of other lorries."
+
+"What have you got down there?"
+
+"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still,
+and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can't build
+anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep
+between the ten of us."
+
+"Take my hammer," said Fanny. "I can get another in the garage."
+
+He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of
+recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his
+banner of blue smoke.
+
+Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.
+
+"This _was_ Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads
+ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the
+village--not a brick lay where the signpost stood.
+
+Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered--and suddenly, out
+of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little
+horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.
+
+"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face.
+His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his
+springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the
+tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung
+out beyond the mudguards.
+
+"Dandy car you've got!" he said with envy. "French?"
+
+Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with
+the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round
+in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she
+stood by the signpost in the desert.
+
+Then she took the road to Peronne.
+
+"I won't have my lunch yet--" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch
+had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She
+passed Peronne--uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into
+the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted
+village, oddly untouched by shell or fire. Here the doors swung and
+banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with
+curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.
+
+The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the
+henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.
+
+With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their
+handle spread it on the bread.
+
+"Lord, how lonely it is--surely some door might open, some face look
+out--" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat,
+for a front door slammed and blew back again.
+
+"I couldn't stay here the night--" with a shiver--and the bird on the
+branch sang louder than ever. "It's all very well," she addressed him.
+"You're with your own civilisation. I'm right _out_ of mine!"
+
+The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the
+sky, came down upon the other.
+
+Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village,
+talked a little to him, and set him down.
+
+A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion
+for half an hour.
+
+"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"
+
+"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question,
+when all France meant Julien!)
+
+"Don't you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he
+grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to
+be French!"
+
+"Little Belgium--jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the
+elder woman of the world!"
+
+A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.
+
+"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of
+severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English
+could do this--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."
+
+She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words
+were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that
+theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor
+would she have known how had she wished it.
+
+They passed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green
+bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came,
+and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I'll teach you to
+meddle with my daughter--"
+
+"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning
+from the car to watch.
+
+A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.
+
+"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed
+wire, fenced round with armed sentries.
+
+She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.
+
+"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don't much like
+driving Americans."
+
+"But I am English."
+
+"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the
+French Mission."
+
+"Why don't you like Americans?"
+
+"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"
+
+"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"
+
+"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I
+don't like them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her
+bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"
+
+"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes
+no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion--and each told
+his women tales of the other's shortcomings.
+
+Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of
+the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did
+not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese,
+Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they
+were in amity or enmity.
+
+Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. _There_ the Allies
+walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. _There_
+were no epithets to fling--they had all been flung long ago.
+
+And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as
+souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different
+languages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE ARDENNES
+
+The day wore on--
+
+The sun came lower and nearer, till the half-light ran with her half-
+thought, dropping, sinking, dying. "Guise," said the signpost, and
+a battlement stared down and threw its shadow across her face. "Is that
+where the dukes lived?" She was a speck in the landscape, moving on
+wheels that were none of her invention, covering distances of hundreds
+of miles without amazement, upon a magic mount unknown to her
+forefathers. Dark and light moved across the face of the falling day.
+Sometimes when she lifted her eyes great clouds full of rain were
+crossing the sky; and now, when she looked again the wind had torn them
+to shreds and hunted them away. The shadows lengthened--those of the few
+trees falling in bars across the road. A turn of the road brought the
+setting sun in her face, and blinded with light, she drove into it. When
+it had gone it left rays enough behind to colour everything, gilding the
+road itself, the air, the mists that hung in the ditches.
+
+Before the light was gone she saw the Ardennes forests begin upon her
+left.
+
+When it was gone, wood and road, air and earth, were alike stone-
+coloured. Then the definite night, creeping forward on all sides,
+painted out all but the road and the margin of the road--and with the
+side lights on all vision narrowed down to the grey snout of the bonnet,
+the two hooped mudguards stretched like divers' arms, and the blanched
+dead leaves which floated above from the unseen branches of the trees.
+
+Four crazy Fords were drawn up in one village street, and as her lights
+flashed on the door she caught sight of the word "Cafe" written on it.
+Placing the Renault beside the Fords she opened the door. Within five
+Frenchmen were drinking at one table, and four Americans at another. The
+Americans sprang up and claimed her, first as their own kin, and then at
+least as a blood sister. They gave her coffee, and would not let her
+pay; but she sat uneasily with them.
+
+"For which nation do you work? There are no English here," they said.
+
+"I am in the French Army."
+
+"Gee, what a rotten job!" they murmured sympathetically.
+
+"Where have you come from?"
+
+"We've just come back from Germany, and you bet it's good up there!"
+
+"Good?"
+
+"Every darn thing you want. Good beds, good food, and, thank God, one
+can speak the lingo."
+
+"You don't speak French then?"
+
+"You bet not."
+
+"Why don't you learn? Mightn't it be useful to you?"
+
+"Useful?"
+
+"Oh, when you get back home. In business perhaps--"
+
+"Ma'am," said the biggest American, leaning earnestly towards her, "let
+me tell you one thing. If any man comes up to me back in the States and
+starts on me with that darn language--I'll drop him one."
+
+"And German is easier?"
+
+"Oh, well, German we learn in the schools, you see. How far do you make
+it to St. Quentin?"
+
+"Are you going there on those Fords?"
+
+"We hope to, ma'am. But we started a convoy of twenty this morning, and
+these here four cars are all we've seen since lunch."
+
+"I hardly think you'll get as far as St. Quentin to-night. And there's
+little enough to sleep in on the way. I should stay here." She rose. "I
+wish you luck. Good-bye."
+
+She thanked them for their coffee, nodded to the quiet French table and
+went out.
+
+One American followed her.
+
+"Can you buzz her round?" he asked kindly, and taking the handle, buzzed
+her round.
+
+"I bet you don't get any one to do that for you in your army, do you?"
+he asked, as he straightened himself from the starting handle. She put
+her gear in with a little bang of anger.
+
+"You're kind," she said, "and they are kind. That you can't see it is
+all a question of language. Every village is full of bored Americans
+with nothing to do, and never one of them buys a dictionary!"
+
+"If it's villages you speak of, ma'am, it isn't dictionaries is needed,"
+he answered, "'tis plumbing!"
+
+She had not left him ten minutes before one of her tyres punctured.
+
+"Alas! I could have found a better use for them than arguing," she
+thought ruefully, regretting the friendly Americans, as she changed the
+tyre by the roadside under the beam from her own lamps.
+
+When it was done she sat for a few minutes in the silent car. The moon
+came up and showed her the battlements of the Ardennes forest standing
+upon the crest of the mountains to her left. "That is to be my home--"
+
+Julien was in Paris by now, divested of his uniform, sitting by a great
+fire, eating civilised food. A strange young man in dark clothes--she
+wondered what he would wear.
+
+He seemed a great many difficult miles away. That he should be in a
+heated room with lights, and flowers, and a spread table--and she under
+the shadow of the forest watching the moon rise, lengthened the miles
+between them; yet though she would have given much to have him with her,
+she would have given nothing to change places with him.
+
+The road left the forest for a time and passed over bare grass hills
+beneath a windy sky. Then back into the forest again, hidden from the
+moon. And here her half-stayed hunger made her fanciful, and she started
+at the noise of a moving bough, blew her horn at nothing, and seemed to
+hear the overtaking hum of a car that never drew near her.
+
+Suddenly, on the left, in a ditch, a dark form appeared, then another
+and another. Down there in a patch of grass below the road she caught
+sight of the upturned wheels of a lorry, and stopping, got down, walked
+to the ditch and looked over. There, in wild disorder, lay thirty or
+forty lorries and cars, burnt, twisted, wheelless, broken, ravaged,
+while on the wooden sides the German eagle, black on white, was marked.
+
+"What--what--can have happened here!"
+
+She climbed back into the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights
+came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and
+die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up
+by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to
+firm land on the other side. Some of the planks were missing, and moving
+carefully around the crater she heard others tip and groan beneath her.
+
+"Could that have been a convoy caught by the mine? Or was it a dumping
+ground for the cars unable to follow in the retreat?"
+
+The mine crater, which was big enough to hold a small villa, was
+overgrown now at the bottom with a little grass and moss.
+
+On and on and on--till she fancied the moon, too, had turned as the sun
+had done, and started a downward course. It grew no colder, she grew no
+hungrier--but losing count of time, slipped on between the flying tree
+trunks, full of unwearied content. At last a light shone through the
+trees, and by a wooden bridge which led over another crater she came on
+a lonely house. "Cafe" was written on the door, but the shutters were
+tight shut, and only a line of light shone from a crack.
+
+From within came sounds of laughter and men's voices. She knocked, and
+there was an instant silence, but no one came to answer. At length the
+bolts were withdrawn and the head of an old woman appeared through the
+door, which was cautiously opened a little.
+
+"An omelette? Coffee?"
+
+"You don't know what you speak of! We have no eggs."
+
+"Then coffee?"
+
+"No, no, nothing at all. Go on to Charleville. We have nothing."
+
+"How far is Charleville?"
+
+But the door shut again, the bolts were shot, and a man's voice growled
+in the hidden room behind.
+
+"Dubious hole. Yet it looks as though a big town were near----" And down
+the next slope she ran into Charleville. The town had been long abed,
+the street lamps were out, the cobbles wet and shining.
+
+On the main boulevard one dark figure hurried along.
+
+"Which is the 'Silver Lion'?" she called, her voice echoing in the empty
+street.
+
+Soon, between rugs on a bed in the "Silver Lion," between a single sheet
+doubled in two, she slept--propping the lockless door with her suitcase.
+
+The Renault slept or watched below in the courtyard, the moon sank, the
+small hours passed, the day broke, the first day in Charleville.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE STUFFED OWL
+
+A stuffed bird stood upon a windless branch and through a window of blue
+and orange squares of glass a broken moon stared in.
+
+A bedroom, formed from a sitting-room, a basin to wash in upon a red
+plush table--no glass, no jug, no lock upon the door. Instead, gilt
+mirrors, three bell ropes and a barometer. A bed with a mattress upon it
+and nothing more.
+
+This was her kingdom.
+
+Beyond, a town without lights, without a station, without a milkshop,
+without a meat shop, without sheets, without blankets, crockery, cooking
+pans, or locks upon the doors. A population half-fed and poor. A sky
+black as ink and liquid as a river.
+
+Prisoners in the streets, moving in green-coated gangs; prisoners in the
+gutters, pushing long scoops to stay the everlasting tide of mud; thin,
+hungry, fierce and sad, green-coated prisoners like bedraggled parrots,
+out-numbered the population.
+
+The candle of the world was snuffed out--and the wick smoked.
+
+The light was gone--the blinding light of the Chantilly snows, the
+lights on the Precy river--moonlight, sunlight--the little boat
+crossing at moonrise, sunrise.
+
+"Ah, that long journey! How I pressed on, how I fled from Amiens!"
+
+"What, not Charleville yet?" I said. "Isn't it Charleville soon? What
+hurry was there then to get there?"
+
+The stuffed bird eyed her from his unstirring branch, and that yellow
+eye seemed to answer: "None, none..."
+
+"This is his home; his country. He told me it was beautiful. But I
+cannot see beauty. I am empty of happiness. Where is the beauty?"
+
+And the vile bird, winking in the candle's light, replied: "Nowhere."
+
+But he lied.
+
+Perhaps she had been sent, stuffed as he was, from Paris. Perhaps he had
+never flown behind the town, and seen the wild mountains that began at
+the last house on the other bank of the river. Or the river itself,
+greener than any other which flowed over black rocks, in cold gulleys
+--the jade-green Meuse flowing to Dinant, to Namur. Perhaps from his
+interminable boulevard he had never seen the lovely Spanish Square of
+red and yellow, its steep-roofed houses standing upon arches--or the
+proud Duc Charles de Gonzague who strutted for ever upon his pedestal,
+his stone cape slipping from one shoulder, his gay Spaniard's hat upon
+his head--holding back a smile from his handsome lips, lest the town
+which he had come over the mountains to found should see him tolerant
+and sin beneath his gaze.
+
+That bird knew the rain would stop--knew it in his dusty feathers,
+but he would not kindle hope. He knew there was a yellow spring at
+hand--but he left her to mourn for the white lustre of Chantilly.
+Vile bird!... She blew out the candle that he might wink no more.
+
+"To-morrow I will buy a padlock and a key. If among these gilt mirrors I
+can have no other charm, I will have solitude!" And having hung a
+thought, a plan, a hope before her in the future, she slept till day
+broke--the second day in Charleville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke, a mixture of courage and philosophy.
+
+"I can stand anything, and beyond a certain limit misfortune makes me
+laugh. But there's no reason why I should stand this!" The key and
+padlock idea was rejected as a compromise with happiness.
+
+"No, no, let us see if we can get something better to lock up than that
+bird." He looked uncommonly dead by daylight.
+
+"I would rather lock up an empty room, and leave it pure when I must
+leave it!"
+
+Dressing, she went quickly down the street to the Bureau de la Place.
+The clerks and secretaries nodded and smiled at each other, and bent
+their heads over their typewriters when she looked at them.
+
+"Can I see the billeting lieutenant?"
+
+"He is not here."
+
+"I saw him enter."
+
+"We will go and see...."
+
+She drummed upon the table with her fingers and the clerks and
+secretaries winked and nodded more meaningly than ever.
+
+"_Entrez_, mademoiselle. He will see you."
+
+The red-haired lieutenant with pince-nez was upon his feet looking at
+her curiously as she entered the adjoining room.
+
+"Good morning, mademoiselle. There is something wrong with the billet
+that I found you yesterday?"
+
+She looked at him. In his pale-blue eyes there was a beam; in his
+creased mouth there was an upward curve. The story of legitimate
+complaint that she had prepared drooped in her mind; she looked at
+him a little longer, hesitated, then, risking everything:
+
+"Monsieur, there is a stuffed owl in the room."
+
+He did not wince. "Take it out, mademoiselle."
+
+"H'm, yes. I cannot see heaven except through orange glass."
+
+"Open the window."
+
+"It is fixed."
+
+Then he failed her; he was a busy, sensible man.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I find you a billet, I instal you, and you come to me in
+the middle of the morning with this ridiculous story of an owl. It isn't
+reasonable...."
+
+The door opened and his superior officer walked in, a stern captain with
+no crease about his mouth, no beam in his olive eye.
+
+Ah, now ... Now the lieutenant had but to turn to his superior officer
+and she would indeed be rent, and reasonably so.
+
+"What is the matter?" said the newcomer. "Is something fresh needed?"
+
+The billeting lieutenant never hesitated a second.
+
+"_Mon capitaine_, unfortunately the billet found yesterday for this lady
+is unsuitable. The owner of the house returns this week, and needs
+the room."
+
+"Have you some other lodging for her?"
+
+"Yes, _mon capitaine_, in the Rue de Cleves."
+
+"Good. Then there is no difficulty?"
+
+"None. Follow me, mademoiselle, the street is near. I will take you to
+the _concierge_."
+
+She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.
+
+"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and
+susceptible."
+
+"Oh, no, no...."
+
+"Indeed, I _am_ young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I
+came to Charleville...."
+
+"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the
+window. Here is the street."
+
+"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and
+how delighted. Is the house here?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. _It is an empty house._"
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But you are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"
+
+"Very little. We will see."
+
+He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful
+face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "_Eh bien!
+More_ officers? I told you, _mon lieutenant_, we have not room for
+one more."
+
+"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this
+time. Have you the key?"
+
+"But the house opposite is empty."
+
+"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+The young _concierge,_ under the impression that he was certainly
+installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with
+a look of impish reproof in her eyes.
+
+Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron
+door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard,
+leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led
+up into the house.
+
+"All this ... all this mine?"
+
+"All yours, mademoiselle."
+
+The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues,
+arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high
+wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the
+staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows
+and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed
+through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and
+mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.
+
+"Who lived here?"
+
+"Who lived here?" echoed the _concierge_, and a strange look passed over
+her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans...."
+
+"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
+
+"All the time. I knew them all."
+
+In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to
+her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house
+opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what
+you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this
+dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take
+that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems
+hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."
+
+"Who is the owner?"
+
+"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She
+has turned _mechante_. She will abuse me when she comes here to see
+this--as though _I_ could have saved it. Her husband and her son were
+killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the
+war, and Phillippe ... I don't know when, but somewhere near here."
+
+"You think she will come back?"
+
+"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her
+daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the
+sun ... was the good God to her."
+
+"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here
+in this empty house? There will be rats...."
+
+"I can be very happy--and so grateful. I will move my things across
+to-day. My companions ... that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy
+from Chantilly to-morrow."
+
+"Six more! Had you told me that before ... But what more simple! I can
+put them all in here. There is room for twenty."
+
+"Oh...." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house
+for myself. And I was so happy!"
+
+"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your sex
+every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you
+cannot lodge with your compatriots!..."
+
+"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"
+
+"I was joking. Take the house--the rats and the rubbish included with
+it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a
+better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I
+must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"
+
+"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."
+
+He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the _concierge._
+
+"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your
+sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life."
+Fanny agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the
+garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of
+brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak
+bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of
+open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other
+furniture.
+
+"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the
+house opposite."
+
+She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the
+road. Fanny fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six
+logs and some twigs from the _concierge,_ promising to fetch her an
+ample store from the hills around.
+
+All day she rummaged in the empty house--finding now a three-legged
+armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian glass
+scrolled in gold for her tooth glass.
+
+In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay
+rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its
+blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.
+
+It covered her oak bed exactly--and by removing the pillows it looked
+like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon
+burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her
+room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale
+afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.
+
+A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey
+of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for
+her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over
+floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for
+cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron
+lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.
+
+But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy's things were
+everywhere, the father's and the son's. Her eyes took in the host of
+relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their
+youth, pressing among phantoms.
+
+"Irons ... For ironing! For my collars!"
+
+But they were so small, too small. His again--the son's. "Yet why
+shouldn't I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon
+one finger.
+
+Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as
+though nothing had ever been packed up--dolls' houses, rocking-horses,
+slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and
+guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.
+
+Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers
+and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom
+she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here ...
+how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter
+to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this
+perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had
+changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah ...
+inhuman... was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not
+weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the
+branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed
+in a thin glass upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the
+house, from her solitude?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+
+What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn't burn in the
+open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage,
+but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn't
+proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and
+had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches.
+All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by
+the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains
+on trays slung on ropes.
+
+Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then,
+when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle.
+"I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
+
+The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down,
+leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
+
+Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the
+Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in
+the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up
+to the attics again.
+
+"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of
+broken white wood from the floor.
+
+It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your
+name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The
+place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse
+cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle
+scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of
+things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it
+away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of
+dried modelling clay....
+
+"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless
+fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had
+"P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
+
+Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any
+use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still
+in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright
+treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of
+a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written
+and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German
+as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of
+difficult questions.
+
+Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished
+chair-back in her hand.
+
+"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am
+doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't
+or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at.
+Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
+
+She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his
+mother's initials on it in gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the
+"Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien's voice
+would call to her.
+
+"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down
+at her from her high seat behind the mugs and glasses.
+
+"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn't written," and
+even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and
+turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her
+and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.
+
+"I am in no hurry," she said, sure that he would come, and walked on
+into the Spanish Square, to stare in the shops behind the arcaded
+pillars. Merchandise trickled back into the empty town in odd ways. By
+lorry, train, and touring car, merchants penetrated and filled the
+shops with provisions, amongst which there were distressing lacks.
+
+The trains, which had now been extended from Rheims over many laborious
+wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the
+bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a
+railroad. To the passenger train, which left Paris twice a week, one
+goods truck full of merchandise was attached--and it seemed as though
+the particular truck to arrive was singled out casually, without any
+regard to the needs of the town. As yet no dusters, sheets or kitchen
+pans could be bought, but to-day in the Spanish Square every shop was
+filled to overflowing with rolls of ladies' stays; even the chemist had
+put a pair in the corner of his window. Fanny inquired the cause. A
+truck had arrived filled with nothing but stays. It was very unfortunate
+as they had expected condensed milk, but they had accepted the truck,
+as, no doubt, they would find means of selling them--for there were
+women in the country round who had not seen a pair for years.
+
+A man appeared in the Square selling boots from Paris--the first to come
+to the town with leather soles instead of wooden ones. Instantly there
+was a crowd round him.
+
+It was dark now and the electric street lamps were lit round the
+pedestal of the Spanish Duke. The organisation of the town was jerky,
+and often the lights would come on when it was daylight and often
+disappear when it was dark. Where Germans had been there were always
+electric light and telephones. No matter how sparse the furniture in the
+houses, how ragged the roof, how patched the windows--what tin cans,
+paper and rubbish lay heaped upon the floors, the electric light
+unfailingly illumined all, the telephone hung upon the wall among the
+peeling paper.
+
+A little rain began to fall lightly and she hurried to her rooms. There,
+once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire
+lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet
+showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece,
+the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.
+
+"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it
+fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.
+
+"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open
+her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the
+street below.
+
+She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop
+which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so
+powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated
+red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He
+would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought
+well of.
+
+"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had
+said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other
+times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold
+meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.
+
+"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"
+She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The days passed.
+
+Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the
+battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.
+Changes passed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying
+clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest,
+shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in
+the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and grass itself, as
+rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.
+
+A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the
+borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey
+carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and
+tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and
+pill-boxes, in wooden shelters scraped together from the _debris_ of
+their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families
+the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a
+patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a
+fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little
+notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the
+earth. "Vin-Cafe" or "Small motor repairs done here."
+
+All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side
+roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars,
+no one set up his habitation.
+
+A certain lawlessness was abroad in the lonelier areas of the
+battlefields. Odds and ends of all the armies, deserters, well hidden
+during many months, lived under the earth in holes and cellars and used
+strange means to gain a living.
+
+There had been rumours of lonely cars which had been stopped and
+robbed--and among the settlers a couple of murders had taken place in a
+single district. The mail from Charleville to Montmedy was held up at
+last by men in masks armed with revolvers. "We will go out armed!"
+exclaimed the drivers in the garage, and polished up their rifles.
+
+After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the
+French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and
+whisky sold in subterranean _estaminets_ of ruined villages, picked a
+quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They
+must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath
+upon the homesick Americans.
+
+Somewhere beyond Rheims the wreck of a cindery village sprawled along a
+side road. Not a chimney, not a pile of bricks, not a finger of wood or
+stone reached three feet high, but in the middle, a little wooden stake
+rose above the rubbish, a cross-bar pointing into the ground, and the
+words "Vin-Cafe" written in chalk upon it. Fanny, who was thirsty, drew
+up her car and climbed across the village to a hole down which the board
+pointed. Steps of pressed earth led down, and from the hole rose the
+quarrelling, fierce voices of three men. She fled back to the car,
+determined to find a more genial _cafe_ upon a national road.
+
+The same day, upon another side road, she came on the remains of a
+village, where the road, instead of leading through it, paused at the
+brink of the river, over which hung the end spars of a broken bridge.
+
+"I will make a meal here," she thought, profiting by the check--and
+pulled out a packet of sandwiches, driving her car round the corner of a
+wall out of the wind. Here, across the road, a donkey cart was standing,
+and a donkey was tied to a brick in the gutter.
+
+Upon the steps of a doorway which was but an aperture leading to
+nothing, for the house itself lay flat behind it and the courtyard was
+filled with trestles of barbed wire, a figure was seated writing
+earnestly upon its knees. She went nearer and saw an old man, who
+looked up as she approached.
+
+"Sir ..." she began, meaning to inquire about the road--and the wind
+through the doorway blew her skirt tight against her.
+
+"I am identifying the houses," he said, as though he expected to be
+asked his business. She saw by his face that he was very old--eighty
+perhaps. The book upon his knee contained quavering drawings, against
+each of which a name was written.
+
+"This is mine," he said, pointing through the doorway on whose step he
+sat. "And all these other houses belong to people whom I know. When they
+come back here to live they have only to come to me and I can show them
+which house to go to. Without me it might be difficult, but I was the
+oldest man here and I know all the streets, and all the houses. I carry
+the village in my head."
+
+"That is your donkey cart, then?"
+
+"It is my son's. I drive here from Rheims on Saturdays, when he doesn't
+want it."
+
+He showed his book, the cheap paper filled with already-fading maps,
+blurred names and vague sketches. The old man was in his dotage and
+would soon die and the book be lost.
+
+"I carry the village in my head," he repeated. It was the only life the
+village had.
+
+So the days went on, day after day, and with each its work, and still no
+letter at the "Silver Lion," Though vaguely ashamed at her mood, she
+could not be oppressed by this. Each cold, fine, blooming day in the
+mountains made him less necessary to her, and only the delicate memory
+of him remained to gild the town. When hopes wither other hopes spring
+up. When the touch of charm trembles no more upon the heart it can no
+longer be imagined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+
+The horn of a two days' moon was driving across the window; then stars,
+darkness, dawn and sunrise painted the open square; till rustling, and
+turning towards the light, she awoke. At the top of the window a magpie
+wiped his beak on a branch, bent head, and tail bent to balance him
+--then dropped like a mottled pebble out of sight. She sat up, drew the
+table prepared overnight towards her, lit the lamp for the chocolate
+--thinking of the dim Julien who might pay his beautiful visit in turn
+with the moon and the sun.
+
+She got up and dressed, and walked in the spring morning, first to the
+bread shop to buy a pound of bread from the woman who wouldn't smile
+ ... so serious and puzzling was this defect that Fanny had once asked
+her: "Would you rather I didn't buy my bread here?"
+
+"No, I don't mind."
+
+Then to the market for a bunch of violets and an egg.
+
+And at last through the "Silver Lion"--for luck, opening one door of
+black wood, passing through the hot, sunny room, ignoring the thrilled
+glances of soldiers drinking at the tables, looking towards the girl at
+the bar, who shook her head, saying: "No, no letter for you!" and out
+again into the street by the other black door (which was gold inside).
+
+She passed the morning in the garage working on the Renault, cleaning
+her, oiling her--then ate her lunch in the garage room with the Section.
+
+Among them there ran a rumour of England--of approaching demobilisation,
+of military driving that must come to an end, to give place to civilian
+drivers who, in Paris, were thronging the steps of the Ministry of the
+Liberated Regions.
+
+"Already," said one, "our khaki seems as old-fashioned as a crinoline.
+A man said to me yesterday: 'It is time mademoiselle bought her dress
+for the summer!'"
+
+(What dream was that of Julien, and of a summer spent in Charleville!
+The noise of England burst upon her ears. She heard the talk at
+parties--faces swam so close to hers that she looked in their eyes and
+spoke to them.)
+
+And how the town is filling with men in new black coats, and women in
+shawls! Every day more and more arrive. And the civilians come first
+now! Down in the Co-operative I asked for a tin of milk, and I was told:
+'We are keeping the milk for the "Civils."' 'For the "Civils"?' I said,
+for we are all accustomed to the idea that the army feeds first."
+
+"Oh, that's all gone! We are losing importance now. It is time to go
+home."
+
+As they spoke there came a shrill whistle which sounded through
+Charleville.
+
+"Ecoute!" said a man down the street, and the Section, moving to the
+window, heard it again, nameless, and yet familiar.
+
+Unseen Charleville lifted its head and said, "Ecoute."
+
+The first train had crawled over the new bridge, and stood whistling its
+triumph in the station.
+
+As spring became more than a bright light over the mountains so the town
+in the hollow blossomed and functioned. The gate bells rang, the electric
+light ceased to glow in the daytime, great cranes came up on the trains
+and fished in the river for the wallowing bridges. Workmen arrived in the
+streets. In the early summer mornings tapping could be heard all about
+the town. Civilians in new black suits, civilians more or less damaged,
+limping or one-eyed, did things that made them happy with a hammer and
+a nail. They whistled as they tapped, nailed up shutters that had hung
+for four years by one hinge, climbed about the roofs and fixed a tile or
+two where a hundred were needed, brought little ladders on borrowed
+wheelbarrows and set them against the house-wall. In the house opposite,
+in the Rue de Cleves, a man was using his old blue puttees to nail up his
+fruit-trees.
+
+All the men worked in new Sunday clothes; they had, as yet, nothing old
+to work in. Every day brought more of them to the town, lorries and
+horse carts set them down by the "Silver Lion," and they walked along
+the street carrying black bags and rolls of carpet, boxes of tools, and
+sometimes a well-oiled carbine.
+
+"Yes, we must go home," said the Englishwomen. "It's time to leave the
+town."
+
+The "Civils" seemed to drive them out. They knew they were birds of
+passage as they walked in the sun in their khaki coats.
+
+The "Civils" were blind to them, never looked at them, hurried on,
+longing to grasp the symbolic hammer, to dust, sweep out the German rags
+and rubbish, nail talc over the gaping windows, set their homes going,
+start their factories in the surrounding mountains, people the houses so
+long the mere shelter for passing troops, light the civilian life of the
+town, and set it burning after the ashes and dust of war.
+
+There were days when every owner, black-trousered and in his shirt-
+sleeves, seemed to be burning the contents of his house in a bonfire in
+the gutter. Poor men burned things that seemed useful to the casual eye
+--mattresses, bolsters, all soiled, soiled again and polluted by four
+years of soldiery.
+
+Idling over the fire in the evening, Fanny's eye was caught by a stain
+upon her armchair. It was sticky; it might well be champagne--the
+champagne which stuck even now to the bottoms of the glasses downstairs.
+
+"I wonder if they will burn the chair--when _they_ come back." Some one
+must come back, some day, even if Philippe's mother never came. She
+seemed to see the figure of the Turkish officer seated in her chair,
+just as the _concierge_ had described him, stout, fezzed, resting his
+legs before her fire--or of the German, stretched back in the chair in
+the evening reading the copy of the _Westfaelisches Volksblatt_ she had
+found stuffed down in the corner of the seat.
+
+How, how did that splash of wax come to be so high up on the face of the
+mirror? Had someone, some predecessor, thrown a candle in a temper? It
+puzzled her in the morning as she lay in bed.
+
+On the polished wooden foot of the bed was burnt the outline of a face
+with a funny nose. A child's drawing. That was Philippe's. The nurse had
+cried at him in a rage, perhaps, and snatched the hot poker with which
+he drew--and that had made the long rushing burn that flew angrily
+across the wood from the base of the face's chin. "Oh, you've made it
+worse!" Philippe must have gibed.
+
+("B"--who wrote "B" on the wall? The Bulgarian--)
+
+She fell asleep.
+
+The first bird, waking early, threw the image of the world across her
+lonely sleep. He squeaked alone, minute after minute, from his tree
+outside the window, thrusting forests, swamps, meadows, mountains in
+among her dreams. Then a fellow joined him, and soon all the birds were
+shouting from their trees. Slowly the room lightened till on the
+mantelpiece the buds of the apple blossom shone, till upon the wall the
+dark patch became an oil painting, till the painting showed its features
+--a castle, a river and a hill.
+
+In the night the last yellow down had fallen from the palm upon the
+floor.
+
+The common voice of the tin clock struck seven. And with it came women's
+voices--women's voices on the landing outside the door--the voice of
+the _concierge_ and another's.'
+
+Some instinct, some strange warning, sent the sleeper on the bed flying
+from it, dazed as she was. Snatching at the initialled cup of gold
+veining she thrust it behind the curtain on the window sill. An act of
+panic merely, for a second glance round the room convinced her that
+there was too much to be hidden, if hidden anything should be. With a
+leap she was back in bed, and drew the bedclothes up to her neck.
+
+Then came the knock at the door.
+
+"I am in bed," she called.
+
+"Nevertheless, can I come in?" asked the _concierge_.
+
+"You may come in."
+
+The young woman came in and closed the door after her. She approached
+the bed and whispered--then glancing round the room with a shrug she
+picked up a dressing-gown and held it that Fanny might slip her
+arms into it.
+
+"But what a time to come!"
+
+"She has travelled all night. She is unfit to move."
+
+"Must I see her now? I am hardly awake."
+
+"I cannot keep her any longer. She was for coming straight here when the
+train came in at five. I have kept her at coffee at my house. _Tant
+pis!_ You have a right to be here!"
+
+The _concierge_ drew the curtain a little wider and the cup was exposed.
+She thrust it back into the shadow; the door opened and Philippe's
+mother walked in. She was very tall, in black, and a deep veil hung
+before her face.
+
+"_Bonjour_, madame," she said, and her veiled face dipped in a faint
+salute.
+
+"Will you sit down?"
+
+She took no notice of this, but leaning a little on a stick she carried,
+said, "I understand that it is right that I should find my house
+occupied. They told me it would be by an officer. Such occupation I
+believe ceases on the return of the owner."
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I am the owner of this house."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask of what nationality you are?"
+
+The _concierge_ standing behind her, shrugged her shoulders impatiently,
+as if she would say, "I have explained, and explained again!"
+
+"I am English, madame."
+
+The lady seemed to sink into a stupor, and bending her head in silence
+stared at the floor. Fanny, sitting upright in bed, waited for her to
+speak. The _>concierge_, her face still as an image, waited too.
+
+Philippe's mother began to sway upon her stick.
+
+"Do please sit down," said Fanny, breaking the silence at last.
+
+"When will you go?" demanded the old lady, suddenly.
+
+"Go?"
+
+"Who gave you that lamp? That is mine." She pointed to a glass lamp
+which stood upon the table.
+
+"It is all yours," said Fanny, humbly.
+
+"Mademoiselle borrowed it," said the voice of the _concierge_. "I lent
+it to her."
+
+"Why are my things lent when I am absent? My armchair--dirty, soiled,
+torn! Paul's picture--there is a hole in the corner. Who made that hole
+in the corner?"
+
+"I didn't," said Fanny feebly, wishing that she were dressed and upon
+her feet.
+
+"Madame, a Turkish officer made the hole. I spoke to him about it; he
+said it was the German colonel who was here before him. But I am sure it
+was the Turk."
+
+"A Turk!" said Philippe's mother in bewilderment. "So you have allowed a
+Turk to come in here!"
+
+"Madame does not understand."
+
+"Oh, I understand well enough that my house has been a den! The house
+where I was born--All my things, all my things--You must give that
+lamp back!"
+
+"Dear madame, I will give everything back, I have hurt nothing--"
+
+"Not ruined my carpet, my mother's carpet! Not soiled my walls, written
+your name upon them, cracked my windows, filled my room downstairs with
+rubbish, broken my furniture--But I am told this is what I must expect!"
+Fanny looked at her, petrified. "But I--" she began.
+
+"You don't understand," said the young _concierge_ fiercely. "Don't you
+know who has lived here? In this room, in this bed, Turks, Bulgars,
+Germans. Four years of soldiers, coming in one week and gone the next.
+I could not stop it! When other houses were burnt I would say to myself,
+'Madame is lucky.' When all your china was broken and your chairs used
+for firewood, could I help it? Can _she_ help it? She is your last
+soldier, and she has taken nothing. So much has gone from this house it
+is not worth while to worry about what remains. When you wrote to me
+last month to send you the barometer, it made me smile. Your barometer!"
+
+"Begone, Elsie."
+
+"No, madame, no! Not till you come back with me. They should not have
+let you come alone. But you were always wilful. You cannot mean to
+live here?"
+
+"I wish this woman gone to-day. I wish to sleep here to-night."
+
+"No, madame, no. Sleep in the house opposite to-night. Give her time to
+find a lodging--"
+
+"A lodging! She will find a lodging soon enough. A town full of
+soldiers--" muttered the old woman.
+
+"I think this is a question for the billeting lieutenant," said Fanny.
+"He will explain to you that I am billeted here exactly as a soldier,
+that I have a right to be here until your arrival. It will be kind of
+you to give me a day in which to find another room."
+
+"Where are _his_ things?" said the old woman unheedingly. "I must go up
+to the attics."
+
+A vision of those broken toys came to Fanny, the dusty heap of horses,
+dolls and boxes--the poor disorder.
+
+"You mustn't, yet!" she cried with feeling. "Rest first. Sit here longer
+first. Or go another day!"
+
+"Have you touched _them_?" cried Philippe's mother, rising from the
+chair. "I must go at once, at once----" but even as she tried to cross
+the room she leant heavily upon the table and put her hand to her heart.
+"Get me water, Elsie," she said, and threw up her veil. Her ruined face
+was grey even at the lips; her eyes were caverns, worn by the dropping
+of water, her mouth was folded tightly that nothing kind or hopeful, or
+happy might come out of it again. Elsie ran to the washing-stand.
+Unfortunately she seized the glass with the golden scrolling, and when
+she held it to the lips of her mistress those lips refused it.
+
+"_That_, too, that glass of mine! Elsie, I wish this woman gone. Why
+don't you get up? Where are your clothes? Why don't you dress and go--"
+
+"Madame, hush, hush, you are ill."
+
+"Ah!" dragging herself weakly to the door, "I must take an inventory.
+That is what I should have done before! If I don't make a list at once I
+shall lose something!"
+
+"Take an inventory!" exclaimed the _concierge_ mockingly, as she
+followed her. "The house won't change! After four years--it isn't now
+that it will change!" She paused at the door and looked back at Fanny.
+"Don't worry about the room, mademoiselle. She is like that--_elle a des
+crises._ She cannot possibly sleep here. Keep the room for a day or two
+till you find another."
+
+"In a very few days I shall be going to England."
+
+"Keep it a week if necessary. She will be persuaded when she is calmer.
+Why did they let her come when they wrote me that she was a dying woman!
+But no--_elle est comme toujours--mechante pour tout le monde._"
+
+"You told me she thought only of Philippe."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, she is like many of us! She has still her sense of
+property."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+Around the Spanish Square the first sun-awnings had been put up in the
+night, awnings red and yellow, flapping in the mountain wind.
+
+In the shops under the arches, in the market in the centre of the
+Square, they were selling anemones.
+
+"But have you any eggs?"
+
+"No eggs this morning."
+
+"Any butter?"
+
+"None. There has been none these three days."
+
+"A pot of condensed milk?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, the train did not bring any."
+
+"Must I eat anemones? Give me two bunches."
+
+And round the Spanish Square the orange awnings protecting the empty
+shop-fronts shuddered and flapped, like a gay hat worn unsteadily when
+the stomach is empty.
+
+What was there to do on a last day but look and note, and watch, and
+take one's leave? The buds against the twig-laced sky were larger than
+ever. To-morrow--the day after to-morrow ... it would be spring in
+England, too!
+
+"_Tenez_, mademoiselle," said the market woman, "there is a little
+ounce of butter here that you may have!"
+
+The morning passed and on drifted the day, and all was finished, all was
+done, and love gone, too. And with love gone the less divine but wider
+world lay open.
+
+In the "Silver Lion" the patient girl behind the counter shook her head.
+
+"There is no letter for you."
+
+"And to-morrow I leave for England."
+
+"If a letter comes where shall I send it on?"
