"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, Fraulein?"
f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y.
"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 gla.s.s and bra.s.s 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 cl.u.s.tered 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, f.a.n.n.y 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."
f.a.n.n.y pulled her tin of English "Bra.s.so" 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 bra.s.s, 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 bra.s.s.
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 bra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this bed for a night and pa.s.sed 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-a-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-a-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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.mbled like a huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was a.s.sailed 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 f.a.n.n.y, whose mind, drowned in her happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and hurry the little creatures in the gla.s.s 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 b.u.mp the front doors, and people upon the pavement scrambled between the gla.s.s of the tram and the gla.s.s 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!"