THE LOVER IN THE LAMP
"How do you know you will meet him?" said the cold morning light; and
when she walked in it the city looked big enough to hide his face. In
the first street a girl said the name of Julien without knowing what it
was she said. But only a child shrieked in answer from a magic square of
chalk upon the pavement.
"You've been away for days and days," said her companions at the garage,
to show that they had noticed it. "Where have you been?"
The garage faded. "Verdun," she said; and Verdun lacy and perilous, hung
in her mind.
"Whom did you take?"
She struggled with the confusing image of the Russian. Before she could
reply the other said: "There's to be an inspection of the cars this
morning. You'll have to get something done to your car!"
Outside in the yard the sun was gay upon the thinly frosted-stones, but
in the shadow of the garage the glass and brass of seventy or eighty
cars glowed in a veiled bloom of polish. Only the Rochet-Schneider,
which had been to Verdun, stood unready for the inspection, coated from
wheel to hood with white Meuse mud. There was nothing to be done with
her until she had been under the hose.
Out in the street, where the hose was fastened to the hydrant, the
little pests of Metz clustered eagerly, standing on the hose pipe where
the bursts were tied with string, and by dexterous pressure diverting
the leaks into gay fountains that flew up and pierced the windows
opposite. As the mud rolled off under the blast of the hose and left the
car streaky and dripping, the little boys dipping their feet into the
gutters and paddled.
Soaked and bareheaded, Fanny drove the clean car slowly back into the
garage and set her in her place in the long line.
Stewart, beside her, whispered, "They've come, they've come! They're
starting at the other end. Four officers."
Fanny pulled her tin of English "Brasso" from a pocket-flap, and began
to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
lake of brass.
Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.
And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have
swallowed her too, his voice in her ear said: "You'd gone for ever...."
"I ... I had gone?" She drew her gaze out of the mirror.
The world outside let him down again on to his feet, and he stood
beside her and said gently in her ear: "Will you meet me again in the
Cathedral at four to-day?" She nodded, and he turned away, and she saw
that he was so unknown to her that she could hardly tell his uniformed
back from the backs of those about him.
To meet this stranger then at four in the Cathedral she prepared herself
with more care than she would have given to meet her oldest friend. The
gilded day went by while she did little things with the holy air of a
nun at her lamp--polishing her shoes, her belt, her cap badge, sitting
on her bed beneath the stag's horn, an enraptured sailor upon the deck
of the world. Around the old basin on the washstand faded blue animals
chased each other and snapped at ferns and roses: she lifted the jug and
drowned the beasts in water, and even to wash her hands was a rite which
sent a shower of thoughts flying through her mind. How many before her
had called this room a sanctuary, a temple, and prepared as carefully as
she for some charmed meeting in the crannies of the town? This room?
This "corridor." The passengers, travellers, soldiers, who had used this
bed for a night and passed on, thought of it only as a segment in the
endless chain of rooms that sheltered them. Bed, washstand, chair,
table, rustled with history. Soldiers resting from the battle out there
by Pont-à-Moussons, kissing the girl who lived in the back room, waking
in the morning as darkly as she, leaving the room to another. Soldiers,
new-fledged, coming up from Germany, trembling in the room as they heard
the thunder out at Pont-à-Moussons. An officer--that ugly, wooden boy
who stared at her from the wall above the mantelpiece. (What a mark he
had left on the household that they should frame him in velvet and keep
him staring at his own bed for ever!) She all but saw spirits--and
shivered at the procession of life. Outside in the street she heard a
cry, and her name called under the window. How like the cry that
afternoon a week ago which had sent her to Verdun! Standing in the
shadow of the curtain she peered cautiously out.
At sight of her, a voice cried up from the street: "There is a fancy
dress dance next Tuesday night! I'm warning every one; it's so hard to
get stuffs." The voice passed on to the house where Stewart lived.
("How nice of her!") This was a good day. ("What shall I wear at the
dance?") There, about the face of the clock, windless and steady, hung
the hours. Not yet time to start, not yet.
Through the lace of the curtain and the now closed window, the shadows
hurried by upon the pavement, heads bobbed below upon the street.
Oh Dark, and Pale, and Plain, walking soberly in hat and coat, what sign
in these faces of the silver webbery within the brain, of the flashing
fancies and merry plans, like birds gone mad in a cage! The tram, as
antique as a sedan chair, clanked across the bridge over the river, and
changing its note as it reached firmer land, roared and bumbled like a
huge bee into the little street. Stopping below her window it was
assailed by little creatures who threw themselves as greedily within as
if they were setting out upon a wild adventure.
"All going to meet somebody," said Fanny, whose mind, drowned in her
happiness, took the narrowest view of life. But for all their push and
hurry the little creatures in the glass cage were forced to unfold their
newspapers and stare at each other for occupation while the all-powerful
driver and _Wattmann_, climbing down from the opposite ends of the car,
conferred together in the street. "It's waiting for the other tram!" And
even as she said it, she found the clock behind her back had leapt
mysteriously and slyly forward. "I'll take the other...." And, going
downstairs, she stood in the shelter of her doorway, out of the cold
wind that blew along the street. The delay of the other car brought her
well up to her hour. "I'll even be a little late," she thought, proud
of herself.
"Don't talk to the _Wattmann_," said the notices in the tramcar crossly
to her in German as she slipped and slid upon its straining seats.
"Don't spit, don't smoke ... don't...." But she had her revenge, for
across all the notices _her_ side of the war had written coldly: "You
are begged, in the measure possible to you, to talk only French."
When they got into the narrow town the tramcar, mysteriously swelling,
seemed to chip the shop windows and bump the front doors, and people
upon the pavement scrambled between the glass of the tram and the glass
of the big drapery shop.
They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never
know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his
thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you
again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed
than he.
"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at
least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the
vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had
brought them together.
"How lucky...."
"How lucky what?"
How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He
would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't
like it."
Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of
talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just
behind the mask of the face.
"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her
lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for
her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in
advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too
clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she
could not say.
"Of what are you thinking?"
Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like
that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she
said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had
the impression of a whole conversation.
"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that
I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding
inspections to find out."
"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
"Why, of course, of course!"
"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 accumulation.
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
assumption 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 Fanny 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 Saturday 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 Fanny, thinking vaguely.
"Black bombazine," said Reherrey, who had finished his thinking.
Fanny 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 assumed
a special air. Fanny 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 Fanny bought seven yards of white soft stuff at seven
francs a yard.
"White," said Reherrey, with a critical look; "how _English_!"
Fanny 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 Fanny, 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 Saturday. 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 Fanny 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."
The frill flowed on with the beat of the Cathedral clock, and came to an
end.
"Now I must go. It's supper--supper in the garage."
He walked with her almost in silence down the Cathedral steps and to the
door of the house in the dark street by the river.
"You do say good-bye so curiously," he remarked, "so suddenly. Perhaps
it's English."
"Perhaps it is," she agreed, disappearing into the house.
"What have you got there?" said her companions in the lighted room
upstairs.
"My dress for the dance." But she did not open the parcel to show them
the charmed frills. ("How is it they don't know that I left him in the
street below?") She looked at the seven travellers who met each night
round the table for dinner, overcome with the mystery of those
uncommunicating, shrouded heads. "What have they all been doing?"
"Has every one had runs?"
"Yes, every one has been out. What have you been doing?"
"I haven't left Metz to-day," she replied, giddy with the isolation and
the silence of the human mind.