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THE HAPPY FOREIGNER

by

ENID BAGNOLD

1920

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: THE EVE

PART I. THE BLACK HUT AT BAR

CHAPTER I. THE TRAVELLER

PART II. LORRAINE

CHAPTER II. METZ CHAPTER III. JULIEN CHAPTER IV. VERDUN CHAPTER V. VERDUN CHAPTER VI. THE LOVER IN THE LAMP CHAPTER VII. THE THREE "CLIENTS" CHAPTER VIII. GERMANY CHAPTER IX. THE CRINOLINE CHAPTER X. FANNY ROBBED AND RESCUED CHAPTER XI. THE LAST NIGHT IN METZ: THE JOURNEY

PART III. THE FORESTS OF CHANTILLY

CHAPTER XII. PRECY-SUR-OISE CHAPTER XIII. THE INN CHAPTER XIV. THE RIVER CHAPTER XV. ALLIES CHAPTER XVI. THE ARDENNES

PART IV. SPRING IN CHARLEVILLE

CHAPTER XVII. THE STUFFED OWL CHAPTER XVIII. PHILIPPE'S HOUSE CHAPTER XIX. PHILIPPE'S MOTHER CHAPTER XX. THE LAST DAY

PROLOGUE

THE EVE

Between the grey walls of its bath—so like its cradle and its coffin—lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the surface of the earth for seventy years.

As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was rising.

The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the bath.

"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The earth itself is moving.

"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head, saying—'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.

"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing—how do I know if I am equipped for a larger horizon!…"

And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:—

"The strange things of travel,
The East and the West,
The hill beyond the hill,—
They lie within the breast!"

PART I

THE BLACK HUT AT BAR

CHAPTER I

THE TRAVELLER

The war had stopped.

The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States was hourly expected.

Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.

She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.

Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for sale held a bunch to her face.

"No, thank you."

He pursued her and held it against her chin.

"No, thank you."

"But I give it to you! I give it to you!"

As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them. But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.

"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute…" he panted.

"Well?"

"Haven't you heard … haven't you heard! The war is over!"

She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"

And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt and the violets accompanied her.

At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc. The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything, expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into the rain.

She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face; down her sleeves and on to her hands.

A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."

She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard these letters—with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach with greed.

Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.

The eye of a captain opened.

"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she should.

The eye of a lieutenant opened.

"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."

"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"

"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."

Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind, unanswering stupor.

"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the slit grew larger. The light went out.

"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent the destruction of the board.

Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon the pavement.

"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.

"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.

"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"

"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders, who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.

"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room alone."

"I've a room … If you're not American!"

"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here, what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"

"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added
"Bandits!"

Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man stooped to the bolts of the door.)

"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now they've gone.
Follow me."

She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground floor.

"I've no light to give you."

"Yet I must have a light."

Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.

"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."

The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning, slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no jug, no basin, no bell to pull.

As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.

Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous. I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off down the street to find her companions.

A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned officers—the brigadier and the two maréchaux des logis.

A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper stretched upon laths of wood—making eight in all. At one end was a small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.

This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her intimate life.

* * * * *

Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny, in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.

"Food is in!"

Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove—then cheese and bread. The watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.

"Where is Stewart?"

"She is not back yet."

Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room remained empty.

The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.

"Is there any food?"

"It's on the stove."

"Is it eatable?"

"No."

Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the cook-house—and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept too well.

"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are doing your hair!" There was no privacy.

"How cold, how cold the water, is!…" sighed Fanny, And a voice through the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your hot-water bottle!"

"What for?"

"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you will find the water has the chill off."

Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of the battlefields.

On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car that had been assigned to her.

Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer. The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and hands, and dripped from her windscreen.

"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them with respect.

When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day, calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went upon his way.

She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's eyes popping from his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client cried to her: "Why do you wait?"

Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her like an egg-shell.

Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.

In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.

Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator, striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.

"What can I do?…" she said to them aloud, in distress.

But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird language, "What can we do … what can we do?…" ("And I…" she thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")

But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.

"Ne vous en faîtes pas, mademoiselle! These poor devils sleep as they drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We were four when we met you—and now we are three!"

On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set to work on her car.

"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.

"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of waste ground."

She crossed to the wall with her bucket.

Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken, but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage, and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.

The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her. His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She stopped short with the bucket in her hand.

"On est delivré de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she went a little nearer.

"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into his coat.

He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said clearly: "Je suis le président Wilson."

"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."

Where have you come from?"

"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for it's late, and … I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.

"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"

"Only be quick."

"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"

"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."

She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once, soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of voices and the smell of gravy.

"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest her. The others looked up.

"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning," said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the brigadier, mademoiselle?"

"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to telephone."

"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"

"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the men stood up in groups.

"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not use force if one can help it…."

Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and wine?" called the man.

"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."

"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.

"What's that you've got?"

"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without letting it go from his hand.

"Where did you find those?"

"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.

"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"

"What's that? But I've no time…."

"Do you know about cars?"

"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.

"I have trouble … I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"

"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."

"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.

The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."

Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car, at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The King expects me."

He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.

She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them. At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened them when a man cried in triumph: "We'll take you to the King!"

"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.

Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day—interviewing mayors of ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts from the battlefields.

The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night after night.

A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men upon the road whom she would never see again became her social intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise of a Chinese scavenger.

Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of the earth.

"Have you got to be here?" asked an American.

"No, I wanted to come."

The eye of the American said "Fool!"

"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.

"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
"Englishwoman!"

Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.

But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats; tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.

The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but make it in the morning how different this room would look!"

There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it, and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried: "Ask Madeleine!"

And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with the men in the garage.

Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny, perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.

Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village, cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.

Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude, she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.

"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.

"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom before them, unknown and bright.

The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.

"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better their condition.

On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not even the night is sacred.

On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made months, till all November was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in fresh torrents of rain.

Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed on upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her "clients" left her for an hour while they inspected a barracks; sometimes it was an old woman who called from a doorway that she might come and warm her hands at the fire; sometimes an American who helped her to change a tyre.

There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends were mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.

"My sister has a grand piano …" said one American to her—opening thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.

"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"

He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.

An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.

American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.

"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of children."

"They seem well-mannered."

"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered. But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"

"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had fetched from his canteen.

"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want other people's children always in one's life."

"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped open disclosing the rusting bones.

"Pardon, madame?"

"What are you doing here?"

"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are discouraged and no one works. The war is over.

"Then this is a park?"

"No, madame, it is a cemetery."

Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other, when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor about her.

She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair escaped from her cap.

A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as she entered.

"Fanny…."

"What is it?"

"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.

Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had no inkling.

Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.

"Metz is a town," she hazarded.

"Of course!"

"There will be things to eat there?"

"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier—who has, for that matter, never been there."

"Then we are going for certain?"

"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
Headquarters Staff. Pétain is there. It might even be gay."

Fanny laughed. "Gay!"

"Why not?"

"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."

"You have silk stockings with you!"

"Yes, I … I am equipped for anything."

There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any one had lived there so long.

PART II

LORRAINE

CHAPTER II

METZ

With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of Lorraine like the gate to a new world.

The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier's restaurant, and join the dancing in the hall below.

Not a night passed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty air. It burst into the narrow streets from estaminets where the soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier Général" danced a triumph. Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.

It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?

In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Maréchal Pétain, and kept his eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them balls—insufficiently fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the cake-shops flowered with éclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux à la crême, and cakes more marvellous with German names.

France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine, that she might make her entry with the assuring dazzle of the benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while the meat shops were empty—were kept dancing in national costume that they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and silk were hiding.

Fêtes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight processions were started on Saturday nights, when the boys of the town went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously through hours of snow, over miles of shell-pitted roads, that they might sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.

The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand Quartier Général, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom, having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills, found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.

"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.

"I have—eight."

"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."

"Is there work, sir?"

"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance all night! Englishwomen do dance, don't they?"

"I have never been to England."

"Get them here. Send for them."

So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-à-Mousson as dusk was falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.

They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of butter, bars of chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.

"Can you see the price on the butter?"

"Twenty-four…."

"What?"

"I can't see. Yes…. Twenty-four francs a pound."

"Good heavens!"

"Ah, is it possible, éclairs?"

"Eclairs!"

And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.

German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper balls into the back of the ambulance.

"I heard, I heard…."

"What is it?"

"I heard German spoken."

"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"

"No," but Fanny felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language spoken in a vanished town.

They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du Theâtre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.

"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"

In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth, with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited behind the chairs.

"Vauclin! That foie gras you brought back from Paris yesterday… where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles, there's a jar left from yours."

"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you, mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"

"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!… What a journey! For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans yet? They exist, yes, they exist."

"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You can't? Nor I either…."

"But these ladies talk French marvellously…."

Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.

A hundred miles … a hundred years away … lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement. "To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without generosity, beauty, or privacy—in a hole, dirty and cold, plain and coarse.

She glanced at her neighbour with wonder and appreciation, delight and envy. There was a light, clean scent upon his hair. She saw his hands, his nails. And her own.

A young Jew opposite her had his hair curled, and a faint powdery bloom about his face.

("But never mind! That is civilisation. There are people who turn from that and cry for nature, but I, since I've lived as a dog, when I see artifice, feel gay!")

"You don't know with what interest you have been awaited."

"We?"

"Ah, yes! And were you pleased to come?"

"We did not know to what we were coming!"

"And now?…"

She looked round the table peacefully, listened to the light voices talking a French she had never heard at Bar.

"And now?…"

"I could not make you understand how different…." (No, she would not tell him how they had lived at Bar. She was ashamed.) But as she was answering the servant gave him a message and he was called away. When he returned he said: "The Commandant Dormans is showing himself very anxious."

The Jew laughed and said: "He wants to see these ladies this evening?"

"No, he spares them that, knowing of their journey. He sends a message by the Capitaine Châtel to tell us that the D.S.A. gives a dance to-morrow night. The personal invitation will be sent by messenger in the morning. You dance, mademoiselle?"

"There is a dance, and we are invited? Yes, yes, I dance! You asked if I was happy now that I am here. To us this might be Babylon, after the desert!"

"Babylon, the wicked city?"

"The gay, the light, beribboned city! What is the 'D.S.A.'?"

"A power which governs our actions. We are but the C.R.A…. the regulating control. But they are the Direction. 'Direction Service Automobile.' They draw up all traffic rules for the Army, dispose of cars, withdraw them. On them you depend and I depend. But they are well-disposed towards you."

"And the Commandant Dormans is the head?"

"The head of all transport. He is a great man. Very peculiar."

"The Capitaine Châtel?"

"His aide, his right hand, the nearest to his ear."

Dinner over, the young Jew, Reherrey, having sent for two cars from the garage, drove the tired Englishwomen to their billets. As the cars passed down the cobbled streets and over a great bridge, Fanny saw water gleam in the gulf below.

"What river is that?"

"The Moselle."

A sentry challenged them on the far side of the bridge. "Now we are in the outer town, the German quarter."

In a narrow street whose houses overhung the river each of the section was put down at a different doorway, given a paper upon which was inscribed her right to billets, and introduced in Reherry's rapid German to her landlady.

