Between the grey walls of its bath—so like its cradle and its coffin—lay one of those small and lonely creatures which inhabit the surface of the earth for seventy years.

As on every other evening the sun was sinking and the moon, unseen, was rising.

The round head of flesh and bone floated upon the deep water of the bath.

"Why should I move?" rolled its thoughts, bewitched by solitude. "The earth itself is moving.

"Summer and winter and winter and summer I have travelled in my head, saying—'All secrets, all wonders, lie within the breast!' But now that is at an end, and to-morrow I go upon a journey.

"I have been accustomed to finding something in nothing—how do I know if I am equipped for a larger horizon!…"

And suddenly the little creature chanted aloud:—

"The strange things of travel,
The East and the West,
The hill beyond the hill,—
They lie within the breast!"

PART I

THE BLACK HUT AT BAR

CHAPTER I

THE TRAVELLER

The war had stopped.

The King of England was in Paris, and the President of the United States was hourly expected.

Humbler guests poured each night from the termini into the overflowing city, and sought anxiously for some bed, lounge-chair, or pillowed corner, in which to rest until the morning. Stretched upon the table in a branch of the Y.W.C.A. lay a young woman from England whose clothes were of brand-new khaki, and whose name was Fanny.

She had arrived that night at the Gare du Nord at eight o'clock, and the following night at eight o'clock she left Paris by the Gare de l'Est.

Just as she entered the station a small boy with a basket of violets for sale held a bunch to her face.

"No, thank you."

He pursued her and held it against her chin.

"No, thank you."

"But I give it to you! I give it to you!"

As she had neither slept on the boat from Southampton nor on the table of the Y.W.C.A., tears of pleasure came into her eyes as she took them. But while she dragged her heavy kitbag and her suitcase across the platform another boy of a different spirit ran beside her.

"Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle! Wait a minute…" he panted.

"Well?"

"Haven't you heard … haven't you heard! The war is over!"

She continued to drag the weighty sack behind her over the platform.
"She didn't know!" howled the wicked boy. "No one had told her!"

And in the train which carried her towards the dead of night the taunt and the violets accompanied her.

At half-past two in the morning she reached the station of Bar-le-Duc. The rain rattled down through the broken roof as she crossed the lines of the platform on the further side, where, vaguely expecting to be met she questioned civilians and military police. But the pall of death that hung over Bar stretched even to the station, where nobody knew anything, expected anything, cared anything, except to hurry out and away into the rain.

She, too, followed at last, leaving her bag and box in the corner of a deserted office, and crossing the station yard tramped out in the thick mud on to a bridge. The rain was falling in torrents, and crouching for 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 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 his head, his body slipping, falling, falling. When she would have slowed the car to watch the end of the flight her client cried to her: "Why do you wait?"

Enormous American guns, trailed behind lorries driven by pink-faced boys swayed from side to side on the greasy road, and threatened to crush her like an egg-shell.

Everywhere she saw a wild disregard for life, everywhere she winced before the menace of speed, of weight, of thundering metal.

In the late afternoon, returning home in the half-light, she overtook a convoy of lorries driven by Annamites.

Hooting with her horn she crept past three lorries and drew abreast of the fourth; then, misjudging, she let the tip of her low mudguard touch the front wheel of the foremost lorry. The touch was so slight that she had passed on, but at a cry she drew up and looked back. The lorry which she had touched was overhanging the edge of the road, and its radiator, striking a tree, had dropped down into the valley below. Climbing from her car she ran back and was instantly surrounded by a crowd of Annamites who chirped and twittered at her, and wrung their little hands.

"What can I do?…" she said to them aloud, in distress.

But they understood nothing, and seemed to echo in their strange bird language, "What can we do … what can we do?…" ("And I…" she thought in consternation, "am responsible for this!")

But the last lorry had drawn alongside, and a French sergeant descended from it and joined the Annamites. He walked to the edge of the road, saw the radiator below upon a rock, and shrugged his shoulders. Catching sight of Fanny's face of horror he laughed.

"Ne vous en faÎtes pas, mademoiselle! These poor devils sleep as they drive. Yes, even with their eyes open. We started nine this morning. We were four when we met you—and now we are three!"

On the third morning the rain stopped for an hour or two. Fanny had no run till the afternoon, and going into the garage in the morning she set to work on her car.

"Where can I get water?" she asked a man.

