A long table was spread with a white cloth,
with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited
behind the chairs.
"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...
where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles,
there's a jar left from yours."
"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you,
mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your
responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey!
For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is
more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans
yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You
can't? Nor I either...."
"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music
stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in
mud, soaked in eternal rain. "What was I?" thought Fanny in amazement.
"To what had I come, in that black hut!" And she thought that she had
run down to the bottom of living, lain on that hard floor where the poor
lie, known what it was to live as the poor live, in a hole, without
generosity, beauty, or privacy--in a hole, dirty and cold, plain
and coarse.
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