Fanny in her turn, following the young man through a dark doorway, found herself in a stone alley and climbed the windings of a stairway. A girl of twelve or thirteen received her on the upper landing, saying "Guten Abend," and looking at her with wonder.

"Where is your mother?" said Reherry.

"She is out with my eldest sister."

"What is your name?"

"Elsa."

"Then, Elsa, look after this lady. Take her to her room, the room I saw your mother about, give her hot water, and bring her breakfast in the morning. Take great care of her."

"Jawohl, mein Herr."

Reherry turned away and ran down the stairs. Elsa showed Fanny to a room prepared for her.

"You are English?" said Elsa, and could not take her eyes off her.

"Yes, I am English. And are you German?" (Question so impossible, so indiscreet in England…)

"I am real German, from Coblentz. How did you come here, Fräulein?"

"In a car."

"But from England! Is there not water?"

"I crossed the water in a ship, and afterwards I came here in a car."

"You have a motor car? But every one is rich in England."

"Oh, not very…"

"Yes, every one. Mother says so."

The girl went away, then brought her a jug of hot water.

"I hope," said Fanny, venturing upon a sea of forgotten German, "I hope
I haven't turned you or your sister out of this room."

"This is the strangers' room," said Elsa. "I thank you."

When she had gone, Fanny looked round the room. It was too German to be true. The walls were dark red, the curtains dark red, the carpet, eiderdown, rep cover of the armchair, plush on the photograph frames, embroidered mats upon the washstand, tiles upon the stove, everything a deep, dark red. Four mugs stood upon the mantelpiece, and … she rubbed her eyes … was it possible that one had an iron cross upon its porcelain, one the legend "Got mit uns," the third the head of the Kaiser, the fourth the head of the Kaiserin? "That is too much! The people I shall write to won't believe it!"

Her bed was overhung by a large branch of stag's horn fixed upon the wall.

She felt the bed, counted the blankets, found matches on the mantelpiece, a candle in the candlestick, room in the stove to boil a kettle or a saucepan. Hot water steamed from her jug, a hot brick had been placed to warm her bed, a plate of rye bread cut in slices and covered with a cloth was upon the table.

Foreign to her own, the eyes which had rejoiced in this room … yet the smile of German comfort was upon it.

She lay down beneath the branching antlers, and smiled before she went to sleep: "One pair of silk stockings … to dance in Babylon …"

* * * * *

In the morning a thin woman dressed in black brought her breakfast—jam, rye bread, coffee and sugar.

"Guten Morgen," said the woman, and looked at her curiously. But Fanny couldn't remember which language she ought to talk, and fumbled in her head so long that the woman went away.

She dressed and went out, meeting Stewart by her doorway. Together they crossed the bridge, the theatre square, and went towards the Cathedral with eager faces. They did not look up at the Cathedral, at the statute of old David upon which the Kaiser had had his own head carved, and upon whose crossed hands the people had now hung chains fastened with a padlock—they did not glance at the Hôtel de Ville in the square beyond, but, avoiding the tram which emerged from the narrow Serpenoise like a monster that had too long been oppressed, they hurried on up the street with a subdued and hungry gaiety.

There was a Need to be satisfied before anything could be seen, done, or said. A Need four years old, now knocking at the doors of heaven, howling to be satisfied.

Before the windows of a shop they paused, but Stewart, standing back and looking up the street, said: "There is a better further on!" and when they had gone on a few paces Fanny whispered, hurrying, "A better still beyond!" At the third shop, the Need, imperative, royal, would wait no longer, and drove them within.

"How many?" asked the saleswoman at the end of ten minutes.

"Seven éclairs and a cream bun, said Stewart.

"Just nine éclairs," said Fanny.

"Seventeen francs," said the woman without moving an eyelash.

This frenzy cooled, their pockets lighter, they walked for pleasure in the town. The narrow streets streamed with people—French soldiers and officers, Lorraine women in the costumes of pageantry, and German children who cried shrilly: "Amerikanerin, Amerikanerin!"

An English major passed them. They recognised his flawless boots before they realised his nationality. And, following his, the worst boots in the world—worn by a couple of sauntering Italian officers, gay in olive and silver uniform. German men in black slouch hats hurried along the streets.

It had been arranged that they should eat their meals in a room overlooking the canal, at the foot of the Cathedral—and there at eleven o'clock they went, to be a little dashed in spirit by the reappearance of the Bar-le-Duc crockery.

The same yellow dish carried what seemed the same rationed jam; the square blocks of meat might have been cooked in the Bar cook-hut, and brought with them over the desert; two heavy loaves stood as usual on the wooden table. The French Army ration was the same in every town.

"Mesdames," said the orderly assigned to them, "there are two sous-officers without who wish to speak with you."

"Let them come in."

Two blue figures appeared in the doorway and saluted. The first brought a card of invitation from the Commandant Dormans. The second was the brigadier from the garage with a list of the cars assigned to the drivers.

"Perhaps these ladies would come down and try their cars after lunch?" he suggested, and lunch being over they walked with him through the winding streets. At the gates of a great yard he paused and a sentry swung them open. Behind the gates lay a sandy plain as large as a parade ground, which, except for gulleys or gangways crossing it at intervals, was packed from end to end with row after row of cars; cars in the worst possible condition, torn, twisted, wheelless, cars with less dramatic and yet fatal injuries; some squatting backwards upon their haunches, some inclined forwards upon their knees—one, lately fished up from a river, had slabs and crusts of ice still upon its seats—one, the last dragged in at the tail of a breakdown lorry, hung, fore-wheels in the air, helpless upon a crane. Here, in the yard, was nothing but broken iron and mouldering carriage work—the cemetery of the Transport of the Grand Quartier.

Lining all one side of the yard ran a shed, closed and warmed and lighted, where living cars slept in long rows mudguard to mudguard, and bright lamps facing outward.

As the Englishwomen walked in a soft rustle could be heard up and down the lighted shed, for each half-hidden driver working by his car turned and shot a glance, expectant and mocking, towards the door.

"Ben quoi, i'paraît qu'c'esst vrai! Tu vois!"

"Qu'est-ce qu'il dit, c'ui-là?"

"C'est les Anglaises, pardi!"

"Tu comprends, j'suis contre tout ca. I'y a des fois ou les femmes c'est bien. Mais ici …"

"Tu grognes? On va r'devenir homme, c'est tres bien!"

"C'est idiot! Qu'est-ce qu'elles vont faire ici!"

"On dirait—c'est du militarisme francais!"

"Le militarisme francais j'm'en f——! Tu verra, cela va faire encore du travail pour nous."

"Attends un peu!"… And murmurs filled the shed—glances threaded the shadows, chilling the spirit of the foreign women adventuring upon the threshold.

"Four Rochets," said the brigadier, consulting his paper, "two
Delages, two FIATS … Mademoiselle, here is yours, and yours. The
Lieutenant Denis will be here in a moment. He fears the Rochets will be
too heavy for you, but we must see."

The lieutenant who had been at dinner the night before entered the shed, greeted them, and turned to Stewart. "That car is too heavy for your strength, mademoiselle. It is not a car for a lady."

"I like the make," she said stiffly, conscious of the ears which listened in the shed.

"See if you can start her now, mademoiselle," said the brigadier, arranging the levers.

There was a still hush in the shed as Stewart bent to the handle. Fanny, standing by the Rochet which had been assigned to her, felt her heart thumping.

("Tu vas voir!" whispered the little soldiers watching brightly from behind the cars. "Attends, attends un peu! Pour les mettre en marche, les tacots, c'est autre chose!")

Stewart, seizing the handle, could not turn it. In the false night of the shed the lights shone on polished lamps, on glass and brass, on French eyes which said: "That's what comes of it!"—which were ready to say—"March out again, Englishwomen, ridiculous and eager and defeated!"

Fanny, looking neither to right nor left, prayed under her breath —"Stewart, Stewart we can never live in this shed if you can't start her. And if you can't, nobody else can…."

There was a spurt of life from the engine as it back-fired, and Stewart sprang away holding her wrist with the other hand. The lieutenant, the brigadier, and a driver from a car near by crowded round her with exclamations.

"You advanced the spark too much," said the driver to the brigadier. "Tenez! I will retard it."

"She shan't touch the car again." said the lieutenant. "It is too heavy."

"Leave the controls alone," said Stewart, scowling at the driver. "Give me room …" She caught the handle with her injured hand, and with a gasp, swung the Rochet into throbbing life.

There was a murmur of voices down the shed, and each man with a slight movement returned to the work he had been doing; the polishers polished, the cleaners swept, and a little chink of metal on metal filled the garage. The women were accepted.

The day had vanished. Cars, yard and garage sank out of sight. Out in the streets the lamps woke one by one, and from the town came shouts and the stamp of feet marching. It was Saturday night and a torchlight procession of soldier and civilians wound down the street. The band passed first, and after it men carried fire-glares fastened upon sticks.

The garage gates turned to rods and bars of gold till the light left them, and the glare upon the house-fronts opposite travelled slowly down the street.

Fanny slipped out of the yard and crept along behind the flares like a shadow on the pavement. At the street corner she passed out on to the bridge over the Moselle, and leant against the stonework to watch the plumes of fire as they glittered up the riverside upon the tow-path. The lights vanished, leaving the darkness so intense that she could only feel her way over the bridge by holding to the stonework with her hand. A sentry challenged her and when she had passed him she had arrived at the door of her German lodging.

Climbing the stairs a slow breeze of excitement filled out the sails of her spirit. "My silk stockings … my gold links, and my benzene bottle!" she murmured happily. Now that of all her life she had the slenderest toilet to make—three hours was the time she had set aside for it!

CHAPTER III

JULIEN

Earth has her usual delights—which can be met with six days out of the seven. But here and there upon grey earth there exist, like the flying of sunlight, celestial pleasures also—and one of these is the heaven of success. When, puffed-up and glorious, the successful creature struts like a peacock, gilded in a passing radiance. And in a radiance, in a magic illumination, the newcomers danced in the drawing-room of the Commandant Dormans, and tasted that which cannot be found when sought, nor held when tasted.

Old tapestries of tropical foliage hung around the walls, dusk upon one wall, dawn upon another. Trees climbed from floor to ceiling laden with lime-coloured flowers, with birds instead of fruits upon the branches.

When at a touch the yellow dust flew out under the lamplight it seemed to the mazy eye of the dancer that the trees sent up a mist of pollen and song.

In this happy summer, Fanny, turning her vain ear to spoken flattery, her vain eye to mute, danced like a golden gnat in fine weather.

The Commandant Dormans spoke to her. If he was not young he had a quick voice that was not old. He said: "We welcome you. We have been waiting for you. We are glad you have come."

Faces surrounded her which to her fresh eyes were not easy to read. Names which she had heard last night became young and old men to her —skins red and pale and dark-white—eyes blue and olive and black—gay, audacious and mocking features. She was dazzled, she did not hurry to understand. One could not choose, one floated free of preference, all men were strangers.

"One day I shall know what they are, how they live, how they think." But she did not want that day to come.

The Commandant Dormans said: "You do not regret Bar-le-Duc?"

"No, no, no."

