THE train passed very quickly a long, red stone house with a garden and
four thick palm-trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other
side was the sea. Then there was a cutting through red stone and clay,
and the sea was only occasionally and far below against rocks.
“I bought him in Palermo,” the American lady said. “We only had an hour
ashore and it was Sunday morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars
and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings very beautifully.”
It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the _lit salon_
compartment. There was no breeze came through the open window. The
American lady pulled the window-blind down and there was no more sea,
even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor,
then an open window, and outside the window were dusty trees and an
oiled road and flat fields of grapes, with gray-stone hills behind them.
There was smoke from many tall chimneys—coming into Marseilles, and the
train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the
station. The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at
Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of _The Daily Mail_ and a
half-bottle of Evian water. She walked a little way along the station
platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes,
where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal
of departure and she had only gotten on just in time. The American lady
was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure
were given and that she did not hear them.
The train left the station in Marseilles and there was not only the
switch-yards and the factory smoke but, looking back, the town of
Marseilles and the harbor with stone hills behind it and the last of the
sun on the water. As it was getting dark the train passed a farmhouse
burning in a field. Motor-cars were stopped along the road and bedding
and things from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field. Many
people were watching the house burn. After it was dark the train was in
Avignon. People got on and off. At the news-stand Frenchmen, returning
to Paris, bought that day’s French papers. On the station platform were
negro soldiers. They wore brown uniforms and were tall and their faces
shone, close under the electric light. Their faces were very black and
they were too tall to stare. The train left Avignon station with the
negroes standing there. A short white sergeant was with them.
Inside the _lit salon_ compartment the porter had pulled down the three
beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night
the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a _rapide_
and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The
American lady’s bed was the one next to the window. The canary from
Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was out of the draft in the
corridor that went into the compartment wash-room. There was a blue
light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast
and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.
In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had
come out from the wash-room, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and
American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the
birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the
restaurant-car for breakfast. When she came back to the _lit salon_
compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made
into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that
came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.
“He loves the sun,” the American lady said. “He’ll sing now in a little
while.”
The canary shook his feathers and pecked into them. “I’ve always loved
birds,” the American lady said. “I’m taking him home to my little girl.
There—he’s singing now.”
The canary chirped and the feathers on his throat stood out, then he
dropped his bill and pecked into his feathers again. The train crossed a
river and passed through a very carefully tended forest. The train
passed through many outside of Paris towns. There were tram-cars in the
towns and big advertisements for the Belle Jardinière and Dubonnet and
Pernod on the walls toward the train. All that the train passed through
looked as though it were before breakfast. For several minutes I had not
listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.
“Is your husband American too?” asked the lady.
“Yes,” said my wife. “We’re both Americans.”
“I thought you were English.”
“Oh, no.”
“Perhaps that was because I wore braces,” I said. I had started to say
suspenders and changed it to braces in the mouth, to keep my English
character. The American lady did not hear. She was really quite deaf;
she read lips, and I had not looked toward her. I had looked out of the
window. She went on talking to my wife.
“I’m so glad you’re Americans. American men make the best husbands,” the
American lady was saying. “That was why we left the Continent, you know.
My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.” She stopped. “They were
simply madly in love.” She stopped again. “I took her away, of course.”
“Did she get over it?” asked my wife.
“I don’t think so,” said the American lady. “She wouldn’t eat anything
and she wouldn’t sleep at all. I’ve tried so very hard, but she doesn’t
seem to take an interest in anything. She doesn’t care about things. I
couldn’t have her marrying a foreigner.” She paused. “Some one, a very
good friend, told me once, ‘No foreigner can make an American girl a
good husband.’”
“No,” said my wife, “I suppose not.”
The American lady admired my wife’s travelling-coat, and it turned out
that the American lady had bought her own clothes for twenty years now
from the same maison de couturier in the Rue Saint Honoré. They had her
measurements, and a vendeuse who knew her and her tastes picked the
dresses out for her and they were sent to America. They came to the
post-office near where she lived up-town in New York, and the duty was
never exorbitant because they opened the dresses there in the
post-office to appraise them and they were always very simple-looking
and with no gold lace nor ornaments that would make the dresses look
expensive. Before the present vendeuse, named Thérèse, there had been
another vendeuse, named Amélie. Altogether there had only been these two
in the twenty years. It had always been the same couturier. Prices,
however, had gone up. The exchange, though, equalized that. They had her
daughter’s measurements now too. She was grown up and there was not much
chance of their changing now.
The train was now coming into Paris. The fortifications were levelled
but grass had not grown. There were many cars standing on tracks—brown
wooden restaurant-cars and brown wooden sleeping-cars that would go to
Italy at five o’clock that night, if that train still left at five; the
cars were marked Paris-Rome, and cars, with seats on the roofs, that
went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all
the seats and on the roofs, if that were the way it were still done, and
passing were the white walls and many windows of houses. Nothing had
eaten any breakfast.
“Americans make the best husbands,” the American lady said to my wife. I
was getting down the bags. “American men are the only men in the world
to marry.”
“How long ago did you leave Vevey?” asked my wife.
“Two years ago this fall. It’s her, you know, that I’m taking the canary
to.”
“Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?”
“Yes,” said the American lady. “He was from a very good family in Vevey.
He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go
on long walks together.”
“I know Vevey,” said my wife. “We were there on our honeymoon.”
“Were you really? That must have been lovely. I had no idea, of course,
that she’d fall in love with him.”
“It was a very lovely place,” said my wife.
“Yes,” said the American lady. “Isn’t it lovely? Where did you stop
there?”
“We stayed at the Trois Couronnes,” said my wife.
“It’s such a fine old hotel,” said the American lady.
“Yes,” said my wife. “We had a very fine room and in the fall the
country was lovely.”
“Were you there in the fall?”
“Yes,” said my wife.
We were passing three cars that had been in a wreck. They were
splintered open and the roofs sagged in.
“Look,” I said. “There’s been a wreck.”
The American lady looked and saw the last car. “I was afraid of just
that all night,” she said. “I have terrific presentiments about things
sometimes. I’ll never travel on a _rapide_ again at night. There must be
other comfortable trains that don’t go so fast.”
Then the train was in the dark of the Gare de Lyons, and then stopped
and porters came up to the windows. I handed bags through the windows,
and we were out on the dim longness of the platform, and the American
lady put herself in charge of one of three men from Cook’s who said:
“Just a moment, madame, and I’ll look for your name.”
The porter brought a truck and piled on the baggage, and my wife said
good-by and I said good-by to the American lady, whose name had been
found by the man from Cook’s on a typewritten page in a sheaf of
typewritten pages which he replaced in his pocket.
We followed the porter with the truck down the long cement platform
beside the train. At the end was a gate and a man took the tickets.
We were returning to Paris to set up separate residences.