+
+"Thank you, but there will come no letter now. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+It was the afternoon. Now such a tea, a happy, lonely tea--the last, the
+best, in Charleville! Crossing the road from the "Silver Lion" Fanny
+bought a round, flat, sandwich cake, and carried it to the house which
+was her own for one more night, placed it in state upon the biggest of
+the green and gold porcelain plates, and the anemones in a sugar-bowl
+beside it. She lit the fire, made tea, and knelt upon the floor to toast
+her bread. There was a half-conscious hurry in her actions.
+
+("So long as nobody comes!" she whispered. "So long as I am left
+alone!") she feared the good-byes of the _concierge_, the threatened
+inventory of Philippe's mother, a call of state farewell from the
+billeting lieutenant.
+
+When the toast was done and the tea made, some whim led her to change
+her tunic for a white jersey newly back from the wash, to put on the
+old dancing shoes of Metz--and not until her hair was carefully brushed
+to match this gaiety did she draw up the armchair with the broken leg,
+and prop it steadily beside the tea-table.
+
+But--
+
+Who was that knocking on the door in the street?
+
+One of the Section coming on a message? The _brigadier_ to tell her that
+she had some last duty still?
+
+"Shall I go to the window?" (creeping nearer to it). Then, with a glance
+back at the tea-table, "No, let them knock!"
+
+But how they knocked! Persistent, gentle--could one sit peacefully at
+tea so called and so besought! She went up to the blue curtains, and
+standing half-concealed, saw the _concierge_ brooding in the sunlight of
+her window-sill.
+
+"Is _nobody_ there?" said a light voice in the hidden street below, and
+at that she peered cautiously over the edge of the stonework, and saw a
+pale young man in grey before the door.
+
+She watched him. She watched him gravely, for he had come too late. But
+tenderly, for she had been in love with him. The _concierge_ raised her
+two black brows in her expressive face and looked upwards. Her look
+said: "Why don't you let him in?"
+
+Yet Fanny stood inactive, her hands resting on the sun-warmed stone.
+
+"Julien is here--is here! And does not know that I go to-morrow!"
+
+But she put _to-morrow_ from her, and in the stillness she felt her
+spirit smiling for pleasure in him. She had mourned him once; she never
+would again.
+
+In her pocket lay the key of the street door, and the curtain-cord, long
+rotted and useless, dangled at her cheek. With a quick wrench she
+brought its length tumbling beside her on the sill, then knotted it to
+the key and let it down into the street.
+
+The young man saw it hang before his eyes.
+
+"Are you coming in?" said a voice above him. "Tea is ready."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"It has been ready for six weeks."
+
+"Only wait--" He was trying the key in the door.
+
+"What--still longer?" said the voice.
+
+He was gone from the pavement, he had entered her house, he was on her
+stair--the grey ghost of the soldier!
+
+She had a minute's grace. Slipping her hand into the cupboard she drew
+out another cup and saucer, and laid the table for two.
+
+There was his face--his hands--at her door! But what a foreign grey
+body!
+
+"Come in, Ghost!" she said, and held out her hands--for now she cared at
+least for "he who cared"--lest that, too, be lost! Does a ghost kiss?
+Yes, sometimes. Sometimes they are ghosts who kiss.
+
+"Oh, Fanny!" Then, with a quick glance at the table, "You are expecting
+someone?"
+
+"You. How late you come to tea with me!"
+
+"But I--You didn't know."
+
+"I waited tea for you," she said, and turning to a calendar upon a
+wooden wheel, she rolled it back a month.
+
+She made him sit, she made him drink and eat. He filled the room with
+his gaiety. He had no reasons upon his tongue, and no excuses; she no
+reproaches, no farewell.
+
+A glance round the room had shown her that there were no signs of her
+packing; her heavy kitbag was at the station, her suitcase packed and in
+the cupboard. She put her gravest news away till later.
+
+"You came by the new train--that has arrived at last in Charleville?"
+
+"Yes, and I go up to Revins to-night."
+
+She paused at that. "But how?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, smiling at her.
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "Could I?" (She had that morning delivered the car to
+its new driver.) "Of course. I could! I will, I will, I'll manage! You
+counted on me to drive you to Revins?"
+
+"Will it be difficult to manage?"
+
+"No--o--But I must get the car out before dark or there will be no
+excuse--" She pushed back her chair and went to the window. The sun was
+sinking over the mountains and the scenery in the western sky was
+reflected in the fiery pools between the cobbles in the street.
+
+"I must go soon and get it. But how--"
+
+She paused and thought. "How do you come down to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't. I go on to Brussels. There is a car at Revins belonging to my
+agent. He will take me to Dinant for the Brussels train."
+
+"You are bound for Brussels? Yet you could have gone straight from Paris
+to Brussels?"
+
+"Yet I didn't because I wanted to see you!"
+
+She took down her cap and coat from the nail on which they were hanging.
+
+"Need you go yet?" he said, withdrawing the clothes from her arm, and
+laying them upon a chair. She sat down again.
+
+"The sun is sinking. The town gets dark so quickly here, though it's
+light enough in the mountains. If I leave it later the men will be gone
+home, and the garage key with them."
+
+"You're right," he said. "Put them on," and he held the coat for her.
+"But once you have the car there's no hurry over our drive. Yes, fetch
+it quickly, and then we'll go up above Revins and I'll show you the
+things I have in mind."
+
+"What things?"
+
+He drew out a fat, red note-book and held it up.
+
+"It's full of my thoughts," he said. "Quick with the car, and we'll get
+up there while it's light enough to show you!"
+
+She slipped out under the apple-red sky, through the streets where the
+shadows of the houses lay black as lacquer.
+
+Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking
+his little, dry cigarettes.
+
+"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What
+an evening!"
+
+"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
+
+"But you've given up the car."
+
+"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!
+And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the
+key!"
+
+He gave her the key.
+
+"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come
+in hang the key on the nail in the office."
+
+Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
+Rue de Cleves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
+
+"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would
+have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started
+on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed
+excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil
+their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him
+as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance
+from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in
+which to fight with her disinclination.
+
+"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I
+can't tell him in the street!"
+
+For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the
+_concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched
+the town.
+
+"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened
+and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself,
+when it will be easy and natural."
+
+By back streets they left the town, and soon upon the step road had
+climbed through the belt of trees and out on to bare slopes.
+
+As they wound up the mountain, sitting so dose together, she felt how
+familiar his company was to her, and how familiar his silence. Their
+thoughts, running together, would meet presently, as they had often met,
+at the juncture when his hand was laid upon hers at the wheel: But when
+he spoke he startled her.
+
+"How long has the railway been extended to Charleville?"
+
+"A fortnight," she answered upon reflection.
+
+"How about the big stone bridge on this side? The railway bridge?"
+
+"Why that lies at the bottom of the river as usual."
+
+"And haven't they replaced it yet by a wooden one?"
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"And no one is even working there?"
+
+"I haven't been there lately," she answered. "Maybe they are by now. Is
+it your railway to Revin you are thinking of?"
+
+He was fingering his big note book.
+
+"I can't start anything till the railway runs," he answered, tapping on
+the book, "but when it runs--I'll show you when we get up there."
+
+They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient
+trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small
+branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its shaking
+holes.
+
+"You see," he said, pursuing his thought, "lorries wouldn't do here.
+They'd sink."
+
+"They would," she agreed, and found that his innocence of her secret
+locked her words more tightly in her throat. Far above, from an iron
+peak, the light of the heavy sun was slipping. Beneath it they ran in
+shadow, through rock and moss. Before the light had gone they had
+reached the first crest and drew up for a moment at a movement of
+his hand.
+
+Looking back to Charleville, he said, "See where the river winds. The
+railway crosses it three times. Can we see from here if the bridges are
+all down?" And he stood up and, steadying himself upon her shoulder,
+peered down at Charleville, to where man lived in the valleys. But
+though the slopes ahead of them were still alight, depths, distance, the
+crowding and thickening of twilight in the hollows behind them offered
+no detail.
+
+"I fear they are," she said, gazing with him. "I think they are. I think
+I can remember that they are."
+
+Soon they would be at the top of the long descent on Revins. Should she
+tell him, he who sat so close, so unsuspecting? An arrowy temptation
+shot through her mind.
+
+"Is it possible--Why not write a letter when he is gone!"
+
+She saw its beauty, its advantages, and she played with it like someone
+who knew where to find strength to withstand it.
+
+"He is so happy, so gay," urged the voice, "so full of his plans! And
+you have left it so late. How painful now, just as he is going, to bid
+him think: 'I will never see her face again!'"
+
+(How close he sat beside her! How close her secret sat within her!)
+
+"Think how it is with you," pursued the tempting voice. "It is hard to
+part from a face, but not so hard to part from the writer of a letter."
+
+Over the next crest the Belgian Ardennes showed blue and dim in the
+distance.
+
+"Stop!" he said, holding up his hand again.
+
+They were on the top of a high plateau; she drew up. A large bird with
+red under its wings flapped out and hung in the air over the precipice.
+
+"See--the Meuse!" he said. "See, on its banks, do you see down there?
+Come to the edge."
+
+Hundreds of feet below lay a ribbon-loop of dark, unstirring water. They
+stood at the edge of the rock looking down together. She saw he was
+excited. His usually pale face was flushed.
+
+"Do you see down there, do you see in this light--a village?"
+
+She could see well enough a village.
+
+"That's Revins. And those dark dots beyond----"
+
+"I see them."
+
+"My factories. Before the summer you'll see smoke down there! They are
+partially destroyed. One can't see well, one can't see how much--"
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you never been back? Have you never seen what's happened?"
+
+She had not guessed this: she was not prepared for this. This was the
+secret, then of his absorption.
+
+"I've not seen it yet. I've not been able to get away. And the Paris
+factories have held me every minute. But now I'm here, I'm--I'm
+wondering--You see that dot beyond, standing separate?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's where I sleep to-night. That's the house."
+
+"But can you sleep there?" she asked, still shocked that she had not
+realised what this journey was to him.
+
+"Can I?"
+
+"I mean is the house ruined?"
+
+"Oh, the house is in bad order," he said. "Not ruined. 'Looted,' my old
+_concierge_ writes. She was my nurse a hundred years ago. She has been
+there through the occupation. I wrote to her, and she expects me
+to-night. To-night it will be too dark, but to-morrow before I leave I
+shall see what they have done to the factories."
+
+"Don't you know at all how bad they are?"
+
+"I've had letters. The agent went on ahead five days ago and he has
+settled there already. But letters don't tell one enough. There are
+little things in the factories--things I put in myself--" He broke off
+and drew her to another side of the plateau. "See down there! That
+unfortunate railway crosses two more bridges. I can't see now, but
+they're blown up, since all the others are. And such a time for
+business! It hurts me to think of the things I can't set going till that
+railway works. Every one is crying out for the things that I can
+make here."
+
+On and on he talked in his excitement, absorbed and planning, leading
+her from one point of view on the plateau to another. Her eyes followed
+his pointing hands from crest to crest of the mountains their neighbours,
+till the valleys were full of creeping shadows. Even when the shades
+filmed his eager hand he held it out to point here and there as though
+the whole landscape of the mountains was printed in immortal daylight on
+his mind.
+
+"I can't see," she said. "It's so dark down there. I can't see it," as
+he pointed to the spot where the Brussels railway once ran.
+
+"Well, it's there," he said, staring at the spot with eyes that knew.
+
+The blue night deepened in the sky; from east, west, north, south,
+sprang the stars.
+
+"Fanny, look! There's a light in my house!"
+
+Fathoms of shade piled over the village and in the heart of it a light
+had appeared. "Marie has lit the lamp on the steps. I mustn't be too
+late for her--I must soon go down."
+
+"What, you walk? Is there a footpath down?"
+
+"I shall go down this mountain path below. It's a path I know, shooting
+hares. Soon I shall be back again. Brussels one week; then Paris; then
+here again. I'll see what builders can be spared from the Paris
+factories. They can walk out here from Charleville. Ten miles, that's
+nothing! Then we'll get the stone cut ready in the quarries. Do you
+know, during the war, I thought (when I thought of it), 'If the Revins
+factories are destroyed it won't be I who'll start them again. I won't
+take up that hard mountain life any more. If they're destroyed, it's too
+discouraging, so let them lie!' But now I don't feel discouraged at
+all. I've new ideas, bigger ones. I'm older, I'm going to be richer. And
+then, since they're partly knocked down I'll rebuild them in a better
+way. And it's not only that--See!" He was carried away by his resolves,
+shaken by excitement, and pulling out his note-book he tilted it this
+way and that under the starlight, but he could not read it, and all the
+stars in that sky were no use to him. He struck a match and held the
+feeble flame under that heavenly magnificence, and a puff of wind
+blew it out.
+
+"But I don't need to see!" he exclaimed, and pointing into the night he
+continued to unfold his plans, to build in the unmeaning darkness,
+which, to his eyes, was mountain valleys where new factories arose,
+mountain slopes whose sides were to be quarried for their stony ribs,
+rivers to move power-stations, railways to Paris and to Brussels. As she
+followed his finger her eyes lit upon the stars instead, and now he
+said, "There, there!" pointing to Orion, and now "Here, here!" lighting
+upon Aldebrande.
+
+As she followed his finger her thoughts were on their own paths,
+thinking, "This is Julien as he will be, not as I have known him." The
+soldier had been a wanderer like herself, a half-fantastic being. But
+here beside her in the darkness stood the civilian, the Julien-to-come,
+the solid man, the builder, plotting to capture the future.
+
+For him, too, she could no longer remain as she had been. Here, below
+her was the face, the mountain face, of her rival. Unless she became one
+with his plans and lived in the same blazing light with them, she would
+be a separate landscape, a strain upon his focus.
+
+Then she saw him looking at her. Her face, silver-bright in the
+starlight, was as unreadable as his own note-book.
+
+"Are you sure," he was saying, "that you won't be blamed about the car?"
+
+"Sure, quite sure. The men have all gone home."
+
+"But to-morrow morning? When they see it has been out?"
+
+"Not--to-morrow morning. No, they won't say anything to-morrow morning.
+Oh, dear Julien--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think, I hope you are going to have a great success here. And don't
+forget--me--when you--"
+
+"--When I come back in a week!"
+
+"But your weeks--are so long."
+
+"Yet you will be happy without me," he said suddenly.
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"You've some solace, some treasure of your own." He nodded. "In a way,"
+he said, "I've sometimes thought you half out of reach of pain."
+
+She caught her breath, and the starry sky whirled over her head.
+
+"You're a happy foreigner!" he finished. "Did you know? Dormans called
+you that after the first dance. He said to me: 'I wonder if they are all
+so happy in England! I must go and see.'"
+
+"You too, you too!" she said, eagerly, and she wanted him to admit it.
+"See how happy, how busy, how full of the affairs of life you soon will
+be! Difficulties of every sort, and hard work and triumph--"
+
+"And you'll see, you'll see, I'll do it," he said, catching fire again.
+"I'll grow rich on these bony mountains--it isn't only the riches, mind
+you, but they are the proof--I'll wring it out in triumph, not in water,
+but in gold--from the rock!"
+
+He stood at the edge of the path, a little above her, blotting out the
+sky with his darker shape, then turning, kissed her.
+
+"For the little time!" he said, and disappeared.
+
+The noise of his footsteps descended in the night below. Ten minutes
+passed, and as each step trod innocently away from her for ever she
+continued motionless and silent to listen from her rock. The noises all
+but faded, yet, loth to put an end to the soft rustle, she listened
+while it grew fainter and less human to her ear, till it mingled at last
+with the rustle of nature, with the whine of the wind and the pit-pat of
+a little creature close at hand.
+
+She stirred at last, and turned; and found herself alone with that
+flock of enormous companions, the hog-backed mountains, like cattle
+feeding about her. Above, uniting craggy horn to horn, was an
+architrave of stars.
+
+"Good-bye"--to the light in the valley, and starting the car she began
+the descent on Charleville. There are moments when the roll of the world
+is perceptible to the extravagant senses. There are moments when the
+glamour of man thins away into oblivion before the magic of night, when
+his face fades and his voice is silenced before that wind of excited
+perception that blows out of nowhere to shake the soul.
+
+In such a mood, in such a giddy hour, seated in person upon her car, in
+spirit upon her imagination, Fanny rode down the mountain into the night.
+
+She was invincible, inattentive to the voice of absent man, a hard,
+hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven--composing and chanting
+unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven,
+protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her
+down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought
+her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot
+of the last hill.
+
+Recalled to earth by the light of Charleville she drove slowly up the
+main street, replaced the car in the garage, and returned to her house
+in the Rue de Cleves.
+
+"It is true," she whispered, as she entered the room, "that I am half
+out of reach of pain--" and long, in plans for the future, she hung over
+the embers.
+
+The gradual sinking of the light before her reminded her of the present.
+"The last night that the fire burns for me!" She heaped on all her logs.
+
+"Little pannikin of chocolate, little companion!" Hunger, too, awoke,
+and she dropped two sticks of chocolate into the water. "The fire dies
+down to-night. To-morrow I shall be gone." A petal from the apple
+blossom on the mantelpiece fell against her hand.
+
+"To-morrow I shall be gone. The apple blossom is spread to large wax
+flowers, and the flowers will fall and never breed apples. They will
+sweep this room, and Philippe's mother will come and sit in it and make
+it sad. So many things happen in the evening. So many unripe thoughts
+ripen before the fire. Turk, Bulgar, German--Me. Never to return. When
+she comes into this room the apple flowers will stare at her across the
+desert of _my_ absence, and wonder who _she_ is! I wonder if I can teach
+her anything. Will she keep the grid on the wood fire? And the blue
+birds flying on the bed? It is like going out of life--tenderly leaving
+one's little arrangements to the next comer--"
+
+And drawing her chair up to the table, she lit the lamp, and sat down to
+write her letter.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+This file should be named 7hpfr10.txt or 7hpfr10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 7hpfr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 7hpfr10a.txt
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/7hpfr10.zip b/old/7hpfr10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..69a9906
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/7hpfr10.zip
diff --git a/old/8hpfr10.txt b/old/8hpfr10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4eef392
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8hpfr10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8575 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Happy Foreigner
+
+Author: Enid Bagnold
+
+Release Date: March, 2006 [EBook #9978]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on November 7, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE HAPPY FOREIGNER
+
+by
+
+ENID BAGNOLD
+
+1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PROLOGUE: THE EVE
+
+
+PART I. THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+CHAPTER I. THE TRAVELLER
+
+
+PART II. LORRAINE
+
+CHAPTER II. METZ
+CHAPTER III. JULIEN
+CHAPTER IV. VERDUN
+CHAPTER V. VERDUN
+CHAPTER VI. THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+CHAPTER VII. THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+CHAPTER VIII. GERMANY
+CHAPTER IX. THE CRINOLINE
+CHAPTER X. FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+CHAPTER XI. THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+
+PART III. THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+CHAPTER XII. PRECY-SUR-OISE
+CHAPTER XIII. THE INN
+CHAPTER XIV. THE RIVER
+CHAPTER XV. ALLIES
+CHAPTER XVI. THE ARDENNES
+
+
+PART IV. SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+CHAPTER XVII. THE STUFFED OWL
+CHAPTER XVIII. PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+CHAPTER XIX. PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+CHAPTER XX. THE LAST DAY
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+
+THE EVE
+
+Between the grey walls of its bath--so like its cradle and its
+coffin--lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the
+surface of the earth for seventy years.
+
+As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was
+rising.
+
+The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the
+bath.
+
+"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The
+earth itself is moving.
+
+"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head,
+saying--'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that
+is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.
+
+"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing--how do I know
+if I am equipped for a larger horizon!..."
+
+And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:--
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+        The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill,--
+        They lie within the breast!"
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+THE BLACK HUT AT BAR
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+THE TRAVELLER
+
+The war had stopped.
+
+The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States
+was hourly expected.
+
+Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing
+city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed
+corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in
+a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes
+were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.
+
+She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the
+following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.
+
+Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for
+sale held a bunch to her face.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+He pursued her and held it against her chin.
+
+"No, thank you."
+
+"But I give it to you! I _give_ it to you!"
+
+As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table
+of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them.
+But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the
+platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.
+
+"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute..." he panted.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Haven't you heard ... haven't you heard! The war is over!"
+
+She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
+"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"
+
+And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt
+and the violets accompanied her.
+
+At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc.
+The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines
+of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met
+she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that
+hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything,
+expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into
+the rain.
+
+She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a
+deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick
+mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for
+a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her
+coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the
+clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no
+one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the
+travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the
+pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face;
+down her sleeves and on to her hands.
+
+A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking
+towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she
+could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."
+
+She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard
+these letters--with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach
+with greed.
+
+Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved
+with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many
+American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a
+stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining
+each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.
+
+The eye of a captain opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she
+should.
+
+The eye of a lieutenant opened.
+
+"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."
+
+"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"
+
+"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."
+
+Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two
+boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American
+thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his
+pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard
+noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind,
+unanswering stupor.
+
+"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the
+slit grew larger. The light went out.
+
+"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent
+the destruction of the board.
+
+Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon
+the pavement.
+
+"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.
+
+"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.
+
+"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"
+
+"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved
+towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders,
+who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.
+
+"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room
+alone."
+
+"I've a room ... If you're not American!"
+
+"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American
+wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here,
+what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"
+
+"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added
+"Bandits!"
+
+Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of
+her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it
+is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man
+stooped to the bolts of the door.)
+
+"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now _they've_ gone.
+Follow me."
+
+She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground
+floor.
+
+"I've no light to give you."
+
+"Yet I must have a light."
+
+Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.
+
+"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."
+
+The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and
+musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as
+well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning,
+slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no
+jug, no basin, no bell to pull.
+
+As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by
+waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark
+coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black
+coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.
+
+Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous.
+I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so
+well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of
+least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off
+down the street to find her companions.
+
+A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood
+a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a
+garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic
+used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and
+clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned
+officers--the _brigadier_ and the two _maréchaux des logis_.
+
+A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream
+which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden
+bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon
+simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either
+hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper
+stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end was a
+small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
+
+This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one
+of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her
+intimate life.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the
+eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny,
+in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then
+turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A
+bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
+
+"Food is in!"
+
+Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a
+tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread. The
+watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
+
+"Where is Stewart?"
+
+"She is not back yet."
+
+Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to
+read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the
+most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room
+remained empty.
+
+The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern
+in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.
+
+"Is there any food?"
+
+"It's on the stove."
+
+"Is it eatable?"
+
+"No."
+
+Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black
+mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the
+cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those
+who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept
+too well.
+
+"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are
+doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
+
+"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice through
+the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your
+hot-water bottle!"
+
+"What for?"
+
+"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you
+will find the water has the chill off."
+
+Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with
+their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars
+in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of
+the battlefields.
+
+On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the
+test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car
+that had been assigned to her.
+
+Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain
+she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer.
+The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans
+did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a
+roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered
+down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the
+pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and
+hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
+
+"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her
+handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some
+desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them
+with respect.
+
+When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at
+his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day,
+calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she
+drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had
+need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop
+into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled
+himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went
+upon his way.
+
+She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its
+back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's
+eyes popping from his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When
+she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client
+cried to her: "Why do you wait?"
+
+Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys
+swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her
+like an egg-shell.
+
+Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced
+before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.
+
+In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a
+convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.
+
+Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of
+the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch
+the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she
+had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which
+she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator,
+striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from
+her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites
+who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.
+
+"What can I do?..." she said to them aloud, in distress.
+
+But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird
+language, "What can _we_ do ... what can _we_ do?..." ("And I..." she
+thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")
+
+But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended
+from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw
+the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching
+sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.
+
+"_Ne vous en faîtes pas, mademoiselle_! These poor devils sleep as they
+drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We
+were four when we met you--and now we are three!"
+
+On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no
+run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set
+to work on her car.
+
+"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.
+
+"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last
+night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of
+waste ground."
+
+She crossed to the wall with her bucket.
+
+Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine
+had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken,
+but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage,
+and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.
+
+The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed
+the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her.
+His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She
+stopped short with the bucket in her hand.
+
+"On est delivré de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she
+went a little nearer.
+
+"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into
+his coat.
+
+He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said
+clearly: "Je suis le président Wilson."
+
+"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and
+willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You
+must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me
+bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."
+
+Where have you come from?"
+
+"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for
+it's late, and ... I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.
+
+"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"
+
+"Only be quick."
+
+"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"
+
+"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."
+
+She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the
+box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into
+her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she
+approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked
+round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once,
+soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of
+voices and the smell of gravy.
+
+"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest
+her. The others looked up.
+
+"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning,"
+said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the
+brigadier, mademoiselle?"
+
+"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to
+telephone."
+
+"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"
+
+"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him
+by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the
+men stood up in groups.
+
+"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not
+use force if one can help it...."
+
+Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and
+wine?" called the man.
+
+"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."
+
+"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King
+waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the
+step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.
+
+"What's that you've got?"
+
+"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without
+letting it go from his hand.
+
+"Where did you find those?"
+
+"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.
+
+"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"
+
+"What's that? But I've no time...."
+
+"Do you know about cars?"
+
+"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.
+
+"I have trouble ... I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"
+
+"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."
+
+"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you
+go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.
+
+The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom
+one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."
+
+Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car,
+at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he
+grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The
+King expects me."
+
+He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate
+about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she
+called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.
+
+She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her
+collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her
+skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly
+into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them.
+At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he
+cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes
+that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened
+them when a man cried in triumph: "_We'll_ take you to the King!"
+
+"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.
+
+Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven
+upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day--interviewing mayors of
+ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French
+troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made
+offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts
+from the battlefields.
+
+The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long
+hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day
+after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read
+alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night
+after night.
+
+A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She
+found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men
+upon the road whom she would never see again became her social
+intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking
+whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise
+of a Chinese scavenger.
+
+Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could
+have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around
+her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of
+the earth.
+
+"Have you _got_ to be here?" asked an American.
+
+"No, I wanted to come."
+
+The eye of the American said "Fool!"
+
+"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.
+
+"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
+"Englishwoman!"
+
+Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after
+dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road
+by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and
+entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.
+
+But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character
+of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she
+could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain
+which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats;
+tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.
+
+The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but
+make it in the morning how different this room would look!"
+
+There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the
+stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew
+whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes
+the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it,
+and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no
+coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried:
+"Ask Madeleine!"
+
+And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with
+the men in the garage.
+
+Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling
+across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny,
+perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them
+to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her
+room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in
+comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never
+known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she
+prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not
+taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the
+branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.
+
+Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village,
+cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more
+picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one
+of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.
+
+Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude,
+she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the
+milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the
+lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.
+
+"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.
+
+"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of
+sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their
+stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom
+before them, unknown and bright.
+
+The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.
+
+"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting
+up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to
+make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been
+there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven
+the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and
+their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were
+tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better
+their condition.
+
+On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together
+and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in
+the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not
+even the night is sacred.
+
+On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made months, till all November
+was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in fresh torrents
+of rain.
+
+Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed on
+upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her "clients" left
+her for an hour while they inspected a barracks; sometimes it was an old
+woman who called from a doorway that she might come and warm her hands
+at the fire; sometimes an American who helped her to change a tyre.
+
+There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old
+women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends were
+mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.
+
+"My sister has a grand piano ..." said one American to her--opening
+thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.
+
+"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"
+
+He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to
+her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the
+pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.
+
+An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were
+busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.
+
+American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the
+daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and
+twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
+
+"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at
+their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of
+children."
+
+"They seem well-mannered."
+
+"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered.
+But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your
+house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in
+the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out
+of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the
+Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"
+
+"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure
+cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had
+fetched from his canteen.
+
+"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want
+other people's children always in one's life."
+
+"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village
+whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and
+ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of
+some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped
+open disclosing the rusting bones.
+
+"Pardon, madame?"
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I
+have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are
+discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
+
+"Then this is a park?"
+
+"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
+
+Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other,
+when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in
+Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor
+about her.
+
+She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she
+paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it
+travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it
+she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair
+escaped from her cap.
+
+A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as
+she entered.
+
+"Fanny...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.
+
+Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the
+Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen
+rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land
+like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had
+no inkling.
+
+Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned
+first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
+
+"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
+
+"Of course!"
+
+"There will be things to eat there?"
+
+"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed
+from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated
+land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that
+matter, never been there."
+
+"Then we are going for certain?"
+
+"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
+Headquarters Staff. Pétain is there. It might even be gay."
+
+Fanny laughed. "Gay!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."
+
+"You have silk stockings with you!"
+
+"Yes, I ... I am equipped for anything."
+
+There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and
+Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the
+edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any
+one had lived there so long.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+LORRAINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+METZ
+
+With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the
+desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of
+Lorraine like the gate to a new world.
+
+The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the
+battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry
+away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed
+garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier's restaurant, and join the dancing
+in the hall below.
+
+Not a night passed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty
+air. It burst into the narrow streets from _estaminets_ where the
+soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German
+houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier Général" danced a triumph.
+Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in
+their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers
+danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because
+they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.
+
+It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a
+little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?
+
+In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Maréchal Pétain, and kept his
+eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the
+Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them balls--insufficiently
+fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France
+could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the
+cake-shops flowered with _éclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux à la
+crême_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.
+
+France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine,
+that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the
+benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while
+the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that
+they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and
+silk were hiding.
+
+Fêtes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight
+processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town
+went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were
+sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously
+through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might
+sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the
+dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing
+white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in
+figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.
+
+The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand
+Quartier Général, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom,
+having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills,
+found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of
+Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.
+
+"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.
+
+"I have--eight."
+
+"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."
+
+"Is there work, sir?"
+
+"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance
+all night! Englishwomen do dance, don't they?"
+
+"I have never been to England."
+
+"Get them here. Send for them."
+
+So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of
+women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-à-Mousson as dusk was
+falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.
+
+They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets
+flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of butter, bars of
+chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
+
+"Can you see the price on the butter?"
+
+"Twenty-four...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I can't see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
+
+"Good heavens!"
+
+"Ah, is it possible, éclairs?"
+
+"Eclairs!"
+
+And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
+
+German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper
+balls into the back of the ambulance.
+
+"I heard, I heard...."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"I heard German spoken."
+
+"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"
+
+"No," but Fanny felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language
+spoken in a vanished town.
+
+They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du
+Theâtre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for
+the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had
+waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.
+
+"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is
+and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"
+
+In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French
+tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they
+walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other
+side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth,
+with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited
+behind the chairs.
+
+"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...
+where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles,
+there's a jar left from yours."
+
+"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you,
+mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
+
+"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your
+responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey!
+For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is
+more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans
+yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
+
+"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You
+can't? Nor I either...."
+
+"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
+
+Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music
+stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
+
+A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in
+mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement.
+"To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had
+run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor
+lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without
+generosity, beauty, or privacy--in a hole, dirty and cold, plain
+and coarse.
+
+She glanced at her neighbour with wonder and appreciation, delight and
+envy. There was a light, clean scent upon his hair. She saw his hands,
+his nails. And her own.
+
+A young Jew opposite her had his hair curled, and a faint powdery bloom
+about his face.
+
+("But never mind! That is civilisation. There are people who turn from
+that and cry for nature, but I, since I've lived as a dog, when I see
+artifice, feel gay!")
+
+"You don't know with what interest you have been awaited."
+
+"We?"
+
+"Ah, yes! And were you pleased to come?"
+
+"We did not know to what we were coming!"
+
+"And now?..."
+
+She looked round the table peacefully, listened to the light voices
+talking a French she had never heard at Bar.
+
+"And now?..."
+
+"I could not make you understand how different...." (No, she would not
+tell him how they had lived at Bar. She was ashamed.) But as she was
+answering the servant gave him a message and he was called away. When he
+returned he said: "The Commandant Dormans is showing himself
+very anxious."
+
+The Jew laughed and said: "He wants to see these ladies this evening?"
+
+"No, he spares them that, knowing of their journey. He sends a message
+by the Capitaine Châtel to tell us that the _D.S.A._ gives a dance
+to-morrow night. The personal invitation will be sent by messenger in
+the morning. You dance, mademoiselle?"
+
+"There is a dance, and we are invited? Yes, yes, I dance! You asked if I
+was happy now that I am here. To us this might be Babylon, after
+the desert!"
+
+"Babylon, the wicked city?"
+
+"The gay, the light, beribboned city! What is the 'D.S.A.'?"
+
+"A power which governs our actions. We are but the C.R.A.... the
+regulating control. But they are the Direction. 'Direction Service
+Automobile.' They draw up all traffic rules for the Army, dispose of
+cars, withdraw them. On them you depend and I depend. But they are
+well-disposed towards you."
+
+"And the Commandant Dormans is the head?"
+
+"The head of all transport. He is a great man. Very peculiar."
+
+"The Capitaine Châtel?"
+
+"His aide, his right hand, the nearest to his ear."
+
+Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the
+garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars
+passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water
+gleam in the gulf below.
+
+"What river is that?"
+
+"The Moselle."
+
+A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in
+the outer town, the German quarter."
+
+In a narrow street whose houses overhung the river each of the section
+was put down at a different doorway, given a paper upon which was
+inscribed her right to billets, and introduced in Reherry's rapid German
+to her landlady.
+
+Fanny in her turn, following the young man through a dark doorway, found
+herself in a stone alley and climbed the windings of a stairway. A girl
+of twelve or thirteen received her on the upper landing, saying "Guten
+Abend," and looking at her with wonder.
+
+"Where is your mother?" said Reherry.
+
+"She is out with my eldest sister."
+
+"What is your name?"
+
+"Elsa."
+
+"Then, Elsa, look after this lady. Take her to her room, the room I saw
+your mother about, give her hot water, and bring her breakfast in the
+morning. Take great care of her."
+
+"Jawohl, mein Herr."
+
+Reherry turned away and ran down the stairs. Elsa showed Fanny to a room
+prepared for her.
+
+"You are English?" said Elsa, and could not take her eyes off her.
+
+"Yes, I am English. And are you German?" (Question so impossible, so
+indiscreet in England...)
+
+"I am real German, from Coblentz. How did you come here, Fräulein?"
+
+"In a car."
+
+"But from England! Is there not water?"
+
+"I crossed the water in a ship, and afterwards I came here in a car."
+
+"You have a motor car? But every one is rich in England."
+
+"Oh, not very..."
+
+"Yes, every one. Mother says so."
+
+The girl went away, then brought her a jug of hot water.
+
+"I hope," said Fanny, venturing upon a sea of forgotten German, "I hope
+I haven't turned you or your sister out of this room."
+
+"This is the strangers' room," said Elsa. "I thank you."
+
+When she had gone, Fanny looked round the room. It was too German to be
+true. The walls were dark red, the curtains dark red, the carpet,
+eiderdown, rep cover of the armchair, plush on the photograph frames,
+embroidered mats upon the washstand, tiles upon the stove, everything a
+deep, dark red. Four mugs stood upon the mantelpiece, and ... she rubbed
+her eyes ... was it possible that one had an iron cross upon its
+porcelain, one the legend "Got mit uns," the third the head of the
+Kaiser, the fourth the head of the Kaiserin? "That is too much! The
+people I shall write to won't believe it!"
+
+Her bed was overhung by a large branch of stag's horn fixed upon the
+wall.
+
+She felt the bed, counted the blankets, found matches on the
+mantelpiece, a candle in the candlestick, room in the stove to boil a
+kettle or a saucepan. Hot water steamed from her jug, a hot brick had
+been placed to warm her bed, a plate of rye bread cut in slices and
+covered with a cloth was upon the table.
+
+Foreign to her own, the eyes which had rejoiced in this room ... yet the
+smile of German comfort was upon it.
+
+She lay down beneath the branching antlers, and smiled before she went
+to sleep: "One pair of silk stockings ... to dance in Babylon ..."
+
+ *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the morning a thin woman dressed in black brought her breakfast--jam,
+rye bread, coffee and sugar.
+
+"Guten Morgen," said the woman, and looked at her curiously. But Fanny
+couldn't remember which language she ought to talk, and fumbled in her
+head so long that the woman went away.
+
+She dressed and went out, meeting Stewart by her doorway. Together they
+crossed the bridge, the theatre square, and went towards the Cathedral
+with eager faces. They did not look up at the Cathedral, at the statute
+of old David upon which the Kaiser had had his own head carved, and upon
+whose crossed hands the people had now hung chains fastened with a
+padlock--they did not glance at the Hôtel de Ville in the square beyond,
+but, avoiding the tram which emerged from the narrow Serpenoise like a
+monster that had too long been oppressed, they hurried on up the street
+with a subdued and hungry gaiety.
+
+There was a Need to be satisfied before anything could be seen, done, or
+said. A Need four years old, now knocking at the doors of heaven,
+howling to be satisfied.
+
+Before the windows of a shop they paused, but Stewart, standing back and
+looking up the street, said: "There is a better further on!" and when
+they had gone on a few paces Fanny whispered, hurrying, "A better still
+beyond!" At the third shop, the Need, imperative, royal, would wait no
+longer, and drove them within.
+
+"How many?" asked the saleswoman at the end of ten minutes.
+
+"Seven _éclairs_ and a cream bun, said Stewart.
+
+"Just nine _éclairs_," said Fanny.
+
+"Seventeen francs," said the woman without moving an eyelash.
+
+This frenzy cooled, their pockets lighter, they walked for pleasure in
+the town. The narrow streets streamed with people--French soldiers and
+officers, Lorraine women in the costumes of pageantry, and German
+children who cried shrilly: "Amerikanerin, Amerikanerin!"
+
+An English major passed them. They recognised his flawless boots before
+they realised his nationality. And, following his, the worst boots in
+the world--worn by a couple of sauntering Italian officers, gay in olive
+and silver uniform. German men in black slouch hats hurried along
+the streets.
+
+It had been arranged that they should eat their meals in a room
+overlooking the canal, at the foot of the Cathedral--and there at eleven
+o'clock they went, to be a little dashed in spirit by the reappearance
+of the Bar-le-Duc crockery.
+
+The same yellow dish carried what seemed the same rationed jam; the
+square blocks of meat might have been cooked in the Bar cook-hut, and
+brought with them over the desert; two heavy loaves stood as usual on
+the wooden table. The French Army ration was the same in every town.
+
+"Mesdames," said the orderly assigned to them, "there are two
+sous-officers without who wish to speak with you."
+
+"Let them come in."
+
+Two blue figures appeared in the doorway and saluted. The first brought
+a card of invitation from the Commandant Dormans. The second was the
+brigadier from the garage with a list of the cars assigned to
+the drivers.
+
+"Perhaps these ladies would come down and try their cars after lunch?"
