"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.
f.a.n.n.y, 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 b.u.t.toned into the dress. All the room stood back to look and admire. "Wie schon!" 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 p.r.i.c.king away from the great hooped skirt.
f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y, stooping towards the bodice, "trust me!"
The children held their breath, except Elsa, who breathed so hard that f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y. "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 f.a.n.n.y. "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 schon!")
"But it isn"t _schon_! 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.
"What"s all this?" and _der Vater_ stood in the doorway, heavy as lead, and red as a plum.
"Give her a bunch of flowers," he said simply, and as if by accident, and "Oh!..." said Elsa"s mother, and disappeared. She came back with three blue cotton cornflowers out of Elsa"s hat, and the gap in the bodice was hidden.
_He was not there_. Her eyes flew round the room, searching the shadows in the corners, searching the faces. In the bitterness of dismay she could not fully enter the door, but stood a little back, blocking the entrance, afraid of the certainty which was ready for her within; but others, less eager, and more hurried, pressed her on, drove her into the centre of the room, and with a voice of excitement and distress chattering within her, like some one who has mislaid all he has, she shook hands with the eighteenth-century general who shrouded the personality of the Commandant Dormans.
At first she could not recognise any one as she looked round upon Turks, clowns, Indians, the tinselled, sequined, beaded, ragged flutter of the room, then from the coloured and composite clothing of a footballer, clown or jockey grinned the round face and owlish eyes of little Duval, who flew to her at once to whisper compliments and stumble on the swelling fortress of her white skirt. She realised dimly from him that her dress was as beautiful as she had hoped it might be, but what was the use of its beauty if Julien should be missing? And, looking over Duval"s head, she tried to see through the crowd.
Suddenly she saw him, dressed in the white uniform of a Russian, standing by a b.u.t.tress of the wall. His uniform had a faint yellowish colour, as if it had been laid away for many years against this evening"s dance; the light caught his knees and long boots, but the shadow of the b.u.t.tress crept over his face, turned from her towards a further door. On his head he wore a white hat of curling sheep"s wool, which made him seem fantastically tall.
When f.a.n.n.y had surveyed him, from the tip of his lit hat to his lit feet, she was content to leave him in his shadowed corner, and turned willingly to dance with Duval. The little man offered an arm to hold her, and, as he came nearer to her, his feet pressed the bottom ring of wire about her skirt, and the whole bell of flowers and frills swung backwards and stood out obliquely behind her.
Presently the Jew boy, Reherrey, detached himself from the others and came out to stand by her and flatter her. He had wound the black stuff that he had bought three days before so cleverly round his slim body that he seemed no fatter than a lacquered hairpin. The cynical flattery of this nineteen-year-old Jew, the plunging admiration which Duval breathed at her side, the attentive look in the bright eyes of the Commandant Dormans, who had come near them and stood before her, filled her with joy. She looked about her, bright rat, tiny and enormous in her own sight, aware now of her outer, now of her inner life, and sipped her meed of success, full of the light happiness fashioned from the admiration of creatures no bigger than herself. She laughed at one and the other, bending towards them, listening to what they had to say, without denying, without doubts, with only triumph in her heart; and, the group shifting a little, a voice was able to say secretly at her ear, "You look beautiful, but you are not exclusive...." Her sense of triumph was not dimmed because her quick ear caught jealousy shading the reproach in his voice.
She did not answer him, except to look at him; but they seemed to forgive each other mutually as the figure of yellowish-white moved close enough to tilt the bell skirt and take the figure of bluish-white into his arms and dance with her. Calico and sheep"s wool and painted flowers went down the room under the low gas brackets, and her eyes, avoiding his, looked out from a little personal silence into the far-off whirl of the room, and heard the dimmed music and the sc.r.a.pe of feet.
For him the world was a pale dumb-show, and she the absorbing centre.
For her the world without was lit equally with his personality, the glamour of which hung over all the scenes before her eyes with the weight of the sky over the land. So long as he lit the horizon the very furthest object in it wore a shaft of his light upon its body.
They danced on, not wearing away the shining boards with their feet half so much as they wore away the thin ice above the enchanted lake.
The Commandant Dormans crossed the room to them.
"She must be drawn. She must go for her portrait. Spare me your partner.
Mademoiselle, we have an artist, a _poilu_, drawing some of the dresses.
Will you come with me and sit for yours?"