The Happy Foreigner | Page 7

months, till all
November was gone, and all December, and the New Year broke in
fresh torrents of rain.
Fanny made friends all day and lost them again for ever as she passed
on upon the roads. Sometimes it was a sentry beside whom her
"clients" left her for an hour while they inspected a barracks;
sometimes it was an old woman who called from a doorway that she
might come and warm her hands at the fire; sometimes an American
who helped her to change a tyre.

There were times, further up towards Verdun, where there were no old
women, or young women, or villages, when she thought her friends
were mad, deranged, eccentric in their loneliness.
"My sister has a grand piano ..." said one American to her--opening
thus his conversation. But he mused upon it and spoke no further.
"Yes?" she encouraged. "Yes?"
He did not open his mind until she was leaving, when he said simply to
her: "I wish I was back home." And between the two sentences all the
pictures of his home were flowing in his thoughts.
An old woman offered her shelter in a village while her clients were
busy with the mayor. In the kitchen there was a tiny fire of twigs.
American boys stamped in and out of the house, laughing, begging the
daughter to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and
twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at
their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of
children."
"They seem well-mannered."
"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and
good-mannered. But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to
have your house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play
all day in the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our
children come out of school there's no holding them, they must be off
playing with the Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them
home?"
"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure
cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had
fetched from his canteen.

"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want
other people's children always in one's life."
"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village
whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and
ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of
some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped
open disclosing the rusting bones.
"Pardon, madame?"
"What are you doing here?"
"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to
Germany. I have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my
men are discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
"Then this is a park?"
"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other,
when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in
Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor
about her.
She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she
paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it travelled
even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it she could
see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair escaped
from her cap.
A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as
she entered.
"Fanny...."
"What is it?"

"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a
letter.
Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving
the Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen
rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the
land like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living?
They had no inkling.
Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned first
to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
"Of course!"
"There will be things to eat there?"
"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed
from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated
land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that
matter, never been there."
"Then we are going for certain?"
"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the
Headquarters Staff. Pétain is there. It might even be gay."
Fanny