An Innocent Very Much Abroad
Having once conceded the point, Arthur did all he could to forward
the foreign trip. Ermengarde must go by Calais; on those splendid
turbine vessels people couldn't be ill if they tried during the whole
fifty minutes across, and she hardly thought she should try.
Besides, in fifty minutes there was hardly time to settle oneself
comfortably; while as for being tired or faint in that short
crossing, the idea was absurd; a deck-chair and the gentle lulling of
the turbine's swift and smooth motion was superior to any bed, while
the _Train de Luxe_ was simply an invitation to repose. Some one
suggested rocking as an accompaniment to ultra-rapid motion, but that
idea was scouted; great speed means smooth motion; does a humming-top
wobble before it slackens speed? Besides, how could it be a _Train
de Luxe_ if it caused train-sickness or any discomfort? And it
undoubtedly was a _Train de Luxe_, her brother-in-law maintained--in
cost.
If the price was too luxurious, why not go second-class? Ermengarde
had already learnt from the paternal omniscience of Cook that foreign
express trains carried second as well as first class fares. Then the
startling intelligence, that not only _Trains de Luxe_, but _Rapides_
and other special quick trains to the Riviera, were only for the
lordly first-class traveller, broke upon her, and fresh sums in
compound addition had to be cast up before an idea of the total cost
could be gained. "And every time I do it the sum total is bigger,"
she sighed, "though, to be sure, one great saving in going by this
first-class train is that you have no hotel expenses; you pass the
night in the train, instead of driving in an expensive cab to a
hotel, and giving Heaven knows how much for being in Heaven knows how
uncomfortable rooms."
"But you've left out the feeding," her brother-in-law objected.
"Not at all; the train has its own restaurant-car," she returned with
the triumph of recent knowledge.
"You blessed innocent, you don't suppose you are going to be fed free
gratis for twenty-four hours," he shouted, with a vulgar and jarring
mirth that was indecently echoed by Arthur; "a train isn't a prison
or a workhouse."
"It certainly is not," she returned with dignity; "it's a train. As
you see, 'the waiters will bring things to the compartments if
necessary.' Besides, how can it be a _Train de Luxe_ if it gives you
nothing to eat all that time? Just listen to the description. 'On
waking the traveller rings his bell to----' Oh yes--I see, you do
pay. 'The tariff of prices is in full view in the carriages. Tea,
tenpence,' etc. Now I shall have to do another sum. But I need only
dine, and have a cup of tea in the afternoon. Lunch I shall carry
with me. And, as you see, there's the picture of people breakfasting
next morning in the Riviera Palace Hotel at Monte Carlo."
"Benighted infant, it's _déjeuner_ they're having at midday. You
really must have a companion."
"Not at all. I've never done any travelling pays before, and it's
high time I learnt how to. Why do the stupid people say breakfast
when they mean lunch? Another tenpenneth of tea and the biscuits I
carry will do for my breakfast. So only dinner need count. Really
the cost of going all that distance is absurdly small when one thinks
of it. And then the saving of night travel, besides the comfort of
having a proper bed without the trouble of going to it."
"Still, you pay pretty high for the comfort."
"Only the usual first-class fare. There it is, written down plainly;
just read the advertisement, Herbert: 'Monte Carlo and Sunshine--as
easy as going to Brighton. The train, with special new bogie
corridor carriages'--I shan't like the bogie part, though--'leaves
Victoria at 11 a.m.' H'm, h'm--'you land at Calais in less than an
hour'--just fancy!--h'm--'no scrambling for meals or seats, your
places have been reserved, and you walk in as you would to your stall
at a theatre.'"
"Matinée Hats and all?" interjected Arthur with brutal levity,
haughtily ignored but not unnoted.
"'Separate staterooms'--now I shall know what a stateroom is
like--'artistically furnished and decorated, warmed, lighted by
electricity, and each provided with a dressing-room with hot and cold
water.' Now, Herbert, isn't it wonderful? And besides all that,
just listen: 'Perfect meals are served, and the sleeping
accommodation is _magnificent_.' Now, I should be quite content with
the artistic stateroom and the separate dressing-room, shouldn't you?