"I hear you are all voracious for work. I hear that if you do not drive from morning to night we cannot hope to keep you with us!"

Denis said to her: "Be careful of him! He believes there is no end to the human strength."

She replied joyously: "There is no end to our strength!"

When she had eyes to see, to watch, to choose, she found that there was in the room a man who was graceful and young, whose eyes were a peculiar shape, who laughed all the time gently as he danced. He never looked at her, never came near her. This young man was indifferent to her, he was indifferent to her … Soon he became a trouble and a pleasure to her. With whom was he dancing now … and now? Who was it that amused him? His eyes and his hair were bright … but there were many around her whose eyes and hair were as bright. Before she had seen that young man laugh her pleasure had been more complete.

While she was talking to Denis a voice said to her: "Won't you dance with me?"

Looking up she saw who it was. His mouth smiled, his eyes were clever and gay.

The moment she danced with him she began to grow proud, she began to find herself. Someone whispered to her: "The section must leave at such and such an hour…."

She thought in a flash: "For me the section is dissolved … I am I, and the others are the others!"

The evening wore on. The musicians flagged and took up their courage again. It was late when Stewart, touching Fanny's arm, showed her that they were almost the only two women in the room.

"Where are the others?"

"In the hall, putting on their coats. We are all going."

"Aren't they in a hurry?"

"They have had orders, which were brought up just now, for runs early to-morrow morning. But you and I have nothing, and Denis has asked us … if you are quick you can slip away … to have supper with him at Moitriers."

"Well?"

"We can. The others go home in two cars which have been sent for us. No one will know that we are not in the other car. I'm so hungry."

"So am I, starving. Very well."

They joined the others, put on their coats, hunted ostentatiously for their gloves, then slipped ahead down the dark stairway into the square below. Denis joined them.

"Splendid. I have my car round that corner. It will be only a matter of half an hour, but if you are both as hungry as I you will welcome it. Everything was finished upstairs, every crumb and cake. We must get a fourth. Who shall I get?"

"Any one whom you would like to bring," said Stewart. "I don't think I have mastered the names yet. I really don't mind."

"And you, mademoiselle?"

"Nor I either," said Fanny, sniffing at the frosty air, at the fresh night.

"Whom you like!"

"Then I won't be a moment. I'll bring whom I can."

"Monsieur!"… as he reached the corner. He turned back.

"There is an artillery captain … in a black uniform with silver."

"An artillery captain …" he paused enquiringly.

"In black and silver. There was no other in the room."

"Oh, yes, there were two in black and silver!"

"Tall, with …"

"Ah, tall! The other is very short … The tall one is the Commandant's aide, Captain Chatêl. He may not be able…. But I will see!" He disappeared again.

When he returned he had the young man beside him.

"One moment," said Châtel, as they walked towards the car; "who asked for me, the girl with the fair hair, or with the dark?"

"With the fair."

Moitriers was closed when they reached it, and they drove on to the only other place where food could be bought past the hour of midnight—the station buffet.

Pushing past the barriers at the entrance to the station they entered a long corridor filled with heavy civilian life. Men and women lay, slept and snored upon the stone ledges which lined the side of the tunnel, their bags and packets stacked around them. Small children lay asleep like cut corn, heads hanging and nodding in all directions, or propped against each other in such an intricate combination that if one should move the whole sheaf of tired heads slipped lower to the floor.

Further on, swing doors of glass led to a waiting-room, and here the sleeping men and women were so packed upon the ground and around the little tables that it was difficult to walk between them. Men sat in groups of nine or ten around a table meant for four each with his head sunk down between his hands upon the marble surface. On one table a small child wrapped in shawls lay among the circle of heads, curled like a snail, its toe in its father's ear. At each end of the room stood soldiers with fixed bayonets.

Denis paused at the entrance. "Walk round here," he said, "there is a gangway for the sentry."

"If we talk too loud," said Fanny, "we shall wake them."

"They must soon wake in any case. It must be near the time for the train. You know who they are?"

"Who?"

"Germans. Expelled from Metz. They leave in batches for Germany every night—by a train that comes in and goes out at some horrible hour."

Passing through more glass doors they came to an inner room where, behind a buffet, a lady in black silk served them with beer and slices of raw ham and bread.

The four sat down for a moment at a little table—Denis talking of the system by which the outgoing Germans were nightly weeded from those who had permission to remain behind in Metz. Julien Châtel joined in the conversation. He spoke with the others but he glanced at Fanny. For the briefest of seconds he thought as he looked at her face that he saw a new interest smile upon it. He did not know that his own face wore the same look. His look said as he looked at her: "You, you, you!" At one moment she thought: "Am I pretty?" At the next she was content only to breathe, and thought no more of herself. She took in now his eyes which seldom rested on her, now a movement of his lips which made her feel both happy and miserable, and suddenly she learnt how often his finger traced some letter upon his cheek.

These things were important. They were like the opening sentences of a great play to which one must listen, absorbed, for fear of misunderstanding all the story.

It was not long before they rose, threaded their way back between the sleeping Germans, regained the car, and drove down the silent streets towards the Cathedral.

"Have you seen it?" said Julien in a low voice, addressing her directly.

"The Cathedral?"

"Yes. I want to show it to you. Will you meet me there to-morrow at three?"

(The others talked and smiled and knew nothing. Whoever has a secret is stronger than they who know nothing. Fanny thought: "My companions, to be as you are is not to exist! Whatever you feel, you are feeling nothing …")

"Will you?"

"Yes," she answered, and joined her hands tightly, for this was where the play really began.

* * * * *

The sun shone gaily. Here was no mud, no unhappiness, here were no puzzled women, and touching mayors of ruined villages, but instead gay goblin houses, pointed churches like sugar cake, the old French theatre with its stone garlands glittering in the sun; sun everywhere, streaming over the Place du Théâtre, over women shaking coloured rags from the windows, women washing linen by the river; everything that had been wet was drying, everything that had savoured of tears and age and sadness was burning up under the sun, and what moisture remained was brighter than jewels.

"Suppose he never came!"

"Why, then, be ready for that. Very likely he wouldn't come. Very likely he would think in daylight—' She is not a woman, but an English Amazon…'" Fanny glanced down at her clothes regretfully. She was ill-equipped for an assignation.

"At least I might have better gloves," she thought, and walked into a small shop which advertised men's clothes in German across the window. She bought yellow washing-leather gloves at twenty-eight francs a pair, and would have paid a hundred had the salesman insisted.

And now with yellow gloves, silk stockings, shining shoes and a heart as light as a leaf upon a wind she walked towards the Cathedral.

"He won't come. He won't be there…." She pushed at the east door.

He was under a Madonna, his black and silver hat in his hand, his eyes critical and pleased as he walked to meet her. They sat down together on a seat, without speaking. Then, each longing for the other to speak —"You have come…." he said first. (His face was oval and his hair was shining.)

"Yes," she nodded, and noticed a peculiar glory in the Cathedral. The dark cave shone as white flesh and youth can shine through the veils of a mourner.

They no longer lived their own separate lives; they had come together at each other's call.

"I thought you wouldn't come."

"Why, why did you think that?"

Little questions and little answers fell in a sudden rain from their lips. Yet while Fanny spoke he did not seem to know what she said, and answered at random, or sometimes he did not answer at all, but smiled.

Afraid of the fragile avowal of silence, evading it, she found little words to follow one another. But he answered less and less, and smiled at her, till his face was full of this smile. So then she said: "We'll go out and walk by the river," and he rose at once and followed her among the forest of wooden chairs. They forgot that he was to have shown her the Cathedral. In all its length she never saw one statue except the first Madonna, not one stone face but his young face with the cold light upon it, his hands as white as stones, as long and fine as any of the carved fingers which prayed around them.

They walked together down the winding path below the bridge to the very edge of the Moselle, which lay in light winter sunlight, its banks buried in shrubberies of green.

Mont St. Quentin, conical, covered with waving trees, shone like a hill in summer, and beyond it the indigo forest of every Lorraine horizon floated indefinitely like a cloud.

A young doctor lounged beside them, putty-coloured under his red plush cap. "Why are all doctors plain in France?" she laughed.

"Hush!" He wound his hand round and round like the player of a barrel -organ. "I have to stop you when you say silly things like a phonograph, at so much a metre."

So he believed he might tease her…. Delighted, she stopped by the bank of the river and stared into the water. The sun ran over her shoulders and warmed her hands. The still shine of the river held both their eyes as movement in a train holds the mind.

"I am enjoying my walk," he said. He did not mean it like that, or as a compliment to her. When it was said he thought it sounded banal, and was sorry. "What a pity!"

But she was not critical because she was looking for living happiness, and every moment she was more and more convinced that she would get it. But when he asked her her name and she repeated it, it sounded so much like an avowal that they both turned together down the tow-path with a quick movement and spoke of other things, for they were old enough to be afraid that the vague happiness that fluttered before them down the path would not be so beautiful when it was caught. And at this fear she said distinctly to herself: "In love!" and wondered that she had not said it before.

Coming back to him with her words, she then began to wound and to delay him. "You mustn't be late for your office…."

"When shall I see you again?"

They dropped into a long silence. She summoned her coquetry that she called pride. The blue, blue forest at the edge of her sight tilted a little like a ship, the watery hill-country rolled towards it in mysterious kilometres.

"It is beautiful," she said clumsily, avoiding his question, ignoring it. "Yet when I go there it is always more beautiful on the next hill.'

"I must hurry," he said at once, "I shall be late at my office."

"Where is your office?"

He looked round vaguely. "There in that group of pines." They walked towards it, they were almost at the door, but he would not repeat his question. Would he not at the last moment? No. Had it not then been clear that the living happiness was at her lips? No. Could he let her go, could it have been a failure? He was holding out one of the stone hands. He was going.

She looked up and the sun was streaming in his eyes, blinding him, and without seeing her he stared into the darkness that was her face. "I have so enjoyed my walk," he said. "Thank you for coming."

All her face said "Oh!" in a hurt, frightened stare, but the sun only came round the edges of her hair and cap and left the panic in a shifting darkness. He was gone.

She went back to her street. Reaching the big, populous house she followed the corridor that led from the stone courtyard, climbed to the first floor and opened the door of her own room. A bitter disillusion ran through her. The close-packed furniture seemed to say indifferently, "There's not much room for you!" and she knew quite well as she sat down on the bed that it was not her room at all, but had been as public to the birds of passage as the branch of a tree to the birds of the air.

"I did so little. I did so little. It was such a little mistake!"
Self-pity flooded her.

"And why did he ask me to come to the Cathedral if such a little thing, such a little thing…." Indignation rose.

"Things don't crumble like that, don't vanish like that!" She stared, astonished, at the scenes she had left behind her, the shining of the dark Cathedral, the ripple on the Moselle. "But they do, they do, they do…."

Down in the street her own name caught her ear, and she went to the window.

"Are you there, are you there?" cried the voice.

Hanging waist-deep out of the window she received her orders for the next day.

"I came down to tell you now," said the girl below on the pavement. "I thought you might have things to do to the car. You must be at the Hôtel Royal, near the station, at half-past six to-morrow morning."

"Have you any idea whom I'm to take? Or where?"