+he suggested, and lunch being over they walked with him through the
+winding streets. At the gates of a great yard he paused and a sentry
+swung them open. Behind the gates lay a sandy plain as large as a parade
+ground, which, except for gulleys or gangways crossing it at intervals,
+was packed from end to end with row after row of cars; cars in the worst
+possible condition, torn, twisted, wheelless, cars with less dramatic
+and yet fatal injuries; some squatting backwards upon their haunches,
+some inclined forwards upon their knees--one, lately fished up from a
+river, had slabs and crusts of ice still upon its seats--one, the last
+dragged in at the tail of a breakdown lorry, hung, fore-wheels in the
+air, helpless upon a crane. Here, in the yard, was nothing but broken
+iron and mouldering carriage work--the cemetery of the Transport of the
+Grand Quartier.
+
+Lining all one side of the yard ran a shed, closed and warmed and
+lighted, where living cars slept in long rows mudguard to mudguard, and
+bright lamps facing outward.
+
+As the Englishwomen walked in a soft rustle could be heard up and down
+the lighted shed, for each half-hidden driver working by his car turned
+and shot a glance, expectant and mocking, towards the door.
+
+"Ben quoi, i'paraît qu'c'esst vrai! Tu vois!"
+
+"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, c'ui-là?"
+
+"C'est les Anglaises, pardi!"
+
+"Tu comprends, j'suis contre tout ca. I'y a des fois ou les femmes c'est
+bien. Mais ici ..."
+
+"Tu grognes? On va r'devenir homme, c'est tres bien!"
+
+"C'est idiot! Qu'est-ce qu'elles vont faire ici!"
+
+"On dirait--c'est du militarisme francais!"
+
+"Le militarisme francais j'm'en f----! Tu verra, cela va faire encore du
+travail pour nous."
+
+"Attends un peu!"... And murmurs filled the shed--glances threaded the
+shadows, chilling the spirit of the foreign women adventuring upon the
+threshold.
+
+"Four Rochets," said the _brigadier_, consulting his paper, "two
+Delages, two FIATS ... Mademoiselle, here is yours, and yours. The
+Lieutenant Denis will be here in a moment. He fears the Rochets will be
+too heavy for you, but we must see."
+
+The lieutenant who had been at dinner the night before entered the shed,
+greeted them, and turned to Stewart. "That car is too heavy for your
+strength, mademoiselle. It is not a car for a lady."
+
+"I like the make," she said stiffly, conscious of the ears which
+listened in the shed.
+
+"See if you can start her now, mademoiselle," said the _brigadier_,
+arranging the levers.
+
+There was a still hush in the shed as Stewart bent to the handle. Fanny,
+standing by the Rochet which had been assigned to her, felt her
+heart thumping.
+
+("Tu vas voir!" whispered the little soldiers watching brightly from
+behind the cars. "Attends, attends un peu! Pour les mettre en marche,
+les tacots, c'est autre chose!")
+
+Stewart, seizing the handle, could not turn it. In the false night of
+the shed the lights shone on polished lamps, on glass and brass, on
+French eyes which said: "That's what comes of it!"--which were ready to
+say--"March out again, Englishwomen, ridiculous and eager and defeated!"
+
+Fanny, looking neither to right nor left, prayed under her breath
+--"Stewart, Stewart we can never live in this shed if you can't start
+her. And if you can't, nobody else can...."
+
+There was a spurt of life from the engine as it back-fired, and Stewart
+sprang away holding her wrist with the other hand. The lieutenant, the
+brigadier, and a driver from a car near by crowded round her with
+exclamations.
+
+"You advanced the spark too much," said the driver to the _brigadier_.
+"_Tenez_! I will retard it."
+
+"She shan't touch the car again." said the lieutenant. "It is too
+heavy."
+
+"Leave the controls alone," said Stewart, scowling at the driver. "Give
+me room ..." She caught the handle with her injured hand, and with a
+gasp, swung the Rochet into throbbing life.
+
+There was a murmur of voices down the shed, and each man with a slight
+movement returned to the work he had been doing; the polishers polished,
+the cleaners swept, and a little chink of metal on metal filled the
+garage. The women were accepted.
+
+The day had vanished. Cars, yard and garage sank out of sight. Out in
+the streets the lamps woke one by one, and from the town came shouts and
+the stamp of feet marching. It was Saturday night and a torchlight
+procession of soldier and civilians wound down the street. The band
+passed first, and after it men carried fire-glares fastened upon sticks.
+
+The garage gates turned to rods and bars of gold till the light left
+them, and the glare upon the house-fronts opposite travelled slowly down
+the street.
+
+Fanny slipped out of the yard and crept along behind the flares like a
+shadow on the pavement. At the street corner she passed out on to the
+bridge over the Moselle, and leant against the stonework to watch the
+plumes of fire as they glittered up the riverside upon the tow-path. The
+lights vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that she could only
+feel her way over the bridge by holding to the stonework with her hand.
+A sentry challenged her and when she had passed him she had arrived at
+the door of her German lodging.
+
+Climbing the stairs a slow breeze of excitement filled out the sails of
+her spirit. "My silk stockings ... my gold links, and my benzene
+bottle!" she murmured happily. Now that of all her life she had the
+slenderest toilet to make--three hours was the time she had set
+aside for it!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+JULIEN
+
+Earth has her usual delights--which can be met with six days out of the
+seven. But here and there upon grey earth there exist, like the flying
+of sunlight, celestial pleasures also--and one of these is the heaven of
+success. When, puffed-up and glorious, the successful creature struts
+like a peacock, gilded in a passing radiance. And in a radiance, in a
+magic illumination, the newcomers danced in the drawing-room of the
+Commandant Dormans, and tasted that which cannot be found when sought,
+nor held when tasted.
+
+Old tapestries of tropical foliage hung around the walls, dusk upon one
+wall, dawn upon another. Trees climbed from floor to ceiling laden with
+lime-coloured flowers, with birds instead of fruits upon the branches.
+
+When at a touch the yellow dust flew out under the lamplight it seemed
+to the mazy eye of the dancer that the trees sent up a mist of
+pollen and song.
+
+In this happy summer, Fanny, turning her vain ear to spoken flattery,
+her vain eye to mute, danced like a golden gnat in fine weather.
+
+The Commandant Dormans spoke to her. If he was not young he had a quick
+voice that was not old. He said: "We welcome you. We have been waiting
+for you. We are glad you have come."
+
+Faces surrounded her which to her fresh eyes were not easy to read.
+Names which she had heard last night became young and old men to her
+--skins red and pale and dark-white--eyes blue and olive and black--gay,
+audacious and mocking features. She was dazzled, she did not hurry to
+understand. One could not choose, one floated free of preference, all
+men were strangers.
+
+"One day I shall know what they are, how they live, how they think." But
+she did not want that day to come.
+
+The Commandant Dormans said: "You do not regret Bar-le-Duc?"
+
+"No, no, no."
+
+"I hear you are all voracious for work. I hear that if you do not drive
+from morning to night we cannot hope to keep you with us!"
+
+Denis said to her: "Be careful of him! He believes there is no end to
+the human strength."
+
+She replied joyously: "There is no end to our strength!"
+
+When she had eyes to see, to watch, to choose, she found that there was
+in the room a man who was graceful and young, whose eyes were a peculiar
+shape, who laughed all the time gently as he danced. He never looked at
+her, never came near her. This young man was indifferent to her, he was
+indifferent to her ... Soon he became a trouble and a pleasure to her.
+With whom was he dancing now ... and now? Who was it that amused him?
+His eyes and his hair were bright ... but there were many around her
+whose eyes and hair were as bright. Before she had seen that young man
+laugh her pleasure had been more complete.
+
+While she was talking to Denis a voice said to her: "Won't you dance
+with me?"
+
+Looking up she saw who it was. His mouth smiled, his eyes were clever
+and gay.
+
+The moment she danced with him she began to grow proud, she began to
+find herself. Someone whispered to her: "The section must leave at such
+and such an hour...."
+
+She thought in a flash: "For me the section is dissolved ... I am I, and
+the others are the others!"
+
+The evening wore on. The musicians flagged and took up their courage
+again. It was late when Stewart, touching Fanny's arm, showed her that
+they were almost the only two women in the room.
+
+"Where are the others?"
+
+"In the hall, putting on their coats. We are all going."
+
+"Aren't they in a hurry?"
+
+"They have had orders, which were brought up just now, for runs early
+to-morrow morning. But you and I have nothing, and Denis has asked
+us ... if you are quick you can slip away ... to have supper with him
+at Moitriers."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"We can. The others go home in two cars which have been sent for us. No
+one will know that we are not in the other car. I'm so hungry."
+
+"So am I, starving. Very well."
+
+They joined the others, put on their coats, hunted ostentatiously for
+their gloves, then slipped ahead down the dark stairway into the square
+below. Denis joined them.
+
+"Splendid. I have my car round that corner. It will be only a matter of
+half an hour, but if you are both as hungry as I you will welcome it.
+Everything was finished upstairs, every crumb and cake. We must get a
+fourth. Who shall I get?"
+
+"Any one whom you would like to bring," said Stewart. "I don't think I
+have mastered the names yet. I really don't mind."
+
+"And you, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Nor I either," said Fanny, sniffing at the frosty air, at the fresh
+night.
+
+"Whom you like!"
+
+"Then I won't be a moment. I'll bring whom I can."
+
+"Monsieur!"... as he reached the corner. He turned back.
+
+"There is an artillery captain ... in a black uniform with silver."
+
+"An artillery captain ..." he paused enquiringly.
+
+"In black and silver. There was no other in the room."
+
+"Oh, yes, there were two in black and silver!"
+
+"Tall, with ..."
+
+"Ah, tall! The other is very short ... The tall one is the Commandant's
+aide, Captain Chatêl. He may not be able.... But I will see!" He
+disappeared again.
+
+When he returned he had the young man beside him.
+
+"One moment," said Châtel, as they walked towards the car; "who asked
+for me, the girl with the fair hair, or with the dark?"
+
+"With the fair."
+
+Moitriers was closed when they reached it, and they drove on to the only
+other place where food could be bought past the hour of midnight--the
+station buffet.
+
+Pushing past the barriers at the entrance to the station they entered a
+long corridor filled with heavy civilian life. Men and women lay, slept
+and snored upon the stone ledges which lined the side of the tunnel,
+their bags and packets stacked around them. Small children lay asleep
+like cut corn, heads hanging and nodding in all directions, or propped
+against each other in such an intricate combination that if one should
+move the whole sheaf of tired heads slipped lower to the floor.
+
+Further on, swing doors of glass led to a waiting-room, and here the
+sleeping men and women were so packed upon the ground and around the
+little tables that it was difficult to walk between them. Men sat in
+groups of nine or ten around a table meant for four each with his head
+sunk down between his hands upon the marble surface. On one table a
+small child wrapped in shawls lay among the circle of heads, curled like
+a snail, its toe in its father's ear. At each end of the room stood
+soldiers with fixed bayonets.
+
+Denis paused at the entrance. "Walk round here," he said, "there is a
+gangway for the sentry."
+
+"If we talk too loud," said Fanny, "we shall wake them."
+
+"They must soon wake in any case. It must be near the time for the
+train. You know who they are?"
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Germans. Expelled from Metz. They leave in batches for Germany every
+night--by a train that comes in and goes out at some horrible hour."
+
+Passing through more glass doors they came to an inner room where,
+behind a buffet, a lady in black silk served them with beer and slices
+of raw ham and bread.
+
+The four sat down for a moment at a little table--Denis talking of the
+system by which the outgoing Germans were nightly weeded from those who
+had permission to remain behind in Metz. Julien Châtel joined in the
+conversation. He spoke with the others but he glanced at Fanny. For the
+briefest of seconds he thought as he looked at her face that he saw a
+new interest smile upon it. He did not know that his own face wore the
+same look. His look said as he looked at her: "You, you, you!" At one
+moment she thought: "Am I pretty?" At the next she was content only to
+breathe, and thought no more of herself. She took in now his eyes which
+seldom rested on her, now a movement of his lips which made her feel
+both happy and miserable, and suddenly she learnt how often his finger
+traced some letter upon his cheek.
+
+These things were important. They were like the opening sentences of a
+great play to which one must listen, absorbed, for fear of
+misunderstanding all the story.
+
+It was not long before they rose, threaded their way back between the
+sleeping Germans, regained the car, and drove down the silent streets
+towards the Cathedral.
+
+"Have you seen it?" said Julien in a low voice, addressing her directly.
+
+"The Cathedral?"
+
+"Yes. I want to show it to you. Will you meet me there to-morrow at
+three?"
+
+(The others talked and smiled and knew nothing. Whoever has a secret is
+stronger than they who know nothing. Fanny thought: "My companions, to
+be as you are is not to exist! Whatever you feel, you are feeling
+nothing ...")
+
+"Will you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, and joined her hands tightly, for this was where
+the play really began.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun shone gaily. Here was no mud, no unhappiness, here were no
+puzzled women, and touching mayors of ruined villages, but instead gay
+goblin houses, pointed churches like sugar cake, the old French theatre
+with its stone garlands glittering in the sun; sun everywhere, streaming
+over the Place du Théâtre, over women shaking coloured rags from the
+windows, women washing linen by the river; everything that had been wet
+was drying, everything that had savoured of tears and age and sadness
+was burning up under the sun, and what moisture remained was brighter
+than jewels.
+
+"Suppose he never came!"
+
+"Why, then, be ready for that. Very likely he wouldn't come. Very likely
+he would think in daylight--' She is not a woman, but an English
+Amazon...'" Fanny glanced down at her clothes regretfully. She was
+ill-equipped for an assignation.
+
+"At least I might have better gloves," she thought, and walked into a
+small shop which advertised men's clothes in German across the window.
+She bought yellow washing-leather gloves at twenty-eight francs a pair,
+and would have paid a hundred had the salesman insisted.
+
+And now with yellow gloves, silk stockings, shining shoes and a heart
+as light as a leaf upon a wind she walked towards the Cathedral.
+
+"He won't come. He won't be there...." She pushed at the east door.
+
+He was under a Madonna, his black and silver hat in his hand, his eyes
+critical and pleased as he walked to meet her. They sat down together
+on a seat, without speaking. Then, each longing for the other to speak
+--"You have come...." he said first. (His face was oval and his hair
+was shining.)
+
+"Yes," she nodded, and noticed a peculiar glory in the Cathedral. The
+dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of
+a mourner.
+
+They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at
+each other's call.
+
+"I thought you wouldn't come."
+
+"Why, why did you think that?"
+
+Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their
+lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and
+answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.
+
+Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little
+words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled
+at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll
+go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her
+among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown
+her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except
+the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold
+light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of
+the carved fingers which prayed around them.
+
+They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very
+edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks
+buried in shrubberies of green.
+
+Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill
+in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon
+floated indefinitely like a cloud.
+
+A young doctor lounged beside them, putty-coloured under his red plush
+cap. "Why are all doctors plain in France?" she laughed.
+
+"Hush!" He wound his hand round and round like the player of a barrel
+-organ. "I have to stop you when you say silly things like a phonograph,
+at so much a metre."
+
+So he believed he might tease her.... Delighted, she stopped by the bank
+of the river and stared into the water. The sun ran over her shoulders
+and warmed her hands. The still shine of the river held both their eyes
+as movement in a train holds the mind.
+
+"I am enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a
+compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was
+sorry. "What a pity!"
+
+But she was not critical because she was looking for living happiness,
+and every moment she was more and more convinced that she would get it.
+But when he asked her her name and she repeated it, it sounded so much
+like an avowal that they both turned together down the tow-path with a
+quick movement and spoke of other things, for they were old enough to be
+afraid that the vague happiness that fluttered before them down the path
+would not be so beautiful when it was caught. And at this fear she said
+distinctly to herself: "In love!" and wondered that she had not said
+it before.
+
+Coming back to him with her words, she then began to wound and to delay
+him. "You mustn't be late for your office...."
+
+"When shall I see you again?"
+
+They dropped into a long silence. She summoned her coquetry that she
+called pride. The blue, blue forest at the edge of her sight tilted a
+little like a ship, the watery hill-country rolled towards it in
+mysterious kilometres.
+
+"It is beautiful," she said clumsily, avoiding his question, ignoring
+it. "Yet when I go there it is always more beautiful on the next hill.'
+
+"I must hurry," he said at once, "I shall be late at my office."
+
+"Where is your office?"
+
+He looked round vaguely. "There in that group of pines." They walked
+towards it, they were almost at the door, but he would not repeat his
+question. Would he not at the last moment? No. Had it not then been
+clear that the living happiness was at her lips? No. Could he let her
+go, could it have been a failure? He was holding out one of the stone
+hands. He was going.
+
+She looked up and the sun was streaming in his eyes, blinding him, and
+without seeing her he stared into the darkness that was her face. "I
+have so enjoyed my walk," he said. "Thank you for coming."
+
+All her face said "Oh!" in a hurt, frightened stare, but the sun only
+came round the edges of her hair and cap and left the panic in a
+shifting darkness. He was gone.
+
+She went back to her street. Reaching the big, populous house she
+followed the corridor that led from the stone courtyard, climbed to the
+first floor and opened the door of her own room. A bitter disillusion
+ran through her. The close-packed furniture seemed to say indifferently,
+"There's not much room for you!" and she knew quite well as she sat down
+on the bed that it was not her room at all, but had been as public to
+the birds of passage as the branch of a tree to the birds of the air.
+
+"I did so little. I did so little. It was such a little mistake!"
+Self-pity flooded her.
+
+"And why did he ask me to come to the Cathedral if such a little thing,
+such a little thing...." Indignation rose.
+
+"Things don't crumble like that, don't vanish like that!" She stared,
+astonished, at the scenes she had left behind her, the shining of the
+dark Cathedral, the ripple on the Moselle. "But they do, they do,
+they do...."
+
+Down in the street her own name caught her ear, and she went to the
+window.
+
+"Are you there, are you there?" cried the voice.
+
+Hanging waist-deep out of the window she received her orders for the
+next day.
+
+"I came down to tell you now," said the girl below on the pavement. "I
+thought you might have things to do to the car. You must be at the Hôtel
+Royal, near the station, at half-past six to-morrow morning."
+
+"Have you any idea whom I'm to take? Or where?"
+
+"I don't know where, but the man is a Russian colonel."
+
+She drew her head back through the window, and the gay tumble of the
+street gave way to the impersonal, heavy room. Cramming her oil-stained
+overall into her haversack, she put on her leather coat and went up to
+the garage.
+
+The sun had disappeared. A cold wind struck the silk-clad ankles.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+"Come in," she said in English, lifting her head and all her mind and
+spirit out of the pit of the pillow.
+
+Feet came further into the room and a shivering child held a candle in
+her face. "Halb sechs, Fräulein," it said. But the Fräulein continued to
+stare at him. He thought she was not yet awake--he could not tell that
+she was counting countries in her head to find which one she was in--or
+that she was inclining towards the theory that she was at school in
+Germany. He was very cold in his shirt and little trousers, and he
+pulled at her sheets. "Fräulein!" he said again with chattering teeth,
+and when she nodded more collectedly the little ghost slipped out
+relieved by the door. "Russian colonel ... I must get up. Fancy making
+that boy call me! Why couldn't someone older ... I must get up."
+
+He had left the electric light burning in her room, but out in the
+corridor all was black and hushed as she had left it the night before
+when she had gone to bed. Behind the kitchen door there was a noise of
+water running in the sink. She opened the door, and there was the
+wretched child again, still in his shirt, rinsing out her coffee-pot by
+the light of one candle. Well, since he was doing it ... Poor child! But
+she must have her coffee. By the time she was dressed he tapped again
+and brought in the tray with coffee, bread and jam on it. Setting it
+down, he looked it over with an anxious face. "Zucker," he said, and
+disappeared to fetch it. She filled her thermos bottle with the rest of
+the coffee which she could not finish, and put two of the slices of grey
+bread into the haversack, then crept downstairs and out into the black
+street where the gas lamps still burnt and the night sentry still paced
+up and down in the spectral gloom. Over the river hung a woolly fog,
+imprisoning the water; but as she crossed the bridge she noticed where
+its solidity was incomplete and torn, and into the dark water which lay
+at the bottom of such crevasses a lamp upon the bridge struck its
+arrowed likeness. It was a good seven minutes' walk to the garage, and
+she tried to get warm by running, but the ice crackling in the gutters
+and between the cobble stones defied her, and her hands ached with cold
+though she put them in turn right through her blouse against her heart
+to warm them as she ran. Fetching her car she drove to the Hôtel Royal,
+and settled down to wait.
+
+A porter came out and swept the steps of the hotel, and a puff of his
+dust caught her in the face. He laid a fibre mat on each stone step, and
+clipped them with little metal clips.
+
+"Are you for us?" asked a _sous-lieutenant_, looking first up and down
+the empty street and then at the car. He had blue eyes and a long, sad
+moustache that swept down the lower half of his face and even below his
+chin, making him look older than he should.
+
+"I am for a Russian colonel," she said, liking his mild face.
+
+"That's right. Yes, a Russian colonel. Colonel Dellahousse. But can you
+manage by yourself? Can you really? I will tell him...."
+
+He disappeared up the steps and through the swing door of the hotel. A
+moment later he was out again.
+
+"He will come to you himself, he will see you. But we want to go to
+Verdun! Could you drive so far? You could? Yes, yes, perhaps. Yet here
+he comes...."
+
+In dark civilian clothes the Russian came down the hotel steps. He was
+tall, serious, upright, rich. His face beneath his wide, black hat was
+grave and well cared for. The sombre glitter of his eye was grave, his
+small dark beard shone in the well-controlled prime of its growth. From
+the narrow line of white collar to the narrower thread of French
+watchchain--from the lean, long feet to the lean, white hands she took
+him in, and braced herself, adjusted herself, to meet his stately
+gravity. If there was something of the Mephistopheles in fancy dress
+about him, it was corrected by his considerate expression.
+
+"Have you had breakfast?" he began, speaking French with a softly nasal
+accent.
+
+"How kind of you to think of it! Yes, thank you, monsieur."
+
+"I have to go to Verdun," he put it to her. "I have business there." It
+was as though he expected that she would let him off without difficult
+explanations, would exclaim: "There is some mistake! Some other car,
+some other driver is intended for your work!"
+
+But she remained silent except for a smile of acknowledgment, and with a
+sigh he summoned the lieutenant and went back into the hotel. In a few
+minutes the Frenchman came out again. "Monsieur Dellahousse would like
+to know if you know the way?" he inquired.
+
+"He doesn't want to take me? Isn't that it?" asked Fanny, smiling but
+anxious.
+
+"He is a little doubtful," admitted the lieutenant. "You must
+excuse...."
+
+"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and
+I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know
+the way to Verdun."
+
+He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and
+Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care
+under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort
+of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure,
+too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their
+women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."
+
+She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she
+met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to
+drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to
+apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her
+bewilderment.
+
+She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates,
+and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields
+and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out
+of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long,
+at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden
+crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead
+gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges
+of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with
+ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out
+moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large
+upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's
+side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree
+across the road.
+
+"Halt--Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards
+which swung and creaked in the wind.
+
+"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone,
+pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the
+German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach
+Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one
+might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the
+arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."
+
+For miles and miles nothing living was to be seen, neither animal, nor
+motor, nor living man; only the stray fires of the Chinese fluttered
+here and there like blue and red marsh fires a mile or so back from the
+main road. Once as she flew along she shied like a horse and twisted the
+wheel as a wild screaming and twittering rose at the side of the car,
+and glancing back she saw three figures wriggle and laugh in mockery and
+astonishment. They had risen round the embers of a dead fire, and stood
+swaying on their feet and showing white teeth in orange faces. One had
+the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.
+
+They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with
+hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an
+arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first
+pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.
+
+Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the
+brow of a hill.
+
+"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it
+is a town!"
+
+"Wait, wait till you get nearer...."
+
+Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the
+suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful
+frailty--its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood
+upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry--not one house
+was whole.
+
+"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill
+which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was
+poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let
+out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still
+upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it
+should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet.
+Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the
+palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky. The
+Russian, who had stood up in the car, sat down. "Now go on...."
+
+The streets which circled the base of the hill had been partially
+cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way
+between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers,
+manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon
+fingers of stone already touched by moss.
+
+Here and there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But
+the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind
+--and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of the
+world's youth.
+
+Now and then with a crash the remains of a house fell, as the block of
+stonework which alone supported it was disarranged by the
+working soldiers.
+
+"Where am I to go?" asked Fanny, as the street wound round the base of
+the hill.
+
+"I will climb over beside you and direct you," said the French
+lieutenant, and dropped into the front seat.
+
+"Where do these soldiers sleep? Not among these ruins?"
+
+A block of masonry fell ahead of them and split its stones across the
+street.
+
+"Be careful! You can get round by this side street. Up here.... In these
+ruins. No living soul can sleep in Verdun now."
+
+"Where, then?"
+
+"Don't you know? They sleep _beneath_ Verdun, in this hill around which
+we are circling. I am looking for the entrance."
+
+"Inside this hill? Under the town?"
+
+"But you've heard of the _citadelle?_"
+
+"Yes, but... this hill is so big."
+
+"There are fifteen kilometres of tunnel in this hollow hill, and
+hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a
+defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, here is the entrance."
+
+They left the car. Before them was a small dark hole in the side of the
+hill, an entrance not much higher than a man, into which ran a single
+rail line of narrow gauge. A sentry challenged them as they walked
+towards him.
+
+Entering the hill they found themselves in a tunnel lit by electric
+bulbs which hung in a dotted line ahead of them.
+
+"Wait!" ordered the deep voice of the Russian, and he strode from them
+into the depths of the tunnel with the Eastern swing of Ali Baba
+entering his cave.
+
+Fanny stood by the mild lieutenant, and they waited obediently.
+
+"I must tell you a secret," he said to her. "Monsieur Dellahousse is
+very glad to be here. He said this morning: 'The Governor has sent me a
+woman to break my neck!'"
+
+"But he took me...."
+
+"Could he refuse you?--For he felt that it was a glove of challenge
+thrown down by the Governor of Metz. They do not get on together.... He
+took you with dignity, but he was convinced that he placed himself in
+the jaws of death."
+
+"When do we go back? We cannot now be in Metz before dark."
+
+"But haven't they told you? Never warned you? How monstrous! We are
+staying here."
+
+"And I return alone?"
+
+"No, you stay too. You are lent to us for five days. They should have
+told you!"
+
+"Oh, I stay too. In this tunnel, here! How odd, how amusing!"
+
+"Monsieur Dellahousse has gone to ask the Commandant of the _citadelle_
+to house us all. Here he comes."
+
+The Russian returned under the chain of lights. "Follow me," he said,
+and led them further into his cavern.
+
+They followed him like children, and as they advanced the lieutenant
+whispered: "We are now well beneath the town. It lies like a crust above
+our heads. Exactly beneath the palace you will see the steps go up...."
+
+"What is the railway line for?"
+
+"Bread for the garrison. There are great bakeries in the _citadelle_."
+
+Further and further still.... Till the Russian turned to the right and
+took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were
+twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist
+floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally
+above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the _officers de
+passage_, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle
+held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a
+chair and a shelf, and each bore the name of its temporary owner written
+on a card upon the door.
+
+"Twenty ... twenty-one ... and twenty-two," read the Russian from a
+paper he carried, and threw open the door of twenty-two.
+
+"This is yours, mademoiselle"; he bowed and waved her toward it. Fanny
+entered the room, which, from his manner, might have been the gilded
+ante-chamber of his Tzar.
+
+She heard him enter his own room, and through the partition the very
+sighing of his breath was audible as it rustled upon his lips! He tried
+to give her the illusion of privacy, for, wishing to speak to her, he
+left his room again to tap at her door, though his voice was as near her
+ear whether at door or wall.
+
+"I hope you are content, mademoiselle?" he said through the woodwork.
+
+"Delighted, monsieur."
+
+"You will sleep here," he continued, as though he suspected her of
+sleeping anywhere but there, "and dine with us in the officers' mess at
+seven. Until then, please stay in the _citadelle_ in case I need you."
+
+She heard his footsteps go up the corridor, the lieutenant following
+him. "I will unpack," she thought, and from her knapsack drew what she
+had by chance brought with her. Upon the shelf she arranged a tin of
+_singe_--the French bully beef--a gilt box of powder, a toothbrush, a
+comb, a map, a packet of letters to be answered, and a magneto spanner.
+
+There was an hour yet before dinner and she wandered out into the
+corridors to explore the _citadelle_. A soldier stood upon a ladder
+changing the bulb of an electric light.
+
+Catching sight of her he hurried from his ladder, and passing her with
+a stiff face, saluted, and disappeared.
+
+Soon she began to think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the
+corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed
+behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on,
+and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about
+their duties.
+
+"Perhaps they are changing the guard...."
+
+Yet a face which had already passed her three times began to impress its
+features upon her, and she realised suddenly that it was curiosity, not
+duty, that called the soldiers from their burrows. The news was spreading,
+for out of the gloom ahead fresh parties of onlookers appeared, paused
+disconcerted as she wished them "good evening," nodded or saluted her in
+haste, then hurried by.
+
+An officer with grizzled hair stepped into the passage from a doorway.
+As she neared him she saw he wore the badges of a commandant.
+
+"Who is this?" he asked in a low voice of the soldier who followed at
+his heels.
+
+"J'n'en sais rien, mon commandant," The soldier stiffened as a watch-dog
+who sees a cat.
+
+Fanny hastened nearer. "I drive a Russian officer," she explained. "I
+hope I have your permission to stay here."
+
+"Ah!" exclaimed the officer, looking at her in surprise. "Colonel
+Dellahousse told me 'a driver'; he did not add that the driver was a
+lady. Where have they put you? Not in the cubicles of the _officiers de
+passage?_ No, no, that must be changed, that won't do. Come, you shall
+sleep in the room next to the bishop's room, as he is absent. It is in
+my corridor."
+
+Fanny followed him, and noticed that the corridor was now clear of
+soldiers. The commandant paused before a door decorated with flags and
+led her into another corridor lined with cubicles much larger than those
+she had seen at first.
+
+"Open number seven."
+
+The soldier took his bunch of keys and opened the door.
+
+"Now fetch mademoiselle's effects from the other corridor. Which number
+was your room, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Twenty-two. But I can fetch them ... I have really nothing."
+
+The soldier withdrew.
+
+"He will get them. You dine with us, I hope, to-night at seven. Are you
+English, mees?"
+
+"Yes, English--with the French Army. I am really so grateful...."
+
+"The other room was not possible. I like the English, mees. I have known
+them at my home near Biarritz. You and I must talk a little. Do you
+care to read?"
+
+"Oh, yes, if I get time...."
+
+"Any books you may want please take from my sitting-room, number
+sixteen in this corridor. _Tenez!_ I have an English book there--'The
+Light that Failed'--I will get it for you."
+
+"Oh! I have read ... But thank you."
+
+_"De rien, de rien!_ I will get it now." He hastened up the corridor and
+returned with the book in his hand.
+
+The soldier, too, returned, bearing the seven objects which had
+accompanied her travels.
+
+"You will clean mademoiselle's shoes, brush her uniform, and bring her
+hot water when she needs it," ordered the commandant, and the soldier
+saluted impassively--a watch-dog who had been told that it was the
+house-cat after all.
+
+Left alone, she searched all her pockets for some forgotten stick of
+chocolate, and finding nothing, sat down upon the bed to wait hungrily
+till seven. The air in the tunnels was heavy and dry, and throwing off
+her tunic she lay down on the bed and slept until footsteps passing her
+door awoke her.
+
+She became aware that the inhabitants of her corridor were washing their
+hands for dinner, and sitting up sleepily found that it was already
+seven. In a few minutes she hurried from her room and out into the main
+tunnel, glad to get nearer the fresh air which filtered in through the
+opening at the far end.
+
+Reaching a door which she had noticed before, marked "_popote_," she
+paused a second, listening to the hum of voices within, then pushed at
+the door and entered.
+
+Instantly there was a hush of astonishment as seventy or eighty
+officers, eating at a long trestle table, sharply turned their heads
+towards her, their forks poised for a second, their hands still. Then,
+with a quick recovery, all was as before, and the stream of talk
+flowed on.
+
+The first section of the table was reserved for strangers passing
+through Verdun, and here sat a party of young Russian officers in light
+blouse-tunics, an American or two, and a few French officers. At the
+next section sat the officers of the _citadelle_, a passing general, and
+at the left hand of the commandant, Monsieur Dellahousse and the mild
+lieutenant.
+
+Overhead the stone roof of the tunnel was arched with flags, and
+orderlies hurried up and down serving the diners.
+
+Fanny, halfway up the long table, wavered in doubt. Where, after all,
+was she supposed to sit? At the top section, as a guest--or, as a
+driver, among the whispering Russians at the "stranger" section? Her
+anxiety showed in her face as she glanced forwards and backwards and an
+orderly hurried towards her. "Par ici, mademoiselle, par ici!" and she
+followed him towards the head of the table. Her doubts dissolved as she
+saw the gap left for her by the friendly arm of the lieutenant, and,
+arrived at the long wooden bench upon which they sat, she bowed to the
+commandant, and lifting one leg beneath her skirt as a hen does beneath
+its feathers, she straddled the difficult bench and dropped
+into position.
+
+"Beer, mademoiselle? Or red wine?" asked the Russian, suddenly turning
+to her; and the commandant, released from his conversation, called out
+gaily: "The mees will say 'water'--but one must insist. Take the wine,
+mees, it is better for you." The idea of water had never crossed Fanny's
+mind, but having decided on beer she changed it politely to red wine,
+which she guessed to be no other than the everlasting _pinard_.
+
+"I know them...." continued the commandant, smiling at the general. "I
+know the English! My home is at Biarritz and there one meets so many."
+
+And this old man thus addressed, a great star blazing on his breast, and
+tears of age trembling in his blue eyes, lifted his hand to attract her
+attention, and said to Fanny in gentle English: "Verdun honours a
+charming guest, mademoiselle."
+
+_"Verdun ... honours...."_ His words lingered in her ear. She a guest,
+_she_ honoured ... _here_!
+
+Up till now the novelty of her situation had engrossed her, the little
+soldiers watching in the tunnels, the commandant so eager to air his
+stumbling English, these had amused her.
+
+And when she had perceived herself rare, unique, she had forgotten why
+she was thus rare, and what strange, romantic life she meddled in.
+
+Here in this womanless region, in this fortress, in this room, night
+after night, month after month, the commandant and his officers had sat
+at table; in this room, which, unlike the tomb, had held only the
+living, while the dead and the threatened-with-death inhabited the
+earth above.
+
+They had finished dinner and Monsieur Dellahousse signalled to Fanny
+that she might rise. She rose, and at the full sight of her uniform he
+remembered her duties and said stiffly: "Be good enough to wait up till
+ten to-night. I may need you."
+
+They passed out again down the length of the tables. Near the door the
+Russian paused to speak with his countrymen, who rose and stood
+respectfully round him. Fanny and the lieutenant went on alone to
+the corridor.
+
+"You have travelled with him before?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes. I am lent to him to help him through the country. He is on a
+tour of inspection for the Red Cross; he visits all the camps of Russian
+prisoners liberated from Germany."
+
+"But are there many round Verdun?"
+
+"Thousands. You will see to-morrow. And be prepared for early rising. If
+he doesn't send for you by ten to-night I will tell the orderly to let
+you know the hour at which you will be wanted to-morrow morning. The
+car is all ready to start again?"
+
+"I am going out to her now."
+
+He turned away to join the Russian, and Fanny passed the sentry at the
+tunnel's mouth, and stood in the road outside.
+
+Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.
+
+Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its
+bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came
+and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the
+tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:--with his left eye
+he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with
+his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.
+
+"Fait beau dehors." His voice startled her. She turned to him, but he
+stood immobile in the shadow as though he had never spoken. She could
+not be sure that he had indicated to her that every man has his taste
+and his choice.
+
+She set to work on her car which stood in the shelter of an archway
+opposite, and for half an hour the sky trembled unregarded above her
+head. When she had finished she stood back and gazed at the Rochet with
+an anxious friendly enmity--the friendship of an infant with a lion.
+"The garage is eighty miles away," she sighed, "with its friendly men
+who know all where I know so little.... Ah, do I know enough? What have
+I left undone?" For she felt, what was the truth, that the whole
+expedition depended on her, that the stately Russian had perhaps never
+known what it was to have a breakdown--that in Moscow, in Petrograd, in
+his faraway life, he had sat in town cars behind two chauffeurs, unaware
+of the deadly traps in rubber and metal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+VERDUN
+
+Night was the same as day in the tunnels; the electric light was always
+on, and with the morning no daylight crept in to alter it. The orderly
+called her at half-past six and she took her "clients" to a barracks in
+the suburbs of Verdun, where Russian prisoners "liberated" from Germany
+crowded and jostled to see her from behind the bars of the barrack
+square, like wild animals in a cage. Armed sentries paced backwards and
+forwards across the gateway to the yard. As it came on to snow a French
+soldier came out of a guardroom and invited her in by the fire.
+
+Inside, the rest of the guard huddled about the stove, and behind them a
+Russian prisoner with a moon face swept up the crumbs from their last meal.
+
+"Why do Americans guard the gate?" she asked, "since you are a French
+guard?"
+
+"Because we don't shoot with enough goodwill," grinned a little man.
+
+"But who do you want to shoot?"
+
+"Those fellows!" said the little man, slapping the moon-faced Russian on
+the thigh. "We used to guard the gates a week ago. But the Russians were
+always escaping, and not enough were shot as they got over the wall. So
+they said: 'The Americans are the types for that!' and they put them on
+to guard the gates. Look outside! You are having a success,
+mademoiselle!"
+
+Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor,
+scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at
+Fanny in silence through the open doorway.
+
+"But I thought these were _liberated_ prisoners from Germany?"
+
+"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they
+were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the
+Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look
+after these pigs!"
+
+A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to
+the doctor," he said sharply.
+
+"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the
+sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the
+bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.
+
+"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, _va-t'en_!" they all said,
+and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned
+towards the door.
+
+"Here, dress yourself!"
+
+"What, to take a ... to the doctor?"
+
+He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and
+disappeared, buckling it on.
+
+"You have Russians in cells, too?"
+
+"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on
+bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."
+
+"But why won't they work?"
+
+"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they
+are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian,
+and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all
+useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are
+in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."
+
+An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
+French.
+
+"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly.
+"I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step
+across ... it isn't a stone's throw."
+
+She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and
+rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for
+they probably had the same ration as she--one piece of meat, two potatoes,
+and one sardine a man.
+
+After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him
+out of the hut.
+
+"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so
+we thought you'd better come and have some chips."
