CHAPTER XV
ALLIES
A thaw set in.
All night the snow hurried from the branches, slid down the tree trunks, sank into the ground. Sank into the moss, which suddenly uncovered, breathed water as a sponge breathes beneath the sea; sank into the Oise, which set up a roaring as the rising water sapped and tunnelled under its banks.
With a noise of thunder the winter roof of the villa slipped down and fell into the garden--leaving the handiwork of man exposed to the dawn--streaming tiles, ornamental chimneys, unburied gargoyles, parapet, and towers of wood.
In a still earlier hour, while darkness yet concealed the change of aspect, f.a.n.n.y left the garden with a lantern in her hand. She had a paper in her pocket, and on the paper was written the order of her mission; the order ran clearly: "To take one officer to the demobolisation centre at Amiens and proceed to Charleville"; but the familiar words "and return" were not upon it.
She cast no glance back, yet in her mind sent no glance forward. She could not think of what she left; she left nothing, since these romantic forests would be as empty as tunnels when Julien was not there; but closing the door of the garden gate softly behind her, she blew out the lantern and hung it to the topmost spike, that Stewart, who was leaving for England in the morning, might bequeath it to their landlady.
All night long the Renault had stood ready packed in the road by the villa--and now, starting the engine, which ran soundlessly beneath the bonnet--she drove from a village whose strangeness was hidden from her, followed the Oise, which rumbled on a new note, heard the bubbling of wild brooks through the trees, and was lost in the steamy moisture of a thawing forest.
There was a sad, a deadly charm still about the journey. There was a bitter and a sweet comfort yet before her. There were two hours of farewell to be said at dawn. There was the sight of his face once more for her. That the man who slipped into the seat beside her at Chantilly was Julien dissolved her courage and set her heart beating. She glanced at him in that early light, and he at her. Two hours before them still.
She was to carry him with her only to lose him surely; he was to accompany her on her journey only to turn back.
All the way to Amiens he rea.s.sured himself and her: "In a week I will come to Charleville."
And she replied: "Yes, this is nothing. I lose you here, but in a week you will come."
(Why then this dread?)
"In a week--in a week," ran the refrain.
"How will you find me at Charleville? Will you come to the garage?"
"No, I shall write to the "Silver Lion." You will find in the middle of the main street an old inn with mouldering black wood upon the window sashes. How well I know it! I will write there."
"We are so near the end," she said suddenly, "that to have said "Good-bye" to you, to leave you at Amiens, is no worse than this."
And faster she hurried towards Amiens to find relief. He did not contradict her, or bid her go slower, but as they neared Amiens, offered once more his promise that they would meet again in a week.
"It isn"t that," she said. "I know we shall meet again. It isn"t that I fear never to see you again. It is the closing of a chapter."
"I, too, know that."
They drove into Amiens in the streaming daylight.
The rain poured.
"I am sending you to my home," he said. "Every inch of the country is mine. You go to a town that I know, villages that I know, roads that I have walked and ridden and driven upon. You go to my country. I like to think of that."
"I shall go at once to see your house in Revins."
"Yes--oh, you will see it easily--on the banks of the Meuse. I was born there. In a week, in a few days, in a short time--I will come, too."
She stopped the car in a side street of the town.
Lifting her hands she said: "They want to hold you back." Then placed them back on the wheel. "They can"t," she said, and shook her head.
He took his bag in his hand, and stood by the car, looking at her.
"You take the three o"clock train back to Paris when the papers are through," she said hurriedly with sudden nervousness. And then: "Oh, we"ve said everything! Oh, let"s get it over--"
He held the side of the car with his hand, then stepped back sharply.
She drove down the street without looking back.
There was a sort of relief in turning the next corner, in knowing that if she looked back she would see nothing. A heavy shadow lifted from her; it was a deliverance. "Good-bye" was said--was over; that pain was done--now for the next, now for the first of the days without him. She had slipped over the portal of one sorrow to arrive at another; but she felt the change, and her misery lightened. This half-happiness lasted her all the morning.
She moved out of Amiens upon the St. Quentin road, and was almost beyond the town before she thought of buying food for the day. Unjustly, violently, she reflected: "What a hurry to leave me! He did not ask if I had food, or petrol, or a map--"
But she knew in her heart that it was because he was young and in trouble, and had left her quickly, blindly, as eager as she to loosen that violent pain.
She bought a loaf of bread, a tin of potted meat, an orange and a small cheese, and drove on upon the road until she came to Warfusee. Wherever her thoughts fell, wherever her eye lay, his personality gnawed within her--and nowhere upon her horizon could she find anything that would do instead. Julien, who had moved off down the street in Amiens, went moving off down the street of her endless thought.
"I have only just left him! Can"t I go back?" And this cry, carried out in the nerves of her foot, slowed the car up at the side of the road.
She looked back--no smoke darkened the landscape. Amiens was gone behind her.
Again, on. In ten minutes the battlefields closed in beside the road.
Julien was gone. Stewart was gone. Comfort and ease and plenty were gone. "But _We_ are here again!" groaned the great moors ahead, and on each hand. The dun gra.s.s waved to the very edge of the road cut through it. Deep and wild stretched the battlefields, and there, a few yards ahead, were those poor strangers, the scavenging Chinamen.
Upon a large rough signpost the word "Foucaucourt" was painted in white letters. A village of spars and beams and broken bricks--yet here, as everywhere, returning civilians hunted like crows among the ruins, carrying beams and rusty stoves, and large umbrellas for the rain.
At the next corner a Scotch officer hailed her.
"Will you give me a lift?"
He sat down beside her.
"What do you do?" she asked.
"I look after Chinamen."
"Ah, how lonely!"
"It is terrible," he replied. "Look at it! Dead for miles; the army gone, and I here with these little yellow fellows, grubbing up the crumbs."
She put him down at what he called "my corner"--a piece of ground indistinguishable from the rest.
"Is that where you live?"