"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!"