H'm--h'm--h'm. 'And you arrive, not fatigued, but _refreshed_, at
Nice at 10.32 a.m., so that'--h'm--h'm--h'm--'you may be taking your
_déjeuner_'--h'm--h'm--'_bathed in sunlight_,' etc., 'in about
twenty-four hours after leaving the fogs of London.' Bathed in
sunlight," she sighed with luxurious rapture.
"Why have we never done this thing before?" asked Herbert. "Far from
being expensive, the journey appears positively to enrich you.
Still, I advise you to take some soap and a towel, and a few odd
louis and a handful of francs. But, my poor child, observe this
little item, 'Supplemental charges' for the sleeping-cars."
"What? Five pounds practically! Then I'll just not have a
sleeping-car at all, but tuck myself up in the artistically
furnished, warmed, and lighted stateroom for the night."
"Alas! I regret to say that the staterooms and sleeping-rooms are
one and indivisible."
"Then," said Ermengarde, with deep and indignant conviction, "it's a
shame and a swindle. And I'll go by a _Rapide_, and make myself up
in a corner with cushions. Providing I face the engine and have a
corner seat, I can always sleep in a train."
A cumulative family veto promptly negatived this mad resolve, and
Ermengarde's sum total for the single journey leapt up accordingly,
till, what with booking fees, registrations, insurances, tips, and
those supplemental charges that bristle all over Continental
time-tables, it doubled her original estimate, and she began to think
that, if hotel expenses bounded up in the same proportion, it might
be the more prudent course to stay at home.
But the very word home came with a shock that showed the
impossibility of that course. She must forget certain things, and
grow accustomed to certain daily deepening pangs, and steep her
thoughts in other atmospheres, and so take breath and strength for
the newer, darker aspects of life confronting her. Especially she
must forget the experience of a certain dark and dreadful night. On
that occasion she had dined at her father's house, and growing weary
of the musical evening that followed, and eschewing the delights of
bridge in a dim and distant room clandestinely devoted to that
pastime, had cabbed quietly home at eleven and let herself in with a
latchkey.
The house was silent; the servants evidently had gone to bed; a
candle and matches under a still burning gas-bracket awaited her; but
the light under the study door showed that the master of the house
had come home, presumably to the heavy evening's work that had been
his excuse for not dining at Onslow Gardens. Thinking to just let
him know she was in, without interrupting his work, she stepped
softly to the study, and as softly opened the door and looked in.
The room was partly in shadow, lighted by fire-gleams. Over the
writing-table was a shaded lamp, in the interrupted light of which
she saw the slender, bowed figure of a woman sitting, with her face
hidden by her hands. Beside her, and bending slightly over her,
stood Arthur, his face in shadow, his hand on her shoulder, which
quivered with restrained sobs; he was speaking in a low, earnest
voice words inaudible at the door at the other end of the room.
For a moment Ermengarde stood at gaze, transfixed, a curious
strangling sensation in her throat, and a feeling like hot wires
burning her eyes. Then, very softly, almost unconsciously, she
closed the door, and, after a moment's pause, turned, carefully
gathering up her skirts from their silken rustle on the floor, and
went to the table, whence she took the unlighted candle, and walked
upstairs with a slow, tired step and a strange proud quiver of lips.
Presently she heard the street door opened, the shrilling of a
cab-whistle and answering trot of a horse, some murmured voices,
followed by hoof-beats dying away, and the sound of shutting the
door, bolts driven, and chain put up. Half an hour later the study
door, opening, let out the scent of a cigar, and Arthur came up.
"You came home early?" he asked indifferently, and she said "Yes,"
trying to force herself to make some matter-of-fact allusion to the
friend in the study, but not succeeding till next day, when her easy
observation, "Were you alone when I came in last night?" produced the
unembarrassed reply, "No; a secretary was with me. I had rather a
heavy night."
