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?"