The Happy Foreigner | Page 2

a minute in a doorway she made her bundles faster and buttoned up her coat. Roofs jutted above her, pavements sounded under her feet, the clock struck three near by. If there was an hotel anywhere there was no one to give information about it. The last train had emptied itself, the travellers had hurried off into the night, and not a foot rang upon the pavements. The rain ran in a stream down her cap and on to her face; down her sleeves and on to her hands.
A light further up the street attracted her attention, and walking towards it she found that it came from an open doorway above which she could make out the letters "Y.M.C.A."
She did not know with what complicated feelings she would come to regard these letters--with what gratitude mixed with irritation, self-reproach with greed.
Climbing the steps she looked inside. The hall of the building was paved with stone, and on a couple of dozen summer chairs of cane sat as many American officers, dozing in painful attitudes of unrest. By each ran a stream of water that trickled from his clothes, and the streams, joining each other, formed aimless rivers upon the floor.
The eye of a captain opened.
"Come in, ma'am," he said without moving. She wondered whether she should.
The eye of a lieutenant opened.
"Come in, ma'am," he said, and rose. "Take my chair."
"Could you tell me if there is any hotel?"
"There is some sort of a shanty down the street. I'll take you."
Further up the street a faint light shone under a slit between two boards. There was no door near it, no keyhole or shutter. The American thundered at the boards with a tin of jam which he took out of his pocket. The noise was monstrous in the blackness, but the town had heard noises more monstrous than that, and it lay in a barred and blind, unanswering stupor.
"God!" said the American, quickly angered, and kicked the board till the slit grew larger. The light went out.
"Some one is coming round to the door," said Fanny, in time to prevent the destruction of the board.
Higher up the street bolts were being withdrawn and a light fell upon the pavement.
"Who's there?" creaked a voice. The American moved towards the light.
"The hotel is shut to Americans," said the voice.
"The devil it is," shouted the American. "And why, then?"
"Man killed here last night," said the voice briefly. Fanny moved towards the light and saw an old man with a shawl upon his shoulders, who held a candle fixed in the neck of a bottle.
"I am English," she said to the old man. "I am alone. I want a room alone."
"I've a room ... If you're not American!"
"I don't know what kind of a hole this is," said the American wrathfully. "I think you'd better come right back to the 'Y.' Say, here, what kind of a row was this last night you got a man killed in?"
"Kind of row your countrymen make," muttered the old man, and added "Bandits!"
Soothing, on the one hand, entreating on the other, the girl got rid of her new friend, and effected an entrance into the hotel. ("If hotel it is!" she thought, in the brief passage of a panic while the old man stooped to the bolts of the door.)
"I've got rooms enough," he said, "rooms enough. Now they've gone. Follow me."
She followed his candle flame and he threw open a door upon the ground floor.
"I've no light to give you."
"Yet I must have a light."
Grumbling, he produced half an inch of wax candle.
"Hurry into bed and that will last you. It's all I have."
The bed wore a coloured rug, bare and thin, an eiderdown, damp and musty. Spreading her wet mackintosh on the top she rolled herself up as well as she could, and developing a sort of warmth towards morning, slept an hour or two. The daylight showed her nothing to wash in, no jug, no basin, no bell to pull.
As no one would come to her, as there was nothing to be gained by waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black coffee, sugarless, and two pieces of dry bread.
Yet, having eaten, she was able to think: "I am a soldier of five sous. I am here to drive for the French Army." And her thoughts pleased her so well that, at the moment when her circumstances were in their state of least perfection, she exclaimed: "How right I was to come!" and set off down the street to find her companions.
A mile out of the town upon the banks of a tributary of the Meuse stood a deserted glass factory which had been converted by the French into a