After six hours’ continuous sleep, I felt full of energy and joy. There
were no servants to sadden by their incompetence; so I got up and made
the tea and prepared the baths, and did many simple domestic things,
the doing of which personally is the beginning of “the solution of the
servant problem,” so much talked about. Shall we catch the 9.25 fast or
the 9.50 slow? Only my watch was going among all the clocks and watches
in the flat. I looked at it from time to time, fighting against the
instinct to hurry, the instinct to beat that one tiny watch in its
struggle against me. Just when I was quite ready, I had to button a
corsage with ten thousand buttons--toy buttons like sago, that must be
persuaded into invisible nooses of thread. I turned off the gas at the
meter and the electricity at the meter, and glanced ’round finally at
the little museum of furniture, pictures, and prints that was nearly
all I had to show in the way of spoils after forty years of living and
twenty-five years of sharpshooting. I picked up the valise, and we went
out on the staircase. I locked and double locked the door. (Instinct of
property.) At the concierge’s lodge a head stuck itself out and offered
the “Mercure de France,” which had just come. Strange how my pleasure in
receiving new numbers never wanes! I shoved it into my left-hand pocket;
in my right-hand pocket a new book was already reposing.
*****
Out into the street, and though we had been up for an hour and a half,
we were now for the first time in the light of day! Mist! It would
probably be called “pearly” by some novelists; but it was like blue
mousseline--diaphanous as a dancer’s skirt. The damp air had the
astringent, nipping quality that is so marked in November--like
a friendly dog pretending to bite you. Pavements drying. The coal
merchant’s opposite was not yet open. The sight of his closed shutters
pleased me; I owed him forty francs, and my pride might have forced me
to pay him on the spot had I caught his eye. We met a cab instantly. The
driver, a middle-aged parent, was in that state of waking up in
which ideas have to push themselves into the brain. “Where?” he asked
mechanically, after I had directed him, but before I could repeat the
direction the idea had reached his brain, and he nodded. This driver
was no ordinary man, for instead of taking the narrow, blocked streets,
which form the shortest route, like the absurd 99 per cent. of drivers,
he aimed straight for the grand boulevard, and was not delayed once by
traffic in the whole journey. More pleasure in driving through the city
as it woke! It was ugly, dirty--look at the dirty shirt of the waiter
rubbing the door handles of the fashionable restaurant!--but it
was refreshed. And the friendly dog kept on biting. Scarcely any
motor-cars--all the chauffeurs were yet asleep--but the tram-cars were
gliding in curves over the muddy wood, and the three horses in each
omnibus had their early magnificent willingness of action, and the
vegetable hawkers, old men and women, were earnestly pushing their
barrows along in financial anxiety; their heads, as they pushed, were
always much in advance of their feet. They moved forward with heedless
fatalism; if we collided with them and spilled cauliflowers, so much the
worse!
We reached the station, whose blue mousseline had evaporated as we
approached it, half an hour too soon. A good horse, no stoppages, and
the record had been lowered, and the driver had earned two francs in
twenty-five minutes! Before the Revolution he would have had to pay
a franc and a half of it in assorted taxes. Thirty minutes in a vast
station, and nothing to do. We examined the platform signs. There was
a train for Marseilles and Monte Carlo at 9.00 and another train for
Marseilles at 9.15. Then ours at 9.25. Sometimes I go south by the “Cote
d’Azur,” so this morning I must inspect it, owning it. Very few people;
a short, trying-to-be-proud train. The cook was busy in the kitchen of
the restaurant-car--what filth and smell! Separated from him only by
a partition were the flower-adorned white tables. On the platform the
officials of the train, some in new uniforms, strolled and conversed.
A young Frenchman dressed in the height of English fashion, with a
fine-bred pink-under-white fox terrier, attracted my notice. He guessed
it; became self-conscious, bridled, and called sportsmannishly to the
dog. His recognition of his own vital existence had forced him into some
action. He knew I was English, and that, therefore, I knew all about
dogs. He made the dog jump into the car, but the animal hadn’t enough
sense to jump in without impatient and violent help from behind.
I never cared to have my dogs too well-bred, lest they should be as
handsome and as silly as the scions of ancient families. This dog’s
master was really a beautiful example of perfect masculine dressing.
His cap, the length of his trousers, the “roll” of the collar of his
jacket--perfect! Yes, it is agreeable to see a faultless achievement.
Not a woman on the train to compare to _him!_ It is a fact that men are
always at their sartorial best when travelling; they then put on gay
colours, and give themselves a certain licence.. . . The train seemed
to go off while no one was looking; no whistle, no waving of flags. It
crept out. But to the minute.. . .
*****
It is astounding the lively joy I find in staring at a railway
bookstall. Men came up, threw down a sou, snatched a paper, and
departed; scores of them; but I remained, staring, like a ploughman,
vaguely.. . .
I was a quarter of an hour in buying the “Figaro.” What decided me was
the Saturday literary supplement. We mounted into our train before its
toilette was finished. It smelt nice and damp. We had a compartment to
ourselves. X. had one seat, I another, the “Mercure de France” a third,
the “Figaro” a fourth, and the valise a fifth. Male travellers passed
along the corridor and examined us with secret interest, but externally
ferocious and damnatory. Outside were two little Frenchmen of employés,
palefaces, with short, straggly beards. One yawned suddenly, and then
said something that the other smiled at. What diverts me is to detect
the domestic man everywhere beneath the official, beneath the mere unit.
I never see a porter without giving him a hearth and home, and worries,
and a hasty breakfast. Then the train went, without warning, like the
other, silently. I did not pick up my newspaper nor my magazine at
once, nor take the new book out of my pocket. I felt so well, so full of
potential energy.. . . and the friendly dog was still biting... I
wanted to bathe deep in my consciousness of being alive. . . Then I read
unpublished letters of de Maupassant, and a story by Matilde Serao and
memoirs of Ernest Blum, and my new book. What pleasure! After all what
joy I had in life! Is it not remarkable that so simple a mechanism as
print, for the transmission of thought, can work so successfully!
At Melun there were teams of oxen, with the yoke on their foreheads, in
the shunting-yard. Quaint, piquant, collusion of different centuries!
And Melun, what a charming provincial town--to look at and pass on! I
would not think of its hard narrowness, nor of its brewery.. . .
The landscape shed its mousseline, and day really began. Brilliant
sunshine. We arrived. Suddenly I felt tired. I wished to sleep. I no
longer tingled with the joy of life. I only remembered, rather sadly,
that half an hour ago I had been a glorious and proud being.