AWAY TO PARIS.
The wedding party.--The canals.--New
Haven.--Around the tea-table.--Separating the
sheep from the goats.--"Will it be a rough
passage?"--Gymnastic feats of the little
steamer.--O, what were officers to us?--"Who ever
invented earrings!"--Dieppe.--Fish-wives.--Train
for
Paris.--Fellow-passengers.--Rouen.--Babel.--Deliverance.
IT was the last week in May, and by no means the "merry, merry month of
May" had we found it. Not only was the sky weighed down with clouds, but
they dripped upon the earth continually, the sun showing his ghastly,
white, half-drowned face for a moment only to be swept from sight again
by the cloud waves. A friend was going to Paris. Would we shake the
drops from our garments, close our umbrellas, and go with him? We not
only would, we did. We gathered a lunch, packed our trunk, said our
adieus, and drove down to the station in the usual pouring rain, the
tearful accompaniment to all our movements. But one party besides our
own awaited the train upon the platform--a young man with the insignia
of bliss in the gloves of startling whiteness upon his hands, and a
middle-aged woman of seraphic expression of countenance, clad in robes
of spotless white, her feet encased in capacious white slippers. In
this airy costume, one hand grasping a huge bouquet devoid of color, the
other the arm of her companion, she paced back and forth, to the great
amusement of the laughing porters, casting upon us less fortunate ones,
who shivered meekly in our wraps, glances of triumphant pity
indescribable.
"Weddin' party, zur," explained the guard, touching his cap to our
friend. "Jus' come down in fly." They looked to us a good deal more as
if they were just going up in a "fly." The train shrieked into the
station, and we were soon rushing over the road to New Haven, from
which, in an evil moment, we had planned to cross the Channel. There was
little new or strange in the picture seen from our window. The cottages
were now of a dull, clay color, instead of the dingy red we had observed
before, as though they had been erected in sudden need, without waiting
for the burning of the bricks. There were brick-yards all along the way,
answering a vexed question in my mind as to where all the bricks came
from which were used so entirely in town and village here, in the
absence of the wood so plentiful with us. The canals added much to the
beauty of the landscape, winding through the meadows as if they were
going to no particular place, and were in no haste to reach their
destination. They turned aside for a clump of willows or a mound of
daisy-crowned earth; they went quite out of their way to peep into the
back doors of a village, and, in fact, strolled along in a lazy,
serpentine manner that would have crazed the proprietor of a Yankee
canal boat.
It was five o'clock when we reached New Haven, having dropped our
fellow-passengers along the way, the blissful couple among them.
Through some error in calculation we had taken an earlier train than we
need have, and found hours of doleful leisure awaiting us in this sleepy
little town, lying upon an arm of the sea. Its outer appearance was not
inviting. Here were the first and last houses of wood we saw in
England,--high, ugly things, that might have been built of old boats or
drift wood, with an economy that precluded all thought of grace in
architecture. The train, in a gracious spirit of accommodation, instead
of plunging into the sea, as it might have done, paused before the door
of a hotel upon the wharf. There, in a little parlor, we improvised a
home for a time. Our friend went off to explore the town. We took
possession of the faded red arm-chairs by the wide windows. Down below,
beyond the wet platform, rose the well-colored meerschaum of the little
French steamer, whose long-boats hung just above the edge of the wharf.
Through the closed window stole the breath of the salt sea, that, only a
hand-breadth here, widened out below into boundlessness, bringing
visions of the ocean and a thrill of remembered delight. The rain had
ceased. The breeze rolled the clouds into snow-balls, pure white against
the blue of the sky. Over the narrow stream came the twitter of birds,
hidden in the hawthorn hedge all abloom. Everything smiled, and beamed,
and glistened without, though far out to sea the white caps crowned the
dancing waves. When night fell, and the lights glimmered all through the
town, we drew the heavy curtains, lighted the candles in the shining
candlesticks, whose light cast a delusive glow over the dingy dustiness
of the room, bringing out cheerfully the little round tea-table in the
centre, with its bright silver and steaming urn, over which we lingered
a long hour, measuring and weighing our comfort, telling tales, seeing
visions, and dreaming dreams of home.
The clock struck nine as we crossed the plank to the Alexandra, trying
in vain to find in its toy appointments some likeness to our ocean
steamer of delightful memory. The train whizzed in from London, bringing
our fellow-voyagers. The sheep were separated from the goats by the
officer at the foot of the plank, who asked each one descending, "First
or second cabin?"--sending one to the right, the other to the left. The
wind swept in from the sea raw and cold. The foot-square deck was
cheerless and wet. Even a diagonal promenade proved short and
unsatisfactory, and in despair we descended the slippery, perpendicular
stairs between boxes and bales, and down still another flight, to the
cabin. A narrow, cushioned seat clung to its four sides, divided into
lengths for berths. "Will it be a rough night?" we carelessly asked the
young stewardess. "O, no!" was the stereotyped reply, though all the
while the wicked waves were dancing beneath the white caps just outside.
We divested ourselves of hats, and wraps, and useless ornaments,
reserving only that of a meek and quiet spirit, which, under a nameless
fear, grew every moment meeker and more quiet. We undid the interminable
buttons of our American boots, and prepared for a comfortable rest, with
an ignorance that at the time approximated bliss. There was leisure for
the working out of elaborate schemes. Something possessed the tide.
