"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.