+
+"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to
+turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a
+shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling
+kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought
+Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she
+was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her
+a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat
+them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with
+coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only
+that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French
+that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."
+
+Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had
+finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what
+remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of
+animals, they said:
+
+"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or
+they'd sure die."
+
+"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't
+get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."
+
+"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
+"We wouldn't stand it."
+
+"You have no idea of poverty."
+
+Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a
+hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"
+
+She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the
+Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet
+here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry,
+though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality
+they were....
+
+She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man
+standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish
+accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a
+souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."
+
+"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"
+
+"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
+Just as though you were a zebra."
+
+"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of
+silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other
+barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps
+of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the _citadelle_
+for lunch.
+
+At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in
+search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows,
+invisible from the main roads.
+
+And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to
+evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many
+thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them,
+and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with
+the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once
+he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you
+and interest me?"
+
+She looked round.
+
+"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is
+jealous of you."
+
+She did not know what to make of this.
+
+"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the
+_citadelle_."
+
+"But...."
+
+"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does,
+as _his woman_."
+
+"But, why...."
+
+"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman
+for miles around, and you belong to us!"
+
+"You too?"
+
+"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger
+because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great
+curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me.
+I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"
+
+"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"
+
+"We talk of this and that."
+
+That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.
+
+"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"
+
+"Oh, but that's not necessary ... mystery!"
+
+"It _is_ necessary to love."
+
+"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much,
+"does not believe that you can love what you know."
+
+The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory
+image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This
+poor lady will soon be used to everything."
+
+Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.
+
+"When do we go back?" she asked absently.
+
+The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that,
+and he smiled again.
+
+They left next day, after the midday meal.
+
+Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching
+corridors.
+
+"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."
+
+She waited.
+
+"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
+Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."
+
+Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:
+
+"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."
+
+"Let me pass...." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."
+
+He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely
+ashamed of her refusal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you
+satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"
+
+"My experience?"
+
+"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now,
+if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town
+where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends
+again! But we are not coming all the way with you."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."
+
+They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead
+violence of the plains--between trenches that wandered down from the
+side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion
+upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the
+semblance of houses in the distance behind them.
+
+The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and
+cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on
+the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the
+road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled
+with instruments. Depôt after depôt was piled between the trees and the
+notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them.
+"The drinking trough--the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no
+horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the...." but they
+flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued
+them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not
+smoke here ... _Nicht rauchen_," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "_Rauchen streng
+verboten_," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood
+chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made
+them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as
+it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of
+camouflage--small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with
+wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the
+moon--long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing
+undergrowth--and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its
+knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of
+the earth.
+
+When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out
+upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare.
+Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse
+villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow
+grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across
+village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure
+toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer
+a lift?"
+
+Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a
+murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom
+she had overtaken.
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+"To Briey."
+
+"We, too. Get in, madame."
+
+The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing,
+climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her
+her basket and umbrella.
+
+"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her
+a rug.
+
+"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature
+against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."
+
+"You are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"Cover yourself well, well."
+
+Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road,
+who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace
+they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word,
+though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears
+until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!"
+they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own
+doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing
+themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop...."
+
+They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the
+sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the
+Frenchman indicated.
+
+The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her
+handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out
+backwards, with feet feeling for the ground--"What do I owe you,
+mademoiselle?"
+
+"Ah, nothing, nothing."
+
+"_Mais si_! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny
+piece on the seat, she hurried away.
+
+Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny
+ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said,
+"remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of
+life is spoilt for you."
+
+"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.
+
+Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the
+foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just
+above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the
+moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed
+slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the
+window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who
+prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fräulein," said Fanny, "would it
+matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry
+it afterwards."
+
+What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had
+nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room
+overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night
+full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the
+smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.
+
+When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open
+the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow
+and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out
+ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little
+boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed.
+The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again,
+between the grey walls of her bath--so like her cradle and her
+coffin--she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.
+
+"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to
+travel is not to move across the earth."
+
+Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten
+words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:
+
+     "The strange things of travel,
+      The East and the West,
+      The hill beyond the hill--"
+
+But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her
+through the door.
+
+"You are well, Fräulein?"
+
+Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
+I was ill?"
+
+"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we
+had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have
+just remembered her."
+
+"Well, I won't drown myself."
+
+"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."
+
+"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon
+the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to
+drown myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
+
+"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and
+when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In
+the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it
+was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of
+chalk upon the pavement.
+
+"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage,
+to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"
+
+The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung
+in her mind.
+
+"Whom did you take?"
+
+She struggled with the confusing image of the Russian. Before she could
+reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this
+morning. You'll have to get something done to your car!"
+
+Outside in the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but
+in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty
+cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider,
+which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from
+wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with
+her until she had been under the hose.
+
+Out in the street, where the hose was fastened to the hydrant, the
+little pests of Metz clustered eagerly, standing on the hose pipe where
+the bursts were tied with string, and by dexterous pressure diverting
+the leaks into gay fountains that flew up and pierced the windows
+opposite. As the mud rolled off under the blast of the hose and left the
+car streaky and dripping, the little boys dipping their feet into the
+gutters and paddled.
+
+Soaked and bareheaded, Fanny drove the clean car slowly back into the
+garage and set her in her place in the long line.
+
+Stewart, beside her, whispered, "They've come, they've come! They're
+starting at the other end. Four officers."
+
+Fanny pulled her tin of English "Brasso" from a pocket-flap, and began
+to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
+standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
+tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
+on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
+clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
+all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
+curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
+ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
+and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
+lake of brass.
+
+Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
+and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
+comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
+garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
+then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
+motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.
+
+And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
+fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
+on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
+face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
+impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
+his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
+scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
+She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
+little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
+enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
+into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
+up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have
+swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."
+
+"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.
+
+The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
+beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
+Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
+that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
+back from the backs of those about him.
+
+To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
+with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
+gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
+nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
+on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
+of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
+chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
+drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
+sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
+had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
+she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
+This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
+bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
+endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
+table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
+by Pont-à-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
+in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
+new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
+the thunder out at Pont-à-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
+who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he
+had left on the household that they should frame him in velvet and keep
+him staring at his own bed for ever!) She all but saw spirits--and
+shivered at the procession of life. Outside in the street she heard a
+cry, and her name called under the window. How like the cry that
+afternoon a week ago which had sent her to Verdun! Standing in the
+shadow of the curtain she peered cautiously out.
+
+At sight of her, a voice cried up from the street: "There is a fancy
+dress dance next Tuesday night! I'm warning every one; it's so hard to
+get stuffs." The voice passed on to the house where Stewart lived.
+
+("How nice of her!") This was a good day. ("What shall I wear at the
+dance?") There, about the face of the clock, windless and steady, hung
+the hours. Not yet time to start, not yet.
+
+Through the lace of the curtain and the now closed window, the shadows
+hurried by upon the pavement, heads bobbed below upon the street.
+
+Oh Dark, and Pale, and Plain, walking soberly in hat and coat, what sign
+in these faces of the silver webbery within the brain, of the flashing
+fancies and merry plans, like birds gone mad in a cage! The tram, as
+antique as a sedan chair, clanked across the bridge over the river, and
+changing its note as it reached firmer land, roared and bumbled like a
+huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was
+assailed by little creatures who threw themselves as greedily within as
+if they were setting out upon a wild adventure.
+
+"All going to meet somebody," said Fanny, whose mind, drowned in her
+happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and
+hurry the little creatures in the glass cage were forced to unfold their
+newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
+driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
+conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
+even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
+mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
+downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
+wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
+well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
+of herself.
+
+"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
+to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
+"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
+across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
+are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."
+
+When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
+seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
+upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
+of the big drapery shop.
+
+They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
+know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
+thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
+again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
+than he.
+
+"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
+
+She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at
+least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the
+vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had
+brought them together.
+
+"How lucky...."
+
+"How lucky what?"
+
+How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He
+would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't
+like it."
+
+Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of
+talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just
+behind the mask of the face.
+
+"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her
+lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for
+her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in
+advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too
+clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she
+could not say.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?"
+
+Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like
+that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she
+said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had
+the impression of a whole conversation.
+
+"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that
+I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding
+inspections to find out."
+
+"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
+
+"Why, of course, of course!"
+
+"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say
+it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).
+
+"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car
+had returned."
+
+Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun
+that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz,
+and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.
+
+But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does
+that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it
+for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself--the
+khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The
+Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these
+human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?..."
+Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a
+fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the
+spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to
+do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to
+do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit
+assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle
+was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.
+
+She glanced at him from time to time, and would have grown more silent,
+but by his light questions he kept her talking briskly on, offering her
+no new proof, until she grew unsure and wondered whether she had been
+mistaken; and, the hour striking for her supper in the town, she went to
+it, filled anew with his charm and her anxiety. Other meetings came,
+when, thrilling with the see-saw of belief and doubt, they watched each
+other with absorbed attention, and in their fragile and unconfessed
+relationship sometimes one was the victor and sometimes the vanquished.
+Yet what was plain to the man who swept the mud from the streets was not
+plain to them.
+
+"Does he love me already?"
+
+"Will she love me soon?"
+
+When they saw other couples by the banks of the Moselle, Reason in a
+convinced and careless voice said: "That is love!" But on coming towards
+each other they were not sure at all, and each said of the other:
+"To-morrow he may not meet me...." "To-morrow she will say she is busy
+and it will not be true!"
+
+When Fanny said, "He may not meet me," she was mad. How could he fail to
+meet her when the rolling hours hung fire and buzzed about his head like
+loaded bees, unable to proceed; when in a lethargy of vision he signed
+his name at the bottom of the typewritten sheet, saying confusedly,
+"What does she think? Does she think of me?"
+
+When at last they met under the shadow of the Cathedral they would
+exclaim in their hearts: "What next?" and hurry off by the Moselle,
+looking into the future, looking into the future, and yet warding it
+off, aware of the open speech that must soon lie between them, and yet
+charmed by the beautiful, the merciful, the delay. And going home, each
+would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned
+from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with
+mountains and rivers.
+
+That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the
+town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till
+seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.
+
+"I'm going to Weile," he said.
+
+"I'm going there myself."
+
+"To get your dress?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once
+by a group of idle girls.
+
+"Stuffs ..." said Fanny, thinking vaguely.
+
+"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
+
+Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of
+empty shelves. They had no black bombazine.
+
+"Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black
+gauze, black cotton..."
+
+It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he
+had bought six yards at eight francs a yard.
+
+"White ... something ... for me."
+
+There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard. "But cheap, cheap,
+CHEAP stuff," she expostulated--"stuff you would make lampshades of,
+or dusters. It's only for a fancy dress." The idle little girls assumed
+a special air. Fanny looked round the shop in desperation. It was like
+all the shops in Metz--the window dressed, the saleswomen ready, the
+shelves scrubbed out and polished, the lady waiting at the pay desk--but
+the goods hadn't come!
+
+Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and
+eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven
+francs a yard.
+
+"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
+
+Fanny had an idea of her own.
+
+"_Wo_," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening,
+"_ist eine Schneiderin?_"
+
+"A dressmaker who speaks French...."
+
+Elsa took her out into the dark street again, and in at a neighbouring
+archway, till at the back of deep courtyards they found a tiny flat of a
+little old lady. "Like this," explained Fanny, drawing with her pencil.
+
+"Why, my mother had a dress like that!" said the little lady, pleased.
+"Before the last war." She nodded many times. "I know how to make a
+crinoline. But when do you want it?"
+
+"For Tuesday night."
+
+"Ah, dear mademoiselle! How can I! To-day is Saturday. I have only
+to-day and Monday. Unless.... Are you a Catholic?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then you can sew on Sunday. You can do the frills."
+
+All Sunday Fanny sewed frills under the stag's horn, and when she went
+to meet Julien in the late afternoon, she had the frills still in a
+parcel. "What is that?" he asked, as she unfolded the parcel in the
+empty Cathedral, and began to thread her needle.
+
+"My dress for the dance."
+
+"What is it going to be?"
+
+"Frills. Hundreds of frills." She shook her lap a little, and yards and
+yards of white frills leapt on to the floor in a river.
+
+"Those flowers you bought, look, you have never put them in water!"
+
+He shook his head, and leaning from his chair, stretched out his arm for
+the parcel of white paper. "They are dying. Smell them! They yield more
+scent when they die." She sat holding the flowers near her face, and not
+thinking of him very distinctly, but not thinking of anything else.
+
+"But they won't last."
+
+"They will last this visit. I'll get new ones."
+
+"Oh, how extravagant you are with happiness!..."
+
+They looked startled and became silent. For every now and then among
+their talk some sentence which they had thought discreet rang out with
+a clarity which disturbed them.
+
+Between them there had been no avowal, and neither could count on the
+other's secret. She was not sure he loved her; and though he argued,
+"Why should she come if she does not care?" he watched her sit by him
+with as little confidence, with as much despair, as if she sat on the
+other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Is it raining again? How dark it
+gets. I must soon go." She made gaps in and scattered that alarming
+silence in which the image of each filled and fitted into the thoughts
+of the other like an orange into its close rind. Yet so dark and perfect
+is the mask of the face, so dull the inner ear, that each looked
+uncertainly about, half deaf to the song which issued so plainly from
+the other, distracted by the great gaps in the music.
+
+"Won't you stay with me till you have sewn to the end of that frill?"
+
+She sat down again without a word. And, greedy after his victory, he
+added: "But I oughtn't to keep you?"
+
+"I want to stay, too."
+
+The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an
+end.
+
+"Now I must go. It's supper--supper in the garage."
+
+He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the
+door of the house in the dark street by the river.
+
+"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps
+it's English."
+
+"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.
+
+"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room
+upstairs.
+
+"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them
+the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the
+street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night
+round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those
+uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"
+
+"Has every one had runs?"
+
+"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"
+
+"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and
+the silence of the human mind.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+THE THREE "CLIENTS"
+
+"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the _brigadier_ and at
+the pink paper he offered her.
+
+"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night.
+You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as
+you can to the Hôtel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be,
+but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and
+Pichot is getting you two spare tubes...."
+
+She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order
+and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy
+of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead,
+the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and
+accident, pure accident, had lighted on _her_, to sweep _her_ out of
+Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city
+like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold _Anywhere_.
+White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's
+cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something,
+anything--that she was ill--and stay.
+
+She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue
+tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and
+the funnel.
+
+"And if I said--(it is mad)--if I said, 'I am in love. _I can't go_.
+Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on
+the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver
+was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen
+bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with
+the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased
+stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of
+bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung
+about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some
+close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his
+mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.
+
+The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her
+skirt and feet.
+
+"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Coming. Where are the tubes?"
+
+"I have them."
+
+She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge
+to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder--hating
+every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.
+
+At the Hôtel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded
+with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from
+which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days
+when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.
+
+She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and
+flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising,
+but intent only on her question.
+
+"And could you tell me--(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me
+very late at the garage)--and would you mind telling me which day you
+expect to get back?"
+
+He turned to the others.
+
+"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
+To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."
+
+"Where shall I drive you?"
+
+"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Trèves."
+
+Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that
+the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was
+smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself
+and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and
+the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.
+
+In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel,
+unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat
+horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to
+the left and flat grass prairie to the right--little villages and
+clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its
+tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the
+road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before
+them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the
+grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards
+sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of
+beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again,
+and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot
+and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be
+touched to be relinquished.
+
+Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the
+corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was
+half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down
+by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car,
+but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped
+down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better
+than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of
+chamois-leather.
+
+At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose
+wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass.
+The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the
+landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village
+beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along
+the dry road.
+
+The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them,
+made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
+nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
+the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
+a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
+into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
+bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
+Bread, cheese, sausage, _pâté_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
+and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
+from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
+dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
+break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
+bodies of the bottles.
+
+It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
+strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
+spreading _pâté_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
+red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.
+
+"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
+thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
+morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.
+
+The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
+innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
+thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
+against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
+that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
+of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
+intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
+knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.
+
+The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked
+appreciatively together.
+
+"_Hé!_ The _pâté_ is not bad."
+
+"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"
+
+"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the
+bottle is all warmed. Try some."
+
+"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.
+
+"He is in the army."
+
+"You have no brother--no one to take care of you?"
+
+"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they
+think it interesting for us."
+
+"Tiens!"
+
+They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But
+the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and,
+bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:
+
+"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"
+
+The others reconsidered her.
+
+"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do
+not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that
+fine leather coat?"
+
+"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.
+
+Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to
+appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.
+
+"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that
+cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than--Well, how much?"
+
+The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned
+her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.
+
+"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his
+cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very
+serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."
+
+But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider
+that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big
+Bearskin be her _impresario_ or their instructor.
+
+"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and
+turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him
+for his stay in Balham.
+
+When the lunch was over and the last fragment of _pâté_ drawn off the
+last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes
+turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and
+the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with
+care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the
+last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.
+
+All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It
+grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that
+the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud
+moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with
+the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose
+simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.
+
+As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet
+and heavy, melted on her ear.
+
+"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"
+
+They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the
+back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."
+
+"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."
+
+"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.
+
+"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."
+
+And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny
+pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might
+lift the back seat and find the curtains.
+
+"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the
+car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been
+cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting
+on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight
+of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above
+them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky
+there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few
+yards ahead.
+
+As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow.
+Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily
+at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.
+
+They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at
+last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a
+voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which
+held so much discomfort.
+
+Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was
+keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back
+and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat
+was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs
+upon the floor.
+
+"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the
+big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours,
+running downhill in another mile."
+
+They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a
+querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they
+glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of
+fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed
+to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light
+which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of
+shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village--if village
+it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in
+the forest.
+
+The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and
+skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made
+slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a
+triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was
+written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses
+glittered in the snow with flags.
+
+A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow
+bridge brought her to a standstill.
+
+"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a
+safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.
+
+"We expect Pétain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."
+
+"But Thionville is forty miles away--"
+
+"Still, he might pass here--"
+
+Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow
+behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they
+came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a
+board: "This is Germany."
+
+They pulled up. Germany it might be--but the road to Tréves? He did not
+know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in
+Germany, and with his right in France.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+GERMANY
+
+Over the side of the next mountain all Hans Andersen was stretched
+before them--tracts of _little_ country, little wooden houses with
+pointed roofs, little hills covered with squares of different coloured
+woods, and a blue river at the bottom of the valley, white with geese
+upon its banks. They held their open mouths insultedly in the air as the
+motor passed. The narrow road became like marble, and the car hissed
+like a glass ball rolled on a stone step. On every little hill stood a
+castle made of brown chocolate, very small, but complete with turrets.
+Young horses with fat stomachs and arched necks bolted sideways off the
+road in fear, followed by gaily painted lattice-work carts, and plunged
+far into the grassland at the side. Old women with coloured hoods swore
+at them, and pulled the reins. Many pointed hills were grey with
+vine-sticks, and on the crest of each of these stood a small chapel as
+if to bless the wine. The countryside was wet and fresh--white, hardly
+yellow--with the winter sun; moss by the roadside still dripped from the
+night, and small bare orchard trees stood in brilliant grass.
+
+"Look! How the grass grows in Germany!"
+
+"Ah, it doesn't grow like that in the valley of the Meuse--"
+
+Every cottage in every village was different; many wore hats instead of
+roofs, wooden things like steeples, with deep eaves and carved fringes,
+in which were shadowy windows like old eyes. Some were pink and some
+were yellow.
+
+Soon they left the woods and came out upon an open plateau surrounded by
+wavy hills with castles on them. In the middle of the plateau was a
+Zeppelin shed which looked like the work of bigger men than the crawling
+peasants in the roads. One side of the shed was open, and the strange
+predatory bird within, insensible to the peering eye of an enemy, seemed
+lost in thought in this green valley. The camp of huts beside it was
+deserted, and there seemed to exist no hand to close the house door.
+They rose again on to a hillside, and on every horizon shone a far blue
+forest faint like sea or cloud.
+
+Nearer Tréves the villages were filled with Americans--Americans mending
+the already perfect roads, and playing with the children.
+
+"This is a topsy-turvy country, as it would be in Hans Andersen,"
+thought Fanny. "I thought the Germans had to mend the broken roads
+in France!"
+
+They stayed that night in the Porta-Nigra hotel, which had been turned
+into an Allied hostel. The mess downstairs was chiefly filled with
+American officers, though a few Frenchmen sat together in one corner.
+The food was American--corn cakes, syrup, and white, flaky bread.
+
+"Well, what bread! It's like cake!"
+
+"Oh, the Americans eat well!"
+
+"I don't agree with you. They put money into their food, and they eat a
+lot of it, but they can't cook.
+
+"Isn't it astonishing what they eat! It's astonishing what all the
+armies eat compared with our soldiers."
+
+"Now this cake-bread! I should soon sicken of it. But _they_ will eat
+sweets and such things all day long."
+
+"Well, I told you they are children!"
+
+"The Americans here seem different. They behave better than those in
+France."
+
+"These are very _chics types_. Pershing is here. This is the
+Headquarters Staff."
+
+"Yes, one can see they are different."
+
+"It appears they get on very well with the Germans."
+
+"Hsh--not so loud."
+
+After dinner they strolled out into the town. The Bearskin was very
+anxious to get a "genuine iron cross."
+
+He was offered iron crosses worked on matchboxes, on cigarette lighters,
+on ladies' chains.
+
+"But are they genuine?"
+
+He did not know quite what he meant.
+
+"I don't suppose them to be taken from a dead man's neck, but are they
+genuine?"
+
+In the streets the Germans sold iron crosses from job lots on barrows
+for ten francs each.
+
+"But I will get one cheaper!" said the Bearskin, and clambered up the
+steps into shop after shop. He found an iron cross on a chain for seven
+francs. No one knew what the mark was worth, and the three men, with the
+German salesman, bent over the counter adding and subtracting on paper.
+
+"How can a goblin countryside breed people who sell iron crosses at ten
+francs each?" wondered Fanny.
+
+There was a notice on the other side of the street, "Y.M.C.A., two doors
+down the street on your left," and the thin man stood in the door of the
+shop beside Fanny and pointed to it.
+
+"Couldn't you go there and get me cigars? They will be very cheap. Have
+you money with you?"
+
+"I'll try," said Fanny, "I've money. We can settle afterwards," inwardly
+resolving to get as many cigarettes as she could to take back for the
+men in the garage. She crossed the street, but looked back to find the
+thin man creeping after her. She waited for him, irritated.
+
+"Go back. If the American salesman sees you he'll know it's for the
+French, and he won't sell."
+
+"Tiens?"
+
+"He knew that quite well," she thought impatiently to herself, "or he
+wouldn't have asked me to buy for him."
+
+The thin man turned back to the cover of the shop like an eager little
+dog which has jumped too quickly for biscuit and been snubbed.
+
+She went down the street and into the Y.M.C.A.
+
+Instantly she was among three or four hundred men, who stood with their
+backs to her, in queues up the long wooden hall. Far ahead on the
+improvised counter was a _guichet_ marked "Cigars." She placed herself
+at the tail of that queue.
+
+"Move up, lady," said the man in front of her, moving her forward. "Say
+here's a lady. Move her up."
+
+Men from the other queues looked round, and one or two whistled slyly
+beneath their breath, but her own queue adopted her protectingly, and
+moved her up to their head, against the counter.
+
+It was out of the question to get cigars now. She had become a guest,
+and to get cigars would imply that she was not buying for herself, but
+to supply an unknown man without. And the marks on her uniform showed
+that the unknown was French.
+
+"One carton of Camels, please," she said, used to the phraseology.
+
+"Take two if you like," said the salesman. "We've just got a dump in."
+
+She took two long cardboard packets of cigarettes, and put down ten
+francs.
+
+"Only marks taken here," said the salesman. "You got to make the change
+as you come in."
+
+"Oh, well--I'll--"
+
+"Put it down. Put it here. We don't get a lady in every day."
+
+He gave her the change in marks, which seemed countless.
+
+"I'm sure you've given me too much!"
+
+"Oh no. Marks is goin' just for love in this country. Makes you feel
+rich!"
+
+As she emerged from the hall with her two long cartons under her arm she
+found the thin man, the Bearskin and Blackberry-Eyes standing like
+children on the doorstep.
+
+It was too much--to give her away like that.
+
+Other Americans, coming out, looked at them as a gentleman coming out of
+his own house might look at a party of penguins on his doorstep.
+
+Fanny swept past her friends without a glance and walked on up the
+street with her head in the air. They turned and came after her
+guiltily. When they caught her up in the next street, she said to the
+thin man, "I asked you not to come near while I was buying--"
+
+"Have you got cigars, mademoiselle?"
+
+"No, I couldn't. Why did you come like that? Now I can go in no more.
+You'd only to wait two minutes."
+
+They looked crestfallen, while she held the cigarettes away from them as
+a nurse holds sweets from a naughty child.
+
+"I could only get two packets. I can give you one. I'm sorry, but I
+promised to get cigarettes for some people in Metz."
+
+The thin man brightened, and took the big carton of Camels with delight.
+
+"They're good, those!" he said knowingly to the others. "How much were
+they, mademoiselle?"
+
+"Five francs twenty the carton."
+
+"Is it possible? And we have to pay...."
+
+By his tone he made it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a
+country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult
+to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the
+floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been a bitter journey for
+them.
+
+After all--those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated
+down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three
+times a day to keep their spirits up--why shouldn't they let him have
+their cigarettes?
+
+"You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it.
+"I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."
+
+He thanked her, delighted, and they went back to the hotel.
+
+The problem of the kindness of the Americans, and her frequent abuse of
+it to benefit the French, puzzled her.
+
+"But, after all, it's very easy to be kind. It's much easier to be kind
+if you are American and pink than if you are French and anxious."
+
+Another difference between the two nations struck her.
+
+"The Americans treat me as if I were an amusing child. The French, no
+matter how peculiar their advances, always, always as a woman."
+
+Next morning, when she got down to breakfast at eight, she found that
+the three Frenchmen had already gone out about their work.
+
+"Perhaps I shall get home to-night, after all," she prayed. She sat in
+the hotel and watched the Americans, or wandered about the little town
+until eleven. The affair with the cigars was suitably arranged. The hall
+was nearly empty when she went in, and the few men who stood about in it
+did not disarm her with special kindness. On getting back to the hotel
+she found the Bearskin pushing breathlessly and anxiously through the
+glass doors.
+
+"Monsieur Raudel has left his cigarettes in his bedroom," he said,
+"unlocked up. He is anxious so I have come back."
+
+"Well, tell him that if he--tell him quite as a joke, you know--that if
+I can get home--"
+
+(Something in his little blue eye shone sympathetically, and she leant
+towards him.) "Well, I'll tell _you_! There is a dance to-night in Metz,
+and I am asked. And tell him that I have bought two boxes of cigars
+for him!"
+
+The Bearskin, enchanted, promised to do his best.
+
+By half-past twelve the three were back at lunch in the hotel. Over the
+coffee Monsieur Raudel looked reflectively at his well-shaped nails.
+
+"Well, mademoiselle, so this is what it is to have a woman chauffeur--"
+
+Fanny looked up nervously, regretting her confidence in the Bearskin.
+
+"Apart from the pleasure of your company with us, we get cheap cigars,
+and you get your dance, so every one is pleased."
+
+"Oh!" She was radiant. "But you haven't hurried too much? Are we really
+starting back?"
+
+Monsieur Raudel, who was a new man when he wasn't cold, reassured her,
+and soon they were all packed in the Renault, and running out of Tréves.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+THE CRINOLINE
+
+That same night as dusk fell she shook the snow from her feet and
+clothes and entered the dressmaker's kitchen. Four candles were burning
+beside the gas, and the tea-cups lay heaped and unwashed upon
+the dresser.
+
+"Good-evening, good-evening," murmured a number of voices, German and
+French, and the old dressmaker, standing up, her face haggard under the
+gas, took both Fanny's hands with a whimper:
+
+"It will never be done! Oh, dear child, it will _never_ be done!"
+
+The crinoline which they were preparing lay in white rags upon the
+table.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, that is good! Are you helping too?" Elsa had brought three of
+her friends with her, and the four bright, bullety heads bent over the
+long frills which moved slowly through their sewing fingers. "_Good_
+Conquered Children!" They were sewing like little machines.
+
+"The Fräulein Schneiderin," explained Elsa, "is so upset."
+
+And this was evident and needed no explaining. The little lady twisted
+her fingers, grieved and scolded, snatching at this and that, and
+rapping with her scissors upon the table as though she were going to
+wear the dress herself.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I had to get them." She nodded towards the busy Conquered
+Children, apologising for them as though she feared Fanny might think
+she had done a deal with the devil for her sake.
+
+"Here are my frills," said Fanny, bringing from her pocket two paper
+parcels, one of which she laid in mystery upon the table, the other
+opened and shook out her two long frills. She drew off her leather coat
+and sat down to sew.
+
+"Oh, how calm you are!" burst out the dressmaker. "How can you be so
+calm? It won't be finished."
+
+"Yes, yes, yes. It's only half-past five. Can I have a needle?"
+
+"My mother had a dress like this before the last war." (This for the
+fiftieth time.) "And will your _amoureux_ be there?" she asked with the
+licence of the old.
+
+"Well, yes," said Fanny smiling, "he will."
+
+"And what will he wear?"
+
+"Oh, it's a secret. I don't know. But I chose this particular dress
+because it is so feminine, and it will be the first time he has seen me
+in the clothes of a woman."
+
+"Children, hurry, hurry!" cried the dressmaker, in a frenzy of sympathy.
+"Minette, get down!" She slapped the grey cat tenderly as she lifted him
+off the table. "Tell them in their language to hurry!" she exclaimed.
+"_I_ never learnt it!"
+
+But, after the breath of excitement, followed her poor despair, and she
+dropped her hands in her lap. "It will never be done. I can't do it."
+
+"Look, my dear, courage! The bodice is already done ... Have you had any
+tea?"
+
+"The children ate. I couldn't. I am too excited. But you are so calm.
+You have no nerves. It isn't natural!"
+
+Yet she ate a little piece of cake, scolding the cat and the children
+with her mouth full, prowling restlessly above their bent heads as they
+sewed and solidly sewed.
+
+At the end of an hour and a half the nine frills were on the skirt, the
+long hoops of wire had been run in, and the hooks and eyes on the belt.
+
+Often the door opened and shut; visitors came and went in the room; the
+milk woman put her head in, crying: "What a party!" and left the tiny
+can of milk upon the floor: Elsa's mother came to call her daughter to
+supper, but let her stay when she saw the dress still unfinished. Now
+and then some one would run out of the flat opposite, the flat above or
+the flat next door and, popping a head in at the door, wish them good
+luck. All the building seemed to know of the crinoline that was being
+made in the kitchen.
+
+"You do not smoke a pipe?..." said the dressmaker softly, with
+appreciation.
+
+"But none of us do!"
+
+"Oh, pardon, yes! I saw it yesterday. A great big girl dressed like you
+with her hands in her pockets and a pipe in her mouth. It made an effect
+on me--you can hardly believe how it startled me! I called Madame
+Coppet to see."
+
+"I know it wasn't one of us. And (it seems rude of me to say so) I even
+think the woman you saw was French."
+
+"Oh, my dear, French women never do that!"
+
+"Well, they do when they get free. They go beyond us in freedom when
+they get it The woman you saw (I have seen her, too) works with the men,
+shoulder to shoulder, eats with them, smokes with them, drinks with
+them, drives all night and all day, and they say she can change a tyre
+in two minutes.
+
+"There was a woman, too, who drove a lorry between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc,
+not a tender, you know, but a big lorry. She wore a bit of old ermine
+round her neck, knickerbockers, and yellow check stockings. One could
+imagine she had painted her face by the light of a candle at four in the
+morning. She never wore a hat, and her short yellow hair stuck out over
+her face which was as bright as a pink lamp shade."
+
+"Terrible."
+
+"She may have been, but she worked hard! She was always on that road. Or
+she would disappear for days with her lorry and come back caked in rouge
+and mud. I wish I could have got to know her and heard where she went
+and the things that happened to her."
+
+"But, my dear, I keep thinking what a strange life it is for you. Are
+you always alone on your car?"
+
+"Always alone."
+
+"You are with men alone then all the time?"
+
+"All the time."
+
+"Well, it's more than I can understand. It's part of the war."
+
+Elsa bent across the table and picked up the folded bodice, murmuring
+that it was done. The dressmaker rose, and reaching for the hooped
+skirt, held it up between her two arms. It was a thrilling moment.
+Fanny, too, rose. "Put it on a dummy," she commanded. Candles were
+placed around the dummy, who seemed to step forward out of the shades of
+the kitchen, and offer its headless body to be hooked and buttoned into
+the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schön!" said
+Elsa's shiny-headed friends, peering with their mouths open.
+
+"Ah, dear child, you were so calm, and now it is done!" said the old
+dressmaker.
+
+The dress stood stiffly glittering at them, white as snow, the nine
+frills pricking away from the great hooped skirt.
+
+Fanny picked up the brown paper parcel she had laid on the dresser,
+taking from it a bottle of blue ink, a bottle of green, and a paint
+brush, and diluted the inks in a saucer under the tap. There was awe in
+the kitchen as she held the brush, filled with colour, in the air, and
+began to paint blue flowers on the dress.
+
+At the first touch of the brush the old dressmaker clasped her hands.
+"What is she doing, the English girl! And we who have kept it so
+white...."
+
+"Hush," said Fanny, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"
+
+The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that
+Fanny felt her hair stir on her neck. She covered the plain, tight-
+waisted bodice with dancing flowers in blue and green.
+
+On the frills of the skirt a dozen large flowers were painted as though
+fallen from the bodice. Soon it was done.
+
+"Like that! In five minutes!" groaned the dressmaker, troubled by the
+peculiar growth of the flowers.
+
+"Let it dry," said Fanny. "I'll go home and start doing my hair. Elsa
+will bring it round when it's dry."
+
+The old woman held out both her hands, in a gesture of mute
+congratulation and fatigue.
+
+"Now rest," said Fanny. "Now sleep--and in the morning I will come and
+tell you all about it," and ran out into the snow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The top hook of the bodice would not meet. With her heart in her mouth,
+with despair, she pulled. Then sat down on the bed and stared blankly
+before her.
+
+"Then if _that_ won't meet, all, all the dress is wasted. I can't go.
+No, right in the front! There is nothing to be done, nothing to be
+done!" She sat alone in the room, the five candles she had lighted
+guttering and spilling wax. She was in the half-fastened painted bodice
+and a fine net petticoat she had bought at Nancy. Even the green silk
+bedroom slippers were on, tied round her ankles with ribbons, the only
+slippers she had found in Metz, and she had searched for them for hours.
+
+The room was icy cold, and the hand of the clock chasing towards the
+hour for the dance. Should she go in uniform? Not for the world.
+
+She would not meet him, and it seemed as though there could be no
+to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This
+meeting had had a peculiar significance--the flouncy, painted dress, the
+plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in
+absurd anguish she sat still on the bed.
+
+"Oh, Elsa, Elsa, look!" Better the child than no one, and the shiny head
+was hanging round the door. ("Wie schön!")
+
+"But it isn't _schön_! Look! It won't meet!"
+
+"Oh!..." Elsa's eyes grew round with horror, and she went to fetch her
+mother. "Tanzen!" They talked so much of "tanzen" in that household. The
+thin mother was all sympathy, and stood in helpless sorrow before the
+gap in the bodice.
+
+"What's all this?" and _der Vater_ stood in the doorway, heavy as lead,
+and red as a plum.
+
+"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident,
+and "Oh!..." said Elsa's mother, and disappeared. She came back with
+three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa's hat, and the gap in the
+bodice was hidden.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_He was not there_. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows
+in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she
+could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the
+entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but
+others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into
+the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress
+chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she
+shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the
+personality of the Commandant Dormans.
+
+At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks,
+clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the
+room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer,
+clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval,
+who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the
+swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that
+her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was
+the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over
+Duval's head, she tried to see through the crowd.
+
+Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian,
+standing by a buttress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish
+colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this
+evening's dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the
+shadow of the buttress crept over his face, turned from her towards a
+further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep's wool,
+which made him seem fantastically tall.
+
+When Fanny had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit
+feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned
+willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold
+her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of
+wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung
+backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
+
+Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and
+came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff
+that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body
+that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery
+of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval
+breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the
+Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled
+her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her
+own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her
+meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the
+admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and
+the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say,
+without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and,
+the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her
+ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive...." Her sense of
+triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the
+reproach in his voice.
+
+She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to
+forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close
+enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into
+his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep's wool and painted flowers
+went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding
+his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of
+the room, and heard the dimmed music and the scrape of feet.
+
+For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre.
+For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the
+glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the
+weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very
+furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.
+
+They danced on, not wearing away the shining boards with their feet half
+so much as they wore away the thin ice above the enchanted lake.
+
+The Commandant Dormans crossed the room to them.
+
+"She must be drawn. She must go for her portrait. Spare me your partner.
+Mademoiselle, we have an artist, a _poilu_, drawing some of the dresses.
+Will you come with me and sit for yours?"
+
+She went into the little room and stood for the drawing; the door shut
+on her, and she and the artist faced each other. Through the door the
+music came softly, and as she stood, hands resting without a breath's
+stir on fold, on frill, head bent and wandering eyes, the artist with
+twitching face and moving hand looked up and down, up and down, and she
+sank, swaying a little upon her rooted feet, into a hypnotised
+tranquillity. She did not care what the man put upon the white paper
+with his flying hands; he might draw the flowers upon her skirt, but not
+the tall blooming flowers within her, growing fabulously like the lilies
+in a dream. Her thoughts went out to meet the waves of music floating
+through the door; her rooted body held so still that she no longer felt
+it, and her spirit hung unbodied in an exaltation between love which
+she remembered and love which she expected. No one came through the
+door; they left her in silence, enclosed in the cell of the room and of
+her dreams, and she was content to stand without movement, without act
+or thought. The near chair, the wall hard by, the golden room which she
+had just left so suddenly were alike to her; her eyes and her
+imagination were tuned to the same level, and there was no distinction
+between what was on her horizon and beyond it. Across the face of the
+artist the scenes in the room behind her passed in unarrested
+procession, and the voice of an illusory lover in her ear startled her
+by its clearness. The music wandered about the room like visible
+movement, and the artist, God bless him, never opened his mouth between
+his shower of tiny glances.
+
+"Finished, mademoiselle!" and he held the drawing towards her as he
+leant back with a sigh. He had made too many drawings that evening, and
+any talent he had hung in his mind as wearily as a flag in an airless
+room. With an effort she broke her position and moved towards him,
+taking up the drawing in her hand with a forced interest. "Yes, thank
+you, thank you," she said, and he took it back and laid it with the pile
+he had made. "You don't like it? But I'm so tired. Look at these others
+I did earlier in the evening...."