"So had I," she thought with growing bitterness.
But afterwards she stooped to a thing that lowered her in her own
sight, while something stronger than herself drove her to do it.
"By the way, I thought I heard voices in the study when I came home
last night," she said carelessly to the parlourmaid. "Did anyone
call while I was out?"
"No, ma'am," with some hesitation. "At least--only the--the young
lady."
"The _young lady_, Rushton? What young lady?" sharply.
"Please, m'm, the young lady that comes for master. I never can
remember her name. She came last time you went to Onslow Gardens,
and when you were ill--and----"
"Of course, Rushton, of course--" she interrupted, the blood
throbbing in her temples and a mist coming before her eyes. "How
stupid I am! I had quite forgotten. Yes--yes. Be sure you remember
about the table-centre to-night. And sweet geranium leaves in the
finger-bowls. Yes--yes."
That was the tragic note jarring all the music of life; it was that
she wished to forget. There was no doubt of the meaning of that
scene; it could be nothing else, and whatever its meaning might have
been, she could not stoop to ask any solution. And being what she
thought, there was no appeal, no help; nothing for it but stoic
endurance and averted eyes. Often she had listened to the bitter,
godless creed that no man is without reproach, none proof against one
form of temptation; that women can only wait and look away till that
trouble is over-past; and insensibly the dogma had sunk into her
mind, neither welcomed nor repelled, only put out of sight in the
brightness and gaiety of a safe and sunny life.
But would she so readily have grasped the situation except for those
hats? and would he have sneered at those unlucky pieces of costume
had his heart been where it should be?
Not that Ermengarde admitted this to herself. "O for the wings of a
dove!" she cried in her heart, and explained to herself that the
Influenza demon had weakened and depressed her, that the beginning of
Charlie's first term at school had made the house a desert solitude,
and that she had come to realize the melancholy fact that her married
life had reached the inevitable stage of monotonous indifference and
mutual irritation, of which no poet sings, but ordinary mortals
discourse in very plain, unvarnished prose. Once she had accustomed
herself to it, no doubt she would be able to put up with it, as other
women did. So far had she travelled from the petulant security of
the days before the arraignment of the five rejected hats.
It must have been Herbert who made the unlucky suggestion that the
train-booking should be done through Cook, and the services of his
interpreters secured. To this Ermengarde readily agreed, though her
French was above the British average. "I'll write to-night," she
said.
Then it was that Arthur observed that it might be well before buying
tickets to decide where she was going. That horrid sarcastic style
of his was so immeasurably irritating.
"Since you wish to know," she replied haughtily, "my destination is
Nice."
And when asked why, unready with an answer, having settled on the
spur of the moment upon the first name that came up, she said lamely,
"It's--it's the centre of everything."
"But why choose the coldest and dustiest place on the Riviera?" her
mother asked over the afternoon teacups.
"And the resort of the rowdiest lot of visitors and haunt of native
and foreign sharpers," added a woman, who had just appeared, full of
the grievance of being packed and ready and at the last moment denied
a ticket till after the next ten days, every place till then being
booked ahead. "Besides, if you want quiet and scenery, you hardly go
to a big town."
Somebody else suggested that what had been good enough for Queen
Victoria was good enough for her, and painted the beauties of Cimiez
in glowing colours. "And think of the Opera and the Theatre at Nice.
And the Battle of Flowers and the Carnival. To see those properly
you must go to Nice."
Then Ermengarde decided on Hyères, for scenery, good air, and
romantic associations; and, having penned her letter to Cook, heard
from one whose pilgrimage had been to that shrine, that there was
absolutely nothing to do at Hyères and no society whatever, and that
the climate and also that of Costebelle was positively murderous.
Why not try San Remo or Alassio? or Pegli, with the advantage of
being practically at Genoa? Each of these being in turn decided on,
some dreadful defect in each was in turn discovered. Everybody
Ermengarde knew had been everywhere and knew everything about it, and
as each had entirely different views of every place, it was a little
bewildering to an unbiased mind.
