I repeated the question—“Why are you afraid, mademoiselle?” and she answered by words which I had heard a million times since the war began as an explanation of all trouble, tears, ruin, misery.
“C’est la guerre!”
“Look out!” said the little doctor. “She’s fainting.”
She had risen from her cowering position and stood upright for a moment, with her hand against the doorpost. Then she swayed and would have fallen if the doctor had not caught her. Even then she fell, indeed, though without hurt, because he could not support her sudden weight—though she was of slight build,—and they sank together in a kind of huddle on the door-step.
“For the love of Mike!” said Dr. Small. He was on his knees before her now, chafing her cold hands. She came-to in about a minute, and I leaned over her and asked her where she lived, and made out from her faint whisper that she lived in the house to which this doorway belonged, in the upper room where the light was burning. With numbed fingers—“cold as a toad” said “Daddy” Small—she fumbled at her bodice and drew out a latch-key.
“We had better carry her up,” I said, and the doctor nodded.
The front door opened into a dimly-lit passage, uncarpeted, and with leprous-looking walls. At one end was a staircase with heavy bannisters. The doctor and I supported the girl, who was able to walk a little now, and managed to get her to the first landing.
“Where?” I asked, and she said, “Opposite.”
It was the front room looking on to the street. A lamp was burning on the round table in the centre of the room, and I saw by the light of it the poverty of the furniture, and its untidiness. At one end of the room was a big iron bedstead with curtains of torn lace, and on the wooden chairs hung some soiled petticoats, and blouses. There was a small cooking-stove in a corner, but no charcoal burned in it, and I remember an ebony-framed mirror over the mantelpiece. I remember that mirror, vividly. I remember, for instance, that a bit of the ebony had broken off, showing the white plaster underneath, and a crack in the right-hand corner of the looking-glass. Probably my eyes were attracted to it because of a number of photographs stuck into the framework. They were photographs of a girl in a variety of stage costumes, and glancing at the girl whom the doctor had put into a low arm-chair, I saw that they were of her. But with all the tragic difference between happiness and misery; worse than that—between unscathed girlhood and haggard womanhood. This girl with red hair and a white waxen face was pretty still. There was something more than prettiness in the broadness of her brow and the long tawny lashes that were now veiling her closed eyes as she sat with her head back against the chair, showing a long white throat. But her face was lined with an imprint of pain and her mouth, rather long and bow-like, was drawn with a look of misery.
The doctor spoke to me—in English, of course.