"I don't know where, but the man is a Russian colonel."

She drew her head back through the window, and the gay tumble of the street gave way to the impersonal, heavy room. Cramming her oil-stained overall into her haversack, she put on her leather coat and went up to the garage.

The sun had disappeared. A cold wind struck the silk-clad ankles.

CHAPTER IV

VERDUN

"Come in," she said in English, lifting her head and all her mind and spirit out of the pit of the pillow.

Feet came further into the room and a shivering child held a candle in her face. "Halb sechs, Fräulein," it said. But the Fräulein continued to stare at him. He thought she was not yet awake—he could not tell that she was counting countries in her head to find which one she was in—or that she was inclining towards the theory that she was at school in Germany. He was very cold in his shirt and little trousers, and he pulled at her sheets. "Fräulein!" he said again with chattering teeth, and when she nodded more collectedly the little ghost slipped out relieved by the door. "Russian colonel … I must get up. Fancy making that boy call me! Why couldn't someone older … I must get up."

He had left the electric light burning in her room, but out in the corridor all was black and hushed as she had left it the night before when she had gone to bed. Behind the kitchen door there was a noise of water running in the sink. She opened the door, and there was the wretched child again, still in his shirt, rinsing out her coffee-pot by the light of one candle. Well, since he was doing it … Poor child! But she must have her coffee. By the time she was dressed he tapped again and brought in the tray with coffee, bread and jam on it. Setting it down, he looked it over with an anxious face. "Zucker," he said, and disappeared to fetch it. She filled her thermos bottle with the rest of the coffee which she could not finish, and put two of the slices of grey bread into the haversack, then crept downstairs and out into the black street where the gas lamps still burnt and the night sentry still paced up and down in the spectral gloom. Over the river hung a woolly fog, imprisoning the water; but as she crossed the bridge she noticed where its solidity was incomplete and torn, and into the dark water which lay at the bottom of such crevasses a lamp upon the bridge struck its arrowed likeness. It was a good seven minutes' walk to the garage, and she tried to get warm by running, but the ice crackling in the gutters and between the cobble stones defied her, and her hands ached with cold though she put them in turn right through her blouse against her heart to warm them as she ran. Fetching her car she drove to the Hôtel Royal, and settled down to wait.

A porter came out and swept the steps of the hotel, and a puff of his dust caught her in the face. He laid a fibre mat on each stone step, and clipped them with little metal clips.

"Are you for us?" asked a sous-lieutenant, looking first up and down the empty street and then at the car. He had blue eyes and a long, sad moustache that swept down the lower half of his face and even below his chin, making him look older than he should.

"I am for a Russian colonel," she said, liking his mild face.

"That's right. Yes, a Russian colonel. Colonel Dellahousse. But can you manage by yourself? Can you really? I will tell him…."

He disappeared up the steps and through the swing door of the hotel. A moment later he was out again.

"He will come to you himself, he will see you. But we want to go to Verdun! Could you drive so far? You could? Yes, yes, perhaps. Yet here he comes…."

In dark civilian clothes the Russian came down the hotel steps. He was tall, serious, upright, rich. His face beneath his wide, black hat was grave and well cared for. The sombre glitter of his eye was grave, his small dark beard shone in the well-controlled prime of its growth. From the narrow line of white collar to the narrower thread of French watchchain—from the lean, long feet to the lean, white hands she took him in, and braced herself, adjusted herself, to meet his stately gravity. If there was something of the Mephistopheles in fancy dress about him, it was corrected by his considerate expression.

"Have you had breakfast?" he began, speaking French with a softly nasal accent.

"How kind of you to think of it! Yes, thank you, monsieur."

"I have to go to Verdun," he put it to her. "I have business there." It was as though he expected that she would let him off without difficult explanations, would exclaim: "There is some mistake! Some other car, some other driver is intended for your work!"

But she remained silent except for a smile of acknowledgment, and with a sigh he summoned the lieutenant and went back into the hotel. In a few minutes the Frenchman came out again. "Monsieur Dellahousse would like to know if you know the way?" he inquired.

"He doesn't want to take me? Isn't that it?" asked Fanny, smiling but anxious.

"He is a little doubtful," admitted the lieutenant. "You must excuse…."

"Perhaps I appear flippant to him. But I am grave, too, grave as he, and I long to go, and the car and I, we are trustworthy. I do, indeed, know the way to Verdun."

He went in again, and for answer the porter brought out the bags, and Colonel Dellahousse followed, carrying a sealed black bag with care under his arm. She was sure he had said to the Frenchman: "But what sort of a woman is she? One does not want to have difficulties." And as sure, too, that the other had answered: "I know the English. They let their women do this sort of thing. I think it will be all right."

She no longer felt defiant towards the spoken and unspoken criticism she met everywhere: "What kind of women can these be whose men allow them to drive alone with us for hours, and sometimes days?" but had begun to apologise for it even to herself, while it sometimes caused her bewilderment.

She drove them back through the waking town and out by the Verdun gates, and soon up on to the steep heights above the town among frozen fields and grasslands white with frost. The big stone tombs of 1870 stuck out of a light ground fog like sails upon a grey sea, and it was not long, at Jeandelize, before the 1914 graves began, small isolated wooden crosses. They touched the brink of the battlefields; a rain of dead gunfire began along the sides of the road, shell-holes with hairy edges of dried thistles and, at the bottom of each, green moss stiffened with ice. The road grew wilder and wilder and took on the air of a burnt-out moor, mile after mile of grey, stricken grass, old iron, and large upturned stones. Wherever a pair of blasted trees was left at the road's side a notice hung in mid-air, on wires slung from tree to tree across the road.

"Halt—Autos!" shouted the square, black, German orders from the boards which swung and creaked in the wind.

"Nach Verdun," said the monster black arrows painted on trees and stone, pointing, thick, black and steady, till it seemed that the ghost of the German endeavour still flung itself along the road. "Nach Verdun! Nach Verdun!" without a pause, with head down. "Nach Verdun," so that no one might go wrong, go aside, go astray, turn back against the order of the arrow. Not an arrow anywhere answered "Nach Metz."

For miles and miles nothing living was to be seen, neither animal, nor motor, nor living man; only the stray fires of the Chinese fluttered here and there like blue and red marsh fires a mile or so back from the main road. Once as she flew along she shied like a horse and twisted the wheel as a wild screaming and twittering rose at the side of the car, and glancing back she saw three figures wriggle and laugh in mockery and astonishment. They had risen round the embers of a dead fire, and stood swaying on their feet and showing white teeth in orange faces. One had the long hair of a woman flapping about his ears.

They reached Etain, and turned the sharp corner in the street lined with hollow houses, passed under a tunnel of thick camouflage, leafy as an arbour, mouldy as the rags upon a corpse, and came on the first pill-boxes of the Hindenburg line.

Another twelve miles and the twin towers of Verdun appeared over the brow of a hill.

"I thought it but dust!" exclaimed the Russian. "I thought it a ruin; it is a town!"

"Wait, wait till you get nearer…."

Then down the last long hill and over the paved Route d'Etain into the suburbs of Verdun. As they neared it the town began to show its awful frailty—its appearance of preservation was a mockery. Verdun stood upright as by a miracle, a coarse lace of masonry—not one house was whole.

"Stop!" ordered the Russian, and at the foot of the steep, conical hill which wore Verdun upon its crest they stopped and stared. The town was poured over the slopes of the hill as though a titanic tipcart had let out its rubbish upon the summit. Houses, shops and churches, still upright, still formed Verdun, kept its shape intact, unwilling that it should fall to dust while these deadly skeletons could keep their feet. Light glared through the walls, and upon the topmost point of all the palace of the bishop was balanced, its bones laced against the sky. The Russian, who had stood up in the car, sat down. "Now go on…."

The streets which circled the base of the hill had been partially cleared of fallen rock and stonework, and the car could pick its way between the crazy shop-fronts, where notices of vanished cobblers, manicurists, butchers, flapped before caverns hollowed by fire, upon fingers of stone already touched by moss.

Here and there soldiers moved in bands at their work of clearing. But the black hat, the drab coat of the civilian had long been left behind —and here the face of a woman was unknown as the flying dragons of the world's youth.

Now and then with a crash the remains of a house fell, as the block of stonework which alone supported it was disarranged by the working soldiers.

"Where am I to go?" asked Fanny, as the street wound round the base of the hill.

"I will climb over beside you and direct you," said the French lieutenant, and dropped into the front seat.

"Where do these soldiers sleep? Not among these ruins?"

A block of masonry fell ahead of them and split its stones across the street.

"Be careful! You can get round by this side street. Up here…. In these ruins. No living soul can sleep in Verdun now."

"Where, then?"

"Don't you know? They sleep beneath Verdun, in this hill around which we are circling. I am looking for the entrance."

"Inside this hill? Under the town?"

"But you've heard of the citadelle?"

"Yes, but… this hill is so big."

"There are fifteen kilometres of tunnel in this hollow hill, and hundreds of steps lead up to the top by the palace, where there is a defence of barbed wire and guns. Look, here is the entrance."

They left the car. Before them was a small dark hole in the side of the hill, an entrance not much higher than a man, into which ran a single rail line of narrow gauge. A sentry challenged them as they walked towards him.

Entering the hill they found themselves in a tunnel lit by electric bulbs which hung in a dotted line ahead of them.

"Wait!" ordered the deep voice of the Russian, and he strode from them into the depths of the tunnel with the Eastern swing of Ali Baba entering his cave.

Fanny stood by the mild lieutenant, and they waited obediently.

"I must tell you a secret," he said to her. "Monsieur Dellahousse is very glad to be here. He said this morning: 'The Governor has sent me a woman to break my neck!'"

"But he took me…."

"Could he refuse you?—For he felt that it was a glove of challenge thrown down by the Governor of Metz. They do not get on together…. He took you with dignity, but he was convinced that he placed himself in the jaws of death."

"When do we go back? We cannot now be in Metz before dark."

"But haven't they told you? Never warned you? How monstrous! We are staying here."

"And I return alone?"

"No, you stay too. You are lent to us for five days. They should have told you!"

"Oh, I stay too. In this tunnel, here! How odd, how amusing!"

"Monsieur Dellahousse has gone to ask the Commandant of the citadelle to house us all. Here he comes."

The Russian returned under the chain of lights. "Follow me," he said, and led them further into his cavern.

They followed him like children, and as they advanced the lieutenant whispered: "We are now well beneath the town. It lies like a crust above our heads. Exactly beneath the palace you will see the steps go up…."

"What is the railway line for?"

"Bread for the garrison. There are great bakeries in the citadelle."

Further and further still…. Till the Russian turned to the right and took a branching tunnel. Here, lining the curve of the stone wall were twenty little cubicles of light wood, raised a few inches from the moist floor, and roofless except for the arch of the tunnel that ran equally above them all. These were the rooms assigned to the officers de passage, officers whom duty kept for a night in Verdun. Each cubicle held a bed, a tin basin on a tripod, a minute square of looking-glass, a chair and a shelf, and each bore the name of its temporary owner written on a card upon the door.

"Twenty … twenty-one … and twenty-two," read the Russian from a paper he carried, and threw open the door of twenty-two.