"The pump is broken," he replied. "I backed my car against it last night. But there is a tap by that broken wall on the piece of waste ground."

She crossed to the wall with her bucket.

Standing upon the waste ground was an old, closed limousine whose engine had long been injured past repair. One of the glass windows was broken, but it was as roomy and comfortable as a first-class railway carriage, and the men often sat in it in a spare moment.

The yard cleared suddenly for the eleven o'clock meal. As Fanny passed the limousine a man appeared at the broken window and beckoned to her. His face was white, and he wore his shirt, trousers, and braces. She stopped short with the bucket in her hand.

"On est delivrÉ de cette bande!" he said, pointing to the yard, and she went a little nearer.

"Wait till I get my coat on," he said softly to her, and struggled into his coat.

He put both his hands on the window ledge, leant towards her, and said clearly: "Je suis le prÉsident Wilson."

"You are the President Wilson," she echoed, hunting for the joke, and willing to smile. He passed her out his water-bottle and a tin box. "You must fill these for me," he said. "Fill the bottle with wine, and get me bread and meat. Be quick. You know I must be off. The King expects me."

Where have you come from?"

"I slept here last night. I have come far. But I must be quick now, for it's late, and … I believe in Freedom!" he finished emphatically.

"Well, will you wait till I have made you up a parcel of food?"

"Only be quick."

"Will you wait in the car? Promise to wait!"

"Yes. Be quick. Look sharp."

She put down her bucket and stretched up her hand for the bottle and the box. He held them above her a second, hesitating, then put them into her hand. She turned from him and went back into the yard. As she approached the door of the room where the men sat eating she looked round and saw that he was watching her intently. She waved once, soothingly, then slipped into the long room filled with the hum of voices and the smell of gravy.

"There is a poor madman in the yard," she whispered to the man nearest her. The others looked up.

"They've lost a man from the asylum. I heard in the town this morning," said one. "We must keep him here till we telephone. Have you told the brigadier, mademoiselle?"

"You tell him. I'll go back and talk to the man. Ask the brigadier to telephone."

"I'll come with you, mademoiselle," said another. "Where is he?"

"In the old limousine by the water tap. He is quiet. Don't frighten him by coming all together." Chairs and benches were pushed back, and the men stood up in groups.

"We will go round by the gate in case he makes a run for it. Better not use force if one can help it…."

Fanny and her companion went out to the car. "Where is my food and wine?" called the man.

"It's coming," answered Fanny, "they are doing it up in the kitchen."

"Well, I can't wait. I must go without it. I can't keep the King waiting." And he opened the door of the limousine. As he stood on the step he held a bundle of rusty weapons.

"What's that you've got?"

"Bosche daggers," he said. "See!" He held one towards her, without letting it go from his hand.

"Where did you find those?"

"On the battlefields." He climbed down the steps.

"Stay a moment," said Fanny. "I'm in a difficulty. Will you help me?"

"What's that? But I've no time…."

"Do you know about cars?"

"I was in the trade," he nodded his head.

"I have trouble … I cannot tell what to do. Will you come and see?"

"If it's a matter of a moment. But I must be away."

"If you leave all those things in the car you could fetch them as you go," suggested Fanny, eyeing the daggers.

The man whistled and screwed up one eye. "When one believes in Freedom one must go armed," he said. "Show me the car."

Going with her to the car-shed he looked at the spark-plugs of the car, at her suggestion unscrewing three from their seatings. At the fourth he grew tired, and said fretfully: "Now I must be off. You know I must. The King expects me."

He walked to the gate of the yard, and she saw the men behind the gate about to close on him. "You're not wearing your decorations!" she called after him. He stopped, looked down, looked a little troubled.

She took the gilt safety pin from her tie, the safety pin that held her collar to her blouse at the back, and another from the back of her skirt, and pinned them along his poor coat. An ambulance drove quickly into the yard, and three men, descending from it, hurried towards them. At sight of them the poor madman grew frantic, and turning upon Fanny he cried: "You are against me!" then ran across the yard. She shut her eyes that she might not see them hunt the lover of freedom, and only opened them when a man cried in triumph: "We'll take you to the King!"

"Pauvre malheureux!" muttered the drivers in the yard.