+
+But while she bent over them the door burst open and Dormans came in,
+followed by Duval and Dennis. "Is it finished? Let me look! Yes, yes,
+very good! Quite good!" They were pleased enough, and drew the artist
+away with them to the buffet.
+
+Suddenly Julien was with her and had closed the door. He was hurried,
+excited, and it seemed as though he said what he could no longer contain,
+as though the thought biggest in his mind broke in a bound from him. He
+was white and he exclaimed: "It's terrible how _much_ you could hurt me
+if you would!"
+
+He seemed to close his eyes a little then and lean his head towards her.
+She looked at the drooping, half-lit head, and she knew that she had him
+without fear of escape. Knew too, that the moment was brief. Their recent,
+undeclared silence brooded as though still with them, half regretful and
+departing angel. "You will have other beauties," she said to her heart,
+"but none like this silence."
+
+They were breathless. The ice had gone from the lake and the ship had
+not yet set sail. In a dream she moved down to the beach. She saw him
+open his eyes and stare at her incredulously. "I am going to break this
+beauty," she breathed alone, and put out her hand and launched the ship.
+He was by her side, the silence broken, the voyage begun.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED
+
+Clouds, yellow, mauve and blue, hung ominously over the road to Nancy.
+The valley was filled with shades, but the road itself gleamed like a
+bleached bone in a ditch. Seated upon the dashboard of her wounded car,
+Fanny had drummed her heels for warmth since morning, and seemed likely
+soon to drum them upon a carpet of snow. Beneath the car a dark stream
+of oil marked the road, and the oil still dripped from the differential
+case, where the back axle lay in two halves.
+
+"I will telephone to your garage," her "client" had promised, as he
+climbed on to a passing lorry and continued his journey into Nancy. With
+that she had to be content, while she waited, first without her lunch,
+and then without her tea, for the breakdown lorry which his telephone
+message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four
+o'clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold
+made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve
+shades thickened upon the sky no flake of snow had fallen.
+
+Only last night, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been preparing for
+the dance; and only last night she had said to Julien ... What had she
+said to Julien? What had he said to her? Again she was deep in a reverie
+that had lasted all day, that had kept her warm, had fed her.
+
+She was almost asleep when a man's voice woke her, and she found a car
+with three Americans drawn up beside her.
+
+"I guess this is too bad," said the man who had woken her. "We passed
+you this morning on our way into Nancy, and here you are still looking
+as though you had never moved. 'Ain't you had any food since then?"
+
+"I haven't been so very hungry."
+
+"Not hungry? You're sure past being hungry! Lucky we've got food with us
+in the car. Pity we've got to hurry, but here's sandwiches and sandwiches,
+and cakes and candy, and bits of bunstuff, and an apple. And here's a
+cheese that's running out of its wrappin'. When's your show coming to
+fetch you? 'Ain't you coming home along with us?"
+
+"They won't be long now. Oh, you are good...." Fanny's hunger revived as
+she took the food, and now she was waiting ungratefully for them to be
+gone that she might start on her heavensent meal.
+
+"Good-bye, ma'am," they cried together.
+
+"Good-bye," she waved, and as their car passed onwards she climbed up on
+to the mudguard and spread the rug over her knees.
+
+The slow night grew out of nothing, expanded, and nearly enveloped the
+slopes of the hill below. The wind dropped in the cloudy, heavy
+twilight, and the papers of the sandwiches did no more than rustle upon
+her knees. Not prepared yet to light her car lamps, Fanny laid her torch
+upon her lap, and its patch of white light lit her hands and the piles
+of bread, cake, and fancy buns.
+
+Across the road in the deeper gloom that dyed the valley and spilt over
+its banks, a head rustled in the ragged border of twig and reed, and
+eyes watched the brightly-lighted meal which seemed to hang suspended
+above the vague shape of the motor car.
+
+With a sense of being perfectly alone, walled round by the gathering
+dusk, Fanny made a deep inroad upon her sandwiches and cake, finishing
+with the apple, and began to roll up what remained in case of further
+need, should no one come to fetch her.
+
+She reflected that her torch would not last her long and that she ought
+to put it and light her head and tail lamps instead, but, drowsy with
+pleasure in her lonely dinner, she sat on, prolonging the last moments
+before she must uncurl her feet and climb down on to the ground. The
+torch slipped from her knee on to a lower fold of the rug, lighting only
+the corner of a packet in which she had rolled the cake.
+
+Suddenly, while she watched it, the gleam of the corner disappeared. She
+stared at the spot intensely, and saw a hand, a shade lighter than the
+darkness, travel across the surface of the rug, cover with its fingers
+the second parcel and draw it backwards into what had now become dense
+night. Her skin stirred as though a million antennae were alive upon it;
+she could not breathe lest any movement should fling the unknown upon
+her; her eyes were glued to the third packet, and, in a moment, the hand
+advanced again. With horror she saw it creep along the rug, a small
+brown, fibrous hand, worn with work. The third packet was eclipsed by
+the fingers and receded as the others had done, but as it reached the
+edge of the rug, overflowing horror galvanised her into movement, and
+catching the corners of the rug she threw it violently after the package
+and over the hand, at the same moment jumping from her seat and on to
+the footboard, to grope wildly for the switch. Her heart was leaping
+like a fish just flung into a basket, and every inch of her body winced
+from an expected grasp upon it. She flung herself over the side and into
+the seat of the car, found the switch and pushed it.
+
+A dozen Chinese at least were caught in the two long beams that flew out
+across the darkness. For a second their wrinkled faces stared, eyes
+blinked, and short, unhollowed lips stretched over yellow teeth, then,
+with a flutter of dark garments, the Chinese started away from the fixed
+beams and were gone into the shadow. Except for the sudden twitter of a
+voice, the spurt of a stone flung up against the metal of the car, they
+melted silently out of sight and hearing. Sick with panic, Fanny leant
+down upon her knees and covered her head with her two arms, expecting a
+blow from above. Seconds passed, and ice-cold, with one leg gone to
+sleep, she lifted her head, switched off the lights and stared into the
+night. She could see nothing, and gradually becoming accustomed to the
+darkness, she found that they had completely disappeared. The rug, too,
+had gone, and all three packets of sandwiches. Cautiously, with
+trembling legs, she stepped upon the footboard.
+
+Something hit her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to
+suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in
+its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...."
+she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture
+them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were
+now far from her on their way to some encampment.
+
+Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she
+prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
+There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
+
+Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and
+curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road
+around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between
+the spokes of the wheels.
+
+Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car,
+and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the
+hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly
+bent, with a knob at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure,
+but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming
+out from Pont-à-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps
+glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his
+thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through
+the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
+
+The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and
+climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled
+about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the
+open valley on the left.
+
+"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
+
+"Hardly yet, _mon capitaine_. It was unlucky the _brigadier_ should be
+at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but
+it wants two men to tow in the car."
+
+"This is Marbache!"
+
+In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a
+handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately
+darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind
+burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the glass.
+
+"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the
+right here."
+
+The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes
+drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The
+left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and
+deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.
+
+"What's that?"
+
+A pale light hung in the dark ahead of them.
+
+"Is it a car? No."
+
+"Yes, lamps. With the beam broken by the snow."
+
+"Go slow."
+
+For fear of blinding the driver of a lighted vehicle which might, after
+all, be moving, one of the men put out his hand and switched off the
+headlights, and the car glided forward on its own momentum.
+
+Thus they came upon Fanny, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an
+obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her
+mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in
+her right hand, the torch ready as a signal in her left.
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Well, yes, my poor child!" And she saw the man behind him, and laughed.
+
+"Help me down. Within and without I am set in plaster."
+
+"You look like a poor, weather-chipped goddess, or an old stone pillar
+with a face."
+
+"Be careful, that leg will not stand.... Oh, look, look how the snow
+clings. It's frozen on my lap."
+
+"We must be quick. Everything must be quickly done, or we shall all stay
+here."
+
+"Oh, I don't care about that now!"
+
+"What have you got in your hand? Give it to me."
+
+"That's a weapon. I almost needed it. Where is the lorry?"
+
+"The garage was empty. The _brigadier_ was at Thionville. The lorry had
+a spring broken."
+
+"And they told you?"
+
+"I did not call at the 'C.R.A.' office till late in the day, or you
+would have been fetched long ago. Come along! Have you got your things
+together? We must take them back in the other car. And the magneto too."
+
+"We're to leave the car after all my guarding care?"
+
+"No; here's Pichot volunteered to take your place."
+
+"Has he got food with him and rugs. My rug has gone...."
+
+"He has everything. Come along! Let's put everything of value into the
+other car."
+
+When they had finished the night air was clear of snowflakes; hill, road
+and valley were lit by the pallor of the fallen snow.
+
+Fanny followed Julien to the other car. He swung the handle and jumped
+into the driving seat. "Come...." he said, and held out a hand.
+
+"Good-night, Pichot. We'll send for you early in the morning."
+
+"Good-night, _mon capitaine._ Good-night, mademoiselle."
+
+They moved forward, and the moon like a wandering lamp lit their faces.
+
+"Blow out, old moon!" said Julien, turning his silvered face and hair up
+to the sky. The moon flew behind a cloud.
+
+"Quick!" he said.
+
+"What?"
+
+... and kissed her. The jacks and tyres and wheels and bolts fluttered
+out of Fanny's head like black ravens and disappeared. They flew on,
+over the bridge at Pont-à-Moussons, up the shining ruinous street.
+
+"Crouch lower!" said Julien. "If any one wanted to, they could count
+your eyelashes from the windows."
+
+"Ah, yes, if there was any one to count...." She glanced up at the
+fragmentary pronged chimneys, the dark, unstirring caves of brick.
+
+Soon the church clocks of Metz rang out, quarrelling, out of time with
+one another.
+
+"Do you know this isn't going to last?" said Julien suddenly, as if the
+clocks had reminded him.
+
+She turned swiftly towards him.
+
+"The Grand Quartier is moving?"
+
+"Ah, you knew? You had heard?"
+
+"No, no," she shook her head. "But do you think I haven't thought of it?
+I keep thinking, 'We can't stay here for ever. Some end will come.' And
+then--'It will come this way. The Grand Quartier will go.'"
+
+"But you are going with it."
+
+"Julien! Is that true?"
+
+"Certain. It was settled to-day. We are actually leaving in three days
+for Chantilly; and you, with all the garage, all the drivers, and the
+offices of the 'C.R.A.' are to be at Précy-sur-Oise, five miles away."
+
+"But you are at Précy too?"
+
+"No, I have to be at Chantilly. And worse than that ... The bridge over
+the Oise at Précy is blown up and all cars have to come sixteen miles
+round to Chantilly by another bridge. I am in despair about it. I have
+tried every means to get Dormans to fix upon another village, but he is
+obstinate, and Précy it must be for you, and Chantilly for me. But don't
+let's think of it now. Wait till you've eaten and are warm, and we can
+plan. Here are the gates!"
+
+He handed out the paper pass as a red light waved to and from upon the
+snow. First the Customs-men, Germans still, in their ancient civic
+uniform. "Nothing to declare?" Then the little soldier with the lantern
+in his hand: "Your pass, _ma belle!_" As he caught sight of Julien,
+"Pardon, mademoiselle!" Lastly, up the long road into the open square by
+the station, down the narrow street, splashing the melted snow-water
+against the shop windows, and under the shadow of the cathedral.
+
+"Put the car away and come and dine with me at Moitriers."
+
+She looked at him astonished. "The car? Whose car is it? Does it belong
+to our garage?"
+
+"It will in future. It arrived last night, fresh from Versailles. I am
+arranging with Dennis for you to take it over to-morrow."
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "A beautiful Renault! A brand new Renault!..."
+
+He laughed. "Hurry, or you will faint with hunger. Put it away and come,
+just as you are, to Moitriers, up into the balcony. I am going there
+first to order a wonderful dinner."
+
+In a quarter of an hour they were sitting behind the wooden balustrade
+of the balcony at Moitriers--the only diners on the little landing that
+overhung the one fashionable restaurant in Metz. It was a quarter to
+nine; down below, the room, which was lined with mirrors set in gilt
+frames, was filled with light; knives and forks still tapped upon the
+plates, but the hour being late many diners leant across the strewn
+tablecloths and talked, or sat a little askew in their chairs and
+listened. A hum filled the warm air, and what was garish below, here,
+behind the balustrade, became filtered and strained to delicate streaks
+and bars of light which crossed and recrossed their cloth, their hands,
+their faces--what was noisy below was here no more than a soft insect
+bustle, a murmurous background to their talk.
+
+The door of the balcony opened behind them, and Madame Berthe, the
+proprietress herself, moved at their side; her old-fashioned body,
+shaped like an hour-glass, was clothed in rucked black silk, which
+flowed over her like a pigment; flowed from her chin to the floor, upon
+which it lay stiffly in hills and valleys of braided hem. Her gay gold
+tooth gleamed, and the gold in her ears wagged, as she fed them gently
+on omelette, chicken and tinned peas, and a _soufflé_ ice.
+
+They talked a little, sleepy after the wind, smiling at each other.
+
+"Don't you want more light than that?" said Madame Berthe, coming in
+again softly with the coffee.
+
+Fanny shook her head. "Not any more than this."
+
+Then they were left alone, stirring the coffee, gazing down between the
+wooden columns at the diners below.
+
+"Of what are you thinking?" she asked, as a sigh escaped her companion.
+
+"The move to Chantilly. I am so loth to break up all this."
+
+"Break up?"
+
+"Ah, well, it changes, doesn't it? Even if it is no longer the same
+landscape it changes!"
+
+After a silence he added: "How fragile it is!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"You!" He covered her hand with both his. "You! What I think you are,
+and what you think I am. Love and illusion. Too fragile to be given to
+us with our blunders and our nonsense."
+
+She watched him, silent, and he went on:
+
+"I don't understand this life. That's why I keep quiet and smile, as you
+say I do. There are often things I don't say when I smile."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh, I wonder how much you believe me. And I listen to that immense
+interior life, which talks such a different language. I _hate_ to move
+on to Chantilly."
+
+Suddenly she recognised that they were at a corner which he had wanted
+her to turn for days. There had been something he had hinted at,
+something he wanted to tell her. He chafed at some knowledge he had
+which she did not share, which he wanted her to share.
+
+Once he had said: "I had letters this morning which worried me...."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"One in particular. It hurt me. It gave me pain."
+
+But she had not wanted to ask what was in the letter. Then he had grown
+restless, sighed and turned away, but soon they had talked again and it
+had passed.
+
+And now to-night he said:
+
+"Look how detached we are in this town, which is like an island in the
+middle of the sea. We behave as though we had no past lives, and never
+expected any future. Especially you."
+
+"Especially I?"
+
+"You behave as though I was born the day before you met me, and would
+die the day after you leave me. You never ask anything about me; you
+tell me nothing about yourself. We might be a couple of stars hanging in
+mid air shining at each other. And then I have the feeling that one
+might drop and the other wouldn't know where to look for it."
+
+But after a little silence the truth burst out, and he said with
+despair: "Don't you want to know _anything_ about me?"
+
+(Yes, that was all very well. She did, she did. But not just this that
+was coming!)
+
+And then he told her....
+
+     *     *     *     *     *
+
+"What is she like ... Violette?"
+
+"Fair."
+
+After several low questions she seemed to stand between them like a
+child, thin and fair, delicate and silent, innocently expecting to be
+spared all pain.
+
+"No, she doesn't go out very much. She stays indoors and does her hair,
+and her nails, and reads a little book."
+
+"And have you known her for a long time?"
+
+"A long time...."
+
+After this they pretended that she did not exist, and the little wraith
+floated back to Paris from which she had come, suddenly, on days when
+she had written him certain letters which had brought tears into
+his eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY
+
+Fanny turned again to seek the lights of the town and the dagger points
+of the churches that climbed against the sky upon the hill behind her,
+but all that met her eyes was the blanket of wet darkness, and the
+shimmer of the snowflakes under the lamps.
+
+She slipped through the garage gates, touching the iron bars ... "almost
+for the last time."
+
+"But what does it matter? All towns are the same and we sing the same
+song in each and wear the same coloured feathers." She stirred the snow
+in the yard with her foot. "An inch already and the Renault has so
+little grip upon the snow. Shall we be able to start to-morrow?"
+
+Then she set out to look for a heap of snow chains which she had noticed
+before in a corner of the yard. Not far from her another little torch
+moved in the darkness, and under its downward ray she caught sight of a
+khaki skirt and a foot. "Someone else has thought of chains, too! And
+there are so few!" She clicked off her light and moved stealthily along
+the forest of cars, her fingers sweeping blankets of snow from the
+mudguards. Passing the first line of corpse-cars she saw the light
+again. "She's in the wrong place!" she thought, and hurried on. "Those
+bags of chains are just behind the Berliet they brought in backwards."
+Behind the Berliet little mounds showed in the snow. She stooped over
+them, shading her light with her knees, and dug in the light powder with
+her hand, pulling out a small canvas bag which she dusted and beat with
+her fingers.
+
+"Are you looking for chains?" she called to the other light, her bag
+safely in her arms.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"They are here. Here! In this corner!"
+
+"Who are you?" cried the voice.
+
+But she slipped away in silence to the garage door; for on this last
+black and white night in Metz she longed to creep about unspoken to,
+unquestioned. A little soldier sat on guard by a brazier of glowing
+charcoal near the door. She nodded to him as she moved down the long
+line of cars to her own.
+
+There it stood, the light of the brazier falling faintly upon it, the
+two points of the windscreen standing up like the ready ears of an
+interested dog, the beautiful lines of its body, long bonnet and
+mudguards stretched like a greyhound at a gallop, at rest until the
+dawn. She flung the bag of chains inside, and, patting the bonnet,
+slipped away and out into the street without attempting to try the fit
+of the chains upon the wheels.
+
+She slept a last night in the dark red German room three streets
+away--first making a little tour of the walls in her nightgown, the
+candle flame waving from her hand, the hot wax running in a cascade over
+her fingers--and looked at the stag's horn fastened to the bracket and
+the cluster of Christmas postcards pinned to the wall.
+
+The postcards arrested her attention, and a light darted in her mind.
+They were dark postcards, encrusted with shiny frosting, like the snow
+outside. Little birds and goblins, a wreath of holly, and a house with
+red mica windows were designed on them. She put out a finger and gently
+touched the rough, bright, common stuff; standing opposite them, almost
+breathless with a wave of memory. She could see herself no taller than
+the nursery fireguard, with round eyes to which every bright thing was a
+desire. She could feel herself very small amid the bustle and clatter of
+Christmas, blowing dark breath marks against the bright silver on the
+table, pulling the fringe round the iced cake, wetting her finger and
+picking up "hundreds and thousands" with it from a bag.
+
+These postcards now in front of her were made by some one with the mind
+of a child. It struck and shook her violently with memory to see them.
+"That's why the Germans write good fairy stories!" she thought, and her
+eyes passed to the framed photographs that hung near the postcards,
+pictures of soldiers in uniform, sitting at a table with the two
+daughters of the house. But these wooden faces, these bodies pressing
+through unwieldy clothes seemed unrelated to the childish postcards.
+
+She went contentedly to her bed, the room, bare of all her belongings,
+except the one bag that stood, filled and open, upon the table; sleeping
+for the last time in the strange bed in the strange town which she might
+never see again. It was time indeed to go.
+
+For days past civilians had crept through the gates of Metz, leading old
+horses, drawing ramshackle carts filled with mattresses, faded silk
+chairs, gilt ormolu stands, clocks and cloaks and parrot cages; all the
+strange things that men and women use for their lives. The furniture
+that had fled in other carts from villages now dust upon a dead plain
+was returning through all the roads of France, repacked and dusted, to
+set up the spirit of civilian life again.
+
+It was time to go, following all the other birds of passage that war had
+dragged through the town of Metz--time to make way for the toiling
+civilian with his impedimenta of civilisation.
+
+In the morning when she opened her eyes the room was darker than usual,
+and the opening of the window but the merest square of light. Snow was
+built up round the frame in thick rolls four inches high.
+
+She dressed hurriedly and rolled up the sleeping-sack with her few last
+things inside it. Out in the street the snow was dry and thick and
+beautifully untrodden. The garage gates looked strange, with a thick
+white banner blown down each side of the pillars. She looked inside the
+garage shed. Yes, all the cars had gone--hers stood alone, the suitcases
+inside, tyres pumped stiff and solid, the hood well buckled back.
+
+"Mademoiselle hasn't gone with the convoy?" said the _maréchal des
+logis_, aghast.
+
+"Oh, I'm separate," she laughed.
+
+"But the convoy is gone."
+
+"I know it. But I'm not with them. It's an order. I'm going alone."
+
+"_Bien_. But do you know the route?"
+
+"I'm not going by it."
+
+He laughed, suddenly giving up all attempt at responsibility, and bent
+to catch her starting handle.
+
+"Oh, don't worry."
+
+"Yes, it's your last day, I may as well help you to go away."
+
+The engine started easily and she drove out of the garage into the yard,
+the wheels flying helplessly in the snow, and flinging up dry puffs like
+flour. "Haven't you chains?" said the _maréchal des logis_. But she
+smiled and nodded and could not wait. "Good-bye--good-bye to all the
+garage," she nodded and waved. The sun broke out from behind a cloud,
+her brass and glass caught fire and twinkled gaily, the snow sparkled,
+the gate-posts shone at her. She left the garage without a regret in her
+heart, with not a thought in her head, save that in a minute she would
+be safe, no accident could stop her, she would be abroad upon the magic,
+the unbelievable journey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were in a small circular room, shaped like an English oasthouse,
+its roof running upwards in a funnel to meet the sky. At the apex was a
+round porthole of thick glass to let in the light, but as this was
+supporting several feet of snow the lighting of the room was effected
+only by a large oil-lamp which stood on the blackened table in the
+centre. An old woman came forward into the light of the lamp. Her eyes
+were fine and black--her mouth was toothless and folded away for ever,
+lost in a crevice under her nose. When she smiled the oak-apples of her
+cheeks rose up and cut the black eyes into hoops.
+
+"We are on a long journey, madame, to Chantilly. We are cold; can we
+have coffee?"
+
+She drew out chairs and bade them sit, then placed two tall glasses of
+coffee in the ring of light from the lamp, sugar melting in a sandy heap
+at the bottom of each.
+
+"What an odd shape your house is!" said Julien, looking round him.
+
+"It's very old, like me. And the light is poor. You have to know it to
+get used to it," she replied.
+
+"You've only that one window?" He stared up the funnel to where he
+could see the grey underside of the cone of snow.
+
+"But I can make that one better than it is; and then the lady can see
+herself in this little glass!" The old woman moved to the side of the
+wall where a rope hung down. "_Elle a raison_; since she has a gentleman
+with her! I was the same--and even not so long ago!"
+
+She put up her thin arm and gave the rope a long pull. She must have
+been strong, for the skylight and all its burden opened on a hinge, and
+the snow could be seen sliding from it, could be heard in a heavy body
+rumbling on the roof. She closed the skylight, and now a wan light
+filtered down the funnel and turned their faces green. It was like life
+at the bottom of a well, and they felt as though the level of the earth
+was far above their heads, and its weighty walls pressing against
+their sides.
+
+"But why is it built this way?"
+
+"Many houses are," said the old woman with a shrug. "It's old, older
+than my mother." She sat down beside them. "Soldiers have been drunk in
+here many times in the war," she said. "And in the old war, too. But I
+never saw one like you." She pinched Fanny's sleeve. "Fine stuff," she
+said. "The Americans are rich!"
+
+"I'm not American."
+
+"Rich they are. But I don't care for them. They have no real feeling for
+a woman. You are not stupid, _ma belle_, to get a Frenchman for a lover."
+
+"Don't make him vain."
+
+"It is the truth. He knows it very well. Why should he be vain? An
+American loves a pretty face; but a Frenchman loves what is a woman."
+She rose and lifted the lamp, and let its ray search out a corner of the
+room wherein the great bed stood, wooden and square, its posts black
+with age, its bedding puffed about it and crowned with a scarlet
+eiderdown as solid and deep as the bed itself.
+
+"A fine bed; an old bed; it is possible that you will not believe me,
+but I shared that bed with a bishop not two years ago."
+
+Fanny's eyes were riveted on the bed.
+
+Julien laughed. "In the worst sense, mother?"
+
+"In the best, my son," bragged the old woman, sliding a skinny finger to
+the tip of her nose. "You don't believe me?"
+
+Coming nearer, she stood with the lamp held in her two hands resting on
+the table, so that she towered over them in fluttering shawl and shadow.
+
+"He arrived in the village one night in a great storm. It was past the
+New Year and soldiers had been coming through the street all day to go
+up to the lines beyond Pont-à-Moussons. I've had them sleeping in here
+on the floor in rows, clearing away the table and lying from wall to
+wall so thick that I had to step on them when I crossed the room with my
+lamp. But that night there were none; they were all passing through up
+to the front lines, and though the other end of the village was full, no
+one knocked here. There was snow as there is to-day, but not lying still
+on the ground. It was rushing through the air and choking people and
+lying heavy on everything that moved outside. That glass of mine up
+there was too heavy for me to move so I let it be. A knock came at the
+door in the middle of the night, and when I got up to unbar the door
+there was a soldier on the doorstep. I said: 'Are you going to wake me
+up every night to fill the room with men?' And he said: 'Not to-night,
+mother, only one. Pass in, monsieur.'
+
+"It was a bishop, as I told you. _Un éveque_. A great big man with a red
+face shining with the snow. If he had not been white with snow he would
+have been as black as a rook. He stamped on the cobbles by the door and
+the snow went down off him in heaps, and there he was in his beautiful
+long clothes, and I said to myself: 'Whatever shall I do with him? Not
+the floor for such a man!' So there we were, I in my red shawl that
+hangs on the hook there, and he in his long clothes like a black baby
+in arms, and his big man's face staring at me over the top.
+
+"'I can't put you anywhere but in my bed,' I told him. I told him like
+that, quickly, that he might know. And he answered like a gentleman, the
+Lord save his soul: 'Madame, what lady could do more!'
+
+"'But there's only one bed' I told him (I told him to make it clear),
+'and I'm not young enough to sleep on the floor.' Not that I'm an old
+woman. And he answered like a gentleman, the Lord save him...."
+
+"I will tell _you_ the end," said the old woman, drawing near to Julien
+as he took some money from his pocket to pay for the coffee.
+
+Two hours later they drew up at a _café_ in the main square at Ligny.
+
+Within was a gentle murmur of voices, a smell of soup and baking bread;
+warm steam, the glow of oil lamps and reddened faces.
+
+Sitting at a small table, with a white cloth, among the half-dozen
+American soldiers who, having long finished their lunch, were playing
+cards and dominoes, they ordered bread-soup, an omelette, white wine,
+brille cheese and their own ration of bully beef which they had brought
+in tins to be fried with onions.
+
+A woman appeared from the door of the kitchen, carrying their bowl of
+bread-soup. Across the plains of her great chest shone a white satin
+waistcoat fastened with blue glass studs, and above her handsome face
+rose a crown of well-brushed hair dyed in two shades of scarlet. A
+little maid followed, and they covered the table with dishes, knives and
+forks, bread and wine. The woman beamed upon Fanny and Julien, and
+laying her hand upon Fanny's shoulder begged them not to eat till she
+had fetched them a glass of her own wine.
+
+"You bet it's good, ma'am," advised a big American sergeant at a table
+near them. "You take it."
+
+She brought them a wine which shone like dark amber in a couple of
+glasses, and stood over them listening with pleasure to their
+appreciation while each slight movement of her shoulders sent ripples
+and rivers of heaving light over the waistcoat of satin.
+
+The butter round the omelette was bubbling in the dish, the brille had
+had its red rind removed and replaced by fried breadcrumbs, the white
+wine was light and sweet, and with the coffee afterwards they were given
+as much sugar as they wished.
+
+"I have seen her before somewhere," said Julien, as the scarlet head
+receded among the shadows of the back room. "I wonder where?"
+
+"One wouldn't forget her."
+
+"No. It might have been in Paris; it might have been anywhere."
+
+The little maid was at his elbow. "Madame would be glad if you would
+come to her store and make your choice of a cigar, monsieur."
+
+"Well, I shall know where I met her. Do you mind if I go?"
+
+He followed the girl into the back room. Fanny, searching in her pocket
+for her handkerchief, scattered a couple of German iron pennies on the
+floor; an American from the table behind picked them up and returned
+them to her. "These things are just a weight and a trouble," he said.
+"I think I shall throw mine away?"
+
+"You've come down from Germany, then?"
+
+"Been up at Trêves. They do you well up there."
+
+"Not better than here!"
+
+"No, this is an exception. It's a good place."
+
+"Madame is a great manager."
+
+"Hev' you got more German pennies than you know what to do with?" said
+the American sergeant who had advised her to drink the wine. "Because,
+if you hev' so hev' I and I'll play you at dominoes for them."
+
+As Julien did not return at once, Fanny moved to his table and piled her
+German pennies beside her, and they picked out their dominoes from
+the pile.
+
+"I want to go home," said the American, and lifted up his big face and
+looked at her.
+
+"You all do."
+
+"That's right. We all do," assented another and another. They would make
+this statement to her at every village where she met them, in every
+_estaminet_, at any puncture on the road over which they helped her
+--simply, and because it was the only thing in their minds.
+
+"Do you hev' to come out here?" he enquired.
+
+"Oh, no. We come because we like to."
+
+Thinking this a trumpery remark he made no answer, but put out another
+domino--then as though something about her still intrigued his heavy
+curiosity: "You with the French, ain't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Like that too?"
+
+He sat a little back into his chair as though he felt he had put her in
+a corner now, and when she said she even liked that too, twitched his
+cheek a little in contempt for such a lie and went on playing.
+
+But the remark worked something in him, for five minutes later he
+pursued:
+
+"I don't see anything in the French. They ain't clean. They ain't
+generous. They ain't up-to-date nor comfortable."
+
+Fanny played out her domino.
+
+"They don't know how to _live_," he said more violently than he had
+spoken yet.
+
+"What's living?" she said quickly. "What is it to live, if _you_ know?"
+
+"You want to put yourself at something, an' build up. Build up your
+fortune and spread it out and about, and have your house so's people
+know you've got it. I want to get home and be doing it."
+
+"Mademoiselle actually knows it!" said Julien in the doorway to the
+red-haired woman in the back room, and Fanny jumped up.
+
+The American passed four iron coins across the table. "'Tisn't going to
+hinder that fortune I'm going to make," he said, smiling at last.
+
+"What do I know?" she asked, approaching the doorway, and moving with
+him into the back room.
+
+"Madame owns a house in Verdun," said Julien, "and I tell her you know
+it."
+
+"_I_ know it?"
+
+"Come and drink this little glass of my wine, mademoiselle," said the
+red-haired woman good-humouredly, "and tell me about my poor little
+house. I had a house on the crown of the hill ... with a good view
+... and a good situation (she laughed) by the Cathedral."
+
+"Had you? Well, there are a great many by the Cathedral," Fanny answered
+cautiously, for she thought she knew the house that was meant.
+
+"But my house looked out on the _citadelle_, and stood very high on a
+rock. Below it there was a drop and steep steps went down to a street
+below."
+
+"Had you pink curtains in the upper windows?"
+
+"Is it not then so damaged?" demanded the woman eagerly, dropping her
+smile. "The curtains are left? You can see the curtains?"
+
+"No, no, it is terribly damaged. If it is the house you mean I found a
+piece of pink satin and a curtain ring under a brick, and there is a sad
+piece which still waves on a high window. But wait a minute, excuse me,
+I'll be back." She passed through the café and ran out to the car,
+returning in a moment with something in her hand.
+
+"I fear I looted your house, madame," she said, offering her a small
+cylindrical pot made of coarse clouded glass, and half filled with a
+yellowish paste. "I found that inside on the ground floor; I don't know
+why I took it."
+
+The woman held it in her hand. "Oh!" she wailed, and sliding down upon
+the sofa, found her handkerchief.
+
+"_Mais non!_" said Julien, "you who have so much courage!"
+
+"But it was my own _face_!" she cried incoherently, holding out the
+little pot. "My poor little cream pot!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It was my face cream!"
+
+"How strange!"
+
+"I had not used it for a week because they had recommended me a new one.
+Ah! miraculous! that so small a thing should follow me!"
+
+She touched her eyes carefully with her handkerchief, but a live tear
+had fallen on the waistcoat.
+
+"Tell me, mademoiselle ... sit down beside me, my dear ... the poor
+little house is no more good to me? I couldn't live there? Is there
+a roof?"
+
+"You couldn't live in it."
+
+"But the roof?"
+
+"It was on the point of sliding off; it was worn like a hat over one
+ear. The front of the house is gone. Only on the frame of one window
+which sticks to the wall could I see your piece of pink curtain
+which waves."
+
+"My poor, pretty house!" she mused. "My first, you know," she said in an
+undertone to Julien. "Ah, well, courage, as you say!"
+
+"But you are very well here."
+
+"True, but this isn't my vocation. I shall start again elsewhere. And
+Verdun itself, Mademoiselle, can one live in it?"
+
+"No, not yet. Perhaps never."
+
+"Well, well...."
+
+"Madame, we must move on again," interrupted Julien. "We have a long way
+to go before night."
+
+The woman rose, and turning to a drawer, pulled out a heap of soiled
+papers, bills and letters. "Wait," she said, "wait an instant!"
+
+Turning them over she sought and found a couple of old sheets pinned
+together, and unpinning them she handed one to Fanny.
+
+"It is the receipt for the cream," she said, "that I want to give you.
+It is a good cream though I left the pot behind."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The sun sank and the forests around Chantilly grew vague and deep. White
+statues stood by the roadside, and among the trees chateaux with closed
+eyes slept through the winter. Every tree hung down beneath its load of
+snow; the telephone wires drooped like worsted threads across the road.
+
+Fanny, who had left Julien at his new billets in Chantilly, drove on
+alone to the little village on the Oise which was to be her home. It was
+not long before she could make out the posts and signals of the railway
+on her left, and the river appeared in a broad band below her. The moon
+rose, and in the river the reeds hung head downwards, staring up at the
+living reeds upon the bank.
+
+"PRECY."
+
+It gleamed upon a signpost, and turning down a lane on the left she came
+on a handful of unlighted cottages, and beyond them a single village
+street, soundless and asleep. A chemist's shop full of coloured glasses
+was lit from within by a single candle; upon the step the chemist stood,
+a skull cap above his large, pitted face.
+
+Somewhere in the shuttered village a roof already sheltered her
+companions, but before looking for them she drew up and gazed out beyond
+the river and the railway line to where the moon was slowly lighting
+hill after hill. But the spectral summer town which she sought was
+veiled in the night.
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+
+THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+PRECY-SUR-OISE
+
+The light of dawn touched Paris, the wastes of snow surrounding her,
+forests, villages scattered in the forest and plains around Senlis,
+Chantilly, Boran, Précy. The dark receded in the west; in the east a
+green light spread upwards from the horizon, touched the banks of the
+black Oise, the roofs of the houses of Précy, the dark window panes, and
+the flanks of the granite piers that stood beheaded in the water--all
+that was left of the great bridge that had crossed from bank to bank.
+
+Above the river stood the station hut and the wooden gates of the level
+crossing, upon which the night lantern still hung; above again a strip
+of snow divided the railway line from the road, at the other side of
+whose stone wall the village itself began, and stretched backwards up
+a hill.
+
+Upon a patch of snow above the river and below the road stood a
+flourishing little house covered with gables and turrets; and odd shapes
+like the newel-posts of staircases climbed unexpectedly about the roof.
+In summer, fresh with paint, the outside of the house must wave its
+vulgar little hands into the sky, but now, everything that bristled upon
+it served only as a fresh support for the snow which hung in deep
+drifts on its roof, and around its balconied windows. It stood in its
+own symmetrical walled garden, like a cup in a deep saucer, and within
+the wall a variety of humps and hillocks showed where the bushes
+crouched beneath their unusual blanket. One window, facing towards the
+railway and the river, had no balcony clinging to its stonework, and in
+the dark room behind it the light of the dawn pressed faintly between
+the undrawn curtains. A figure stirred upon the bed within, and Fanny,
+not clearly aware whether she had slept or not, longed to search the
+room for some heavier covering which, warming her, would let her sink
+into unconsciousness. Her slowly gathering wits, together with the
+nagging cold, forced her at last from the high bed on to the floor, and
+she crossed the room towards the light. In the walled garden below
+strange lights of dawn played, red, green and amber, like a crop of
+flowers. The railway lines beyond the garden wall disappeared in fiery
+bands north and south, lights flashed down from the sky above and winked
+in the black and polished river; at the limit of the white plain beyond,
+a window caught the sun and turned its burning-glass upon the snow.
+
+"Chantilly...." A word like the dawn, filled with light and the promise
+of light! Turning back into the dim room, she flung her coat upon the
+bed, climbed in and fell asleep. Three hours later something pressed
+against her bed and she opened her eyes again. The room was fresh with
+daylight, and Stewart standing beside her carried a rug on her arm and
+wore a coat over her nightgown. "I'm coming down to have chocolate in
+your room...."
+
+Fanny watched her. Stewart climbed up beside her wrapped in the rug. A
+knock at the door heralded the entry of a woman carrying a tray. Fanny
+watched her too, and saw that she was fresh, smiling, clean and big, and
+that steam flew up in puffs from the tray she carried. The woman pulled
+a little table towards the bed and set the tray on it.
+
+"This is Madame Boujan!" said Stewart's voice.
+
+Fanny tried to smile and say "Good morning," and succeeded. She was not
+awake but knew she was in clover. The cups holding the steaming
+chocolate were as large as bowls, and painted cherries and leaves
+glistened beneath their lustre surface. Beside the cups was a plate with
+rolls, four rolls; and there were knives and two big pots which must be
+butter and jam.
+
+"Wake up!"
+
+Fanny rolled nearer to the chocolate, sniffed it and pulled herself up
+in bed. The woman, still smiling beside them, turned and hunted among
+the clothes upon the chair; then held a jersey towards her shoulders and
+guided her arms into its sleeves. Ecstasy stole over Fanny; other
+similar wakings strung themselves like beads upon her memory; nursery
+wakings when her spirit had been guided into daylight by the crackle of
+a fire new-lit, by the movements of just such an aproned figure as this,
+by a smile on just such a pink face; or wakings after illness when her
+freshening life had leapt in her at the sound of a blind drawn up, at
+the sight of the white-cuffed hand that pulled the cord.
