THE THREE "CLIENTS"
"What!" cried Fanny on Monday morning, staring at the _brigadier_ and at
the pink paper he offered her.
"At once, at once, mademoiselle. You ought to have been told last night.
You must go back for your things for the night and then as quickly as
you can to the Hôtel de l'Europe. I don't know how many days you'll be,
but here is an order for fifty litres of petrol and a can of oil, and
Pichot is getting you two spare tubes...."
She stared at him in horror a moment longer, then took the pink order
and disappeared through the dark garage door. Her mind was in a frenzy
of protestation. She saw the waiting cars which might have gone instead,
the drivers polishing a patch of brass for want of something to do, and
accident, pure accident, had lighted on _her_, to sweep _her_ out of
Metz, away from that luminous personality which brooded over the city
like a sunset, out into the nondescript world, the cold _Anywhere_.
White frills and yards of bleached calico lying at the dressmaker's
cried out to her to stay, to make some protest, to say something,
anything--that she was ill--and stay.
She splashed petrol wastefully into the tank, holding the small blue
tin with firm hands high in the air above the leather strainer and
the funnel.
"And if I said--(it is mad)--if I said, 'I am in love. _I can't go_.
Send some one who is not in love!'" She glanced down from her perch on
the footboard at the olive profile bent over the next car. The driver
was sitting on his step with his open hand outstretched to hold a dozen
bright washers which he was stirring with his forefinger. The hand with
the washers sank gently to rest on his knee, and he sighed as he ceased
stirring, and looked absently down the garage, his mystical cloak of
bone and skin shrouding his thoughts. Idle men all down the garage hung
about the cars, each holding within him some private affection, some
close hope, something which sent a spurt of dubious song out of his
mouth, or his eyes, wandering sightless, down the shed.
The tank, resenting her treatment, overflowed violently and drenched her
skirt and feet.
"Are you ready, mademoiselle?"
"Coming. Where are the tubes?"
"I have them."
She drove through the yard, down the street, and hurried over the bridge
to her room. Nightgown, toothbrush, comb, sponge, and powder--hating
every hour of the days and nights her preparations meant.
At the Hôtel de l'Europe, three men waited for her with frowns, loaded
with plaid rugs, mufflers, black bags, and gaping baskets of food, from
which protruded bottles of wine. It was, then, to be one of those days
when they lunched by the wayside in the bitter cold.
She drew up beside them. A huge man with an unclean bearskin coat and
flaccid red cheeks told her she was very late. She listened, apologising,
but intent only on her question.
"And could you tell me--(I'm so dreadfully sorry, but they only told me
very late at the garage)--and would you mind telling me which day you
expect to get back?"
He turned to the others.
"It depends," said a dry, dark man with a look of rebuke, "on our work.
To-morrow night, perhaps. Perhaps the next morning."
"Where shall I drive you?"
"Go out by Thionville. We are going up the Moselle to Trèves."
Anxious to dispose of such a mountain of a man, it was suggested that
the Bearskin should climb in beside the driver. Instantly Fanny was
smothered up as he sat down, placing so many packages between himself
and the outer side of the car that he sank heavily against her arm, and
the fur of his coat blew into her mouth.
In discomfort she drove them from the town, brooding over her wheel,
unhappily on and on till Metz had sunk over the edge of the flat
horizon. The weary way to Thionville unfurled before them, furnaces to
the left and flat grass prairie to the right--little villages and
clustering houses went by them, and Thionville itself, with its
tramlines and faint air of Manchester, drew near. Beyond Thionville the
road changed colour abruptly, and stretched red and gravelly before
them. The frost deepened, the wheels bit harder on the road surface, the
grass-fields sparkled with a brittle light, and scanty winter orchards
sprang up beside the road, which narrowed down and became a lane of
beautiful surface. Not for long, however, for the surface changed again,
and long hours set in when the car had to be held desperately with foot
and hand brake to save the springs, and the accelerator could only be
touched to be relinquished.