Day followed day and there was plenty of work. Officers had to be driven upon rounds of two hundred kilometres a day—interviewing mayors of ruined villages, listening to claims, assessing damage caused by French troops in billets. Others inspected distant motor parks. Others made offers to purchase old iron among the villages in order to prove thefts from the battlefields.

The early start at dawn, the flying miles, the winter dusk, the long hours of travel by the faint light of the acetylene lamps filled day after day; the unsavoury meal eaten alone by the stove, the book read alone in the cubicle, the fitful sleep upon the stretcher, filled night after night.

A loneliness beyond anything she had ever known settled upon Fanny. She found comfort in a look, a cry, a whistle. The smiles of strange men upon the road whom she would never see again became her social intercourse. The lost smiles of kind Americans, the lost, mocking whistles of Frenchmen, the scream of a nigger, the twittering surprise of a Chinese scavenger.

Yet she was glad to have come, for half the world was here. There could have been nothing like it since the Tower of Babel. The country around her was a vast tract of men sick with longing for the four corners of the earth.

"Have you got to be here?" asked an American.

"No, I wanted to come."

The eye of the American said "Fool!"

"Are you paid to come here?" asked a Frenchman.

"No. In a sense, I pay to come." The eye of the Frenchman said,
"Englishwoman!"

Each day she drove in a wash of rain. Each night she returned long after dark, and putting her car in the garage, felt her way up the inky road by the rushing of the river at its edge, crossed the wooden bridge, and entered the cell which she tried to make her personal haven.

But if personal, it was the personality of a dog; it had the character of a kennel. She had brought no furnishings with her from England; she could buy nothing in the town. The wooden floor was swamped by the rain which blew through the window; the paper on the walls was torn by rats; tarry drops from the roof had fallen upon her unmade bed.

The sight of this bed caused her a nightly dismay. "Oh, if I could but make it in the morning how different this room would look!"

There would be no one in the sitting-room, but a tin would stand on the stove with one, two, or three pieces of meat in it. By this she knew whether the cubicles were full or if one or two were empty. Sometimes the coffee jug would rise too lightly from the floor as she lifted it, and in an angry voice she would call through the hut: "There is no coffee!" Silence, silence; till a voice, goaded by the silence, cried: "Ask Madeleine!"

And Madeleine, the little maid, had long since gone over to laugh with the men in the garage.

Then came the owners of the second and third piece of meat, stumbling across the bridge and up the corridor, lantern in hand. And Fanny, perhaps remembering a treasure left in her car, would rise, leave them to eat, feel her way to the garage, and back again to the safety of her room with a tin of sweetened condensed milk under her arm. So low in comfort had she sunk it needed but this to make her happy. She had never known so sharp, so sweet a sense of luxury as that with which she prepared the delicacy she had seized by her own cunning. It had not taken her long to learn the possibilities of the American Y.M.C.A., the branch in Bar, or any other which she might pass in her travels.

Shameless she was as she leant upon the counter in some distant village, cajoling, persuading, spinning some tale of want and necessity more picturesque, though no less actual, than her own. Secret, too, lest one of her companions, over-eager, should spoil her hunting ground.

Sitting with her leather coat over her shoulders, happy in her solitude, she would drink the cup of Benger's Food which she had made from the milk, and when it was finished, slide lower among the rugs, put out the lights, and listen to the rustle of the rats in the wall.

"Mary Bell is getting married," said a clear voice in the hut.

"To the Wykely boy?" answered a second voice, and in a sudden need of sound the two voices talked on, while the six listeners upon their stretchers saw in the dark the life and happiness of Mary Bell blossom before them, unknown and bright.

The alarm clock went off with a scream at five.

"Why, I've hardly been asleep!" sighed Fanny, bewildered, and, getting up, she lit the lamp and made her coffee. Again there was not time to make the bed. Though fresh to the work she believed that she had been there for ever, yet the women with whom she shared her life had driven the roads of the Meuse district for months before she came to them, and their eyes were dim with peering into the dark nights, and they were tired past any sense of adventure, past any wish or power to better their condition.

On and on and on rolled the days, and though one might add them together and make them seven, they never made Sunday. For there is no Sunday in the French Army, there is no bell at which tools are laid aside, and not even the night is sacred.

On and on rolled the weeks, and the weeks made 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 laughed. "Gay!"

"Why not?"

"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."

"You have silk stockings with you!"

"Yes, I … I am equipped for anything."

There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and Fanny, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any one had lived there so long.