+
+Oh, heavenly woman, who stood beside the tray, who fed her and warmed
+her while she was yet weak and babyish from sleep! Beyond her the white
+plains of beauty shone outside the window.... She sat up and smiled:
+"I'm awake," she said.
+
+And Madame Boujan, having seen that her feet were set upon the threshold
+of day, went out of the door and closed it softly.
+
+They held the lustre bowls cupped in their hands and sipped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During lunch in the little villa, while they were all recounting their
+experiences, Madame Boujan came softly to Fanny's side and whispered:
+
+"A soldier has brought you a note from Chantilly."
+
+"Keep it for me in the kitchen," Fanny answered, under her breath,
+helping herself to potatoes.
+
+"Will you come and cut wood for the bedroom fire?" said Stewart, when
+lunch was over. "I bought a hatchet in the village this morning."
+
+"Come down by the river first," insisted Fanny, who had her note in her
+hand.
+
+"Why? And it gets dark so soon!"
+
+"I want to find a boat."
+
+"What for?"
+
+"To cross the river."
+
+"To cross the river! Do you want to see what's on the other side?"
+
+"Julien will be on the other side.... I have had a letter from him. I am
+to dine in Chantilly. He will send a car at seven to wait for me in the
+fields at the other side of the broken bridge, and trusts to me to find
+a boat. Come over the level crossing to the river."
+
+They passed the station hut and came to a little landing stage near
+which a boat was tied.
+
+"There's a boat," said Stewart. "Shall we ask at that hut?"
+
+The wooden hut stood above their heads on a pedestal of stone; from its
+side the haunch of the stone bridge sprang away into the air, but
+stopped abruptly where it had been broken off. The hut, once perhaps a
+toll-house, was on a level with what had been the height of the bridge,
+and now it could be reached by stone steps which wound up to a small
+platform in front of the door. From within came men's voices singing.
+
+"Look in here!"
+
+A flickering light issued from a small window, and having climbed the
+steps they could see inside. Two boys, about sixteen, a soldier and an
+old man, sat round a table beneath a hanging lamp, and sang from scraps
+of paper which they held in their hands. Behind the old man a girl stood
+cleaning a cup with a cloth.
+
+"They are practising something. Knock!"
+
+But there was no need, for a dog chained in a barrel close to them set
+up a wild barking.
+
+"Is he chained? Keep this side. The old man is coming."
+
+The door opened. The voices ceased; the girl stood by the old man's
+side.
+
+"Yes, it could be arranged. People still crossed that way; their boat
+was a sort of ferry and there was a charge.
+
+"There might be a little fog to-night, but it didn't matter. Margot
+knows the way across blindfold--Margot would row the lady. She would be
+waiting with a lantern at five minutes to seven; and again at half-past
+nine. Not too late at all! But Margot would not wait on the other side,
+it was too cold. They would lend the lady a whistle, and she must blow
+on it from the far bank."
+
+"There's romance!" said Fanny, as they came away.
+
+"Not if you are caught."
+
+"There's my magic luck!"
+
+"How dare you ask like that? Even if you are not superstitious, even if
+you don't believe a word of it, why be so defiant--why not set the
+signs right!"
+
+"Oh, my dear Stewart, I hardly care! And to the creature who doesn't
+care no suspicion clings. Haven't I an honest face? Would you think it
+was me, me, of all the Section, to cross the river to-night, in a little
+boat with a lantern, to creep out of the house, out of the village, to
+dine forbidden in Chantilly, with some one who enchants me! You
+wouldn't. Why, do you know, if I lived up in their house, under their
+eyes, I would go out just the same, to cross the river. I wouldn't climb
+by windows or invent a wild tale to soothe them, but open the door and
+shut the door, and be gone. And would anybody say: 'Where's Fanny?'"
+
+"They might."
+
+"They might. But they would answer their own question: 'Innocently
+sleeping. Innocently working. Innocently darning, reading, writing.'
+I don't suspect myself so why should any one else suspect me!"
+
+Fanny broke off and laughed.
+
+"Come along and cut wood!"
+
+They moved off into the woods as people with not a care in the world,
+and coming upon a snow-covered stack of great logs which had been piled
+by some one else, began to steal one or two and drag them away into a
+deep woodland drive where they could cut them up without fear of
+being noticed.
+
+They worked on for an hour, and then Stewart drew a packet of cake from
+her coat pocket, and sitting upon the logs they had their tea.
+
+Soon Fanny, wringing her hands, cried:
+
+"I'm blue again, stiff again, letting the cold in, letting the snow
+gnaw. Where's the hatchet?"
+
+For a time she chopped and hacked, and Stewart, shepherding the
+splinters which flew into the snow, piled them--splinters, most precious
+of all--_petit bois_ to set a fire alight; and the afternoon grew bluer,
+deeper. Stewart worked in a reverie--Fanny in a heat of expectation. One
+mused reposedly on life--the other warmly of the immediate hours
+before her.
+
+"Now I'm going to fetch the car," said Stewart at last. "Will you stay
+here and go on cutting till I come? There are two more logs."
+
+She walked away up the drive, and Fanny picked the hatchet out of the
+snow and started on the leathery, damp end of a fresh log. It would not
+split, the tapping marred the white silence, and yet again she let the
+hatchet fall and sat down on the log instead. It was nearly six--they
+had spent the whole afternoon splitting up the logs, and making a fine
+pile of short pieces for firewood; the forest was darkening rapidly,
+blue deepened above the trees to indigo, and black settled among the
+trunks. Only the snow sent up its everlasting shine. Her thoughts fell
+and rose. Now they were upon the ground busy with a multitude of small
+gleams and sparkles--now they were up and away through the forest
+tunnels to Chantilly. What would he say first? How look when he met her?
+
+"Ah, I am a silly woman in a fever! Yet happy--for I see beauty in
+everything, in the world, upon strange faces, in nights and days. Upon
+what passes behind the glassy eyes" (she pressed her own) "depends
+sight, or no sight. There is a life within life, and only I" (she
+thought arrogantly, her peopled world bounded by her companions) "am
+living in it. We are afraid, we are ashamed, but when one dares talk of
+this strange ecstasy, other people nod their heads and say: 'Ah, yes, we
+know about that! They are in love.' And they smile. But what a
+convention--tradition--that smile!"
+
+There was no sound in the forest at all--not the cry of a bird, not the
+rustle of snow falling from a branch--but there was something deeper and
+remoter than sound, the approach of night. There was a change on the
+face of the forest--an effective silence which was not blankness--a
+voiceless expression of attention as the Newcomer settled into his
+place. Fanny looked up and saw the labyrinth of trees in the very act of
+receiving a guest.
+
+"Oh, what wretched earnest I am in," she thought, suddenly chilled. "And
+it can only have one end--parting." But she had a power to evade these
+moods. She could slip round them and say to herself: "I am old enough--I
+have learnt again and again--that there is only one joy--the Present;
+only one Perfection--the Present. If I look into the future it is lost."
+
+She heard the returning car far up the forest drive, and in a moment saw
+the gleam of its two lamps as they rocked and swayed. It drew up, and
+Stewart put out the lamps, ever remembering that their logs were stolen.
+There was still light enough by which they could pack the car with wood.
+As they finished Stewart caught her arm: "Look, a fire!" she said,
+pointing into the forest. Through a gap in the trees they could see a
+red glow which burst up over the horizon.
+
+"And look behind the trees--the whole sky is illumined--What a fire!" As
+they watched, the glare grew stronger and brighter, and seemed about to
+lift the very tongue of its flame over the horizon.
+
+"It's the moon!" they cried together.
+
+The cold moon it was who had come up red and angry from some Olympic
+quarrel and hung like a copper fire behind the forest branches. Up and
+up she sailed, but paling as she rose from red to orange, from orange to
+the yellow of hay; and at yellow she remained, when the last branch had
+dropped past her face of light, and she was drifting in the height
+of the sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+THE INN
+
+They drove back to the village and down to their isolated villa, and
+here on the road they passed ones and twos of the Section walking
+into supper.
+
+"How little we have thought out your evasion!" whispered Stewart at the
+wheel, as they drew up at the door: "Get out, and go and dress. I will
+take the car up to the garage and come back."
+
+Fanny slipped in through the garden. What they called "dressing" was a
+clean skirt and silk stockings--but silk stockings she dared not put on
+before her brief appearance at supper. Stuffing the little roll into her
+pocket she determined to change her stockings on the boat.
+
+Soon, before supper was ended, she had risen from the table,
+unquestioned by the others, had paused a moment to meet Stewart's eye
+full of mystery and blessing, had closed the door and was gone.
+
+She slipped down the road and across the field to the railway. There was
+a train standing, glowing and breathing upon the lines, and the driver
+called to her as she ran round the buffers of the engine. Soon she was
+down by the riverside and looking for Margot. Though there was moonlight
+far above her the river banks were wrapped in fog that smelt of water,
+and Margot's face at the hut window was white, and her wool dress white,
+too. She came down and they rowed out into the fog, in an upward circle
+because of the stream. Fanny could just see her companion's little blunt
+boots, the stretched laces across her instep, and above, her pretty face
+and slant eyes. Hurriedly, in the boat she pulled off the thick stockings,
+rolled them up, and drew on the silk. A chill struck her feet. She wrapped
+the ends of her coat lightly round her knees and as she did so the roll
+of thick stockings sprang out of her lap and fell overboard into the fog
+and the river.
+
+"Mademoiselle goes to a party?" said Margot, who had not noticed. The
+soft sympathetic voice was as full of blessing as Stewart's eyes had
+been.
+
+"Yes, to a party. And you will fetch me back to-night when I whistle?"
+
+"Yes. Blow three times, for sometimes in the singing at home I lose the
+sound."
+
+The opposite bank seemed to drift in under the motionless boat, and she
+sprang out.
+
+"A tout à l'heure, mademoiselle."
+
+At the top of the bank the road ran out into the fog, which was thicker
+on this side. She walked along it and was lost to Margot's incurious
+eyes. Here it was utterly deserted: since the bridge had been blown up
+the road had become disused and only the few who passed over by
+Margot's boat ever found their way across these fields. She strayed
+along by the road's edge and could distinguish the blanched form of
+a tree.
+
+Strange that the fog should reach so much further inland on this side of
+the river. Perhaps the ground was lower. Standing still her ear caught a
+rich, high, throaty sound, a choking complaint which travelled in the air.
+
+"It is the car," she thought. Far away a patch of light floated in the
+sky, like an uprooted searchlight.
+
+"That is the fog, bending the headlights upward."
+
+She stood in the centre of the road and listened to the sound as it drew
+nearer and nearer, till suddenly the headlights came down out of the sky
+and pierced her--she stood washed in light, and the car stopped.
+
+Beside the driver of the car was, not Julien, but a man with a red,
+wooden face like a Hindoo god made out of mahogany. Saluting, he said:
+"We are sent to fetch you, mademoiselle." He held the door of the closed
+car open for her, she smiled, nodded, climbed in and sank upon the seat.
+
+"When you get to the lights of the houses, mademoiselle, will you stoop
+a little and cover yourself with this rug? It is not foggy in Chantilly
+and the street is very full."
+
+"I will," she said, "I'll kneel down."
+
+Something about his face distressed her. How came it that Julien trusted
+this new man? Perhaps he was some old and private friend of his who felt
+antagonistic to her, who disbelieved in her, who would hurt them both
+with his cynical impassivity.
+
+"I'm fanciful!" she thought. "This is only some friend of his from
+Paris." Paris sending forth obstacles already!
+
+In Chantilly she crouched beneath the rug--her expectations closing,
+unwandering, against her breast. Beams might pierce the glass of the car
+and light nothing unusual; what burnt beneath was not a fire that man
+could see. Generals in the street walked indifferently to the Hotel of
+the Grand Condé. It was their dinner hour, and who cared that an empty
+car should move towards a little inn beyond? Now, she held armfuls of
+the rug about her, buried from the light, now held her breath, too, as
+the car stopped.
+
+"Now mademoiselle!"
+
+And there stood Julien, at the end of the passage, he whom she had left,
+sombre and distracted, a long twenty-four hours ago in Chantilly. She
+saw the change even while she flew to him. He was gay, he was excited,
+he was exciting. He was beautiful, admirable, he admired her.
+
+"Fanny, is it true? You have come?" and "Que vous êtes en beauté!"
+
+Within, a table was laid for three--three chairs, three plates, three
+covers. He saw her looking at this.
+
+"We dine three to-night. You must condescend to dine with a sergeant.
+My old friend--Where is Alfred?"
+
+"I am here."
+
+"My old friend--four years before the war. The oldest friend I have.
+He has heard--"
+
+("----Of Violette. He has heard of Violette! He is Violette's friend;
+he is against me!")
+
+"I am so glad," she said aloud, in a small voice, and put out her hand.
+She did not like him, she had an instant dread of him, and thought he
+beheld it too.
+
+"I did not even know he was here," said Julien, more gay than ever. "But
+he is the sergeant of the garage, and I find him again.
+
+"What a help you'll be, to say the least of it! You will drive her to
+the river, you will fetch her from the river! I myself cannot drive, I
+am not allowed."
+
+The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little
+eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has
+made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly
+decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by this man,
+how deeply she distrusted him. But Julien was far from distrusting him.
+Through the dinner he seemed silently to brag to Alfred. His look said,
+and his smile said: "Is she not this and that, Alfred? Is she not
+perfect?" His blue eyes were bright, and once he said, "Go on, talk,
+Fanny, talk, Fanny, you have an audience. To-night you have two to
+dazzle!" Impossible to dazzle Alfred. Could he not see that? One might
+as easily dazzle a mahogany god, a little god alive beneath its casing
+with a cold and angry life. Yet though at first she was silent, inclined
+to listen to Alfred, to hope that something in his tones would soothe
+her enemy fears, soon she could not help following Julien's mood. Should
+she want to be praised, she had it from his eye--or be assured of love,
+it was there, too, in the eye, the smile, the soft tone. Because of
+Alfred, he could put nothing into words--because he must be dumb she
+could read a more satisfying conversation in his face.
+
+She began to think the occasional presence of a third person was an
+addition, an exciting disturbance, a medium through which she could talk
+with ease two languages at once, French to Alfred, and love to Julien.
+
+When they had finished dining Alfred left them, promising to come back
+with the car in half an hour, to take Fanny to the river.
+
+"You must like him!" said Julien confidently, when the door had closed.
+Fanny said she would. "And _do_ you like him?" Fanny said she did.
+
+"I met him so many years ago. He was suffering very much at the time
+through a woman. Now he will tell you he has become a cynic."
+
+"Did she treat him badly?"
+
+"She ran away from him, taking his carriage and his two horses--"
+
+"A beautiful woman?" interrupted Fanny, who liked details.
+
+"She might equally well have been magnificent or monstrous. She was over
+life-size, and Alfred, who is small, adored her. Everything about her
+was emphatic. Her hair was heavy-black, her skin too red. And never
+still, never in one place. Alfred had a house outside Paris, and
+carriage and horses to take him to the station. One night she took the
+horses, put them into the carriage and was seen by a villager seated
+upon the coachman's box driving along the road. When she had passed him
+this man saw her stop and take up a dark figure who climbed to the seat
+beside her. They--the woman and her probable lover, who never once had
+been suspected, and never since been heard of--drove as far as Persan-
+Beaumont, near here, where they had an accident, and turned the carriage
+into the ditch, killing one of the horses. The other they took out and
+coolly tied to the station railings. They took the train and disappeared,
+and though she had lived with Alfred two years, she never left a note
+for him to tell him that she had gone, she never wired to him about the
+roses, she never has written one since."
+
+"Enough to turn him into a cynic!"
+
+"Not at first. He came to me, spent the night in my flat; he was
+distracted. We must have walked together a mile across my little floor.
+He couldn't believe she was gone, which was natural. And though next
+morning the horses were missing and the coach-house empty, he couldn't
+be got to connect the two disappearances. He rang me up from the country
+where he went next day, saying earnestly as though to convince himself,
+'You know I've got on to the Paris police about those horses.' And later
+in the day, again: 'I hear there has been a good deal of horse-stealing
+all over the country.' Then, when the horses were found, one dead, and
+the other tied to the station railings, he believed at once that she had
+taken them and wouldn't talk one word more upon the subject. He sold the
+remaining horse."
+
+"It was then he grew cool about women!"
+
+"Not yet. It was then that he met, almost at once, a young girl who
+insisted in the most amazing fashion, that she loved him. He could not
+understand it. He came to me and said: 'Why does she love me?'
+
+"I thought she was merely intriguing to marry him, but no, he said:
+'There's something sincere and impressive in her tone; she loves me.
+What shall I do?'
+
+'Why _shouldn't_ you marry her?' I said.
+
+And then he was all at once taken with the idea to such a degree that
+he became terrified when he was with her. 'Suppose she refuses me,' he
+said twenty times a day. 'Ask her. It's simple.' 'It's staking too much.
+You say, "Ask her," when all in a minute she may say no.'
+
+"He got quite ill over it. The girl's mother asked him to the house, the
+girl herself, though she saw him less and less alone, smiled at him as
+tenderly as ever. And then there came a day when he left me full of
+courage, and going to her house he asked her to marry him. He met her
+alone by chance, and before asking her mother he spoke to the girl
+herself. She said no, point-blank. She said 'Nothing would induce her
+to.' He was so astonished that he didn't stay a second longer in the
+house. He didn't even come to me, but went back into the country, and
+then to England."
+
+"But why did the girl--?"
+
+"There is nothing to ask. Or, at any rate, there is no answer to
+anything. I suppose he asked himself every question about her conduct,
+but it was inexplicable."
+
+"He should have asked her twice."
+
+"It never occurred to him. And he has told me lately that she refused
+him with such considered firmness that it seemed unlikely that it was
+a whim."
+
+"Well--poor Alfred! And yet it was only the merest chance, the merest
+run of bad luck--but it leaves him, you say, with the impression that we
+are flawed?"
+
+"A terrible flaw. His opinion is that there is a deep coldness in
+women. In the brain, too, he feels them mortally unsound. Mad and cold
+he says now of all women, and therefore as unlike a normal man as a
+creature half-lunatic, half-snake."
+
+"He thinks that of all women, young or old?"
+
+"Yes, I think so. He tells me that whereas most men make the mistake of
+putting down womanly unreason to the score of their having too much
+heart, he puts it down to their having no heart at all, which he says
+is so mad a state that they are unrecognisable as human creatures."
+
+"But--(alas, poor Alfred)--you have made a charming confidante for us!"
+
+"Confidante? He will make the best. He is devoted to me."
+
+"To me?"
+
+"To anything, to any one I care for."
+
+"Not to me. What you have told me is the key to his expression when he
+looks at me. If he is devoted to you it is not an unreasoning devotion,
+and he is judging me poisonous to you. As he has himself been hurt, he
+will not have you hurt. I wish he had never come. I wish he might never
+be my driver to the river, and your friend, and our enemy."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"I wish it. I am unhappy about him, and unhappiness is always punished.
+While we were in Metz every one smiled at us; here every one will spy
+us out, scold, frown, punish--"
+
+"And your magic luck?"
+
+"Alfred threatens my luck," she said. Then, with another look, "Are you
+angry with me? Can you love such a character?"
+
+"I love it now."
+
+"You have never heard me when I scold, or cry or am sulky?..."
+
+"Never."
+
+"But if I make the experiment?"
+
+"I could make a hundred experiments, but I make none of them. We cannot
+know what to-morrow may bring."
+
+This she remembered suddenly with all her heart.
+
+"Come nearer to me, Fanny. Why are you sitting so far away?"
+
+She sat down nearer to him; she put all her fingers tightly round his
+wrist.
+
+"I am not always sure that you are there, Julien; that you exist."
+
+"Yet I am substantial enough."
+
+"No, you are most phantom-like. It is the thought of parting that checks
+my earnestness; as though I had an impulse to save myself. It is the
+thought of parting that turns you into a ghost, already parted with;
+that sheds a light of unreality over you when I am distant. Something in
+me makes ready for that parting, flees from you, and I cannot stay it,
+steals itself, and I cannot break through it. I have known you so short
+a time. I have had nothing but pleasure from you; isn't it possible that
+I can escape without pain?"
+
+"Is it?"
+
+"No, no, no!" She laid her cheek upon his hand. "Do something to make it
+easier. Must it be that when you go you go completely? Promise me at
+least that it will be gradual, that you will try to see me when you have
+taken up your other life."
+
+"But if I can't? If you are ordered back to Metz?"
+
+"Why should I be? But, if I am, promise me that you will try. If it is
+only an artifice, beguile me with it; I will believe in any promise."
+
+"You don't need to ask me to promise; you know you don't need to make me
+promise. Wherever you are sent I will try to come. _Wherever_--do you
+hear? Do you think that that 'other' life is a dragon to eat me up? That
+it will be such bliss to me that I shall forget you completely? It isn't
+to be bliss, but work, hard work, and competition. It is the work that
+will keep me to Paris, not my happiness, my gaiety, my content with
+other faces. That would comfort me if I were listener, and you the
+speaker. But, Fanny, Fanny, I never met any one with such joy as you--it
+is you who change the forest and the inns we meet in, make the journeys
+a miracle. Don't show me another face. We have been in love without a
+cloud, without scenes, without tears. You have laughed at everything.
+Don't change, don't show me someone whom I don't know; _not that
+sad face_!"
+
+"This then!" She held up a face in whose eyes and smile was the hasty
+radiance his fervour had brought her--and at sight of it the words broke
+from him--"Are you happy so quickly?"
+
+"Yes, yes, already happy."
+
+"Because I speak aloud of what I feel? What a doubting heart you have
+within you! And I believe you only pretend to distress yourself, that
+you may test whether I am sensitive enough to show the reflection of it.
+Come! Well--am I right?"
+
+"Partly. But I need not think. Oh, I am glad your feeling is so like
+mine, and mine like yours! I will let the parting take care of itself
+--yet there is one thing about which I cannot tell. What does your
+heart do in absence, what kind of man are you when there is no one but
+Alfred, who will say: 'Forget her'?"
+
+"What kind do you think?"
+
+"While I am here beside you, you cannot even imagine how dim I might
+become. Can I tell? Can you assure me?"
+
+Dim she might become to him, but dim she was not now as she besought him
+with eyes that showed a quick and eager heart, eyes fixed on his face
+full of enquiry, sure of its answer, feigning doubt that did not
+distress her.
+
+"And I to you, and I to you?" he said, speaking in her ear when he had
+made her an answer. "Dim, too? Why do we never talk of your inconstancy?
+We must discuss it."
+
+"Inconstancy! That word had not occurred to me. It was _your_
+forgetfulness that I dreaded."
+
+"I shall not be unforgetful until I am inconstant."
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"My love!"
+
+"You can afford to tease me now you have me in such a mood!"
+
+"In such a mood! Have I, indeed? Yet you will forget me before I forget
+you."
+
+"You tell me to my face that I shall change?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. And since you are bound to forget me, I insist at least that there
+shall be a reason for doing so. I would rather be a king dethroned than
+allowed to lapse like a poor idiot."
+
+"You would? You can say that?" Her voice rose.
+
+"One instant, Fanny. Even when my teasing is out of taste, learn to
+distinguish it from what I say in earnest. My dear, my dear, why should
+you have to listen to the matter of _my_ philosophy and _my_ experience
+which tells me all creatures forget and are forgotten! No! I wipe out!
+You will not vanish--"
+
+The door opened and Alfred entered the room.
+
+"The car is ready," he said. "I have had trouble in getting here."
+
+Fanny turned to him. "I am ready," she said. "It is dreadful to have to
+trouble you to take me so late at night to the river."
+
+"No, no--" Alfred, glowing from the exercise in the snowy night outside,
+was inclined to be more friendly, or at least less sparing of his words.
+"Here are some letters that were at your lodging." He handed three
+to Julien.
+
+"When do you dine with me again?" Julien, holding the letters, placed
+his hand upon her shoulder.
+
+"I cannot tell what the work will be. Perhaps little, as the snow is
+deep."
+
+"It is snowing again outside," said Alfred.
+
+"Then the snow will lie even deeper, and there will be no work."
+
+"Get her back quickly, Alfred, or the snow will lie too deep for you.
+I will send you a note, Fanny."
+
+"That is quite easy, is it?"
+
+"Easy. But compromising."
+
+"Oh, surely--not very?"
+
+"In France everything is compromising, mademoiselle," said Alfred. "But
+he will find a way to send it."
+
+Julien had urged her to hurry, fearing the snow; now he said, "You are
+going?" as though it distressed him.
+
+"I must."
+
+"Yes, you must, you must. Where is your leather coat? Here--"
+
+He found it.
+
+"Stay! I must read this before you go. It is my demobilisation paper
+with the final date. I will look--"
+
+"Are you coming?" called Alfred, from the end of the passage. "It is
+snowing wildly."
+
+"There is some mistake," muttered Julien, his eye searching the large
+unfolded document.
+
+"When, when--?" Fanny, hanging on his words, watched him.
+
+"One moment. It is a mistake. Alfred! Alfred, here, a minute!"
+
+"Look," he said, when Alfred had re-entered the room. He handed the
+paper to him, and drew him under the light. "See, they say--ah, wait,
+did I register at Charleville or Paris?"
+
+"At Charleville. As an agriculturist. I remember well."
+
+"Then there is no mistake." He folded up the paper, pinching the edges
+of the folds slowly with his thumb and finger nail.
+
+"Fanny, it has come sooner than I expected."
+
+She could say nothing, but fastened her gaze upon his lips.
+
+"Much, much sooner, and there is no evading it. Alfred, I will bring her
+in a minute."
+
+"The snow is coming down," muttered the mahogany god, grown wooden again
+under the light, and retreated.
+
+"It is worse for me; it has been done by my own stupidity. But in those
+days I didn't know you--"
+
+"Oh, if you are thinking of breaking it to me--only tell me _which_ day!
+To-morrow?" She moved up close to him.
+
+"Not to-morrow! No, no," he said, almost relieved that it was better
+than she feared. "In five days, in five days. Oh, this brings it before
+me! I have no wish now for that release for which I have longed. Fanny,
+it is only a change, not a parting!"
+
+Alfred's voice called sharply from without. "You must come, mademoiselle!
+Julien, bring her!"
+
+"One instant. She is coming. Fanny, I must think it out. Until I go--I
+shall have time--we will get you sent to Charleville, and Charleville I
+must come often to see my land and my factory."
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Often, I must--"
+
+"How often?"
+
+"Once a week at last. Perhaps more often. If we can only manage that!"
+
+"Julien!" Alfred returned and stood again in the doorway. "This is
+absurd. I can never get to the river if you keep her."
+
+"Go, go. I will arrange! You will have a note from me to-morrow. Hurry,
+good-night, good-night!"
+
+She was in the car; now the door was shutting on her; yet once more he
+pulled it open, "Ah! Oh, good-night!"
+
+At the side of the car, the snow whirling round his head, Julien kissed
+her face in the darkness; Alfred, relentless, drove the car onward, and
+the door shutting with a slam, left him standing by the inn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+THE RIVER
+
+The indifferent Alfred drove his unhappy burden towards the river.
+Walled in by the rush of snowflakes about him he made what way he could,
+but it was well-nigh impossible to see. The lamps gave no light, for the
+flakes had built a shutter across the glass like a policeman's dark
+lantern. The flying multitudes in the air turned him dizzy; he could not
+tell upon which side of the road he drove, and he could not tell what he
+would do when the wall beyond the outskirts of Chantilly forsook him. As
+to what was happening below him, what ruts, ditches, pits or hillocks he
+was navigating, he had no idea; his ship was afloat upon the snow,
+sluggishly rolling and heaving as it met with soft, mysterious
+obstacles.
+
+Heaviness and gloom sat upon the velvet seat behind him. The white, wild
+night outside was playful and waggish compared with the black dejection
+behind the opaque glass windows.
+
+Fanny, who could not see her hand move in the darkness, saw clearly with
+other miserable and roving eyes the road that lay before her.
+
+"Julien, good-bye. Don't forget me!" That she would say to him in a few
+days; that was the gate, the black portal which would lead her into the
+road. That she would say, with entreaty, yet no painful tones of hers
+would represent enough the entreaty of her heart that _neither would
+forget the other_. She thought of this.
+
+Not in wilful unreason, or in disbelief of his promise, she looked at
+this parting as though it might be final. Without him she could see no
+charm ahead. And yet.... Tough, leathery heart--indestructible spinner
+she knew herself to be--no sooner should the dew fall from this
+enchanting fabric, the web itself be torn, than she would set to work
+upon the flimsiest of materials to weave another. And with such weaving
+comes forgetfulness. She thought of this.
+
+Not four feet away, another mind, inscrutable to hers, was violently
+employed upon its own problem. In this wild darkness the wall of
+Chantilly had bid him go on alone; it left him first without guide,
+second without shelter. He drove into the path of a rough and bitter
+storm which was attacking everything in the short plain between the
+forest and the town. It leapt upon him in an outbreak of hisses; cut him
+with hailstones, swept up false banks of snow before him till the
+illusion of a road led him astray. He turned too much to the right, hung
+on the lip of a buried ditch, turned back again and saved himself. He
+turned too much to the left, tilted, hung, was in danger--yet found the
+centre of the road again. Here, on this wild plain, the exposed night
+was whiter--blanched enough, foreign enough, fitful enough to puzzle the
+most resolved and native traveller.
+
+He arrived at a cross-roads. Yet was it a cross-roads? When roads are
+filled in level with the plain around them, the plain itself
+wind-churned like a ploughed field, when banks are rompishly erected, or
+melt unstably before the blows of the storm, it is hard to choose the
+true road from the false. He chose a road which instantly he saw to be
+no road. Too late. He pitched, this time not to recover. "A river--a
+river-bed!" was his horrified thought. Down went the nose of the car
+before him, the steering-wheel hitting him in the chest. Down came Fanny
+and all her black thoughts against the glass at his back. The car had
+not fallen very far; it had slid forward into a snow-lined dyke, and
+remained, resting on its radiator, its front wheels thrust into the
+steep walls of the bank, its back wheels in the air. Alfred climbed down
+from a seat which had lost its seating power; Fanny opened the door and
+stepped from the black interior into the deep snow. The front lamps were
+extinguished and buried in the opposite bank, the little red light at
+the back shone upwards to heaven.
+
+"Well--"
+
+"Well!"
+
+"Are you hurt?"
+
+"Not at all. And you?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+Their cold relations did not seem one whit changed from what they had
+been in the inn. Nothing had intervened but a little reflection, a
+little effort, and a vigorous jerk. Why should they change? They stood
+side by side in the noisy violence of the storm, and one shouted to the
+other: "Can you get her out!" and the other answered, "No."
+
+"I will walk on to the river."
+
+"You would never find it."
+
+The truth of this she saw as she looked round.
+
+Alfred left her and descending into the dyke, went on his knees by the
+radiator and fumbled deep in the snow with his hand. A hissing arose as
+the heated water ran from the tap he had turned. He emptied the water
+from the generator; the tail light sank and went out.
+
+"No one will run into her," he remarked. "No one will pass."
+
+Aie--screamed the wind and created a pillar of white powder. Fanny,
+losing her balance, one foot sank on the edge of a rut, and she went
+down on her hands; to the knees her silk-clad legs met the cold bite
+of the snow.
+
+"You must come back with me," shouted Alfred in her ear.
+
+That seemed true and necessary; she could not reach the river; she could
+not stay where she was. She followed him. At the next ditch he put out
+his hand and helped her across. They had no lamp. By the light of the
+snow she watched his blue-clad legs as they sank and rose; her own
+sinking and rising in the holes he left for her, the buffets of wind
+un-steadying her at every step. She followed him. And because she was as
+green as a green bough which bursts into leaf around a wound, the
+disturbing, the exciting menace of her discovery brightened her heart,
+set her mind whirling, and overgrew her dejection.
+
+They gained the Chantilly wall, and experienced at once its protection.
+The howling wind passed overhead and left them in a lew; the dancing
+snowflakes steadied and dropped more like rain upon them; she moved up
+abreast of Alfred.
+
+"I will take you back to the inn," he said. "They will have a room
+there."
+
+"Julien will have left and gone to his lodging."
+
+"Yes, at the other end of the town," answered Alfred, she fancied with
+grim satisfaction. ("Though it is as well," she thought; "there will be
+less scandal in the eyes of the innkeeper.")
+
+"To-morrow morning, mademoiselle, I will fetch you at six with another
+car and its driver, Foss, a man whom I can trust. We will take you to
+the river, and on the return journey drag the car from the ditch. It
+should be easy; she has not heeled over on her side."
+
+"That will be marvellous. I cannot tell you how I apologise."
+
+This, she began to see, was serious; her debt to the enemy Alfred was
+growing hourly.
+
+"No, no," he said, as though he saw the thing in the light of common
+justice. "You have come over to dine with Julien; we must get you back
+to the river."
+
+"Nevertheless it's monstrous," she thought, "what he has to do for me."
+
+But Alfred regarded it less as a friendly office towards Julien than as
+a duty, an order given by an officer. He was a sergeant, and four years
+of war had changed him from an irritable and independent friend to a
+dogged and careful subordinate. He did not like Fanny any the more for
+the trouble she was giving him; but he did not hold her responsible for
+his discomforts. She must be got to the river and to the river he
+would get her.
+
+Pray heaven she never crossed it again.
+
+When they arrived on the pavement outside the inn, he said: "Knock,
+mademoiselle, and ask if there is a room. It would be better that I
+should not be seen. Explain that the snow prevented you from returning.
+If there is a room do not come back to tell me, I shall watch you enter,
+and fetch you at six in the morning."
+
+She thanked him again, and following his instructions, found herself
+presently in a small room under the eaves--pitied by the innkeeper's
+wife, given a hot brick wrapped in flannel by the innkeeper's daughter,
+warmed and cheered and, in a very short time, asleep. At half-past five
+she was called, dressed herself, and drank a cup of coffee; paying a
+fabulous bill which included two francs for the hot brick.
+
+At six came Alfred, in another car, seated beside Foss, the new driver,
+a pale man with a grave face. They moved off in the grey dawn which
+brightened as they drove. Beyond the Chantilly wall the plain stretched,
+and on it the labouring wheel-marks of the night before were plainly
+marked. Alfred, beside the driver, let down a pane of glass to tell her
+that he had already been out with Foss and towed in the other car. She
+saw the ditch into which they had sunk, the scrambled marks upon the
+bank where she had been towed out. In ten minutes they were in the midst
+of the forest.
+
+Now, Fate the bully, punishing the unlucky, tripping up the hurried,
+stepped in again. This car, which had been seized in a hurry by cold and
+yawning men, was not as she should be.
+
+"Is she oiled?" Foss had called to the real driver of the car.
+
+"She is ... everything!" answered the man, in a hurry, going off to his
+coffee. She was not.
+
+Just as the approaching sun began to clear the air, just as with a
+spring at her heart Fanny felt that to be present at the opening of a
+fine day was worth all the trouble in the world, the engine began to
+knock. She saw Foss's head tilt a little sideways, like a keen dog who
+is listening. The knock increased. The engine laboured, a grinding set
+in; Foss pulled up at the side of the road and muttered to Alfred. He
+opened the bonnet, stared a second, then tried the starting handle. It
+would not move. Fanny let down the pane of glass and watched them in
+silence. "Not a drop," said Foss's low voice. And later, "Oil, yes,
+but--find me the tin!"
+
+"Do you mean there is no oil, no spare oil--" Alfred hunted vainly round
+the car, under the seats, in the tool box. There was no tin of oil.
+
+"If I had some oil," said Foss, "and if I let her cool a little, I could
+manage--with a syringe."
+
+They consulted together. Alfred nodded, and approached the window.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I am going on to the next village to get a tin
+of oil. There is a garage. Cars will be passing soon; I must ask you to
+lie covered with the rug in the bottom of the car; your uniform is very
+visible. Foss will remain with you."
+
+Fanny lay down in the bottom of the car, fitting her legs among a couple
+of empty petrol tins; Foss covered her with the rug. A quarter of an
+hour went by, and above her she began to hear the voices of birds; below
+her the cold crept up. She had no idea how far the village might be, and
+it is possible that Alfred had had no idea either. A bicycle bell rang
+at her side; later she heard the noise of a car, which passed her with
+a rush. Lying with her ear so close to the poor body of the motor she
+felt it to be but cold bones in a cemetery, dead, dead.
+
+Outside in the road, Foss shaded his eyes and looked up the now sparkling
+road a hundred times. The motors increased; the morning traffic between
+Précy and Chantilly awoke; the cars were going in to the offices of the
+G.Q.G. Now and then Foss would come to the window of the car. "Don't
+move," he would say. The floor-boards were rattled by an icy wind that
+blew over the face of the snow and up under the car; the brown, silk legs
+lay prone and stiff between the petrol cans, lifeless now to the knee.
+She was seized with fits of violent shivering. At one moment she had
+planned in her despair to call to Foss and tell him she would walk--but
+she had let the moment pass and now she put away the thought of walking
+on those lifeless feet. Besides, she would be seen--that well-known cap,
+bobbing back between the trees from Chantilly so early in the morning!
+
+"Oh, Honour of the Section, I am guarding you like my life!" She tried
+to raise her head a little to ease her neck.
+
+"Don't move," said Foss.
+
+Feet pattered past her; motors swept by; bicycle bells rang.
+
+"Foss," she said.
+
+The soldier leant towards her and listened.
+
+"Choose your own time, but you must let me sit up a moment. I am in
+pain."
+
+"Then, now, mademoiselle!"
+
+She sat up, flinging the rug back, dazzled by the splendour of the
+forest, the climbing sun, the heavy-burdened trees. Behind her was a
+cart coming up slowly; far ahead a cyclist swayed in the ruts of the
+road. As they approached her she pleaded: "They can't know me! Let
+me sit up--"
+
+But Foss knew only one master, his sergeant.
+
+"Better go down, mademoiselle."
+
+She went down again under the black rug, close against the wind that
+lifted the floor-boards, wrapping her coat more tightly round her,
+folding her arms about her knees.
+
+"It must be nearly eight. I have an hour more before they come in to
+breakfast. Ah, and when they do, will one of them go into my bedroom
+with my letters?"
+
+She tried to pick out in her mind that one most friendly to her, that
+one who was to destroy her. She heard in spirit her cry: "Fanny
+_isn't there!_"
+
+She thought of Stewart who would have woken early, planning anxiously to
+save her. The faces of the Guardians of the Honour of the Section began
+to visit her one by one, and horror spread in her. Then, pushing them
+from her, attempting to escape: "They are not all the world--" But they
+_were_ all the world--if in a strange land they were all to frown
+together. The thought was horrible. Time to get there yet! Alas, that
+the car was not facing _towards_ Chantilly--so early in the morning!
+
+"Foss, Foss, don't you see him coming?"
+
+"The road is full of people."