Fanny, hardly sad any more, but busy and hungry, secretly lifted the
corner of her sleeve to peer at her wrist-watch, and seeing that it was
half-past twelve, began to wonder how soon they would decide to sit down
by the roadside for their lunch. She fumbled in the pocket of the car,
but the last piece of chocolate had either been eaten or had slipped
down between the leather and the wood. She could bring up nothing better
than an old postcard, a hairpin, and a forgotten scrap of
chamois-leather.
At last they stopped for lunch, choosing a spot where a hedge rose
wirily against the midday sky, and spread the rugs on the frozen grass.
The sudden cessation of movement and noise brought a stillness into the
landscape; a child's voice startled them from the outskirts of a village
beyond, and the crackle of a wheelbarrow that was being driven along
the dry road.
The third man, who had blackberry eyes, and glasses which enlarged them,
made great preparations over the setting of the meal. They had forgotten
nothing. When they sat down, the Bearskin upon the step of the motor,
the others cross-legged upon the ground, each man had a napkin as big as
a sheet spread across the surface of his coat and waistcoat, and tied
into the band of the overcoat at the side. Bottles of red wine, and a
bottle of white to finish with, lay on a cloth spread upon the grass.
Bread, cheese, sausage, _pâté_, and a slab of chocolate; knives, forks
and a china cup apiece. Fanny, who had taken her own uneatable lunch
from the garage, was made to eat some of theirs. They were on a high,
dry, open plateau of land, and the winter sun, not strong enough to
break the frost, faintly warmed their necks and hands and the round
bodies of the bottles.
It was not unpleasant sitting there with the three white-chested
strangers, watching the sky through the prongs of the bare hedge,
spreading _pâté_ on to fresh bread, and balancing her cup half full of
red wine among the fibres and roots of the grass.
"Now that I have started I am well on my way to getting back," she
thought, and found that within her breast the black despair of the
morning had melted. She watched her companions for amusement.
The Bearskin, cumbrous, high-coloured, and blue-eyed, looked like an
innkeeper in an English tavern. When he took off his cloth hood she
thought she had never seen anything so staring as the pink of his face
against the blue of his cap; but when the cap came off too for a second
that he might stir his forehead with his finger, the blaze and crackle
of his red hair beneath was even more ferocious. Yet he seemed
intimidated by his companions, and kept silence, eating meekly from his
knife, and spreading his napkin with care to the edge of his knees.
The little man with warm black eyes and the colder, thinner man talked
appreciatively together.
"_Hé!_ The _pâté_ is not bad."
"Not bad at all. And you haven't tried the cheese?"
"No, no. I never touch cheese before the wine; it's a sin. Now the
bottle is all warmed. Try some."
"What is your father?" said the little man suddenly to Fanny.
"He is in the army."
"You have no brother--no one to take care of you?"
"You mean, because I come out here? But in England they don't mind; they
think it interesting for us."
"Tiens!"
They obviously did not believe her, and turned to other subjects. But
the Bearskin began to move uncomfortably on the step of the car, and,
bending forward to attract their attention, he burst out:
"But, don't you know, mademoiselle is not paid!"
The others reconsidered her.
"How do you live then, mademoiselle? You have means of your own? You do
not buy your clothes yourself? Your Government gives you those, and that
fine leather coat?"
"I bought it myself," said Fanny, and caused a sensation.
Immediately they put out their delicate hands, and fingers that loved to
appraise, to feel the leather on the lapel.
"How soft! We have no leather now like that in France! How much did that
cost? No, let me guess! You never paid a sou less than--Well, how much?"
The Bearskin, who had sat beside her all the morning, and had now turned
her into an object of interest, took a pride in Fanny.
"The English upbringing is very interesting," he said, pushing back his
cap and letting out the flame of his hair. "The young ladies become very
serious. I have been in England. I have been in Balham."
But though, owing to the leather coat, the others seemed to consider
that they had an heiress amongst them, they would not let the big
Bearskin be her _impresario_ or their instructor.
"Divorce is very easy in England," said the thin man solemnly, and
turned his shoulder slightly on the Bearskin, as though he blamed him
for his stay in Balham.
