She went into the little room and stood for the drawing; the door shut on her, and she and the artist faced each other. Through the door the music came softly, and as she stood, hands resting without a breath"s stir on fold, on frill, head bent and wandering eyes, the artist with twitching face and moving hand looked up and down, up and down, and she sank, swaying a little upon her rooted feet, into a hypnotised tranquillity. She did not care what the man put upon the white paper with his flying hands; he might draw the flowers upon her skirt, but not the tall blooming flowers within her, growing fabulously like the lilies in a dream. Her thoughts went out to meet the waves of music floating through the door; her rooted body held so still that she no longer felt it, and her spirit hung unbodied in an exaltation between love which she remembered and love which she expected. No one came through the door; they left her in silence, enclosed in the cell of the room and of her dreams, and she was content to stand without movement, without act or thought. The near chair, the wall hard by, the golden room which she had just left so suddenly were alike to her; her eyes and her imagination were tuned to the same level, and there was no distinction between what was on her horizon and beyond it. Across the face of the artist the scenes in the room behind her pa.s.sed in unarrested procession, and the voice of an illusory lover in her ear startled her by its clearness. The music wandered about the room like visible movement, and the artist, G.o.d bless him, never opened his mouth between his shower of tiny glances.
"Finished, mademoiselle!" and he held the drawing towards her as he leant back with a sigh. He had made too many drawings that evening, and any talent he had hung in his mind as wearily as a flag in an airless room. With an effort she broke her position and moved towards him, taking up the drawing in her hand with a forced interest. "Yes, thank you, thank you," she said, and he took it back and laid it with the pile he had made. "You don"t like it? But I"m so tired. Look at these others I did earlier in the evening...."
But while she bent over them the door burst open and Dormans came in, followed by Duval and Dennis. "Is it finished? Let me look! Yes, yes, very good! Quite good!" They were pleased enough, and drew the artist away with them to the buffet.
Suddenly Julien was with her and had closed the door. He was hurried, excited, and it seemed as though he said what he could no longer contain, as though the thought biggest in his mind broke in a bound from him. He was white and he exclaimed: "It"s terrible how _much_ you could hurt me if you would!"
He seemed to close his eyes a little then and lean his head towards her.
She looked at the drooping, half-lit head, and she knew that she had him without fear of escape. Knew too, that the moment was brief. Their recent, undeclared silence brooded as though still with them, half regretful and departing angel. "You will have other beauties," she said to her heart, "but none like this silence."
They were breathless. The ice had gone from the lake and the ship had not yet set sail. In a dream she moved down to the beach. She saw him open his eyes and stare at her incredulously. "I am going to break this beauty," she breathed alone, and put out her hand and launched the ship.
He was by her side, the silence broken, the voyage begun.
CHAPTER X
f.a.n.n.y ROBBED AND RESCUED
Clouds, yellow, mauve and blue, hung ominously over the road to Nancy.
The valley was filled with shades, but the road itself gleamed like a bleached bone in a ditch. Seated upon the dashboard of her wounded car, f.a.n.n.y had drummed her heels for warmth since morning, and seemed likely soon to drum them upon a carpet of snow. Beneath the car a dark stream of oil marked the road, and the oil still dripped from the differential case, where the back axle lay in two halves.
"I will telephone to your garage," her "client" had promised, as he climbed on to a pa.s.sing lorry and continued his journey into Nancy. With that she had to be content, while she waited, first without her lunch, and then without her tea, for the breakdown lorry which his telephone message would eventually bring to her aid. Now it was nearly four o"clock. She had been hungry, but was hungry no longer. The bitter cold made her forehead ache, and though every moment the blue and mauve shades thickened upon the sky no flake of snow had fallen.
Only last night, only twenty-four hours ago, she had been preparing for the dance; and only last night she had said to Julien ... What had she said to Julien? What had he said to her? Again she was deep in a reverie that had lasted all day, that had kept her warm, had fed her.
She was almost asleep when a man"s voice woke her, and she found a car with three Americans drawn up beside her.
"I guess this is too bad," said the man who had woken her. "We pa.s.sed you this morning on our way into Nancy, and here you are still looking as though you had never moved. "Ain"t you had any food since then?"
"I haven"t been so very hungry."
"Not hungry? You"re sure past being hungry! Lucky we"ve got food with us in the car. Pity we"ve got to hurry, but here"s sandwiches and sandwiches, and cakes and candy, and bits of bunstuff, and an apple. And here"s a cheese that"s running out of its wrappin". When"s your show coming to fetch you? "Ain"t you coming home along with us?"