+
+A car rushed by them, yet never seemed to pass. The engine slowed down
+and a voice called: "What's up? Anything you want?"
+
+It was the voice of Roland Vauclin. Ah, she knew him--that fat, childish
+man, who loved gossip as he loved his food. To Fanny it seemed but a
+question of seconds before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good
+morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village
+spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay
+still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could not hear.
+
+Then she heard him clear his throat and speak.
+
+"The Captain asked me to get a bit of wood for his fire, sir. I have a
+man in there gathering branches, while I do a bit of 'business' with
+the car."
+
+"Oh, right!... Go on!" said Vauclin to his own chauffeur. Again they were
+left alone. Talk between them was almost impossible; Fanny was so
+muffled, Foss so anxiously watched for Alfred. The reedy singing between
+the boards where the wind attacked her occupied all her attention. The
+very core of warmth seemed extinguished in her body, never to be lit
+again. She remembered their last _fourier_, or special body-servant, who
+had gone on leave upon an open truck, and who had grown colder and
+colder--"and he never got warm again and he died, madame," the letter
+from his wife had told them.
+
+"I think he is coming! There is no one else on the road, mademoiselle.
+Will you look? I don't see very well--"
+
+She tried to throw off the rug and sit up, but her frozen elbow slipped
+and she fell again on the floor of the car. Pulling herself up she
+stared with him through the glass. Far up the white road a little figure
+toiled towards them, carrying something, wavering as though the ice-ruts
+were deep, picking its way from side to side. Neither of them was sure
+whether it was Alfred; they watched in silence. Before she knew it was
+upon her a car went by; she dived beneath the rug, striking her forehead
+on the corner of the folding seat.
+
+"Did they see? Was any one inside?"
+
+"It was an empty car. Please be careful."
+
+Foss was cold with rebuke. After that she lay still, isolated even from
+Foss. Ten minutes went by and suddenly Foss spoke--"Did you have to go
+far?"
+
+And Alfred's hard voice answered "Yes."
+
+Then she heard the two men working, tools clattering, murmured voices,
+and in ten minutes Foss said: "Try the starting handle."
+
+She heard the efforts, the labour of Alfred at the handle.
+
+"He will kill himself--he will break a blood-vessel," she thought as she
+listened to him. Every few minutes someone seized the handle and wound
+and wound--as she had never wound in her life--on and on, past the very
+limit of endurance. And under her ear, in the cold bones of the car, not
+a sign of life! Not a sign of life, and, as though she could hear them,
+all the clocks in the world struck nine.
+
+The Guardians of the Honour would be in at breakfast now! they would be
+sitting, sitting--discussing her absence. Stewart, upstairs, would be
+looking out of the window, watching the river, perhaps answering
+questions indifferently with her cool look. "Oh, in the garage--or
+walking in the forest. I don't know." Cough! She jumped as the bones in
+the bottom of the car moved under her, and the engine breathed. The
+noise died out, Foss leapt to the handle and wound and wound, fiercely,
+like a man who meant to make her breathe again or die. Again she
+struggled to life, lived for a few minutes, choked and was silent.
+
+"How is the handle?"
+
+"Pretty stiff," said Foss, "but getting better. Give me the oil squirt."
+
+Alfred took his place at the handle. Suddenly the car sprang to life
+again on a full deep note. Fanny lifted her head a little. Foss was
+leaning over the carburettor with his thin anxious look: Alfred stood
+in the snow, dark red in the face, and covered with oil. Soon they were
+moving along the road, slowly at first, and with difficulty: then faster
+and more freely. A little thin warmth began to creep up through the
+boards and play about her legs.
+
+She was carried along under her dark rug for another twenty minutes,
+then fell against the seat as the car turned sharply into the forsaken
+road that led to the broken bridge. In five minutes more the car had
+stopped and Alfred was at the door saying: "At last, mademoiselle!" She
+stammered her thanks as she tried to step from the car to the ground
+--but fell on her knees on the dashboard.
+
+"Have you hurt your foot?" said Alfred, who was hot.
+
+"I am only cold," she said humbly, unwilling to intrude her puny
+endurances on their gigantic labours.
+
+She sat on the step of the car rubbing her ankles, and stared at the
+meadows of thawing snow, at the open porches of stone which led the road
+straight into the river, at the church and the sunlit houses on the
+other side.
+
+Bidding them good-bye she reached the bank, and climbed down it,
+stumbling in the frozen mud and pits of ice till she reached the stiff
+reeds at the bank.
+
+The river had floes of ice upon it, green ice which swung and caught
+among the reeds at the edge. "It is thin," she thought, pushing her
+shoe through it, "it can't prevent the boat from crossing the river."
+Yet she was anxious.
+
+There on the other side was the little hut, the steps, the boat tied to
+the stone and held rigid in the ice. A shaggy dog ran by her feet to the
+river's edge and barked. Feet came clambering down the bank and a
+workman followed the dog, with a bag of tools and a basket. He walked up
+to the river, and putting his hands in a trumpet to his mouth called in
+a huge voice: "Un passant, Margot! Margot!" Fanny remembered her whistle
+and blew that too.
+
+There was no sign of life, and the little hut looked as before, like a
+brown dog asleep in the sun. Fanny turned to the man, ready to share her
+anxiety with him, but he had sat down on the bank and was retying a
+bootlace that had come undone.
+
+Margot never showed herself at the hut window, at the hut door. When
+Fanny turned back to whistle again she saw her standing up in the boat,
+which, freed, was drifting out towards them--saw her scatter the ice
+with her oar--and the boat, pushed upstream, came drifting down towards
+them in a curve to hit the bank at their feet. The girl stepped out,
+smiling, happy, pretty, undimmed by the habit of trade. The man got in
+and sat down, the dog beside him.
+
+"I would stand," said Margot to Fanny, "it's so wet."
+
+She made no allusion to the broken appointment for the night before.
+Fanny, noticing the dripping boards of the boat, stood up, her hand upon
+Margot's shoulder to steady herself. The thin, illusory ice shivered and
+broke and sank as the oar dipped in sideways.
+
+Cocks were crowing on the other side--the sun drew faint colours from
+the ice, the river clattered at the side of the boat, wind twisted and
+shook her skirt, and stirred her hair. All was forgotten in the glory of
+the passage of the river.
+
+Margot, smiling up under her damp, brown hair, took her five sous,
+pressed her town boots against the wooden bar, and shot the boat up
+against the bank.
+
+Fanny went up the bank, over the railway lines, and out into the road.
+Two hundred yards of road lay before her, leading straight up to the
+house. On the left was a high wall, on the right the common covered with
+snow--should some one come out of the house there was no chance of
+hiding. She glanced down at her tell-tale silk stockings; yet she could
+not hurry on those stiff and painful feet. She was near the door in
+the wall.
+
+She passed in--the dog did not bark; came to the foot of the steps--nobody
+looked out of the window; walked into the hall among their hanging coats
+and macintoshes, touched them, moved them with her shoulder; heard voices
+behind the door of the breakfast room, was on the stairs, up out of sight
+past the first bend, up, up, into Stewart's room.
+
+"_Do you know_...?"
+
+"_No one knows_!"
+
+"Oh ... oh...." All her high nerves came scudding and shuddering down
+into the meadows of content. Eternal luck.... She crept under Stewart's
+eiderdown and shivered.
+
+"Here's the chocolate. I will boil it again on my cooker. Oh, you have
+a sort of ague...."
+
+Good friend ... kind friend! She had pictured her like that, anxious,
+unquestioning and warm!
+
+Later she went downstairs and opened the door of the breakfast room upon
+the Guardians of the Honour.
+
+As she stood looking at them she felt that her clothes were the clothes
+of some one who had spent hours in the forest--that her eyes gave out a
+gay picture of all that was behind them--her adventures must shout aloud
+from her hands, her feet.
+
+"Had your breakfast?" said some one.
+
+"Upstairs," said Fanny, contentedly, and marvelled.
+
+She had only to open and close her lips a dozen times, bid them form
+the words: "I have been out all night," to turn those browsing herds
+of benevolence into an ambush of threatening horns, lowered at her.
+Almost ... she would _like_ to have said the sentence.
+
+But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third
+breakfast.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+ALLIES
+
+A thaw set in.
+
+All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks,
+sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered,
+breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise,
+which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under
+its banks.
+
+With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and
+fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the
+dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet,
+and towers of wood.
+
+In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of
+aspect, Fanny left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a
+paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her
+mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the
+demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the
+familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
+
+She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She
+could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic
+forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but
+closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the
+lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving
+for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
+
+All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the
+villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the
+bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her,
+followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of
+wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a
+thawing forest.
+
+There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a
+bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of
+farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more
+for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly
+was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced
+at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.
+
+She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to
+accompany her on her journey only to turn back.
+
+All the way to Amiens he reassured himself and her: "In a week I will
+come to Charleville."
+
+And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week
+you will come."
+
+(Why then this dread?)
+
+"In a week--in a week," ran the refrain.
+
+"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"
+
+"No, I shall write to the 'Silver Lion.' You will find in the middle of
+the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window
+sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."
+
+"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said
+'Good-bye' to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."
+
+And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not
+contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered
+once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.
+
+"It isn't that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn't that I
+fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."
+
+"I, too, know that."
+
+They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.
+
+The rain poured.
+
+"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is
+mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I
+have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to
+think of that."
+
+"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."
+
+"Yes--oh, you will see it easily--on the banks of the Meuse. I was born
+there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time--I will come, too."
+
+She stopped the car in a side street of the town.
+
+Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed
+them back on the wheel. "They can't," she said, and shook her head.
+
+He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.
+
+"You take the three o'clock train back to Paris when the papers are
+through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh,
+we've said everything! Oh, let's get it over--"
+
+He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
+She drove down the street without looking back.
+
+There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that
+if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from
+her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was
+done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She
+had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she
+felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted
+her all the morning.
+
+She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond
+the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly,
+violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if
+I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
+
+But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in
+trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen
+that violent pain.
+
+She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small
+cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusée. Wherever
+her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within
+her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do
+instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went
+moving off down the street of her endless thought.
+
+"I have only just left him! Can't I go back?" And this cry, carried out
+in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
+She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone
+behind her.
+
+Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
+
+Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were
+gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on
+each hand. The dun grass waved to the very edge of the road cut through
+it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards
+ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
+
+Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white
+letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as
+everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins,
+carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
+
+At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
+
+"Will you give me a lift?"
+
+He sat down beside her.
+
+"What do you do?" she asked.
+
+"I look after Chinamen."
+
+"Ah, how lonely!"
+
+"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army
+gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up
+the crumbs."
+
+She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground
+indistinguishable from the rest.
+
+"Is that where you live?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to
+this ran a track across the grass. She watched him walk along it, a
+friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the
+rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like
+action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving
+ground; passing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.
+
+Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and
+could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron,
+brown grass--brown grass and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway
+lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far
+between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing
+grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of
+five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand
+grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends
+together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood
+erect for miles and miles--when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon!
+Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life
+stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of
+village bones?
+
+She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of
+dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a
+father or mother below--" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up
+into the air; the child was gone.
+
+A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. Fanny held
+out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.
+
+"Have you been here long?" she asked.
+
+"A month, mademoiselle."
+
+"Are there many of you in this--village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of
+bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)
+
+"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."
+
+"But how are you fed?"
+
+"A lorry passes once a week for all the people in this district--within
+fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two
+in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don't come.
+We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got
+water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the
+radiators of other lorries."
+
+"What have you got down there?"
+
+"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still,
+and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can't build
+anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep
+between the ten of us."
+
+"Take my hammer," said Fanny. "I can get another in the garage."
+
+He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of
+recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his
+banner of blue smoke.
+
+Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.
+
+"This _was_ Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads
+ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the
+village--not a brick lay where the signpost stood.
+
+Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered--and suddenly, out
+of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little
+horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.
+
+"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face.
+His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his
+springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the
+tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung
+out beyond the mudguards.
+
+"Dandy car you've got!" he said with envy. "French?"
+
+Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with
+the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round
+in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she
+stood by the signpost in the desert.
+
+Then she took the road to Peronne.
+
+"I won't have my lunch yet--" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch
+had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She
+passed Peronne--uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into
+the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted
+village, oddly untouched by shell or fire. Here the doors swung and
+banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with
+curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.
+
+The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the
+henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.
+
+With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their
+handle spread it on the bread.
+
+"Lord, how lonely it is--surely some door might open, some face look
+out--" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat,
+for a front door slammed and blew back again.
+
+"I couldn't stay here the night--" with a shiver--and the bird on the
+branch sang louder than ever. "It's all very well," she addressed him.
+"You're with your own civilisation. I'm right _out_ of mine!"
+
+The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the
+sky, came down upon the other.
+
+Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village,
+talked a little to him, and set him down.
+
+A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion
+for half an hour.
+
+"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"
+
+"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question,
+when all France meant Julien!)
+
+"Don't you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he
+grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to
+be French!"
+
+"Little Belgium--jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the
+elder woman of the world!"
+
+A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.
+
+"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of
+severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English
+could do this--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."
+
+She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words
+were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that
+theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor
+would she have known how had she wished it.
+
+They passed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green
+bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came,
+and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I'll teach you to
+meddle with my daughter--"
+
+"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning
+from the car to watch.
+
+A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.
+
+"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed
+wire, fenced round with armed sentries.
+
+She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.
+
+"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don't much like
+driving Americans."
+
+"But I am English."
+
+"Well, that's better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the
+French Mission."
+
+"Why don't you like Americans?"
+
+"Among other things they give me two francs when three is marked!"
+
+"But once they gave you ten where three was marked!"
+
+"That's all changed!" laughed the taxi-man. "And it's a long story. I
+don't like them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Go away!" said France restlessly, pushing at the new nations in her
+bosom. "It's all done. Go back again!"
+
+"Are you an Ally?" said the Allies to each other balefully, their eyes
+no longer lit by battle, but irritable with disillusion--and each told
+his women tales of the other's shortcomings.
+
+Along the sides of the roads, in the gutters, picking the dust-heap of
+the battlefields, there were representatives of other nations who did
+not join in the inter-criticism of the lords of the earth. Chinese,
+Arabs and Annamites made signs and gibbered, but none cared whether they
+were in amity or enmity.
+
+Only up in Germany was there any peace from acrimony. _There_ the Allies
+walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other. _There_
+were no epithets to fling--they had all been flung long ago.
+
+And the German people, looking curiously back, begged buttons as
+souvenirs from the uniforms of the men who spoke so many different
+languages.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+THE ARDENNES
+
+The day wore on--
+
+The sun came lower and nearer, till the half-light ran with her half-
+thought, dropping, sinking, dying. "Guise," said the signpost, and
+a battlement stared down and threw its shadow across her face. "Is that
+where the dukes lived?" She was a speck in the landscape, moving on
+wheels that were none of her invention, covering distances of hundreds
+of miles without amazement, upon a magic mount unknown to her
+forefathers. Dark and light moved across the face of the falling day.
+Sometimes when she lifted her eyes great clouds full of rain were
+crossing the sky; and now, when she looked again the wind had torn them
+to shreds and hunted them away. The shadows lengthened--those of the few
+trees falling in bars across the road. A turn of the road brought the
+setting sun in her face, and blinded with light, she drove into it. When
+it had gone it left rays enough behind to colour everything, gilding the
+road itself, the air, the mists that hung in the ditches.
+
+Before the light was gone she saw the Ardennes forests begin upon her
+left.
+
+When it was gone, wood and road, air and earth, were alike stone-coloured.
+Then the definite night, creeping forward on all sides, painted out all
+but the road and the margin of the road--and with the side lights on all
+vision narrowed down to the grey snout of the bonnet, the two hooped
+mudguards stretched like divers' arms, and the blanched dead leaves which
+floated above from the unseen branches of the trees.
+
+Four crazy Fords were drawn up in one village street, and as her lights
+flashed on the door she caught sight of the word "Café" written on it.
+Placing the Renault beside the Fords she opened the door. Within five
+Frenchmen were drinking at one table, and four Americans at another. The
+Americans sprang up and claimed her, first as their own kin, and then at
+least as a blood sister. They gave her coffee, and would not let her
+pay; but she sat uneasily with them.
+
+"For which nation do you work? There are no English here," they said.
+
+"I am in the French Army."
+
+"Gee, what a rotten job!" they murmured sympathetically.
+
+"Where have you come from?"
+
+"We've just come back from Germany, and you bet it's good up there!"
+
+"Good?"
+
+"Every darn thing you want. Good beds, good food, and, thank God, one
+can speak the lingo."
+
+"You don't speak French then?"
+
+"You bet not."
+
+"Why don't you learn? Mightn't it be useful to you?"
+
+"Useful?"
+
+"Oh, when you get back home. In business perhaps--"
+
+"Ma'am," said the biggest American, leaning earnestly towards her, "let
+me tell you one thing. If any man comes up to me back in the States and
+starts on me with that darn language--I'll drop him one."
+
+"And German is easier?"
+
+"Oh, well, German we learn in the schools, you see. How far do you make
+it to St. Quentin?"
+
+"Are you going there on those Fords?"
+
+"We hope to, ma'am. But we started a convoy of twenty this morning, and
+these here four cars are all we've seen since lunch."
+
+"I hardly think you'll get as far as St. Quentin to-night. And there's
+little enough to sleep in on the way. I should stay here." She rose. "I
+wish you luck. Good-bye."
+
+She thanked them for their coffee, nodded to the quiet French table and
+went out.
+
+One American followed her.
+
+"Can you buzz her round?" he asked kindly, and taking the handle, buzzed
+her round.
+
+"I bet you don't get any one to do that for you in your army, do you?"
+he asked, as he straightened himself from the starting handle. She put
+her gear in with a little bang of anger.
+
+"You're kind," she said, "and they are kind. That you can't see it is
+all a question of language. Every village is full of bored Americans
+with nothing to do, and never one of them buys a dictionary!"
+
+"If it's villages you speak of, ma'am, it isn't dictionaries is needed,"
+he answered, "'tis plumbing!"
+
+She had not left him ten minutes before one of her tyres punctured.
+
+"Alas! I could have found a better use for them than arguing," she
+thought ruefully, regretting the friendly Americans, as she changed the
+tyre by the roadside under the beam from her own lamps.
+
+When it was done she sat for a few minutes in the silent car. The moon
+came up and showed her the battlements of the Ardennes forest standing
+upon the crest of the mountains to her left. "That is to be my home--"
+
+Julien was in Paris by now, divested of his uniform, sitting by a great
+fire, eating civilised food. A strange young man in dark clothes--she
+wondered what he would wear.
+
+He seemed a great many difficult miles away. That he should be in a
+heated room with lights, and flowers, and a spread table--and she under
+the shadow of the forest watching the moon rise, lengthened the miles
+between them; yet though she would have given much to have him with her,
+she would have given nothing to change places with him.
+
+The road left the forest for a time and passed over bare grass hills
+beneath a windy sky. Then back into the forest again, hidden from the
+moon. And here her half-stayed hunger made her fanciful, and she started
+at the noise of a moving bough, blew her horn at nothing, and seemed to
+hear the overtaking hum of a car that never drew near her.
+
+Suddenly, on the left, in a ditch, a dark form appeared, then another
+and another. Down there in a patch of grass below the road she caught
+sight of the upturned wheels of a lorry, and stopping, got down, walked
+to the ditch and looked over. There, in wild disorder, lay thirty or
+forty lorries and cars, burnt, twisted, wheelless, broken, ravaged,
+while on the wooden sides the German eagle, black on white, was marked.
+
+"What--what--can have happened here!"
+
+She climbed back into the car, but just beyond the limit of her lights
+came on a huge mine crater, and the road seemed to hang on its lip and
+die for ever. Again she got down, and found a road of planks, shored up
+by branches of trees, leading round on the left edge of the crater to
+firm land on the other side. Some of the planks were missing, and moving
+carefully around the crater she heard others tip and groan beneath her.
+
+"Could that have been a convoy caught by the mine? Or was it a dumping
+ground for the cars unable to follow in the retreat?"
+
+The mine crater, which was big enough to hold a small villa, was
+overgrown now at the bottom with a little grass and moss.
+
+On and on and on--till she fancied the moon, too, had turned as the sun
+had done, and started a downward course. It grew no colder, she grew no
+hungrier--but losing count of time, slipped on between the flying tree
+trunks, full of unwearied content. At last a light shone through the
+trees, and by a wooden bridge which led over another crater she came on
+a lonely house. "Café" was written on the door, but the shutters were
+tight shut, and only a line of light shone from a crack.
+
+From within came sounds of laughter and men's voices. She knocked, and
+there was an instant silence, but no one came to answer. At length the
+bolts were withdrawn and the head of an old woman appeared through the
+door, which was cautiously opened a little.
+
+"An omelette? Coffee?"
+
+"You don't know what you speak of! We have no eggs."
+
+"Then coffee?"
+
+"No, no, nothing at all. Go on to Charleville. We have nothing."
+
+"How far is Charleville?"
+
+But the door shut again, the bolts were shot, and a man's voice growled
+in the hidden room behind.
+
+"Dubious hole. Yet it looks as though a big town were near----" And down
+the next slope she ran into Charleville. The town had been long abed,
+the street lamps were out, the cobbles wet and shining.
+
+On the main boulevard one dark figure hurried along.
+
+"Which is the 'Silver Lion'?" she called, her voice echoing in the empty
+street.
+
+Soon, between rugs on a bed in the "Silver Lion," between a single sheet
+doubled in two, she slept--propping the lockless door with her suitcase.
+
+The Renault slept or watched below in the courtyard, the moon sank, the
+small hours passed, the day broke, the first day in Charleville.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+
+SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+THE STUFFED OWL
+
+A stuffed bird stood upon a windless branch and through a window of blue
+and orange squares of glass a broken moon stared in.
+
+A bedroom, formed from a sitting-room, a basin to wash in upon a red
+plush table--no glass, no jug, no lock upon the door. Instead, gilt
+mirrors, three bell ropes and a barometer. A bed with a mattress upon it
+and nothing more.
+
+This was her kingdom.
+
+Beyond, a town without lights, without a station, without a milkshop,
+without a meat shop, without sheets, without blankets, crockery, cooking
+pans, or locks upon the doors. A population half-fed and poor. A sky
+black as ink and liquid as a river.
+
+Prisoners in the streets, moving in green-coated gangs; prisoners in the
+gutters, pushing long scoops to stay the everlasting tide of mud; thin,
+hungry, fierce and sad, green-coated prisoners like bedraggled parrots,
+out-numbered the population.
+
+The candle of the world was snuffed out--and the wick smoked.
+
+The light was gone--the blinding light of the Chantilly snows, the
+lights on the Précy river--moonlight, sunlight--the little boat
+crossing at moonrise, sunrise.
+
+"Ah, that long journey! How I pressed on, how I fled from Amiens!"
+
+"What, not Charleville yet?" I said. "Isn't it Charleville soon? What
+hurry was there then to get there?"
+
+The stuffed bird eyed her from his unstirring branch, and that yellow
+eye seemed to answer: "None, none..."
+
+"This is his home; his country. He told me it was beautiful. But I
+cannot see beauty. I am empty of happiness. Where is the beauty?"
+
+And the vile bird, winking in the candle's light, replied: "Nowhere."
+
+But he lied.
+
+Perhaps she had been sent, stuffed as he was, from Paris. Perhaps he had
+never flown behind the town, and seen the wild mountains that began at
+the last house on the other bank of the river. Or the river itself,
+greener than any other which flowed over black rocks, in cold gulleys
+--the jade-green Meuse flowing to Dinant, to Namur. Perhaps from his
+interminable boulevard he had never seen the lovely Spanish Square of red
+and yellow, its steep-roofed houses standing upon arches--or the proud
+Duc Charles de Gonzague who strutted for ever upon his pedestal, his
+stone cape slipping from one shoulder, his gay Spaniard's hat upon his
+head--holding back a smile from his handsome lips, lest the town which he
+had come over the mountains to found should see him tolerant and sin
+beneath his gaze.
+
+That bird knew the rain would stop--knew it in his dusty feathers,
+but he would not kindle hope. He knew there was a yellow spring at
+hand--but he left her to mourn for the white lustre of Chantilly.
+Vile bird!... She blew out the candle that he might wink no more.
+
+"To-morrow I will buy a padlock and a key. If among these gilt mirrors I
+can have no other charm, I will have solitude!" And having hung a
+thought, a plan, a hope before her in the future, she slept till day
+broke--the second day in Charleville.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She woke, a mixture of courage and philosophy.
+
+"I can stand anything, and beyond a certain limit misfortune makes me
+laugh. But there's no reason why I should stand this!" The key and
+padlock idea was rejected as a compromise with happiness.
+
+"No, no, let us see if we can get something better to lock up than that
+bird." He looked uncommonly dead by daylight.
+
+"I would rather lock up an empty room, and leave it pure when I must
+leave it!"
+
+Dressing, she went quickly down the street to the Bureau de la Place.
+The clerks and secretaries nodded and smiled at each other, and bent
+their heads over their typewriters when she looked at them.
+
+"Can I see the billeting lieutenant?"
+
+"He is not here."
+
+"I saw him enter."
+
+"We will go and see...."
+
+She drummed upon the table with her fingers and the clerks and
+secretaries winked and nodded more meaningly than ever.
+
+"_Entrez_, mademoiselle. He will see you."
+
+The red-haired lieutenant with pince-nez was upon his feet looking at
+her curiously as she entered the adjoining room.
+
+"Good morning, mademoiselle. There is something wrong with the billet
+that I found you yesterday?"
+
+She looked at him. In his pale-blue eyes there was a beam; in his
+creased mouth there was an upward curve. The story of legitimate
+complaint that she had prepared drooped in her mind; she looked at
+him a little longer, hesitated, then, risking everything:
+
+"Monsieur, there is a stuffed owl in the room."
+
+He did not wince. "Take it out, mademoiselle."
+
+"H'm, yes. I cannot see heaven except through orange glass."
+
+"Open the window."
+
+"It is fixed."
+
+Then he failed her; he was a busy, sensible man.
+
+"Mademoiselle, I find you a billet, I instal you, and you come to me in
+the middle of the morning with this ridiculous story of an owl. It isn't
+reasonable...."
+
+The door opened and his superior officer walked in, a stern captain with
+no crease about his mouth, no beam in his olive eye.
+
+Ah, now ... Now the lieutenant had but to turn to his superior officer
+and she would indeed be rent, and reasonably so.
+
+"What is the matter?" said the newcomer. "Is something fresh needed?"
+
+The billeting lieutenant never hesitated a second.
+
+"_Mon capitaine_, unfortunately the billet found yesterday for this lady
+is unsuitable. The owner of the house returns this week, and needs
+the room."
+
+"Have you some other lodging for her?"
+
+"Yes, _mon capitaine_, in the Rue de Clèves."
+
+"Good. Then there is no difficulty?"
+
+"None. Follow me, mademoiselle, the street is near. I will take you to
+the _concierge_."
+
+She followed him down the stairs, and caught him up upon the pavement.
+
+"You may think, mademoiselle, that it is because I am young and
+susceptible."
+
+"Oh, no, no...."
+
+"Indeed, I _am_ young; But I slept in that room myself the first night I
+came to Charleville...."
+
+"My room with the owl? Do you mean that?"
+
+"Yes, I put him upon the landing. But even then I dared not break the
+window. Here is the street."
+
+"How you frightened me when your captain came in! How grateful I am, and
+how delighted. Is the house here?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, I do not truly know what to do. _It is an empty house._"
+
+"So much the better."
+
+"But you are not afraid?"
+
+"Oh, no, no, not at all. Has it any furniture?"
+
+"Very little. We will see."
+
+He pulled the bell at an iron railing, and the gate opened. A beautiful
+face looked out of the window, and a young woman called: "_Eh bien!
+More_ officers? I told you, _mon lieutenant_, we have not room for
+one more."
+
+"Now, come, come, Elsie! Not so sharp. It is for the house opposite this
+time. Have you the key?"
+
+"But the house opposite is empty."
+
+"It will not be when I have put mademoiselle into it."
+
+"Alone?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+The young _concierge,_ under the impression that he was certainly
+installing his mistress, left the window, and came through the gate with
+a look of impish reproof in her eyes.
+
+Together they crossed the road and she fitted the key into a green iron
+door let into the face of a yellow wall. Within was a courtyard,
+leading to a garden, and from the courtyard, steps in an inner wall led
+up into the house.
+
+"All this ... all this mine?"
+
+"All yours, mademoiselle."
+
+The garden, a deserted tangle of fruit trees and bushes, fallen statues,
+arbours and grass lawn brown with fallen leaves, was walled in by a high
+wall which kept it from every eye but heaven's. The house was large, the
+staircase wide and low, the rooms square and high, filled with windows
+and painted in dusty shades of cream. In every room as they passed
+through them lay a drift of broken and soiled furniture as brown and
+mouldering as the leaves upon the lawn.
+
+"Who lived here?"
+
+"Who lived here?" echoed the _concierge_, and a strange look passed over
+her face. "Many men. Austrians, Turks, Bulgarians, Germans...."
+
+"Were you, then, in Charleville all the time?"
+
+"All the time. I knew them all."
+
+In her eyes there flitted the image of enemies who had cried gaily to
+her from the street as she leant out of the open window of the house
+opposite. "Take anything," she said, with a shrug, to Fanny. "See what
+you can make from it. If you can make one room habitable from this
+dust-heap, you are welcome. See, there is at least a saucepan. Take
+that. So much has gone from the house in these last years it seems
+hardly worth while to retain a saucepan for the owner."
+
+"Who is the owner?"
+
+"A rich lady who can afford it. The richest family in Charleville. She
+has turned _méchante_. She will abuse me when she comes here to see
+this--as though _I_ could have saved it. Her husband and her son were
+killed. Georges et Phillippe. Georges was killed the first day of the
+war, and Phillippe ... I don't know when, but somewhere near here."
+
+"You think she will come back?"
+
+"Sometimes I think it. She has such a sense of property. But her
+daughter writes that it would kill her to come. Phillippe was the
+sun ... was the good God to her."
+
+"I must go back to my work," said the lieutenant. "Can you be happy here
+in this empty house? There will be rats...."
+
+"I can be very happy--and so grateful. I will move my things across
+to-day. My companions ... that is to say six more of us arrive in convoy
+from Chantilly to-morrow."
+
+"Six more! Had you told me that before ... But what more simple! I can
+put them all in here. There is room for twenty."
+
+"Oh...." Her face fell, and she stood aghast. "And you gave me this house
+for myself. And I was so happy!"
+
+"You are terrible. If my business was to lodge soldiers of your sex
+every day I should be grey-haired. You cannot lodge with an owl, you
+cannot lodge with your compatriots!..."
+
+"Yet you were joking when you said you would put us all here?"
+
+"I was joking. Take the house--the rats and the rubbish included with
+it! No one will disturb you till the owner comes. I have another, a
+better, a cleaner house in my mind for your companions. Now, good-bye, I
+must go back to my work. Will you ask me to tea one day?"
+
+"I promise. The moment I have one sitting-room ready."
+
+He left her, and she explored the upper storey with the _concierge._
+
+"I should have this for your bedroom and this adjoining for your
+sitting-room. The windows look in the street and you can see life."
+Fanny agreed. It pleased her better to look in the street than into the
+garden. The two rooms were large and square. Old blue curtains of
+brocade still hung from the windows; in the inner room was a vast oak
+bed and a turkey carpet of soft red and blue. The fireplaces were of
+open brick and suitable for logs. Both rooms were bare of any other
+furniture.
+
+"I will find you the mattress to match that bed. I hid it; it is in the
+house opposite."
+
+She went away to dust it and find a man to help her carry it across the
+road. Fanny fetched her luggage from her previous billet, borrowed six
+logs and some twigs from the _concierge,_ promising to fetch her an
+ample store from the hills around.
+
+All day she rummaged in the empty house--finding now a three-legged
+armchair which she propped up with a stone, now a single Venetian glass
+scrolled in gold for her tooth glass.
+
+In a small room on the ground floor a beautiful piece of tapestry lay
+rolled in a dusty corner. Pale birds of tarnished silver flew across its
+blue ground and on the border were willows and rivers.
+
+It covered her oak bed exactly--and by removing the pillows it looked
+like a comfortable and venerable divan. The logs in the fire were soon
+burnt through, and she did not like to ask for more, but leaving her
+room and wandering up and down the empty house in the long, pale
+afternoon, she searched for fragments of wood that might serve her.
+
+A narrow door, built on a curve of the staircase, led to an upper storey
+of large attics and her first dazzled thought was of potential loot for
+her bedroom. A faint afternoon sun drained through the lattice over
+floors that were heaped with household goods. A feathered brush for
+cobwebs hung on a nail, she took it joyfully. Below it stood an iron
+lattice for holding a kettle on an open fire. That, too, she put aside.
+
+But soon the attics opened too much treasure. The boy's things were
+everywhere, the father's and the son's. Her eyes took in the host of
+relics till her spirit was living in the lost playgrounds of their
+youth, pressing among phantoms.
+
+"Irons ... For ironing! For my collars!"
+
+But they were so small, too small. His again--the son's. "Yet why
+shouldn't I use them," she thought, and slung the little pair upon
+one finger.
+
+Crossing to the second attic she came upon all the toys. It seemed as
+though nothing had ever been packed up--dolls' houses, rocking-horses,
+slates, weighing machines, marbles, picture books, little swords and
+guns, and strange boxes full of broken things.
+
+Returning to the floor below with empty hands she brooded by the embers
+and shivered in her happy loneliness. Julien was no longer someone whom
+she had left behind, but someone whom she expected. He would be here
+... how soon? In four days, in five, in six. There would be a letter
+to-morrow at the "Silver Lion." Since she had found this house, this
+perfect house in which to live alone and happy, the town outside had
+changed, was expectant with her, and full of his presence. But, ah ...
+inhuman... was Julien alone responsible for this happiness? Was she not
+weaving already, from her blue curtains, from her soft embers, from the
+branches of mimosa which she had bought in the market-place and placed
+in a thin glass upon the mantelpiece, from the gracious silence of the
+house, from her solitude?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S HOUSE
+
+What a struggle to get wood for that fire? Coal wouldn't burn in the
+open hearth. She had begged a little wood from the cook in the garage,
+but it was wet and hissed, and all her fire died down. Wood hadn't
+proved so abundant on the hills as she had hoped. Either it was cut and
+had been taken by the Germans, or grew in solid and forbidding branches.
+All the small broken branches and twigs of winter had been collected by
+the shivering population of the town and drawn down from the mountains
+on trays slung on ropes.
+
+Stooping over her two wet logs she drenched them with paraffin, then,
+when she had used the last drop in her tin, got down her petrol bottle.
+"I shall lose all my hair one day doing this...."
+
+The white flame licked hungrily out towards her, but it too, died down,
+leaving the wet wood as angrily cold as ever.
+
+Going downstairs she searched the courtyard and the hayloft, but the
+Bulgarians and Turks of the past had burnt every bit, and any twigs in
+the garden were as wet as those which spluttered in the hearth. Then--up
+to the attics again.
+
+"I _must_ have wood," she exclaimed angrily, and picked up a piece of
+broken white wood from the floor.
+
+It had "Philippe Seret" scrawled across it in pencil. "Why, it's your
+name!" she said wonderingly, and held the piece of wood in her hand. The
+place was all wood. There was wood here to last her weeks. Mouse
+cages--white mouse cages and dormouse cages, a wooden ruler with idle
+scratches all over it and "P.S." in the corner--boxes and boxes of
+things he wouldn't want; he'd say if he saw them now: "Throw it
+away"--boxes of glass tubes he had blown when he was fifteen, boxes of
+dried modelling clay....
+
+"I must have wood," she said aloud, and picked up another useless
+fragment. It mocked her, it wouldn't listen to her need of wood; it had
+"P.S." in clumsy, inserted wires at the back. His home-made stamp.
+
+Under it was a grey book called "Grammaire Allemande." "It wasn't any
+use your learning German, was it, Philippe?" she said, then stood still
+in a frozen conjecture as to the use and goal of all that bright
+treasure in his mind--his glass-blowing, his modelling, the cast head of
+a man she had found stamped with his initial, the things he had written
+and read, on slates, in books. "It was as much use his learning German
+as anything else," she said slowly, and her mind reeled at the edge of
+difficult questions.
+
+Coming down from the attics again she held one piece of polished
+chair-back in her hand.
+
+"How can I live in their family like this," she mused by the fire. "I am
+doing more. I am living in the dreadful background to which they can't
+or won't come back. I am counting the toys which they can't look at.
+Your mother will never come back to pack them up, Philippe!"
+
+She made herself chocolate and drank it from a fine white cup with his
+mother's initials on it in gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Work was over for the day and she walked down the main street by the
+"Silver Lion," from whose windows she daily expected that Julien's voice
+would call to her.
+
+"Mademoiselle has no correspondence to-day," said the girl, looking down
+at her from her high seat behind the mugs and glasses.
+
+"He ought to be here to-day or to-morrow, as he hasn't written," and
+even at that moment thought she heard hurrying feet behind her and
+turned quickly, searching with her eyes. An old civilian ran past her
+and climbed into the back of a waiting lorry.
+
+"I am in no hurry," she said, sure that he would come, and walked on
+into the Spanish Square, to stare in the shops behind the arcaded
+pillars. Merchandise trickled back into the empty town in odd ways. By
+lorry, train, and touring car, merchants penetrated and filled the
+shops with provisions, amongst which there were distressing lacks.
+
+The trains, which had now been extended from Rheims over many laborious
+wooden bridges, stopped short of Charleville by four miles, as the
+bridges over the Meuse had not yet been made strong enough to support a
+railroad. To the passenger train, which left Paris twice a week, one
+goods truck full of merchandise was attached--and it seemed as though
+the particular truck to arrive was singled out casually, without any
+regard to the needs of the town. As yet no dusters, sheets or kitchen
+pans could be bought, but to-day in the Spanish Square every shop was
+filled to overflowing with rolls of ladies' stays; even the chemist had
+put a pair in the corner of his window. Fanny inquired the cause. A
+truck had arrived filled with nothing but stays. It was very unfortunate
+as they had expected condensed milk, but they had accepted the truck,
+as, no doubt, they would find means of selling them--for there were
+women in the country round who had not seen a pair for years.
+
+A man appeared in the Square selling boots from Paris--the first to come
+to the town with leather soles instead of wooden ones. Instantly there
+was a crowd round him.
+
+It was dark now and the electric street lamps were lit round the
+pedestal of the Spanish Duke. The organisation of the town was jerky,
+and often the lights would come on when it was daylight and often
+disappear when it was dark. Where Germans had been there were always
+electric light and telephones. No matter how sparse the furniture in the
+houses, how ragged the roof, how patched the windows--what tin cans,
+paper and rubbish lay heaped upon the floors, the electric light
+unfailingly illumined all, the telephone hung upon the wall among the
+peeling paper.
