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.