And a market woman came, who had arms like a wrestler
and skirts that stuck out like a ballet dancer's; and a soldier
in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty others of all ages
and sizes came - and they gathered about that small boy and gave
him advice at the top of their voices. And when he yanked out
the shining little silver fish there could not have been more
animation and enthusiasm and excitement if he had landed a full-grown
Presbyterian.
They were still congratulating him when we pulled out and went
tearing along on our way to Paris, scooting through quaint,
stone-walled cities, each one dominated by its crumbly old cathedral;
sliding through open country where the fields were all diked and
ditched with small canals and bordered with poplars trimmed so
that each tree looked like a set of undertaker's whiskers pointing
the wrong way.
And in these fields were peasants in sabots at work, looking as
though they had just stepped out of one of Millet's pictures.
Even the haystacks and the scarecrows were different. In England
the haystacks had been geometrically correct in their dimensions
- so square and firm and exact that sections might be sliced off
them like cheese, and doors and windows might be carved in them;
but these French haystacks were devil-may-care haystacks wearing
tufts on their polls like headdresses. The windmills had a rakish
air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens were debonair and
cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the better to enjoy
the view and fluttering their ragged vestments in a most jaunty
fashion. The land though looked poor - it had a driven, overworked
look to it.
Presently, above the clacking voice of our train, we heard a whining
roar without; and peering forth we beheld almost over our heads a
big monoplane racing with us. It seemed a mighty, winged Thunder
Lizard that had come back to link the Age of Stone with the Age
of Air. On second thought I am inclined to believe the Thunder
Lizard did not flourish in the Stone Age; but if you like the
simile as much as I like it we will just let it stand.
Three times on that trip we saw from the windows of our train
aviators out enjoying the cool of the evening in their airships;
and each time the natives among the passengers jammed into the
passageway that flanked the compartments and speculated regarding
the identity of the aviators and the make of their machines, and
argued and shrugged their shoulders and quarreled and gesticulated.
The whole thing was as Frenchy as tripe in a casserole.
I was wrong, though, a minute ago when I said there remained nothing
to remind us of the right little, tight little island we had just
quit; for we had two Englishmen in our compartment - fit and proper
representatives of a certain breed of Englishman. They were tall
and lean, and had the languid eyes and the long, weary faces and
the yellow buck teeth of weary cart-horses, and they each wore a
fixed expression of intense gloom. You felt sure it was a fixed
expression because any person with such an expression would change
it if he could do so by anything short of a surgical operation.
And it was quite evident they had come mentally prepared to
disapprove of all things and all people in a foreign clime.
Silently, but none the less forcibly, they resented the circumstance
that others should be sharing the same compartment with them - or
sharing the same train, either, for that matter. The compartment
was full, too, which made the situation all the more intolerable:
an elderly English lady with a placid face under a mid-Victorian
bonnet; a young, pretty woman who was either English or American;
the two members of my party, and these two Englishmen.
And when, just as the train was drawing out of Calais, they
discovered that the best two seats, which they had promptly
preempted, belonged to others, and that the seats for which they
held reservations faced rearward, so that they must ride with their
backs to the locomotive - why, that irked them sore and more. I
imagine they wrote a letter to the London Times about it afterward.
As is the pleasing habit of traveling Englishmen, they had brought
with them everything portable they owned. Each one had four or
five large handbags, and a carryall, and a hat box, and his
tea-caddy, and his plaid blanket done up in a shawlstrap, and his
framed picture of the Death of Nelson - and all the rest of it; and
they piled those things in the luggage racks until both the racks
were chock-full; so the rest of us had to hold our baggage in our
laps or sit on it. One of them was facing me not more than five
or six feet distant. He never saw me though. He just gazed
steadily through me, studying the pattern of the upholstery on the
seat behind me; and I could tell by his look that he did not care
for the upholstering - as very naturally he would not, it being
French.
We had traveled together thus for some hours when one of them began
to cloud up for a sneeze. He tried to sidetrack it, but it would
not be sidetracked. The rest of us, looking on, seemed to hear
that sneeze coming from a long way off. It reminded me of a
musical-sketch team giving an imitation of a brass band marching
down Main Street playing the Turkish Patrol - dim and faint at
first, you know, and then growing louder and stronger, and gathering
volume until it bursts right in your face.