"They won"t be long now. Oh, you are good...." f.a.n.n.y"s hunger revived as she took the food, and now she was waiting ungratefully for them to be gone that she might start on her heavensent meal.
"Good-bye, ma"am," they cried together.
"Good-bye," she waved, and as their car pa.s.sed onwards she climbed up on to the mudguard and spread the rug over her knees.
The slow night grew out of nothing, expanded, and nearly enveloped the slopes of the hill below. The wind dropped in the cloudy, heavy twilight, and the papers of the sandwiches did no more than rustle upon her knees. Not prepared yet to light her car lamps, f.a.n.n.y laid her torch upon her lap, and its patch of white light lit her hands and the piles of bread, cake, and fancy buns.
Across the road in the deeper gloom that dyed the valley and spilt over its banks, a head rustled in the ragged border of twig and reed, and eyes watched the brightly-lighted meal which seemed to hang suspended above the vague shape of the motor car.
With a sense of being perfectly alone, walled round by the gathering dusk, f.a.n.n.y made a deep inroad upon her sandwiches and cake, finishing with the apple, and began to roll up what remained in case of further need, should no one come to fetch her.
She reflected that her torch would not last her long and that she ought to put it and light her head and tail lamps instead, but, drowsy with pleasure in her lonely dinner, she sat on, prolonging the last moments before she must uncurl her feet and climb down on to the ground. The torch slipped from her knee on to a lower fold of the rug, lighting only the corner of a packet in which she had rolled the cake.
Suddenly, while she watched it, the gleam of the corner disappeared. She stared at the spot intensely, and saw a hand, a shade lighter than the darkness, travel across the surface of the rug, cover with its fingers the second parcel and draw it backwards into what had now become dense night. Her skin stirred as though a million antennae were alive upon it; she could not breathe lest any movement should fling the unknown upon her; her eyes were glued to the third packet, and, in a moment, the hand advanced again. With horror she saw it creep along the rug, a small brown, fibrous hand, worn with work. The third packet was eclipsed by the fingers and receded as the others had done, but as it reached the edge of the rug, overflowing horror galvanised her into movement, and catching the corners of the rug she threw it violently after the package and over the hand, at the same moment jumping from her seat and on to the footboard, to grope wildly for the switch. Her heart was leaping like a fish just flung into a basket, and every inch of her body winced from an expected grasp upon it. She flung herself over the side and into the seat of the car, found the switch and pushed it.
A dozen Chinese at least were caught in the two long beams that flew out across the darkness. For a second their wrinkled faces stared, eyes blinked, and short, unhollowed lips stretched over yellow teeth, then, with a flutter of dark garments, the Chinese started away from the fixed beams and were gone into the shadow. Except for the sudden twitter of a voice, the spurt of a stone flung up against the metal of the car, they melted silently out of sight and hearing. Sick with panic, f.a.n.n.y leant down upon her knees and covered her head with her two arms, expecting a blow from above. Seconds pa.s.sed, and ice-cold, with one leg gone to sleep, she lifted her head, switched off the lights and stared into the night. She could see nothing, and gradually becoming accustomed to the darkness, she found that they had completely disappeared. The rug, too, had gone, and all three packets of sandwiches. Cautiously, with trembling legs, she stepped upon the footboard.
Something hit her softly upon the forehead, but before she had time to suffer from a new fear her eye caught the glitter of a flake of snow in its parachute descent across the path of her lamps. "They hate snow...."
she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were now far from her on their way to some encampment.
Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between the spokes of the wheels.
Climbing down again from her perch, f.a.n.n.y went to the back of the car, and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly bent, with a k.n.o.b at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure, but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming out from Pont-a-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his thick, blue coat b.u.t.toned about his chin, leant forward peering through the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the open valley on the left.
"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
"Hardly yet, _mon capitaine_. It was unlucky the _brigadier_ should be at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but it wants two men to tow in the car."
"This is Marbache!"
In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the gla.s.s.
"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the right here."
The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.
"What"s that?"
A pale light hung in the dark ahead of them.
"Is it a car? No."
"Yes, lamps. With the beam broken by the snow."
"Go slow."
For fear of blinding the driver of a lighted vehicle which might, after all, be moving, one of the men put out his hand and switched off the headlights, and the car glided forward on its own momentum.
Thus they came upon f.a.n.n.y, in the hollow torn by the lamps out of an obscurity which whirled like a dense pillar above her, seated on her mudguard, blanched and still as an image, the iron bar for a weapon in her right hand, the torch ready as a signal in her left.
"Julien!"
"Well, yes, my poor child!" And she saw the man behind him, and laughed.