"Yes."
There was a black-boarded hut from whose chimney smoke exuded, and to this ran a track across the gra.s.s. She watched him walk along it, a friendless, sandy man, left over from the armies which had peopled the rabbit warren in the ground. The Renault loped on with its wolf-like action, and she felt a spring of relief that she lived upon moving ground; pa.s.sing on down the rickety road she forgot the little man.
Ahead lay the terrible miles. She seemed to make no gain upon them, and could not alter the face of the horizon, however fast she drove. Iron, brown gra.s.s--brown gra.s.s and iron, spars of wood, girders, torn railway lines and stones. Even the lorries travelling the road were few and far between. A deep loneliness was settled upon the desert where nothing grew. Yet, suddenly, from a ditch at the side of the road, a child of five stared at her. It had its foot close by a stacked heap of hand grenades; a shawl was wrapped round it and the thin hands held the ends together. What child? Whose? How did it get here, when not a house stood erect for miles and miles--when not a coil of smoke touched the horizon!
Yes, something oozed from the ground! Smoke, blue smoke! Was life stirring like a bulb under this whiter ruin, this cemetery of village bones?
She stopped the car. The child turned and ran quickly across a heap of dust and iron and down into the ground behind a pillar. "It must have a father or mother below--" The breath of the invisible hearth coiled up into the air; the child was gone.
A man appeared behind the pillar and came towards the car. f.a.n.n.y held out her cigarette-case and offered it to him.
"Have you been here long?" she asked.
"A month, mademoiselle."
"Are there many of you in this--village?" (Not a spar, not a pile of bricks stood higher than two feet above the ground.)
"There are ten persons now. A family came in yesterday."
"But how are you fed?"
"A lorry pa.s.ses once a week for all the people in this district--within fifty miles. There are ten souls in one village, twenty in another, two in another. They have promised to send us huts, but the huts don"t come.
We have sunk a well now and it is drinkable, but before that we got water by lorry once a week, and we often begged a little from the radiators of other lorries."
"What have you got down there?"
"It is the cellar of my house, mademoiselle. There are two rooms still, and one is watertight. The trouble is the lack of tools. I can"t build anything. We have a spade, and a pick and a hammer, which we keep between the ten of us."
"Take my hammer," said f.a.n.n.y. "I can get another in the garage."
He took it, pleased and grateful, and she left this pioneer of recolonisation, this obstinate Crusoe and his family, standing by his banner of blue smoke.
Another hour and a large signpost arrested her attention.
"This _was_ Villers Carbonel," it told her, and beneath it three roads ran in different directions. There was no sign at all of the village--not a brick lay where the signpost stood.
Stopping the car she drew out her map and considered--and suddenly, out of nowhere, with a rattle and a bang, and a high blast on a mad little horn, a Ford arrived at her side upon the cross-roads.
"Got no gas?" enquired an American. She looked up into his pink face.
His hood was broken and hung down over one side of the car. One of his springs was broken and he appeared to be holding the car upright by the tilt of his body. His tyres were in rags, great pieces of rubber hung out beyond the mudguards.
"Dandy car you"ve got!" he said with envy. "French?"
Soon he was gone upon the road to Chaulnes. His retreating back, with the spindly axle, the wild hood, the torn fragments of tyre flying round in streamers, and the painful list of the body set her laughing, as she stood by the signpost in the desert.
Then she took the road to Peronne.
"I won"t have my lunch yet--" looking at the pale sun. Her only watch had stopped long since, resenting the vibrations of the wheel. She pa.s.sed Peronne--uprooted railways and houses falling head foremost into the river, and beyond it, side roads led her to a small deserted village, oddly untouched by sh.e.l.l or fire. Here the doors swung and banged, unlatched by any human fingers, the windows, still draped with curtains, were shut, and no face looked out. Here she ate her lunch.
The rain had ceased and a little pale sunshine cheered the cottages, the henless, dogless, empty road. A valiant bird sang on a hedge beside her.
With her wire-cutters she opened the tin of potted meat, and with their handle spread it on the bread.
"Lord, how lonely it is--surely some door might open, some face look out--" At that a little gust of wind got up, and she jumped in her seat, for a front door slammed and blew back again.
"I couldn"t stay here the night--" with a shiver--and the bird on the branch sang louder than ever. "It"s all very well," she addressed him.
"You"re with your own civilisation. I"m right _out_ of mine!"
The day wore on. The white sun, having finished climbing one side of the sky, came down upon the other.
Here and there a man hailed her, and she gave him a lift to his village, talked a little to him, and set him down.
A young Belgian, who had learned his English at Eton, was her companion for half an hour.
"And you are with the French?" he asked. "How do you like the fellows?"
"I like them very much. I like them enormously." (Strange question, when all France meant Julien!)
"Don"t you find they think there is no one else in the world?" he grumbled. "It is a delicious theory for them, and it must be amusing to be French!"
"Little Belgium--jealous young sister, resentful of the charm of the elder woman of the world!"
A French lieutenant climbed to the seat beside her.
"You are English, mademoiselle?" he said, she thought with a touch of severity. He was silent for a while. Then: "Ah, none but the English could do this--"
"What?"
"Drive as you do, alone, mademoiselle, amid such perils."
She did not ask to what perils he alluded, and she knew that his words were a condemnation, not a compliment. Ah, she knew that story, that theory, that implication of coldness! She did not trouble to reply, nor would she have known how had she wished it.
They pa.s.sed an inhabited village. From a door flew a man in a green bonnet and staggered in the street. After him a huge peasant woman came, and standing in the doorway shook her fist at him. "I"ll teach you to meddle with my daughter--"
"Those are the cursed Italians!" said the French lieutenant, leaning from the car to watch.
A mile further on they came to a quarry, in which men prowled in rags.
"Those are the Russians!" he said. And these were kept behind barbed wire, fenced round with armed sentries.
She remembered an incident in Paris, when she had hailed a taxi.
"Are you an American?" asked the driver. "For you know I don"t much like driving Americans."
"But I am English."
"Well, that"s better. I was on the English Front once, driving for the French Mission."
"Why don"t you like Americans?"