"This is yours, mademoiselle"; he bowed and waved her toward it. Fanny entered the room, which, from his manner, might have been the gilded ante-chamber of his Tzar.

She heard him enter his own room, and through the partition the very sighing of his breath was audible as it rustled upon his lips! He tried to give her the illusion of privacy, for, wishing to speak to her, he left his room again to tap at her door, though his voice was as near her ear whether at door or wall.

"I hope you are content, mademoiselle?" he said through the woodwork.

"Delighted, monsieur."

"You will sleep here," he continued, as though he suspected her of sleeping anywhere but there, "and dine with us in the officers' mess at seven. Until then, please stay in the citadelle in case I need you."

She heard his footsteps go up the corridor, the lieutenant following him. "I will unpack," she thought, and from her knapsack drew what she had by chance brought with her. Upon the shelf she arranged a tin of singe—the French bully beef—a gilt box of powder, a toothbrush, a comb, a map, a packet of letters to be answered, and a magneto spanner.

There was an hour yet before dinner and she wandered out into the corridors to explore the citadelle. A soldier stood upon a ladder changing the bulb of an electric light.

Catching sight of her he hurried from his ladder, and passing her with a stiff face, saluted, and disappeared.

Soon she began to think that this was the busy hour in the fortress: the corridors rustled gently, the unformed whispering of voices echoed behind her. The walls seemed to open at a dozen spots as she walked on, and little men with bright, grave faces hurried past her about their duties.

"Perhaps they are changing the guard…."

Yet a face which had already passed her three times began to impress its features upon her, and she realised suddenly that it was curiosity, not duty, that called the soldiers from their burrows. The news was spreading, for out of the gloom ahead fresh parties of onlookers appeared, paused disconcerted as she wished them "good evening," nodded or saluted her in haste, then hurried by.

An officer with grizzled hair stepped into the passage from a doorway.
As she neared him she saw he wore the badges of a commandant.

"Who is this?" he asked in a low voice of the soldier who followed at his heels.

"J'n'en sais rien, mon commandant," The soldier stiffened as a watch-dog who sees a cat.

Fanny hastened nearer. "I drive a Russian officer," she explained. "I hope I have your permission to stay here."

"Ah!" exclaimed the officer, looking at her in surprise. "Colonel Dellahousse told me 'a driver'; he did not add that the driver was a lady. Where have they put you? Not in the cubicles of the officiers de passage? No, no, that must be changed, that won't do. Come, you shall sleep in the room next to the bishop's room, as he is absent. It is in my corridor."

Fanny followed him, and noticed that the corridor was now clear of soldiers. The commandant paused before a door decorated with flags and led her into another corridor lined with cubicles much larger than those she had seen at first.

"Open number seven."

The soldier took his bunch of keys and opened the door.

"Now fetch mademoiselle's effects from the other corridor. Which number was your room, mademoiselle?"

"Twenty-two. But I can fetch them … I have really nothing."

The soldier withdrew.

"He will get them. You dine with us, I hope, to-night at seven. Are you
English, mees?"

"Yes, English—with the French Army. I am really so grateful…."

"The other room was not possible. I like the English, mees. I have known them at my home near Biarritz. You and I must talk a little. Do you care to read?"

"Oh, yes, if I get time…."

"Any books you may want please take from my sitting-room, number sixteen in this corridor. Tenez! I have an English book there—'The Light that Failed'—I will get it for you."

"Oh! I have read … But thank you."

"De rien, de rien! I will get it now." He hastened up the corridor and returned with the book in his hand.

The soldier, too, returned, bearing the seven objects which had accompanied her travels.

"You will clean mademoiselle's shoes, brush her uniform, and bring her hot water when she needs it," ordered the commandant, and the soldier saluted impassively—a watch-dog who had been told that it was the house-cat after all.

Left alone, she searched all her pockets for some forgotten stick of chocolate, and finding nothing, sat down upon the bed to wait hungrily till seven. The air in the tunnels was heavy and dry, and throwing off her tunic she lay down on the bed and slept until footsteps passing her door awoke her.

She became aware that the inhabitants of her corridor were washing their hands for dinner, and sitting up sleepily found that it was already seven. In a few minutes she hurried from her room and out into the main tunnel, glad to get nearer the fresh air which filtered in through the opening at the far end.

Reaching a door which she had noticed before, marked "popote," she paused a second, listening to the hum of voices within, then pushed at the door and entered.

Instantly there was a hush of astonishment as seventy or eighty officers, eating at a long trestle table, sharply turned their heads towards her, their forks poised for a second, their hands still. Then, with a quick recovery, all was as before, and the stream of talk flowed on.

The first section of the table was reserved for strangers passing through Verdun, and here sat a party of young Russian officers in light blouse-tunics, an American or two, and a few French officers. At the next section sat the officers of the citadelle, a passing general, and at the left hand of the commandant, Monsieur Dellahousse and the mild lieutenant.

Overhead the stone roof of the tunnel was arched with flags, and orderlies hurried up and down serving the diners.

Fanny, halfway up the long table, wavered in doubt. Where, after all, was she supposed to sit? At the top section, as a guest—or, as a driver, among the whispering Russians at the "stranger" section? Her anxiety showed in her face as she glanced forwards and backwards and an orderly hurried towards her. "Par ici, mademoiselle, par ici!" and she followed him towards the head of the table. Her doubts dissolved as she saw the gap left for her by the friendly arm of the lieutenant, and, arrived at the long wooden bench upon which they sat, she bowed to the commandant, and lifting one leg beneath her skirt as a hen does beneath its feathers, she straddled the difficult bench and dropped into position.

"Beer, mademoiselle? Or red wine?" asked the Russian, suddenly turning to her; and the commandant, released from his conversation, called out gaily: "The mees will say 'water'—but one must insist. Take the wine, mees, it is better for you." The idea of water had never crossed Fanny's mind, but having decided on beer she changed it politely to red wine, which she guessed to be no other than the everlasting pinard.

"I know them…." continued the commandant, smiling at the general. "I know the English! My home is at Biarritz and there one meets so many."

And this old man thus addressed, a great star blazing on his breast, and tears of age trembling in his blue eyes, lifted his hand to attract her attention, and said to Fanny in gentle English: "Verdun honours a charming guest, mademoiselle."

"Verdun … honours…." His words lingered in her ear. She a guest, she honoured … here!

Up till now the novelty of her situation had engrossed her, the little soldiers watching in the tunnels, the commandant so eager to air his stumbling English, these had amused her.

And when she had perceived herself rare, unique, she had forgotten why she was thus rare, and what strange, romantic life she meddled in.

Here in this womanless region, in this fortress, in this room, night after night, month after month, the commandant and his officers had sat at table; in this room, which, unlike the tomb, had held only the living, while the dead and the threatened-with-death inhabited the earth above.

They had finished dinner and Monsieur Dellahousse signalled to Fanny that she might rise. She rose, and at the full sight of her uniform he remembered her duties and said stiffly: "Be good enough to wait up till ten to-night. I may need you."

They passed out again down the length of the tables. Near the door the Russian paused to speak with his countrymen, who rose and stood respectfully round him. Fanny and the lieutenant went on alone to the corridor.

"You have travelled with him before?" she asked.

"Oh, yes. I am lent to him to help him through the country. He is on a tour of inspection for the Red Cross; he visits all the camps of Russian prisoners liberated from Germany."

"But are there many round Verdun?"

"Thousands. You will see to-morrow. And be prepared for early rising. If he doesn't send for you by ten to-night I will tell the orderly to let you know the hour at which you will be wanted to-morrow morning. The car is all ready to start again?"

"I am going out to her now."

He turned away to join the Russian, and Fanny passed the sentry at the tunnel's mouth, and stood in the road outside.

Verdun by night, Verdun by starlight, awaited her.

Up the slopes of the hill, every spar, brick and beam, carried its bristle of gold. At her own head's imperceptible movement flashes came and went between the ribs of the Bishop's Palace. The sentry by the tunnel stood between the upper and the underground:—with his left eye he could watch the lights that strung back into the hollow hill, with his right, the smiling and winking of the stars in the sky.

"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!"

Hundreds of Russians stood about together outside, in strange, poor, scraped-together clothes, just as they had come from Germany, peering at Fanny in silence through the open doorway.

"But I thought these were liberated prisoners from Germany?"

"Don't ask me!" said the little man disgustedly. "I wish to heaven they were all back in Germany. Look at me! I've fought in the Somme, the Aisne, and Verdun, and now at the end of the war I'm left here to look after these pigs!"

A sergeant entered. "A man to take the prisoner in the fourth cell up to the doctor," he said sharply.

"It's not my turn," said the little man, aggrieved that the eye of the sergeant should so rest on him. "It's yours!" he said to the man on the bench beside him. "It's yours!" replied this man to the next.

"Yes, it's Chaumet's! Yes, it's Chaumet's, va-t'en!" they all said, and a man with a cast in his eye got up slowly, grumbling, and turned towards the door.

"Here, dress yourself!"

"What, to take a … to the doctor?"

He pulled his belt and gun off the rack with an ill-will and disappeared, buckling it on.

"You have Russians in cells, too?"

"Those who won't work, yes. On bread and water. That one has been on bread and water for five days. In my opinion he'll die."

"But why won't they work?"

"Work! He won't even clean his own cell out! They say it's because they are Bolshevists, but I don't know about that. I talk a little Russian, and I think they are convinced that if they make themselves at all useful to us we shall never send them home. Some of them think they are in Germany still. They're an ignorant lot."

An American came in rather hesitatingly, but without nodding to the
French.

"We've got bacon-chips in our camp," he said, addressing Fanny directly. "I don't like to bring them in here, but if you'd just step across … it isn't a stone's throw."

She did not like to desert the French, but she was sick with hunger, and rose. She knew she would have nothing from the guard-house meal, for they probably had the same ration as she—one piece of meat, two potatoes, and one sardine a man.

After all, food was more important than sentiment, and she followed him out of the hut.

"You won't get anything from those skinflints," said the American, "so we thought you'd better come and have some chips."

"Because they have nothing to give," she answered, half inclined to turn back. The American barracks were opposite, and in the yard, under a shelter of planks, the men were eating round a complicated travelling kitchen on wheels. "They have all the latest, richest things," thought Fanny, jealous for the French, antagonistic, yet hungry. But when she was among the Americans, they were simple and kind to her, offering her a great tray of fried bacon chips, concerned that she should have to eat them with her hand, washing out their tin mugs and filling them with coffee for her, making her sit on a barrel while she ate. "It's only that they are so different," she thought. "So different from the French that they can never meet without hurting and jarring each other."

Russians slouched about in the snow, washing the pans. When they had finished eating the Americans called to the Russians to eat what remained of the bacon chips. Watching them eat with the hunger of animals, they said:

"They starve them in the French barracks. We give them food here, or they'd sure die."

"They give them what they can in the French barracks; the soldiers don't get a ration like this, you know, even for themselves."

"Their fault for not kicking up a shindy," said the free-born Americans.
"We wouldn't stand it."

"You have no idea of poverty."

Food was even lying in the snow. A soldier cook thrust his head out of a hut, crying: "Any one want any more chips?"

