The Happy Foreigner | Page 3

garage for a fleet of thirty cars. Above the garage was a large attic used as a dormitory for the mechanics, soldier-cooks, drivers and clerks. In a smaller room at the end slept the non-commissioned officers--the brigadier and the two maréchaux des logis.
A hundred yards from the factory, built upon the brink of the stream which was now in flood, and reached from the road by a narrow wooden bridge, stood a tarred hut of wood and tarpaulin. It was built upon simple lines. A narrow corridor ran down the centre of it, and on either hand were four square cells divided one from the other by grey paper stretched upon laths of wood--making eight in all. At one end was a small hall filled with mackintoshes. At the other a sitting-room.
This was the home of the women drivers attached to the garage. In one of these paper cells, henceforward to be her own, Fanny set up her intimate life.
* * * * *
Outside the black hut the jet-black night poured water down. Inside, the eight cubicles held each a woman, a bed, and a hurricane lantern. Fanny, in her paper box, listened to the scratching of a pen next door, then turned her eyes as a new and nearer scratching caught her ear. A bright-eyed rat stared at her through the hole it had made in the wall.
"Food is in!"
Out of the boxes came the eight women to eat pieces of dark meat from a tin set on the top of the sitting-room stove--then cheese and bread. The watery night turned into sleet and rattled like tin-foil on the panes.
"Where is Stewart?"
"She is not back yet."
Soon the eight crept back to their boxes and sat again by the lamps to read or darn or write. They lived so close to each other that even the most genial had learnt to care for solitude, and the sitting-room remained empty.
The noise of Stewart's feet sounded in the corridor. She swung a lantern in her hand; her face was shining, her hair streaming.
"Is there any food?"
"It's on the stove."
"Is it eatable?"
"No."
Silence for a while, and then one by one they crept out into the black mud beyond the hut to fill their cans with hot water from the cook-house--and so to bed, on stretchers slung on trestles, where those who did not sleep listened through the long night to those who slept too well.
"Are you awake?" came with the daylight. "Ah, you are washing! You are doing your hair!" There was no privacy.
"How cold, how cold the water, is!..." sighed Fanny, And a voice through the paper wall, catching the shivering whisper, exclaimed: "Use your hot-water bottle!"
"What for?"
"Empty it into your basin. If you have kept it in your bed all night you will find the water has the chill off."
Those who had to be out early had left before the daylight, still with their lanterns swinging in their hands; had battled with the cold cars in the unlighted garage, and were moving alone across the long desert of the battlefields.
On the first morning she was tested on an old ambulance, and passed the test. On the second morning she got her first run upon a Charron car that had been assigned to her.
Driving into Bar-le-Duc in the early morning under a grey flood of rain she asked of a passer-by, "Which is the Rue Thierry?" She got no answer. The French, too poor and wet, did not trouble to reply; the Americans did not know. As she drove along at the side of the road there came a roar out of the distance, and a stream of American lorries thundered down the street. Men, women and children ran for their lives to gain the pavements, as the lorries passed, a mud-spout covered Fanny's face and hands, and dripped from her windscreen.
"Why do they drive like that?" she wondered, hunting blindly for her handkerchief, and mopping at her face. She thought there must be some desperate need calling for the lorries, and looked after them with respect.
When she had found her street, and fetched her "client," she drove at his order to Souilly, upon the great road to Verdun. And all day, calling at little villages upon the way, where he had business, she drove with the caution of the newcomer. It seemed to her that she had need for caution. She saw a Ford roll over, leave the road, and drop into the ditch. The wild American who had driven it to its death, pulled himself up upon the road, and limping, hailed a passing lorry, and went upon his way.
She saw a horse gallop out of a camp with a terrified Annamite upon its back. Horse and Annamite shot past her on the road, the yellow man's eyes popping from