Whether it was high or low, narrow or wide, I do not know; but there at
the wharf we were to await the working of its own will, regardless of
time. Accordingly we selected our places with a deliberation that bore
no proportion to the time we were to fill them, advising with the
stewardess, who had settled herself comfortably to sleep. We tried our
heads to England and our feet to the foe, and then reversed the order,
finally compromising by taking a position across the Channel. But the
loading of the steamer overhead, with the chattering of our
fellow-passengers below,--two English girls, a pretty brunette and her
sister,--banished sleep. At three o'clock our voyage began--the
succession of quivering leaps, plunges, and somersaults which
miraculously landed us upon the French coast. I can think of no words to
describe it. The first night upon the ocean was paradise and the
perfection of peace in comparison. To this day the thought of the
swashing water, beaten white against the port-hole before my eyes, is
sickening. A calm--to me, of utter prostration--fell upon us long after
the day dawned, only to be broken by the stewardess, when sleep had
brought partial forgetfulness, with, "It's nine o'clock; we're at
Dieppe, and the officers want to come in here." We tried to raise our
heads. Officers! What officers? Had we crossed the Styx? Were they of
light or darkness? We sank back. O, what were officers to us!
"But you must get up!"--and she began an awkward attempt at the buttons
of those horrible boots. That recalled to life. American boots are of
this world, and we made a feeble attempt to don some of its vanities.
O, how senseless did the cuffs appear that went on upside down!--the
collar which was fastened under one ear!--the ribbons that were
consigned to our pockets! Making blind stabs at our ears, "Good
heavens!" we ejaculated, "who ever invented earrings? Relics of
barbarism!" We made hasty thrusts at the hair-pins, standing out from
our heads in every direction like enraged porcupine quills; being
pulled, and twisted, and scolded by the stewardess all the while;
hearing the thump, thump, upon our door as one pair of knuckles after
another awoke the echoes, as one strange voice after another shouted,
"Why don't those ladies come out?" O the trembling fingers that refused
to hold the pins!--the trembling feet that staggered up the ladder-like
stairs as we were thrust out of the cabin--out of the cruel little
steamer to take refuge in one of the waiting cabs! O the blessedness of
our thick veils and charitable wraps!
I recall, as though it were a dream, the narrow, roughly-paved street of
Dieppe; a latticed window filled with flowers, and a dark-eyed maiden
peeping through the leaves; the fish-wives in short petticoats and with
high white caps, clattering over the stones in their wooden _sabots_,
wheeling barrows of fish to the market near the station, where they
bartered, and bargained, and gossiped. Evidently it is a woman's right
in Normandy to work--to grow as withered, and hard, and old before the
time as she chooses, or as she has need; for to put away year after
year, as do these poor women, every grace and charm of womanhood, cannot
be of choice.
At the long table in the refreshment-room of the station we drank the
tasteless tea, and ate a slice from the roll four feet in length. The
English-speaking girl who attended us found a place--rough enough, to be
sure--where in the few moments of waiting we could complete our hasty
toilets. Beside us at the table, our fellow-voyagers, were two
professors from a Connecticut college of familiar name, whom we had met
in London. They joined us in the comfortable railway carriage, and added
not a little to the pleasant chat that shortened the long day and the
weary journey to Paris. Our number--for the compartment held eight--was
completed by a young American gentleman, and a Frenchman of evil
countenance, who drank wine and made love to his pretty Lizette in an
unblushing manner, strange, and by no means pleasing, to us,
demonstrating the annoyance, if nothing worse, to which one is often
subjected in these compartment cars. It needed but one glance from the
window to convince us that we were no longer in England. To be sure, the
sky is blue, the grass green, in all lands; but in place of the level
sweep of meadow through which we had passed across the Channel, the land
swelled here into hills on every side. Long rows of stiff poplars
divided the fields, or stretched away in straight avenues as far as the
eye could reach. The English remember the beauty of a curved line; the
French, with a painful rectitude, describe only right angles. Scarlet
poppies blushed among the purple, yellow, and white wild flowers along
the way. The plastered cottages with their high, thatched roofs, the
tortuous River Seine with its green islands, as we neared Paris, the
neat little stations along the way--like gingerbread houses--made for us
a new and charming panorama. Hanging over a gate at one of these
stations was an old man, white-haired, blind; his guide, an old woman,
who waited, with a kind of wondering awe stealing over her withered
face, while he played some simple air upon a little pipe--thus asking
alms. So simple was the air, the very shadow of a melody, that the scene
might have been amusing, had it not been so pitiful.
At noon we lunched in the comfortless waiting-room at Rouen, while the
professors made a hasty visit to the cathedral during our stay of half
an hour. We still suffered from the tossing of the sea, and cathedrals
possessed no charms in our eyes. It was almost night when we reached
Paris, and joined the hurrying crowd descending from the train. It was a
descent into Pandemonium. There was a confusion of unintelligible sounds
in our ears like the roll of a watchman's rattle, bringing no suggestion
of meaning. The calmness of despair fell upon our crushed spirits, with
a sense of powerlessness such as we never experienced before or since. A
dim recollection of school-days--of Ollendorff--rose above the chaos in
our minds. "Has the physician of the shoemaker the canary of the
carpenter?" we repeated mechanically; and with that our minds became a
blank.
Deliverance awaited us; and when, just outside the closed gates, first
in the expectant crowd, we espied the face of a friend, peace enveloped
us like a garment. Our troubles were over.