The Happy Foreigner Part 43

Before the locked gates of the garage the _brigadier_ lounged smoking his little, dry cigarettes.

"We are on fire," he said, pointing up the street at the mountain. "What an evening!"

"Yes, and my last!" she said. "Oh, may I have the key of the garage?"

"But you've given up the car."

"Yes, I have, but--after to-morrow I shall never use your petrol again!

And there are my bags to be taken to the station. Ah, let me have the key!"

He gave her the key.

"Don't be long then. Yet I shall be gone in a few minutes. When you come in hang the key on the nail in the office."

Once more she wound up the Renault, drove from the garage, regained the Rue de Cleves, and saw Julien leaning from her window sill.

"Come down, come down!" she called up to him, and realised that it would have been better to have made her revelation to him before they started on this journey. For now he was staring at the mountains in an absorbed excited fas.h.i.+on, and she would have to check his flow of spirits, spoil their companionable gaiety, and precipitate such heavy thoughts upon him as might, she guessed, spread to herself. Between his disappearance from the window and the opening of the street door she had a second in which to fight with her disinclination.

"And yet, if I've neglected to tell him in the room," she argued, "I can't tell him in the street!"

For looking up she saw, as she expected, the deep eyes of the _concierge_ watching her as impersonally as the mountains watched the town.

"There'll come a moment," she said to herself as the street door opened and he joined her and climbed into the car, "when it'll come of itself, when it will be easy and natural."

By back streets they left the town, and soon upon the step road had climbed through the belt of trees and out on to bare slopes.

As they wound up the mountain, sitting so dose together, she felt how familiar his company was to her, and how familiar his silence. Their thoughts, running together, would meet presently, as they had often met, at the juncture when his hand was laid upon hers at the wheel: But when he spoke he startled her.

"How long has the railway been extended to Charleville?"

"A fortnight," she answered upon reflection.

"How about the big stone bridge on this side? The railway bridge?"

"Why that lies at the bottom of the river as usual."

"And haven't they replaced it yet by a wooden one?"

"No, not yet."

"And no one is even working there?"

"I haven't been there lately," she answered. "Maybe they are by now. Is it your railway to Revin you are thinking of?"

He was fingering his big note book.

"I can't start anything till the railway runs," he answered, tapping on the book, "but when it runs--I'll show you when we get up there."

They came to a quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its shaking holes.

"You see," he said, pursuing his thought, "lorries wouldn't do here.

They'd sink."

"They would," she agreed, and found that his innocence of her secret locked her words more tightly in her throat. Far above, from an iron peak, the light of the heavy sun was slipping. Beneath it they ran in shadow, through rock and moss. Before the light had gone they had reached the first crest and drew up for a moment at a movement of his hand.

Looking back to Charleville, he said, "See where the river winds. The railway crosses it three times. Can we see from here if the bridges are all down?" And he stood up and, steadying himself upon her shoulder, peered down at Charleville, to where man lived in the valleys. But though the slopes ahead of them were still alight, depths, distance, the crowding and thickening of twilight in the hollows behind them offered no detail.

"I fear they are," she said, gazing with him. "I think they are. I think I can remember that they are."

Soon they would be at the top of the long descent on Revins. Should she tell him, he who sat so close, so unsuspecting? An arrowy temptation shot through her mind.

"Is it possible--Why not write a letter when he is gone!"

She saw its beauty, its advantages, and she played with it like someone who knew where to find strength to withstand it.

"He is so happy, so gay," urged the voice, "so full of his plans! And you have left it so late. How painful now, just as he is going, to bid him think: 'I will never see her face again!'"

(How close he sat beside her! How close her secret sat within her!)

"Think how it is with you," pursued the tempting voice. "It is hard to part from a face, but not so hard to part from the writer of a letter."

Over the next crest the Belgian Ardennes showed blue and dim in the distance.

"Stop!" he said, holding up his hand again.

They were on the top of a high plateau; she drew up. A large bird with red under its wings flapped out and hung in the air over the precipice.

"See--the Meuse!" he said. "See, on its banks, do you see down there?

Come to the edge."

Hundreds of feet below lay a ribbon-loop of dark, unstirring water. They stood at the edge of the rock looking down together. She saw he was excited. His usually pale face was flushed.

"Do you see down there, do you see in this light--a village?"

She could see well enough a village.

"That's Revins. And those dark dots beyond----"

"I see them."

"My factories. Before the summer you'll see smoke down there! They are partially destroyed. One can't see well, one can't see how much--"

"Julien!"

"Yes?"

"Have you never been back? Have you never seen what's happened?"

She had not guessed this: she was not prepared for this. This was the secret, then of his absorption.