"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 acc.u.mulation.
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 a.s.sumption 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 f.a.n.n.y 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 f.a.n.n.y, thinking vaguely.
"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
f.a.n.n.y 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 a.s.sumed a special air. f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven francs a yard.
"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y, 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 f.a.n.n.y 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."