They met, as it were, in the very centre of a conversation. "I never know where you are," he complained, as though this trouble was so in his thoughts that he must speak of it at once, "or when I shall see you again." She smiled radiantly, busier with greeting, less absorbed than he.
"You may go away and never come back. You go so far."
She went away often and far. But that was his trouble, not hers. He, at least, remained stationary in Metz. She was full of another thought--the vagueness, the precariousness of the chance that even in Metz had brought them together.
How lucky? How lucky? He begged, implored, frowned, tried to peer. He would not let her rest. "Why should you hide what you think? I don't like it."
Oh, no, he did not like it. No one likes to get hint of that fountain of talk which, sweet or bitter, plays just out of reach of the ear, just behind the mask of the face.
"How lucky that you held the inspection!" had all but stolen from her lips. But this implied too clearly that it was lucky for somebody--for her, for him. And how could she say that? Her thoughts were so far in advance of her confessions. A dozen sentences rose to her lips, all too clear, too intimate. So she became silent before the things that she could not say.
Extortionate question. ("Am I to put all my fortune in your hand like that? Am I to say, 'Of you, of you'?") For every word she said aloud she said a hundred to herself; and after three words between them she had the impression of a whole conversation.
"One must arrange some plan," he said, pursuing his perplexity, "so that I know when you go, and when you come back. I can't always be holding inspections to find out."
"It was for that _that_ you held the inspection?"
"But entirely to find out?" (divided between the desire to make him say it again and the fear of driving his motives into daylight).
"I didn't know what to do. I couldn't telephone and ask whether your car had returned."
Wonderful and excellent! She had had the notion while she was at Verdun that something might be rolling up to her account in the bank at Metz, and now he was giving her proof after proof of the accumulation.
But from the valley of vanity she suddenly flew up to wonder. "He does that for me!" looking at herself in the mirror of her mind. "He does it for me!" But of what use to look at the daylight image of herself--the khaki figure, the driver? "For he must be looking at glory as I do." The Russian said: "Love is an illusory image." "Isn't it strange how these human creatures can cast it like a net out of their personality?..." Vanity, creeping above love, beat it down like a stick beats down a fire; it was too easy to-day; he gave her nothing left to wish for; the spell over him, she felt, was complete, and now she had nothing else to do but develop her own. And this she had instantly less inclination to do. But, guided by his bright wits, he too withdrew, let the tacit assumption of intimacy drop between them, and their walk by the Moselle was filled by her talk of the Russian prisoners and Verdun.