Gone were the incredible stiffness and the incurable honesty of
the race that belonged over yonder on those white chalk cliffs
dimly visible along the horizon. Gone were the phlegm and stolidity
of those people who manifest emotion only on the occasions when
they stand up to sing their national anthem:
God save the King!
The Queen is doing well!
Gone were the green fields of Sussex, which looked as though they
had been taken in every night and brushed and dry-cleaned and then
put down again in the morning. Gone were the trees that Maxfield
Parrish might have painted, so vivid were they in their burnished
green-and-yellow coloring, so spectacular in their grouping.
Gone was the five-franc note which I had intrusted to a sandwich
vender on the railroad platform in the vain hope that he would
come back with the change. After that clincher there was no doubt
about it - we were in La Belle France all right, all right!
Everything testified to the change. From the pier where we landed,
a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was
fishing; he hooked a little fingerling. At the first tentative
tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor. At that there came
running a fat, kindly looking old priest in a long gown and a
shovel hat; 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.