She knew that it was probably true what the Frenchman had said, that the Americans shot the Russians as lightly as if they were sparrows. Yet here they wept over the French ration that kept the Russians hungry, though alive and well. What a curious mixture of sentiment and brutality they were….

She pulled out her cigarette case and offered a cigarette to a man standing near her. He took it and answered in a thick, lisping Jewish accent, soft and uniformed: "I don't smoke, ma'am. But I'll keep it as a souvenir give to me by the only lady I've seen in three months."

"That's really true? You haven't seen a woman for three months?"

"No, ma'am. Not a one. It must seem strange to you to hear us say that.
Just as though you were a zebra."

"There's some one over by your car," said the sentry, who had no idea of silence at his post. She got up quickly and flew back to the other barracks, jumping the deep pools of water and mud and the little heaps of soiled snow, started up the car and drove back to the citadelle for lunch.

At one-thirty they started out again, to chase over the grey downs in search of Russian camps folded away in small depressions and hollows, invisible from the main roads.

And thus, day after day, for five days, she drove him from morning to evening, from camp to camp around Verdun, until they had seen many thousands of Russians. Sometimes the French lieutenant came with them, and once or twice the Russian gravely invited him to sit in front with the driver. Then they would talk together a little in English, and once he said: "Would you like me to tell you something that will surprise you and interest me?"

She looked round.

"Your employer," he said, smiling gently over the expression, "is jealous of you."

She did not know what to make of this.

"He dislikes it intensely when you talk to the commandant of the citadelle."

"But…."

"He does not think you exclusive enough, considering you, as he does, as his woman."

"But, why…."

"Yes, of course! But you ought to realise that you are the only woman for miles around, and you belong to us!"

"You too?"

"Well, yes. I have something the same feeling. But his is stronger because his nature is Oriental. He thinks: 'This woman is a great curiosity, therefore a great treasure; and this treasure belongs to me. I brought her here, I am responsible for her, she obeys my orders.'"

"But does he tell you all this, or do you guess it?"

"We talk of this and that."

That night in the mess-room the Russian leant across the table to Fanny.

"What is man's mystery to a woman if she lives surrounded by him?"

"Oh, but that's not necessary … mystery!"

"It is necessary to love."

"Colonel Dellahousse," explained the lieutenant, smiling very much, "does not believe that you can love what you know."

The Russian nodded. "Love is based on a fabulous belief. An illusory image which fills the eyes of people who are unused to each other. This poor lady will soon be used to everything."

Fanny, who felt momentarily alarmed, suddenly remembered Julien.

"When do we go back?" she asked absently.

The sympathetic eyes of the lieutenant seemed to understand even that, and he smiled again.

They left next day, after the midday meal.

Before lunch she met a soldier, who stopped her in one of the branching corridors.

"You are going," he said. "I have a little thing to ask."

She waited.

"Mademoiselle, it would not incommode you, it is such a little thing.
Think! We have not seen a woman here so long."

Still she waited; and he muttered, already abashed:

"One kiss would not hurt you, mademoiselle."

"Let me pass…." she stammered to this member of the great "monastery."

He wavered and stood aside, and she went on up the corridor vaguely ashamed of her refusal.

* * * * *

"We go now," said the Russian, rising from the luncheon table. "Are you satisfied with your experience, mademoiselle?"

"My experience?"

"Verdun. This life is strange to you. I have seen you reflective. Now, if you will go out to the car you shall go back to your civilised town where the Governor so dislikes me, and you shall see your women friends again! But we are not coming all the way with you."

"No?"

"No, we stay at Briey. You return from Briey alone."

They set out once more upon the roads which ran between the dead violence of the plains—between trenches that wandered down from the side of a sandy hillock, by villages which appeared like an illusion upon the hillside, fading as they passed and reforming into the semblance of houses in the distance behind them.

The clouds above their heads were built up to a great height, rocky and cavernous; crows swung on outspread wings, dived and alighted heavily on the earth like fowls. They came behind the old German lines, and the road changing led them through short patches of covering woods filled with instruments. Depôt after depôt was piled between the trees and the notices hanging from the branches chattered antique directions at them. "The drinking trough—the drinking trough!" cried one, but they had no horse to water. "Take this path!" urged another, "for the…." but they flew by too fast to read the end of the message, while the path pursued them a little way among the pines, then turned abruptly away. "Do not smoke here … Nicht rauchen," "NICHT RAUCHEN," "Rauchen streng verboten," cried the notices, in furious impotent voices. The wood chattered and spat with cries, with commands for which the men who made them cared no longer. The hungry noses of old guns snuffed at the car as it rolled by, guns dragging still upon their flanks the torn cloak of camouflage—small squat guns which stared idly into the air, or with wider mouths still, like petrified dogs for ever baying at the moon—long slim guns which lay along the grass and pushing undergrowth—and one gun which had dipped forward and, fallen upon its knees, howled silenced imprecations at the devil in the centre of the earth.

When they had passed the shattered staging of the past they came out upon the country which had been occupied by Germans but not by warfare. Here the fields, uncultivated, had grown wild, but round the sparse villages little patches of ground had been dug and sown. Not a cow grazed anywhere, not a sheep or a goat. No hens raced wildly across village streets. Far ahead on the white ribbon of road a black figure toiled in the gutter, and Fanny debated with herself: "Might I offer a lift?"

Looking ahead she saw no village or cottage within sight, and with a murmured apology to the Russian she pulled up beside the old woman whom she had overtaken.

"Where are you going?"

"To Briey."

"We, too. Get in, madame."

The Russian made no comment. The old crone, knuckled, hard-breathing, climbed in, holding uncertainly to the windscreen and pulling after her her basket and umbrella.

"Cover yourself, madame," ordered Fanny, as to a child, and handed her a rug.

"I have never been in an auto before," whispered the old creature against a wind which made her breathless. "I have seen them pass."

"You are not afraid?"

"Oh, no!"

"Cover yourself well, well."

Gallant old women, toiling like ants upon the long stretches of road, who, suddenly finding themselves projected through the air at a pace they had never experienced in their lives before, would say not a word, though the colour be whipped to their cheeks and their eyes rained tears until, clinging to the arm of the driver: "Stop here, mademoiselle!" they would whisper, expecting the car to rear and stop dead at their own doorstep; and finding themselves still carried on, and half believing themselves kidnapped: "Ah, mademoiselle, stop, stop…."

They slipped down into the pit of Briey where the houses cling to the sides of a circular hollow, and drew up by a white house which the Frenchman indicated.

The old woman searched, trembling and out of breath for her handkerchief, and wiped her streaming eyes; then, as she climbed out backwards, with feet feeling for the ground—"What do I owe you, mademoiselle?"

"Ah, nothing, nothing."

"Mais si! I am not at all poor!" and leaving a twopence-halfpenny piece on the seat, she hurried away.

Colonel Dellahousse came to the side of the car and thanked Fanny ceremoniously. "And if I do not see you again, mademoiselle," he said, "remember what I say and go back to your home before the pleasure of life is spoilt for you."

"Good-bye, good-bye," said the French lieutenant.

Soon after she had left Briey snow began to fall. A river circled at the foot of a hill, and she followed its windings on a road which ran just above it. Night wiped out the colours on the hills around her, until the moon rose and they glowed again, half trees, half light. She climbed slowly up to a plateau not a dozen miles from Metz.

* * * * *

An hour later, the car put away in the garage, Fanny was tapping at the window of the bath house in the town. The beautiful fat woman who prepared the baths answered her tap. "Fräulein," said Fanny, "would it matter if I had a bath? Is it too late? I'll turn it on myself and dry it afterwards."

What did the woman mind if Fanny had a bath? Fat and beautiful, she had nothing left to wish for, and contentedly she gave her the corner room overlooking the canal and the theatre square, wishing her a good-night full of German blessings. The water ran boiling out of the tap, and the smoke curled up over the looking-glass and the window-sill.

When the bath was full to the brim she got in, lay back, and pulled open the window with her toe. The beautiful French theatre, piebald with snow and shadow, shone over the window-sill. The Cathedral clock struck out ten chimes, whirling and singing over her head, the voices of the little boys died down, the last had thrown his last snowball and gone to bed. The steam rose up like a veil before the window, and once again, between the grey walls of her bath—so like her cradle and her coffin—she meditated upon the riches and treasure of the passing days.

"And yet," echoed the thoughts in that still water travelling still, "to travel is not to move across the earth."

Peering back into the past, frowning in the effort to string forgotten words together, Fanny whispered upon the surface of the water:

"The strange things of travel,
The East and the West,
The hill beyond the hill—"

But the poem was shattered as the voice of the bath woman called to her through the door.

"You are well, Fräulein?"

Fanny turned in her bath astonished. "Why, yes, thank you! Did you think
I was ill?"

"I didn't know. I daren't go to bed till I see you out, for last week we had a woman who killed herself in here, drowned in the water. I have just remembered her."

"Well, I won't drown myself."

"I can never be sure now. She gave me such shock."

"Well, I'm getting out," said Fanny.

"What?"

"I'm getting out. Listen!" And naked feet padded and splashed down upon the cork mat. "Now go to bed. I promise you I have no reason to drown myself."

CHAPTER VI

THE LOVER IN THE LAMP

"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of chalk upon the pavement.

"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage, to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"

The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung in her mind.

"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.

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.

"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."

She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought—the vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had brought them together.

"How lucky…."

"How lucky what?"

How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't like it."

Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just behind the mask of the face.

"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody—for her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she could not say.

"Of what are you thinking?"

Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had the impression of a whole conversation.

"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding inspections to find out."

"It was for that that you held the inspection?"

"Why, of course, of course!"

"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).

"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car had returned."

Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz, and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.

But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself—the khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?…" Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.

She glanced at him from time to time, and would have grown more silent, but by his light questions he kept her talking briskly on, offering her no new proof, until she grew unsure and wondered whether she had been mistaken; and, the hour striking for her supper in the town, she went to it, filled anew with his charm and her anxiety. Other meetings came, when, thrilling with the see-saw of belief and doubt, they watched each other with absorbed attention, and in their fragile and unconfessed relationship sometimes one was the victor and sometimes the vanquished. Yet what was plain to the man who swept the mud from the streets was not plain to them.

"Does he love me already?"

"Will she love me soon?"

When they saw other couples by the banks of the Moselle, Reason in a convinced and careless voice said: "That is love!" But on coming towards each other they were not sure at all, and each said of the other: "To-morrow he may not meet me…." "To-morrow she will say she is busy and it will not be true!"

When Fanny said, "He may not meet me," she was mad. How could he fail to meet her when the rolling hours hung fire and buzzed about his head like loaded bees, unable to proceed; when in a lethargy of vision he signed his name at the bottom of the typewritten sheet, saying confusedly, "What does she think? Does she think of me?"

When at last they met under the shadow of the Cathedral they would exclaim in their hearts: "What next?" and hurry off by the Moselle, looking into the future, looking into the future, and yet warding it off, aware of the open speech that must soon lie between them, and yet charmed by the beautiful, the merciful, the delay. And going home, each would study the hours they had spent together, as a traveller returned from wonderful lands pores over the cold map which for him sparkles with mountains and rivers.

