"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?'
'Whyshouldn'tyou 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 wasyourforgetfulness 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 ofmyphilosophy andmyexperience 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 mewhichday!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.
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 thatneither 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: "Fannyisn'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 theywereall 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 facingtowardsChantilly—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 lastfourier, 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 uponMargot's shoulder to steady herself. The thin, illusory ice shivered andbroke 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 wouldliketo have said the sentence.
But basking in their want of knowledge she sat down and ate her third breakfast.
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. "ButWeare 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.
"ThiswasVillers 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 rightoutof 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 theFrench 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.Therethe Allies walked contentedly about, fed well, looked kindly at each other.Therewere 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.
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.