When the lunch was over and the last fragment of _pâté_ drawn off the
last knife upon the crust of bread that remained, Fanny's restless hopes
turned towards packing up; but she counted without the white wine and
the national repose after the midday meal. They washed their cups with
care under the outlet tap of the radiator, and, wiping them dry to the
last corner, sat back under the hedge to drink slowly.
All this time a peculiar quality had been drawing across the sun. It
grew redder and duller, till, blushing, it died out, and Fanny saw that
the morning frost had disappeared. Out to the left a mauve bank of cloud
moved up across the sky like the smoke from a titanic bonfire, and, with
the first drift of moisture towards them, the four shivered and rose
simultaneously to pack the things and put them in the car.
As Fanny stooped to wind up the handle the first snowflake, soft and wet
and heavy, melted on her ear.
"It won't lie," said the Bearskin. "Shall we draw up the hood?"
They drew it up, but the thin man, huddling himself in the corner of the
back seat, insisted on "side-curtains as well."
"Then I'm sorry. Will you get out? They are under the seat."
"Oh, never mind, my dear fellow," said Blackberry-Eyes.
"No, no. One ought to keep the warmth of food within one."
And the other got out, and stood shivering while the Bearskin and Fanny
pulled rugs and baskets and cushions out into the road that they might
lift the back seat and find the curtains.
"Oh, how torn!" exclaimed the thin man bitterly, as he saw her drape the
car with leather curtains whose windows of mica had long since been
cracked and torn away. The snow was hissing on the radiator and melting
on the road, and there seemed no wind left anywhere to drive the weight
of the mauve cloud further across the sky. It hung solid and low above
them, so that between the surface of the earth and the floor of the sky
there was only a foggy tunnel in which the road could be seen a few
yards ahead.
As they drove forward the windscreen became filmed with melting snow.
Fanny unscrewed it and tilted it open, and the Bearskin fumbled unhappily
at his collar to close every chink and cranny in his mossy hide.
They were climbing higher and higher across an endless plateau, and at
last a voice called from the back, "We must look at the map." It was a
voice of doubt and distrust that any road could be right road which
held so much discomfort.
Fanny stopped and pulled her map from behind her back, where she was
keeping it dry. "It's all right," she showed them, leaning over the back
and holding the map towards them. Then she discovered that the back seat
was empty, and her clients were huddled among the petrol tins and rugs
upon the floor.
"You must be miserable! It's so much colder in the back. See, here's the
big road that we must avoid, going off into Luxembourg, and here's ours,
running downhill in another mile."
They believed her, being too cramped and miserable to take more than a
querulous interest. In another half-hour the snow ceased, and as they
glided down the long hill on the other side of the plateau in a bed of
fresh, unruffled wool, the sun struck out with a suddenness that seemed
to tear the sky in two, and turned the blue snow into a sheet of light
which stretched far below them into a country of pine woods and pits of
shadow. Down, down they ran, till just below lay a village--if village
it was when only a house or two were gathered together for company in
the forest.
The snow seemed to have lain here for days, for the car slipped and
skidded at the steep entrance, where the boys of the village had made
slides for their toboggans. A hundred feet from the first house a
triumphal arch was built of pine and laurel across the road. On it was
written in white letters "Soyez le Bienvenu." All the white poor houses
glittered in the snow with flags.
A stream crossed the village street, and a file of geese on its narrow
bridge brought her to a standstill.
"What are the flags for?" she asked of an old man, pressing back into a
safety alcove in the stone wall of the bridge.
"We expect Pétain here to-day. He is coming to Thionville."
"But Thionville is forty miles away--"
"Still, he might pass here--"
Running on and on through forest and hilly country, they left the snow
behind them, and slipped down into greener valleys, till at last they
came upon a single American sentry, and over his head was chalked upon a
board: "This is Germany."
They pulled up. Germany it might be--but the road to Tréves? He did not
know; he knew nothing, except that with his left foot he stood in
Germany, and with his right in France.