That very Saturday night after the early supper in their room in the town, she had gone out to the big draper's shop which did not close till seven, almost running into Reherrey on the pavement.

"I'm going to Weile," he said.

"I'm going there myself."

"To get your dress?"

"Yes."

They went into the large, empty shop together, to be surrounded at once by a group of idle girls.

"Stuffs …" said Fanny, thinking vaguely.

"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.

Fanny followed Reherrey to a newly-polished counter, backed by rows of empty shelves. They had no black bombazine.

"Black tulle," said Reherrey, with his air of cool indifference, "black gauze, black cotton…"

It had to be black sateen in the end. "Now you!" said Reherrey, when he had bought six yards at eight francs a yard.

"White … something … for me."

There was white nothing under sixteen francs a yard. "But cheap, cheap, CHEAP stuff," she expostulated—"stuff you would make lampshades of, or dusters. It's only for a fancy dress." The idle little girls assumed a special air. Fanny looked round the shop in desperation. It was like all the shops in Metz—the window dressed, the saleswomen ready, the shelves scrubbed out and polished, the lady waiting at the pay desk—but the goods hadn't come!

Here and there a shelf held a roll or two of some material, and eventually Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven francs a yard.

"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how English!"

Fanny had an idea of her own.

"Wo," she said heavily to Elsa's mother still later in the evening, "ist eine Schneiderin?"

"A dressmaker who speaks French…."

Elsa took her out into the dark street again, and in at a neighbouring archway, till at the back of deep courtyards they found a tiny flat of a little old lady. "Like this," explained Fanny, drawing with her pencil.

"Why, my mother had a dress like that!" said the little lady, pleased. "Before the last war." She nodded many times. "I know how to make a crinoline. But when do you want it?"

"For Tuesday night."

"Ah, dear mademoiselle! How can I! To-day is Saturday. I have only to-day and Monday. Unless…. Are you a Catholic?"

"No."

"Then you can sew on Sunday. You can do the frills."

All Sunday Fanny sewed frills under the stag's horn, and when she went to meet Julien in the late afternoon, she had the frills still in a parcel. "What is that?" he asked, as she unfolded the parcel in the empty Cathedral, and began to thread her needle.

"My dress for the dance."

"What is it going to be?"

"Frills. Hundreds of frills." She shook her lap a little, and yards and yards of white frills leapt on to the floor in a river.

"Those flowers you bought, look, you have never put them in water!"

He shook his head, and leaning from his chair, stretched out his arm for the parcel of white paper. "They are dying. Smell them! They yield more scent when they die." She sat holding the flowers near her face, and not thinking of him very distinctly, but not thinking of anything else.

"But they won't last."

"They will last this visit. I'll get new ones."

"Oh, how extravagant you are with happiness!…"

They looked startled and became silent. For every now and then among their talk some sentence which they had thought discreet rang out with a clarity which disturbed them.

Between them there had been no avowal, and neither could count on the other's secret. She was not sure he loved her; and though he argued, "Why should she come if she does not care?" he watched her sit by him with as little confidence, with as much despair, as if she sat on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. "Is it raining again? How dark it gets. I must soon go." She made gaps in and scattered that alarming silence in which the image of each filled and fitted into the thoughts of the other like an orange into its close rind. Yet so dark and perfect is the mask of the face, so dull the inner ear, that each looked uncertainly about, half deaf to the song which issued so plainly from the other, distracted by the great gaps in the music.

"Won't you stay with me till you have sewn to the end of that frill?"

She sat down again without a word. And, greedy after his victory, he added: "But I oughtn't to keep you?"

"I want to stay, too."

The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an end.

"Now I must go. It's supper—supper in the garage."

He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the door of the house in the dark street by the river.

"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps it's English."

"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.

"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room upstairs.

"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"

"Has every one had runs?"

"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"

"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and the silence of the human mind.

CHAPTER VII

THE THREE "CLIENTS"

"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the brigadier and at the pink paper he offered her.

"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night. You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as you can to the Hôtel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be, but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and Pichot is getting you two spare tubes…."

She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead, the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and accident, pure accident, had lighted on her, to sweep her out of Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold Anywhere. White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something, anything—that she was ill—and stay.

She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and the funnel.

"And if I said—(it is mad)—if I said, 'I am in love. I can't go. Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.

The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her skirt and feet.

"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"

"Coming. Where are the tubes?"

"I have them."

She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder—hating every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.

At the Hôtel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.

She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising, but intent only on her question.

"And could you tell me—(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me very late at the garage)—and would you mind telling me which day you expect to get back?"

He turned to the others.

"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."

"Where shall I drive you?"

"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Trèves."

Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.

In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel, unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to the left and flat grass prairie to the right—little villages and clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again, and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be touched to be relinquished.

Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car, but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of chamois-leather.

At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass. The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along the dry road.

The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them, made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor, the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass. Bread, cheese, sausage, pâté, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high, dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round bodies of the bottles.

It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge, spreading pâté on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.

"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.

The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.

The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked appreciatively together.

"Hé! The pâté is not bad."

"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"

"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the bottle is all warmed. Try some."

"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.

"He is in the army."

"You have no brother—no one to take care of you?"

"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they think it interesting for us."

"Tiens!"

They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and, bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:

"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"

The others reconsidered her.

"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that fine leather coat?"

"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.

Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.

"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than—Well, how much?"

The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.

"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."

But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big Bearskin be her impresario or their instructor.

"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him for his stay in Balham.

When the lunch was over and the last fragment of pâté drawn off the last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.

All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.

As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet and heavy, melted on her ear.

"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"

They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."

"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."

"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.

"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."

And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might lift the back seat and find the curtains.

"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few yards ahead.

As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow. Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.

They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which held so much discomfort.

Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs upon the floor.

"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours, running downhill in another mile."

They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village—if village it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in the forest.

The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses glittered in the snow with flags.

A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow bridge brought her to a standstill.

"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.

"We expect Pétain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."

"But Thionville is forty miles away—"

"Still, he might pass here—"

Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a board: "This is Germany."

They pulled up. Germany it might be—but the road to Tréves? He did not know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in Germany, and with his right in France.

CHAPTER VIII

GERMANY

Over the side of the next mountain all Hans Andersen was stretched before them—tracts of little country, little wooden houses with pointed roofs, little hills covered with squares of different coloured woods, and a blue river at the bottom of the valley, white with geese upon its banks. They held their open mouths insultedly in the air as the motor passed. The narrow road became like marble, and the car hissed like a glass ball rolled on a stone step. On every little hill stood a castle made of brown chocolate, very small, but complete with turrets. Young horses with fat stomachs and arched necks bolted sideways off the road in fear, followed by gaily painted lattice-work carts, and plunged far into the grassland at the side. Old women with coloured hoods swore at them, and pulled the reins. Many pointed hills were grey with vine-sticks, and on the crest of each of these stood a small chapel as if to bless the wine. The countryside was wet and fresh—white, hardly yellow—with the winter sun; moss by the roadside still dripped from the night, and small bare orchard trees stood in brilliant grass.

"Look! How the grass grows in Germany!"

"Ah, it doesn't grow like that in the valley of the Meuse—"

Every cottage in every village was different; many wore hats instead of roofs, wooden things like steeples, with deep eaves and carved fringes, in which were shadowy windows like old eyes. Some were pink and some were yellow.

Soon they left the woods and came out upon an open plateau surrounded by wavy hills with castles on them. In the middle of the plateau was a Zeppelin shed which looked like the work of bigger men than the crawling peasants in the roads. One side of the shed was open, and the strange predatory bird within, insensible to the peering eye of an enemy, seemed lost in thought in this green valley. The camp of huts beside it was deserted, and there seemed to exist no hand to close the house door. They rose again on to a hillside, and on every horizon shone a far blue forest faint like sea or cloud.

Nearer Tréves the villages were filled with Americans—Americans mending the already perfect roads, and playing with the children.

"This is a topsy-turvy country, as it would be in Hans Andersen," thought Fanny. "I thought the Germans had to mend the broken roads in France!"

They stayed that night in the Porta-Nigra hotel, which had been turned
into an Allied hostel. The mess downstairs was chiefly filled with
American officers, though a few Frenchmen sat together in one corner.
The food was American—corn cakes, syrup, and white, flaky bread.

"Well, what bread! It's like cake!"

"Oh, the Americans eat well!"

"I don't agree with you. They put money into their food, and they eat a lot of it, but they can't cook.

"Isn't it astonishing what they eat! It's astonishing what all the armies eat compared with our soldiers."

"Now this cake-bread! I should soon sicken of it. But they will eat sweets and such things all day long."

"Well, I told you they are children!"

"The Americans here seem different. They behave better than those in
France."

"These are very chics types. Pershing is here. This is the
Headquarters Staff."

"Yes, one can see they are different."

"It appears they get on very well with the Germans."

"Hsh—not so loud."

After dinner they strolled out into the town. The Bearskin was very anxious to get a "genuine iron cross."

He was offered iron crosses worked on matchboxes, on cigarette lighters, on ladies' chains.

"But are they genuine?"

He did not know quite what he meant.

"I don't suppose them to be taken from a dead man's neck, but are they genuine?"

In the streets the Germans sold iron crosses from job lots on barrows for ten francs each.

"But I will get one cheaper!" said the Bearskin, and clambered up the steps into shop after shop. He found an iron cross on a chain for seven francs. No one knew what the mark was worth, and the three men, with the German salesman, bent over the counter adding and subtracting on paper.

"How can a goblin countryside breed people who sell iron crosses at ten francs each?" wondered Fanny.

There was a notice on the other side of the street, "Y.M.C.A., two doors down the street on your left," and the thin man stood in the door of the shop beside Fanny and pointed to it.

"Couldn't you go there and get me cigars? They will be very cheap. Have you money with you?"

"I'll try," said Fanny, "I've money. We can settle afterwards," inwardly resolving to get as many cigarettes as she could to take back for the men in the garage. She crossed the street, but looked back to find the thin man creeping after her. She waited for him, irritated.

"Go back. If the American salesman sees you he'll know it's for the
French, and he won't sell."

"Tiens?"

"He knew that quite well," she thought impatiently to herself, "or he wouldn't have asked me to buy for him."

The thin man turned back to the cover of the shop like an eager little dog which has jumped too quickly for biscuit and been snubbed.

She went down the street and into the Y.M.C.A.

Instantly she was among three or four hundred men, who stood with their backs to her, in queues up the long wooden hall. Far ahead on the improvised counter was a guichet marked "Cigars." She placed herself at the tail of that queue.

"Move up, lady," said the man in front of her, moving her forward. "Say here's a lady. Move her up."

Men from the other queues looked round, and one or two whistled slyly beneath their breath, but her own queue adopted her protectingly, and moved her up to their head, against the counter.

It was out of the question to get cigars now. She had become a guest, and to get cigars would imply that she was not buying for herself, but to supply an unknown man without. And the marks on her uniform showed that the unknown was French.

"One carton of Camels, please," she said, used to the phraseology.

"Take two if you like," said the salesman. "We've just got a dump in."