+
+A little rain began to fall lightly and she hurried to her rooms. There,
+once within, the padlock slipped through the rings and locked, the fire
+lighted, the lamps lit, the room glowed before her. The turkey carpet
+showed all its blues and reds--the mimosa drooped above the mantelpiece,
+the willow palm in the jar was turning yellow and shedding a faint down.
+
+"You must last till he comes to tea!" she rebuked it, but down it
+fluttered past the mirror on to the carpet.
+
+"He will be here before they all fall," she thought, and propped open
+her window that she might hear his voice if he called her from the
+street below.
+
+She boiled her kettle to make chocolate, hanging it upon a croquet hoop
+which she had found in the garden--Philippe's hoop. But Philippe was so
+powerless, he couldn't even stop his croquet hoop from being heated
+red-hot in the flames as a kettle-holder ... One must be sensible. He
+would allow it. That was the sort of device he would have thought
+well of.
+
+"He rushed about the town on a motor-bicycle," the _concierge_ had
+said, when asked about him. But that was later. There had been other
+times when he had rocked a rocking-horse, broken a doll's head, sold
+meat from a wooden shop, fed a dormouse.
+
+"Did Philippe," she wondered, "have adventures, too, in this street?"
+She felt him in the curtains, under the carpet like a little wind.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The days passed.
+
+Each day her car was ordered and ran to Rheims and Chalons through the
+battlefields, or through the mountains to Givet, Dinant or Namur.
+Changes passed over the mountains as quickly as the shades of flying
+clouds. The spring growth, at every stage and age from valley to crest,
+shook like light before the eyes. There were signs of spring, too, in
+the battlefields. Cowslips grew in the ditches, and grass itself, as
+rare and bright as a flower, broke out upon the plains.
+
+A furtive and elementary civilisation began to creep back upon the
+borders of the national roads. Pioneers, with hand, dog, and donkey
+carts, with too little money, with too many children, with obstinate and
+tenacious courage, began to establish themselves in cellars and
+pill-boxes, in wooden shelters scraped together from the _débris_ of
+their former villages. In those communities of six or seven families
+the re-birth and early struggles of civilisation set in. One tilled a
+patch of soil the size of a sheet between two trenches--one made a
+fowl-yard, fenced it in and placed a miserable hen within. Little
+notices would appear, nailed to poles emerging from the bowels of the
+earth. "Vin-Café" or "Small motor repairs done here."
+
+All this was noticeable along the great national roads. But in the side
+roads, roads deep in yellow mud, uncleared, empty of lorries and cars,
+no one set up his habitation.
+
+A certain lawlessness was abroad in the lonelier areas of the
+battlefields. Odds and ends of all the armies, deserters, well hidden
+during many months, lived under the earth in holes and cellars and used
+strange means to gain a living.
+
+There had been rumours of lonely cars which had been stopped and
+robbed--and among the settlers a couple of murders had taken place in a
+single district. The mail from Charleville to Montmédy was held up at
+last by men in masks armed with revolvers. "We will go out armed!"
+exclaimed the drivers in the garage, and polished up their rifles.
+
+After that, when the Americans hi the camps around, hungry upon the
+French ration, or drunk upon the mixture of methylated spirits and
+whisky sold in subterranean _estaminets_ of ruined villages, picked a
+quarrel, there were deaths instead of broken heads and black eyes. "They
+must ... they MUST go home!" said the French, turning their easy wrath
+upon the homesick Americans.
+
+Somewhere beyond Rheims the wreck of a cindery village sprawled along a
+side road. Not a chimney, not a pile of bricks, not a finger of wood or
+stone reached three feet high, but in the middle, a little wooden stake
+rose above the rubbish, a cross-bar pointing into the ground, and the
+words "Vin-Café" written in chalk upon it. Fanny, who was thirsty, drew
+up her car and climbed across the village to a hole down which the board
+pointed. Steps of pressed earth led down, and from the hole rose the
+quarrelling, fierce voices of three men. She fled back to the car,
+determined to find a more genial _café_ upon a national road.
+
+The same day, upon another side road, she came on the remains of a
+village, where the road, instead of leading through it, paused at the
+brink of the river, over which hung the end spars of a broken bridge.
+
+"I will make a meal here," she thought, profiting by the check--and
+pulled out a packet of sandwiches, driving her car round the corner of a
+wall out of the wind. Here, across the road, a donkey cart was standing,
+and a donkey was tied to a brick in the gutter.
+
+Upon the steps of a doorway which was but an aperture leading to
+nothing, for the house itself lay flat behind it and the courtyard was
+filled with trestles of barbed wire, a figure was seated writing
+earnestly upon its knees. She went nearer and saw an old man, who
+looked up as she approached.
+
+"Sir ..." she began, meaning to inquire about the road--and the wind
+through the doorway blew her skirt tight against her.
+
+"I am identifying the houses," he said, as though he expected to be
+asked his business. She saw by his face that he was very old--eighty
+perhaps. The book upon his knee contained quavering drawings, against
+each of which a name was written.
+
+"This is mine," he said, pointing through the doorway on whose step he
+sat. "And all these other houses belong to people whom I know. When they
+come back here to live they have only to come to me and I can show them
+which house to go to. Without me it might be difficult, but I was the
+oldest man here and I know all the streets, and all the houses. I carry
+the village in my head."
+
+"That is your donkey cart, then?"
+
+"It is my son's. I drive here from Rheims on Saturdays, when he doesn't
+want it."
+
+He showed his book, the cheap paper filled with already-fading maps,
+blurred names and vague sketches. The old man was in his dotage and
+would soon die and the book be lost.
+
+"I carry the village in my head," he repeated. It was the only life the
+village had.
+
+So the days went on, day after day, and with each its work, and still no
+letter at the "Silver Lion," Though vaguely ashamed at her mood, she
+could not be oppressed by this. Each cold, fine, blooming day in the
+mountains made him less necessary to her, and only the delicate memory
+of him remained to gild the town. When hopes wither other hopes spring
+up. When the touch of charm trembles no more upon the heart it can no
+longer be imagined.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+PHILIPPE'S MOTHER
+
+The horn of a two days' moon was driving across the window; then stars,
+darkness, dawn and sunrise painted the open square; till rustling, and
+turning towards the light, she awoke. At the top of the window a magpie
+wiped his beak on a branch, bent head, and tail bent to balance him
+--then dropped like a mottled pebble out of sight. She sat up, drew the
+table prepared overnight towards her, lit the lamp for the chocolate
+--thinking of the dim Julien who might pay his beautiful visit in turn
+with the moon and the sun.
+
+She got up and dressed, and walked in the spring morning, first to the
+bread shop to buy a pound of bread from the woman who wouldn't smile
+... so serious and puzzling was this defect that Fanny had once asked
+her: "Would you rather I didn't buy my bread here?"
+
+"No, I don't mind."
+
+Then to the market for a bunch of violets and an egg.
+
+And at last through the "Silver Lion"--for luck, opening one door of
+black wood, passing through the hot, sunny room, ignoring the thrilled
+glances of soldiers drinking at the tables, looking towards the girl at
+the bar, who shook her head, saying: "No, no letter for you!" and out
+again into the street by the other black door (which was gold inside).
+
+She passed the morning in the garage working on the Renault, cleaning
+her, oiling her--then ate her lunch in the garage room with the Section.
+
+Among them there ran a rumour of England--of approaching demobilisation,
+of military driving that must come to an end, to give place to civilian
+drivers who, in Paris, were thronging the steps of the Ministry of the
+Liberated Regions.
+
+"Already," said one, "our khaki seems as old-fashioned as a crinoline.
+A man said to me yesterday: 'It is time mademoiselle bought her dress
+for the summer!'"
+
+(What dream was that of Julien, and of a summer spent in Charleville!
+The noise of England burst upon her ears. She heard the talk at
+parties--faces swam so close to hers that she looked in their eyes and
+spoke to them.)
+
+And how the town is filling with men in new black coats, and women in
+shawls! Every day more and more arrive. And the civilians come first
+now! Down in the Co-operative I asked for a tin of milk, and I was told:
+'We are keeping the milk for the "Civils."' 'For the "Civils"?' I said,
+for we are all accustomed to the idea that the army feeds first."
+
+"Oh, that's all gone! We are losing importance now. It is time to go
+home."
+
+As they spoke there came a shrill whistle which sounded through
+Charleville.
+
+"Ecoute!" said a man down the street, and the Section, moving to the
+window, heard it again, nameless, and yet familiar.
+
+Unseen Charleville lifted its head and said, "Ecoute."
+
+The first train had crawled over the new bridge, and stood whistling its
+triumph in the station.
+
+As spring became more than a bright light over the mountains so the town
+in the hollow blossomed and functioned. The gate bells rang, the electric
+light ceased to glow in the daytime, great cranes came up on the trains
+and fished in the river for the wallowing bridges. Workmen arrived in the
+streets. In the early summer mornings tapping could be heard all about
+the town. Civilians in new black suits, civilians more or less damaged,
+limping or one-eyed, did things that made them happy with a hammer and
+a nail. They whistled as they tapped, nailed up shutters that had hung
+for four years by one hinge, climbed about the roofs and fixed a tile or
+two where a hundred were needed, brought little ladders on borrowed
+wheelbarrows and set them against the house-wall. In the house opposite,
+in the Rue de Clèves, a man was using his old blue puttees to nail up his
+fruit-trees.
+
+All the men worked in new Sunday clothes; they had, as yet, nothing old
+to work in. Every day brought more of them to the town, lorries and
+horse carts set them down by the "Silver Lion," and they walked along
+the street carrying black bags and rolls of carpet, boxes of tools, and
+sometimes a well-oiled carbine.
+
+"Yes, we must go home," said the Englishwomen. "It's time to leave the
+town."
+
+The "Civils" seemed to drive them out. They knew they were birds of
+passage as they walked in the sun in their khaki coats.
+
+The "Civils" were blind to them, never looked at them, hurried on,
+longing to grasp the symbolic hammer, to dust, sweep out the German rags
+and rubbish, nail talc over the gaping windows, set their homes going,
+start their factories in the surrounding mountains, people the houses so
+long the mere shelter for passing troops, light the civilian life of the
+town, and set it burning after the ashes and dust of war.
+
+There were days when every owner, black-trousered and in his shirt-
+sleeves, seemed to be burning the contents of his house in a bonfire in
+the gutter. Poor men burned things that seemed useful to the casual eye
+--mattresses, bolsters, all soiled, soiled again and polluted by four
+years of soldiery.
+
+Idling over the fire in the evening, Fanny's eye was caught by a stain
+upon her armchair. It was sticky; it might well be champagne--the
+champagne which stuck even now to the bottoms of the glasses downstairs.
+
+"I wonder if they will burn the chair--when _they_ come back." Some one
+must come back, some day, even if Philippe's mother never came. She
+seemed to see the figure of the Turkish officer seated in her chair,
+just as the _concierge_ had described him, stout, fezzed, resting his
+legs before her fire--or of the German, stretched back in the chair in
+the evening reading the copy of the _Westfälisches Volksblatt_ she had
+found stuffed down in the corner of the seat.
+
+How, how did that splash of wax come to be so high up on the face of the
+mirror? Had someone, some predecessor, thrown a candle in a temper? It
+puzzled her in the morning as she lay in bed.
+
+On the polished wooden foot of the bed was burnt the outline of a face
+with a funny nose. A child's drawing. That was Philippe's. The nurse had
+cried at him in a rage, perhaps, and snatched the hot poker with which
+he drew--and that had made the long rushing burn that flew angrily
+across the wood from the base of the face's chin. "Oh, you've made it
+worse!" Philippe must have gibed.
+
+("B"--who wrote "B" on the wall? The Bulgarian--)
+
+She fell asleep.
+
+The first bird, waking early, threw the image of the world across her
+lonely sleep. He squeaked alone, minute after minute, from his tree
+outside the window, thrusting forests, swamps, meadows, mountains in
+among her dreams. Then a fellow joined him, and soon all the birds were
+shouting from their trees. Slowly the room lightened till on the
+mantelpiece the buds of the apple blossom shone, till upon the wall the
+dark patch became an oil painting, till the painting showed its features
+--a castle, a river and a hill.
+
+In the night the last yellow down had fallen from the palm upon the
+floor.
+
+The common voice of the tin clock struck seven. And with it came women's
+voices--women's voices on the landing outside the door--the voice of
+the _concierge_ and another's.'
+
+Some instinct, some strange warning, sent the sleeper on the bed flying
+from it, dazed as she was. Snatching at the initialled cup of gold
+veining she thrust it behind the curtain on the window sill. An act of
+panic merely, for a second glance round the room convinced her that
+there was too much to be hidden, if hidden anything should be. With a
+leap she was back in bed, and drew the bedclothes up to her neck.
+
+Then came the knock at the door.
+
+"I am in bed," she called.
+
+"Nevertheless, can I come in?" asked the _concierge_.
+
+"You may come in."
+
+The young woman came in and closed the door after her. She approached
+the bed and whispered--then glancing round the room with a shrug she
+picked up a dressing-gown and held it that Fanny might slip her
+arms into it.
+
+"But what a time to come!"
+
+"She has travelled all night. She is unfit to move."
+
+"Must I see her now? I am hardly awake."
+
+"I cannot keep her any longer. She was for coming straight here when the
+train came in at five. I have kept her at coffee at my house. _Tant
+pis!_ You have a right to be here!"
+
+The _concierge_ drew the curtain a little wider and the cup was exposed.
+She thrust it back into the shadow; the door opened and Philippe's
+mother walked in. She was very tall, in black, and a deep veil hung
+before her face.
+
+"_Bonjour_, madame," she said, and her veiled face dipped in a faint
+salute.
+
+"Will you sit down?"
+
+She took no notice of this, but leaning a little on a stick she carried,
+said, "I understand that it is right that I should find my house
+occupied. They told me it would be by an officer. Such occupation I
+believe ceases on the return of the owner."
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+"I am the owner of this house."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"May I ask of what nationality you are?"
+
+The _concierge_ standing behind her, shrugged her shoulders impatiently,
+as if she would say, "I have explained, and explained again!"
+
+"I am English, madame."
+
+The lady seemed to sink into a stupor, and bending her head in silence
+stared at the floor. Fanny, sitting upright in bed, waited for her to
+speak. The _>concierge_, her face still as an image, waited too.
+
+Philippe's mother began to sway upon her stick.
+
+"Do please sit down," said Fanny, breaking the silence at last.
+
+"When will you go?" demanded the old lady, suddenly.
+
+"Go?"
+
+"Who gave you that lamp? That is mine." She pointed to a glass lamp
+which stood upon the table.
+
+"It is all yours," said Fanny, humbly.
+
+"Mademoiselle borrowed it," said the voice of the _concierge_. "I lent
+it to her."
+
+"Why are my things lent when I am absent? My armchair--dirty, soiled,
+torn! Paul's picture--there is a hole in the corner. Who made that hole
+in the corner?"
+
+"I didn't," said Fanny feebly, wishing that she were dressed and upon
+her feet.
+
+"Madame, a Turkish officer made the hole. I spoke to him about it; he
+said it was the German colonel who was here before him. But I am sure it
+was the Turk."
+
+"A Turk!" said Philippe's mother in bewilderment. "So you have allowed a
+Turk to come in here!"
+
+"Madame does not understand."
+
+"Oh, I understand well enough that my house has been a den! The house
+where I was born--All my things, all my things--You must give that
+lamp back!"
+
+"Dear madame, I will give everything back, I have hurt nothing--"
+
+"Not ruined my carpet, my mother's carpet! Not soiled my walls, written
+your name upon them, cracked my windows, filled my room downstairs with
+rubbish, broken my furniture--But I am told this is what I must expect!"
+Fanny looked at her, petrified. "But I--" she began.
+
+"You don't understand," said the young _concierge_ fiercely. "Don't you
+know who has lived here? In this room, in this bed, Turks, Bulgars,
+Germans. Four years of soldiers, coming in one week and gone the next. I
+could not stop it! When other houses were burnt I would say to myself,
+'Madame is lucky.' When all your china was broken and your chairs used
+for firewood, could I help it? Can _she_ help it? She is your last
+soldier, and she has taken nothing. So much has gone from this house it
+is not worth while to worry about what remains. When you wrote to me
+last month to send you the barometer, it made me smile. Your barometer!"
+
+"Begone, Elsie."
+
+"No, madame, no! Not till you come back with me. They should not have
+let you come alone. But you were always wilful. You cannot mean to
+live here?"
+
+"I wish this woman gone to-day. I wish to sleep here to-night."
+
+"No, madame, no. Sleep in the house opposite to-night. Give her time to
+find a lodging--"
+
+"A lodging! She will find a lodging soon enough. A town full of
+soldiers--" muttered the old woman.
+
+"I think this is a question for the billeting lieutenant," said Fanny.
+"He will explain to you that I am billeted here exactly as a soldier,
+that I have a right to be here until your arrival. It will be kind of
+you to give me a day in which to find another room."
+
+"Where are _his_ things?" said the old woman unheedingly. "I must go up
+to the attics."
+
+A vision of those broken toys came to Fanny, the dusty heap of horses,
+dolls and boxes--the poor disorder.
+
+"You mustn't, yet!" she cried with feeling. "Rest first. Sit here longer
+first. Or go another day!"
+
+"Have you touched _them_?" cried Philippe's mother, rising from the
+chair. "I must go at once, at once----" but even as she tried to cross
+the room she leant heavily upon the table and put her hand to her heart.
+"Get me water, Elsie," she said, and threw up her veil. Her ruined face
+was grey even at the lips; her eyes were caverns, worn by the dropping
+of water, her mouth was folded tightly that nothing kind or hopeful, or
+happy might come out of it again. Elsie ran to the washing-stand.
+Unfortunately she seized the glass with the golden scrolling, and when
+she held it to the lips of her mistress those lips refused it.
+
+"_That_, too, that glass of mine! Elsie, I wish this woman gone. Why
+don't you get up? Where are your clothes? Why don't you dress and go--"
+
+"Madame, hush, hush, you are ill."
+
+"Ah!" dragging herself weakly to the door, "I must take an inventory.
+That is what I should have done before! If I don't make a list at once I
+shall lose something!"
+
+"Take an inventory!" exclaimed the _concierge_ mockingly, as she
+followed her. "The house won't change! After four years--it isn't now
+that it will change!" She paused at the door and looked back at Fanny.
+"Don't worry about the room, mademoiselle. She is like that--_elle a des
+crises._ She cannot possibly sleep here. Keep the room for a day or two
+till you find another."
+
+"In a very few days I shall be going to England."
+
+"Keep it a week if necessary. She will be persuaded when she is calmer.
+Why did they let her come when they wrote me that she was a dying woman!
+But no--_elle est comme toujours--méchante pour tout le monde._"
+
+"You told me she thought only of Philippe."
+
+"Ah, mademoiselle, she is like many of us! She has still her sense of
+property."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+THE LAST DAY
+
+Around the Spanish Square the first sun-awnings had been put up in the
+night, awnings red and yellow, flapping in the mountain wind.
+
+In the shops under the arches, in the market in the centre of the
+Square, they were selling anemones.
+
+"But have you any eggs?"
+
+"No eggs this morning."
+
+"Any butter?"
+
+"None. There has been none these three days."
+
+"A pot of condensed milk?"
+
+"Mademoiselle, the train did not bring any."
+
+"Must I eat anemones? Give me two bunches."
+
+And round the Spanish Square the orange awnings protecting the empty
+shop-fronts shuddered and flapped, like a gay hat worn unsteadily when
+the stomach is empty.
+
+What was there to do on a last day but look and note, and watch, and
+take one's leave? The buds against the twig-laced sky were larger than
+ever. To-morrow--the day after to-morrow ... it would be spring in
+England, too!
+
+"_Tenez_, mademoiselle," said the market woman, "there is a little
+ounce of butter here that you may have!"
+
+The morning passed and on drifted the day, and all was finished, all was
+done, and love gone, too. And with love gone the less divine but wider
+world lay open.
+
+In the "Silver Lion" the patient girl behind the counter shook her head.
+
+"There is no letter for you."
+
+"And to-morrow I leave for England."
+
+"If a letter comes where shall I send it on?"
+
+"Thank you, but there will come no letter now. Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+It was the afternoon. Now such a tea, a happy, lonely tea--the last, the
+best, in Charleville! Crossing the road from the "Silver Lion" Fanny
+bought a round, flat, sandwich cake, and carried it to the house which
+was her own for one more night, placed it in state upon the biggest of
+the green and gold porcelain plates, and the anemones in a sugar-bowl
+beside it. She lit the fire, made tea, and knelt upon the floor to toast
+her bread. There was a half-conscious hurry in her actions.
+
+("So long as nobody comes!" she whispered. "So long as I am left
+alone!") she feared the good-byes of the _concierge_, the threatened
+inventory of Philippe's mother, a call of state farewell from the
+billeting lieutenant.
+
+When the toast was done and the tea made, some whim led her to change
+her tunic for a white jersey newly back from the wash, to put on the
+old dancing shoes of Metz--and not until her hair was carefully brushed
+to match this gaiety did she draw up the armchair with the broken leg,
+and prop it steadily beside the tea-table.
+
+But--
+
+Who was that knocking on the door in the street?
+
+One of the Section coming on a message? The _brigadier_ to tell her that
+she had some last duty still?
+
+"Shall I go to the window?" (creeping nearer to it). Then, with a glance
+back at the tea-table, "No, let them knock!"
+
+But how they knocked! Persistent, gentle--could one sit peacefully at
+tea so called and so besought! She went up to the blue curtains, and
+standing half-concealed, saw the _concierge_ brooding in the sunlight of
+her window-sill.
+
+"Is _nobody_ there?" said a light voice in the hidden street below, and
+at that she peered cautiously over the edge of the stonework, and saw a
+pale young man in grey before the door.
+
+She watched him. She watched him gravely, for he had come too late. But
+tenderly, for she had been in love with him. The _concierge_ raised her
+two black brows in her expressive face and looked upwards. Her look
+said: "Why don't you let him in?"
+
+Yet Fanny stood inactive, her hands resting on the sun-warmed stone.
+
+"Julien is here--is here! And does not know that I go to-morrow!"
+
+But she put _to-morrow_ from her, and in the stillness she felt her
+spirit smiling for pleasure in him. She had mourned him once; she never
+would again.
+
+In her pocket lay the key of the street door, and the curtain-cord, long
+rotted and useless, dangled at her cheek. With a quick wrench she
+brought its length tumbling beside her on the sill, then knotted it to
+the key and let it down into the street.
+
+The young man saw it hang before his eyes.
+
+"Are you coming in?" said a voice above him. "Tea is ready."
+
+"Fanny!"
+
+"It has been ready for six weeks."
+
+"Only wait--" He was trying the key in the door.
+
+"What--still longer?" said the voice.
+
+He was gone from the pavement, he had entered her house, he was on her
+stair--the grey ghost of the soldier!
+
+She had a minute's grace. Slipping her hand into the cupboard she drew
+out another cup and saucer, and laid the table for two.
+
+There was his face--his hands--at her door! But what a foreign grey
+body!
+
+"Come in, Ghost!" she said, and held out her hands--for now she cared at
+least for "he who cared"--lest that, too, be lost! Does a ghost kiss?
+Yes, sometimes. Sometimes they are ghosts who kiss.
+
+"Oh, Fanny!" Then, with a quick glance at the table, "You are expecting
+someone?"
+
+"You. How late you come to tea with me!"
+
+"But I--You didn't know."
+
+"I waited tea for you," she said, and turning to a calendar upon a
+wooden wheel, she rolled it back a month.
+
+She made him sit, she made him drink and eat. He filled the room with
+his gaiety. He had no reasons upon his tongue, and no excuses; she no
+reproaches, no farewell.
+
+A glance round the room had shown her that there were no signs of her
+packing; her heavy kitbag was at the station, her suitcase packed and in
+the cupboard. She put her gravest news away till later.
+
+"You came by the new train--that has arrived at last in Charleville?"
+
+"Yes, and I go up to Revins to-night."
+
+She paused at that. "But how?"
+
+"I don't know," he answered, smiling at her.
+
+Her eyes sparkled. "Could I?" (She had that morning delivered the car to
+its new driver.) "Of course. I could! I will, I will, I'll manage! You
+counted on me to drive you to Revins?"
+
+"Will it be difficult to manage?"
+
+"No--o--But I must get the car out before dark or there will be no
+excuse--" She pushed back her chair and went to the window. The sun was
+sinking over the mountains and the scenery in the western sky was
+reflected in the fiery pools between the cobbles in the street.
+
+"I must go soon and get it. But how--"
+
+She paused and thought. "How do you come down to-morrow?"
+
+"I don't. I go on to Brussels. There is a car at Revins belonging to my
+agent. He will take me to Dinant for the Brussels train."
+
+"You are bound for Brussels? Yet you could have gone straight from Paris
+to Brussels?"
+
+"Yet I didn't because I wanted to see you!"
+
+She took down her cap and coat from the nail on which they were hanging.
+
+"Need you go yet?" he said, withdrawing the clothes from her arm, and
+laying them upon a chair. She sat down again.
+
+"The sun is sinking. The town gets dark so quickly here, though it's
+light enough in the mountains. If I leave it later the men will be gone
+home, and the garage key with them."
+
+"You're right," he said. "Put them on," and he held the coat for her.
+"But once you have the car there's no hurry over our drive. Yes, fetch
+it quickly, and then we'll go up above Revins and I'll show you the
+things I have in mind."
+
+"What things?"
+
+He drew out a fat, red note-book and held it up.
+
+"It's full of my thoughts," he said. "Quick with the car, and we'll get
+up there while it's light enough to show you!"
+
+She slipped out under the apple-red sky, through the streets where the
+shadows of the houses lay black as lacquer.
+
+Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking
+his little, dry cigarettes.
+
+"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What
+an evening!"
+
+"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"
+
+"But you've given up the car."
+
+"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!
+And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the
+key!"
+
+He gave her the key.
+
+"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come
+in hang the key on the nail in the office."
+
+Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the
+Rue de Clèves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.
+
+"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would
+have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started
+on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed
+excited fashion, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil
+their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him
+as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance
+from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in
+which to fight with her disinclination.
+
+"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I
+can't tell him in the street!"
+
+For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the
+_concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched
+the town.
+
+"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened
+and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself,
+when it will be easy and natural."
+
+By back streets they left the town, and soon upon the step road had
+climbed through the belt of trees and out on to bare slopes.
+
+As they wound up the mountain, sitting so dose together, she felt how
+familiar his company was to her, and how familiar his silence. Their
+thoughts, running together, would meet presently, as they had often met,
+at the juncture when his hand was laid upon hers at the wheel: But when
+he spoke he startled her.
+
+"How long has the railway been extended to Charleville?"
+
+"A fortnight," she answered upon reflection.
+
+"How about the big stone bridge on this side? The railway bridge?"
+
+"Why that lies at the bottom of the river as usual."
+
+"And haven't they replaced it yet by a wooden one?"
+
+"No, not yet."
+
+"And no one is even working there?"
+
+"I haven't been there lately," she answered. "Maybe they are by now. Is
+it your railway to Revin you are thinking of?"
+
+He was fingering his big note book.
+
+"I can't start anything till the railway runs," he answered, tapping on
+the book, "but when it runs--I'll show you when we get up there."
+
+They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient
+trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small
+branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its shaking
+holes.
+
+"You see," he said, pursuing his thought, "lorries wouldn't do here.
+They'd sink."
+
+"They would," she agreed, and found that his innocence of her secret
+locked her words more tightly in her throat. Far above, from an iron
+peak, the light of the heavy sun was slipping. Beneath it they ran in
+shadow, through rock and moss. Before the light had gone they had
+reached the first crest and drew up for a moment at a movement of
+his hand.
+
+Looking back to Charleville, he said, "See where the river winds. The
+railway crosses it three times. Can we see from here if the bridges are
+all down?" And he stood up and, steadying himself upon her shoulder,
+peered down at Charleville, to where man lived in the valleys. But
+though the slopes ahead of them were still alight, depths, distance, the
+crowding and thickening of twilight in the hollows behind them offered
+no detail.
+
+"I fear they are," she said, gazing with him. "I think they are. I think
+I can remember that they are."
+
+Soon they would be at the top of the long descent on Revins. Should she
+tell him, he who sat so close, so unsuspecting? An arrowy temptation
+shot through her mind.
+
+"Is it possible--Why not write a letter when he is gone!"
+
+She saw its beauty, its advantages, and she played with it like someone
+who knew where to find strength to withstand it.
+
+"He is so happy, so gay," urged the voice, "so full of his plans! And
+you have left it so late. How painful now, just as he is going, to bid
+him think: 'I will never see her face again!'"
+
+(How close he sat beside her! How close her secret sat within her!)
+
+"Think how it is with you," pursued the tempting voice. "It is hard to
+part from a face, but not so hard to part from the writer of a letter."
+
+Over the next crest the Belgian Ardennes showed blue and dim in the
+distance.
+
+"Stop!" he said, holding up his hand again.
+
+They were on the top of a high plateau; she drew up. A large bird with
+red under its wings flapped out and hung in the air over the precipice.
+
+"See--the Meuse!" he said. "See, on its banks, do you see down there?
+Come to the edge."
+
+Hundreds of feet below lay a ribbon-loop of dark, unstirring water. They
+stood at the edge of the rock looking down together. She saw he was
+excited. His usually pale face was flushed.
+
+"Do you see down there, do you see in this light--a village?"
+
+She could see well enough a village.
+
+"That's Revins. And those dark dots beyond----"
+
+"I see them."
+
+"My factories. Before the summer you'll see smoke down there! They are
+partially destroyed. One can't see well, one can't see how much--"
+
+"Julien!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Have you never been back? Have you never seen what's happened?"
+
+She had not guessed this: she was not prepared for this. This was the
+secret, then of his absorption.
+
+"I've not seen it yet. I've not been able to get away. And the Paris
+factories have held me every minute. But now I'm here, I'm--I'm
+wondering--You see that dot beyond, standing separate?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's where I sleep to-night. That's the house."
+
+"But can you sleep there?" she asked, still shocked that she had not
+realised what this journey was to him.
+
+"Can I?"
+
+"I mean is the house ruined?"
+
+"Oh, the house is in bad order," he said. "Not ruined. 'Looted,' my old
+_concierge_ writes. She was my nurse a hundred years ago. She has been
+there through the occupation. I wrote to her, and she expects me
+to-night. To-night it will be too dark, but to-morrow before I leave I
+shall see what they have done to the factories."
+
+"Don't you know at all how bad they are?"
+
+"I've had letters. The agent went on ahead five days ago and he has
+settled there already. But letters don't tell one enough. There are
+little things in the factories--things I put in myself--" He broke off
+and drew her to another side of the plateau. "See down there! That
+unfortunate railway crosses two more bridges. I can't see now, but
+they're blown up, since all the others are. And such a time for
+business! It hurts me to think of the things I can't set going till that
+railway works. Every one is crying out for the things that I can
+make here."
+
+On and on he talked in his excitement, absorbed and planning, leading
+her from one point of view on the plateau to another. Her eyes followed
+his pointing hands from crest to crest of the mountains their neighbours,
+till the valleys were full of creeping shadows. Even when the shades
+filmed his eager hand he held it out to point here and there as though
+the whole landscape of the mountains was printed in immortal daylight on
+his mind.
+
+"I can't see," she said. "It's so dark down there. I can't see it," as
+he pointed to the spot where the Brussels railway once ran.
+
+"Well, it's there," he said, staring at the spot with eyes that knew.
+
+The blue night deepened in the sky; from east, west, north, south,
+sprang the stars.
+
+"Fanny, look! There's a light in my house!"
+
+Fathoms of shade piled over the village and in the heart of it a light
+had appeared. "Marie has lit the lamp on the steps. I mustn't be too
+late for her--I must soon go down."
+
+"What, you walk? Is there a footpath down?"
+
+"I shall go down this mountain path below. It's a path I know, shooting
+hares. Soon I shall be back again. Brussels one week; then Paris; then
+here again. I'll see what builders can be spared from the Paris
+factories. They can walk out here from Charleville. Ten miles, that's
+nothing! Then we'll get the stone cut ready in the quarries. Do you
+know, during the war, I thought (when I thought of it), 'If the Revins
+factories are destroyed it won't be I who'll start them again. I won't
+take up that hard mountain life any more. If they're destroyed, it's too
+discouraging, so let them lie!' But now I don't feel discouraged at
+all. I've new ideas, bigger ones. I'm older, I'm going to be richer. And
+then, since they're partly knocked down I'll rebuild them in a better
+way. And it's not only that--See!" He was carried away by his resolves,
+shaken by excitement, and pulling out his note-book he tilted it this
+way and that under the starlight, but he could not read it, and all the
+stars in that sky were no use to him. He struck a match and held the
+feeble flame under that heavenly magnificence, and a puff of wind
+blew it out.
+
+"But I don't need to see!" he exclaimed, and pointing into the night he
+continued to unfold his plans, to build in the unmeaning darkness,
+which, to his eyes, was mountain valleys where new factories arose,
+mountain slopes whose sides were to be quarried for their stony ribs,
+rivers to move power-stations, railways to Paris and to Brussels. As she
+followed his finger her eyes lit upon the stars instead, and now he
+said, "There, there!" pointing to Orion, and now "Here, here!" lighting
+upon Aldebrande.
+
+As she followed his finger her thoughts were on their own paths,
+thinking, "This is Julien as he will be, not as I have known him." The
+soldier had been a wanderer like herself, a half-fantastic being. But
+here beside her in the darkness stood the civilian, the Julien-to-come,
+the solid man, the builder, plotting to capture the future.
+
+For him, too, she could no longer remain as she had been. Here, below
+her was the face, the mountain face, of her rival. Unless she became one
+with his plans and lived in the same blazing light with them, she would
+be a separate landscape, a strain upon his focus.
+
+Then she saw him looking at her. Her face, silver-bright in the
+starlight, was as unreadable as his own note-book.
+
+"Are you sure," he was saying, "that you won't be blamed about the car?"
+
+"Sure, quite sure. The men have all gone home."
+
+"But to-morrow morning? When they see it has been out?"
+
+"Not--to-morrow morning. No, they won't say anything to-morrow morning.
+Oh, dear Julien--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think, I hope you are going to have a great success here. And don't
+forget--me--when you--"
+
+"--When I come back in a week!"
+
+"But your weeks--are so long."
+
+"Yet you will be happy without me," he said suddenly.
+
+"What makes you say that?"
+
+"You've some solace, some treasure of your own." He nodded. "In a way,"
+he said, "I've sometimes thought you half out of reach of pain."
+
+She caught her breath, and the starry sky whirled over her head.
+
+"You're a happy foreigner!" he finished. "Did you know? Dormans called
+you that after the first dance. He said to me: 'I wonder if they are all
+so happy in England! I must go and see.'"
+
+"You too, you too!" she said, eagerly, and she wanted him to admit it.
+"See how happy, how busy, how full of the affairs of life you soon will
+be! Difficulties of every sort, and hard work and triumph--"
+
+"And you'll see, you'll see, I'll do it," he said, catching fire again.
+"I'll grow rich on these bony mountains--it isn't only the riches, mind
+you, but they are the proof--I'll wring it out in triumph, not in water,
+but in gold--from the rock!"
+
+He stood at the edge of the path, a little above her, blotting out the
+sky with his darker shape, then turning, kissed her.
+
+"For the little time!" he said, and disappeared.
+
+The noise of his footsteps descended in the night below. Ten minutes
+passed, and as each step trod innocently away from her for ever she
+continued motionless and silent to listen from her rock. The noises all
+but faded, yet, loth to put an end to the soft rustle, she listened
+while it grew fainter and less human to her ear, till it mingled at last
+with the rustle of nature, with the whine of the wind and the pit-pat of
+a little creature close at hand.
+
+She stirred at last, and turned; and found herself alone with that
+flock of enormous companions, the hog-backed mountains, like cattle
+feeding about her. Above, uniting craggy horn to horn, was an
+architrave of stars.
+
+"Good-bye"--to the light in the valley, and starting the car she began
+the descent on Charleville. There are moments when the roll of the world
+is perceptible to the extravagant senses. There are moments when the
+glamour of man thins away into oblivion before the magic of night, when
+his face fades and his voice is silenced before that wind of excited
+perception that blows out of nowhere to shake the soul.
+
+In such a mood, in such a giddy hour, seated in person upon her car, in
+spirit upon her imagination, Fanny rode down the mountain into the night.
+
+She was invincible, inattentive to the voice of absent man, a hard,
+hollow goddess, a flute for the piping of heaven--composing and chanting
+unmusical songs, her inner ear fastened upon another melody. And heaven,
+protecting a creature at that moment so estranged from earth, led her
+down the wild road, held back the threatening forest branches, brought
+her, all but standing up at the wheel like a lunatic, safely to the foot
+of the last hill.
+
+Recalled to earth by the light of Charleville she drove slowly up the
+main street, replaced the car in the garage, and returned to her house
+in the Rue de Clèves.
+
+"It is true," she whispered, as she entered the room, "that I am half
+out of reach of pain--" and long, in plans for the future, she hung over
+the embers.
+
+The gradual sinking of the light before her reminded her of the present.
+"The last night that the fire burns for me!" She heaped on all her logs.
+
+"Little pannikin of chocolate, little companion!" Hunger, too, awoke,
+and she dropped two sticks of chocolate into the water. "The fire dies
+down to-night. To-morrow I shall be gone." A petal from the apple
+blossom on the mantelpiece fell against her hand.
+
+"To-morrow I shall be gone. The apple blossom is spread to large wax
+flowers, and the flowers will fall and never breed apples. They will
+sweep this room, and Philippe's mother will come and sit in it and make
+it sad. So many things happen in the evening. So many unripe thoughts
+ripen before the fire. Turk, Bulgar, German--Me. Never to return. When
+she comes into this room the apple flowers will stare at her across the
+desert of _my_ absence, and wonder who _she_ is! I wonder if I can teach
+her anything. Will she keep the grid on the wood fire? And the blue
+birds flying on the bed? It is like going out of life--tenderly leaving
+one's little arrangements to the next comer--"
+
+And drawing her chair up to the table, she lit the lamp, and sat down to
+write her letter.
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Happy Foreigner, by Enid Bagnold
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HAPPY FOREIGNER ***
+
+This file should be named 8hpfr10.txt or 8hpfr10.zip
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8hpfr11.txt
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8hpfr10a.txt
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Charlie Kirschner and the PG Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+http://gutenberg.net or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+
diff --git a/old/8hpfr10.zip b/old/8hpfr10.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..7799062
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/8hpfr10.zip