She took two long cardboard packets of cigarettes, and put down ten francs.

"Only marks taken here," said the salesman. "You got to make the change as you come in."

"Oh, well—I'll—"

"Put it down. Put it here. We don't get a lady in every day."

He gave her the change in marks, which seemed countless.

"I'm sure you've given me too much!"

"Oh no. Marks is goin' just for love in this country. Makes you feel rich!"

As she emerged from the hall with her two long cartons under her arm she found the thin man, the Bearskin and Blackberry-Eyes standing like children on the doorstep.

It was too much—to give her away like that.

Other Americans, coming out, looked at them as a gentleman coming out of his own house might look at a party of penguins on his doorstep.

Fanny swept past her friends without a glance and walked on up the street with her head in the air. They turned and came after her guiltily. When they caught her up in the next street, she said to the thin man, "I asked you not to come near while I was buying—"

"Have you got cigars, mademoiselle?"

"No, I couldn't. Why did you come like that? Now I can go in no more.
You'd only to wait two minutes."

They looked crestfallen, while she held the cigarettes away from them as a nurse holds sweets from a naughty child.

"I could only get two packets. I can give you one. I'm sorry, but I promised to get cigarettes for some people in Metz."

The thin man brightened, and took the big carton of Camels with delight.

"They're good, those!" he said knowingly to the others. "How much were they, mademoiselle?"

"Five francs twenty the carton."

"Is it possible? And we have to pay…."

By his tone he made it seem a reflection on the Americans. Why should a country be so rich when his had been devastated, so thinned, so difficult to live in? Fanny thought of the poor huddled clients who had sat on the floor of the car during the snowstorm. It had been a bitter journey for them.

After all—those rich, those pink and happy Americans, leather-coated down to the humblest private, pockets full of money, and fat meals three times a day to keep their spirits up—why shouldn't they let him have their cigarettes?

"You can have this carton, too, if you like," she said, offering it.
"I'll manage to slip in to-morrow morning."

He thanked her, delighted, and they went back to the hotel.

The problem of the kindness of the Americans, and her frequent abuse of it to benefit the French, puzzled her.

"But, after all, it's very easy to be kind. It's much easier to be kind if you are American and pink than if you are French and anxious."

Another difference between the two nations struck her.

"The Americans treat me as if I were an amusing child. The French, no matter how peculiar their advances, always, always as a woman."

Next morning, when she got down to breakfast at eight, she found that the three Frenchmen had already gone out about their work.

"Perhaps I shall get home to-night, after all," she prayed. She sat in the hotel and watched the Americans, or wandered about the little town until eleven. The affair with the cigars was suitably arranged. The hall was nearly empty when she went in, and the few men who stood about in it did not disarm her with special kindness. On getting back to the hotel she found the Bearskin pushing breathlessly and anxiously through the glass doors.

"Monsieur Raudel has left his cigarettes in his bedroom," he said, "unlocked up. He is anxious so I have come back."

"Well, tell him that if he—tell him quite as a joke, you know—that if
I can get home—"

(Something in his little blue eye shone sympathetically, and she leant towards him.) "Well, I'll tell you! There is a dance to-night in Metz, and I am asked. And tell him that I have bought two boxes of cigars for him!"

The Bearskin, enchanted, promised to do his best.

By half-past twelve the three were back at lunch in the hotel. Over the coffee Monsieur Raudel looked reflectively at his well-shaped nails.

"Well, mademoiselle, so this is what it is to have a woman chauffeur—"

Fanny looked up nervously, regretting her confidence in the Bearskin.

"Apart from the pleasure of your company with us, we get cheap cigars, and you get your dance, so every one is pleased."

"Oh!" She was radiant. "But you haven't hurried too much? Are we really starting back?"

Monsieur Raudel, who was a new man when he wasn't cold, reassured her, and soon they were all packed in the Renault, and running out of Tréves.

CHAPTER IX

THE CRINOLINE

That same night as dusk fell she shook the snow from her feet and clothes and entered the dressmaker's kitchen. Four candles were burning beside the gas, and the tea-cups lay heaped and unwashed upon the dresser.

"Good-evening, good-evening," murmured a number of voices, German and French, and the old dressmaker, standing up, her face haggard under the gas, took both Fanny's hands with a whimper:

"It will never be done! Oh, dear child, it will never be done!"

The crinoline which they were preparing lay in white rags upon the table.

"Oh, Elsa, that is good! Are you helping too?" Elsa had brought three of her friends with her, and the four bright, bullety heads bent over the long frills which moved slowly through their sewing fingers. "Good Conquered Children!" They were sewing like little machines.

"The Fräulein Schneiderin," explained Elsa, "is so upset."

And this was evident and needed no explaining. The little lady twisted her fingers, grieved and scolded, snatching at this and that, and rapping with her scissors upon the table as though she were going to wear the dress herself.

"Mademoiselle, I had to get them." She nodded towards the busy Conquered Children, apologising for them as though she feared Fanny might think she had done a deal with the devil for her sake.

"Here are my frills," said Fanny, bringing from her pocket two paper parcels, one of which she laid in mystery upon the table, the other opened and shook out her two long frills. She drew off her leather coat and sat down to sew.

"Oh, how calm you are!" burst out the dressmaker. "How can you be so calm? It won't be finished."

"Yes, yes, yes. It's only half-past five. Can I have a needle?"

"My mother had a dress like this before the last war." (This for the fiftieth time.) "And will your amoureux be there?" she asked with the licence of the old.

"Well, yes," said Fanny smiling, "he will."

"And what will he wear?"

"Oh, it's a secret. I don't know. But I chose this particular dress because it is so feminine, and it will be the first time he has seen me in the clothes of a woman."

"Children, hurry, hurry!" cried the dressmaker, in a frenzy of sympathy. "Minette, get down!" She slapped the grey cat tenderly as she lifted him off the table. "Tell them in their language to hurry!" she exclaimed. "I never learnt it!"

But, after the breath of excitement, followed her poor despair, and she dropped her hands in her lap. "It will never be done. I can't do it."

"Look, my dear, courage! The bodice is already done … Have you had any tea?"

"The children ate. I couldn't. I am too excited. But you are so calm.
You have no nerves. It isn't natural!"

Yet she ate a little piece of cake, scolding the cat and the children with her mouth full, prowling restlessly above their bent heads as they sewed and solidly sewed.

At the end of an hour and a half the nine frills were on the skirt, the long hoops of wire had been run in, and the hooks and eyes on the belt.

Often the door opened and shut; visitors came and went in the room; the milk woman put her head in, crying: "What a party!" and left the tiny can of milk upon the floor: Elsa's mother came to call her daughter to supper, but let her stay when she saw the dress still unfinished. Now and then some one would run out of the flat opposite, the flat above or the flat next door and, popping a head in at the door, wish them good luck. All the building seemed to know of the crinoline that was being made in the kitchen.

"You do not smoke a pipe?…" said the dressmaker softly, with appreciation.

"But none of us do!"

"Oh, pardon, yes! I saw it yesterday. A great big girl dressed like you with her hands in her pockets and a pipe in her mouth. It made an effect on me—you can hardly believe how it startled me! I called Madame Coppet to see."

"I know it wasn't one of us. And (it seems rude of me to say so) I even think the woman you saw was French."

"Oh, my dear, French women never do that!"

"Well, they do when they get free. They go beyond us in freedom when they get it The woman you saw (I have seen her, too) works with the men, shoulder to shoulder, eats with them, smokes with them, drinks with them, drives all night and all day, and they say she can change a tyre in two minutes.

"There was a woman, too, who drove a lorry between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc, not a tender, you know, but a big lorry. She wore a bit of old ermine round her neck, knickerbockers, and yellow check stockings. One could imagine she had painted her face by the light of a candle at four in the morning. She never wore a hat, and her short yellow hair stuck out over her face which was as bright as a pink lamp shade."

"Terrible."

"She may have been, but she worked hard! She was always on that road. Or she would disappear for days with her lorry and come back caked in rouge and mud. I wish I could have got to know her and heard where she went and the things that happened to her."

"But, my dear, I keep thinking what a strange life it is for you. Are you always alone on your car?"

"Always alone."

"You are with men alone then all the time?"

"All the time."

"Well, it's more than I can understand. It's part of the war."

Elsa bent across the table and picked up the folded bodice, murmuring that it was done. The dressmaker rose, and reaching for the hooped skirt, held it up between her two arms. It was a thrilling moment. Fanny, too, rose. "Put it on a dummy," she commanded. Candles were placed around the dummy, who seemed to step forward out of the shades of the kitchen, and offer its headless body to be hooked and buttoned into the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schön!" said Elsa's shiny-headed friends, peering with their mouths open.

"Ah, dear child, you were so calm, and now it is done!" said the old dressmaker.

The dress stood stiffly glittering at them, white as snow, the nine frills pricking away from the great hooped skirt.

Fanny picked up the brown paper parcel she had laid on the dresser, taking from it a bottle of blue ink, a bottle of green, and a paint brush, and diluted the inks in a saucer under the tap. There was awe in the kitchen as she held the brush, filled with colour, in the air, and began to paint blue flowers on the dress.

At the first touch of the brush the old dressmaker clasped her hands. "What is she doing, the English girl! And we who have kept it so white…."

"Hush," said Fanny, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"

The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that Fanny felt her hair stir on her neck. She covered the plain, tight- waisted bodice with dancing flowers in blue and green.

On the frills of the skirt a dozen large flowers were painted as though fallen from the bodice. Soon it was done.

"Like that! In five minutes!" groaned the dressmaker, troubled by the peculiar growth of the flowers.

"Let it dry," said Fanny. "I'll go home and start doing my hair. Elsa will bring it round when it's dry."

The old woman held out both her hands, in a gesture of mute congratulation and fatigue.

"Now rest," said Fanny. "Now sleep—and in the morning I will come and tell you all about it," and ran out into the snow.

* * * * *

The top hook of the bodice would not meet. With her heart in her mouth, with despair, she pulled. Then sat down on the bed and stared blankly before her.

"Then if that won't meet, all, all the dress is wasted. I can't go. No, right in the front! There is nothing to be done, nothing to be done!" She sat alone in the room, the five candles she had lighted guttering and spilling wax. She was in the half-fastened painted bodice and a fine net petticoat she had bought at Nancy. Even the green silk bedroom slippers were on, tied round her ankles with ribbons, the only slippers she had found in Metz, and she had searched for them for hours.

The room was icy cold, and the hand of the clock chasing towards the hour for the dance. Should she go in uniform? Not for the world.

She would not meet him, and it seemed as though there could be no to-morrow, and she would never meet him again in this world. This meeting had had a peculiar significance—the flouncy, painted dress, the plans she had made to meet him for once as a woman. Shivering, and in absurd anguish she sat still on the bed.

"Oh, Elsa, Elsa, look!" Better the child than no one, and the shiny head was hanging round the door. ("Wie schön!")

"But it isn't schön! Look! It won't meet!"

"Oh!…" Elsa's eyes grew round with horror, and she went to fetch her mother. "Tanzen!" They talked so much of "tanzen" in that household. The thin mother was all sympathy, and stood in helpless sorrow before the gap in the bodice.