Bordighera was at last chosen, as being a place of palms, and
associated with Ruffini's charming story, Dr. Antonio. Then it
turned out that Bordighera was the windiest spot in Europe, and
absolutely without shelter, and that the palms, being tied up like
lettuces for the market, were an abomination of desolation; besides,
crossing the frontier involved another custom-house worry, and the
loss of an hour at Ventimiglia.
So at last Mentone, chosen more than once from rapturous reports of
friends and the charm of Bennett's description in his Mediterranean
book, and more than once abandoned on account of dismal tales of bad
sanitation, heat, damp, and relaxing air, was finally decided upon--a
stern and unanimous family veto having been pronounced against both
Monte Carlo and Monaco--and a seat booked ten days in advance.
"A seat," Ermengarde observed with a deep sigh of content; "rather an
exquisite boudoir"--"'Artistically furnished and decorated,'" her
husband muttered--"with a most luxurious sofa, little tables, and
every comfort, and 'through the window a moving panorama of lovely,
sunlit scenery.' How restful! With books, papers, letters to write,
when the outlook palls. All the comfort of a private room in a
first-class hotel, with no stairs and constant change of scene. I
could travel for weeks in such circumstances. The only trouble is
the fellow-traveller. How nice it would be to be able to take two
places!"
Female friends urged the necessity of summer frocks and shady hats;
Arthur was strong upon furs and wraps. Monte Carlo would involve
great splendour of evening toilette, and summer hues and textures by
day. Tailor-mades by artists of renown would be _chic_, but only of
superfine faced-cloth, so Herbert said, quoting with the pride of
recent knowledge from the _Queen_, while as to hats--
"Don't speak of them. My wife is like Mr. Toots, who, you remember,
was fond of waistcoats," interposed Arthur; "she has a weakness for
hats."
"Out of compassion to you, to give you something to sneer at," she
flashed out, bit her lips, and turned the subject, while Arthur,
dumbfounded, and cudgelling his brains to discover the rock of his
offence, remembered the five discarded hats, and fumed with annoyance.
Victoria at eleven in the morning, when some ruddy gold sunbeams were
struggling through clinging folds of mist, presented a lively
spectacle, something between an Ascot day and a cheap excursion.
Shepherded by men in and out of livery and lady's-maids engaging in
fierce combat with porters and guards, fur-clad dames of high and low
degree, decked with flowers, and with fur-coated squires to match
them, sailed majestically in the path of advancing towers of luggage,
and impeded progress in every direction by standing in picturesque
groups at the doors of carriages, or exactly in front of moving
crowds, to exchange inane smiles, minute bows and meaningless small
talk, impervious to the hoarse shouts of hot and panting porters,
stonily unconscious of civil requests from fellow-travellers looking
for hat-boxes, friends, trunks, mistresses, hand-baggage, servants,
and such oddments, in the hurrying melée among toppling towers of
trunks.
"Half London and the whole of the suburbs seem to be going by the
twelve-fifty boat," Ermengarde said, unmoved by all this hurry and
confusion in the happy security of a corner seat facing the engine,
and booked by Cook. She was glad that Arthur was unable to see her
off, he having had an unexpected business call to one of the South
Coast summer resorts, she had forgotten which, the day before, so
that only Herbert, her mother, and some half-dozen intimate friends,
were saying good-bye and preventing her from looking after her
luggage.
"Look here, there's some mistake about this ticket," cried Herbert
presently, emerging from an arduous and prolonged struggle all down
the long train and back again. "No seat is booked for you in this
train, but at last I've found an empty corner, if you come quick
before it's snapped up."
Ermengarde, speechless with amazement and indignation, and clinging
to Herbert's hand, somehow threaded the mazes of the crowd that
surged among laden trunks, staggering porters, hurrying servants with
hand-baggage, imperious conductors and omnipotent guards, all talking
and giving orders at once, while bells rang and whistles shrilled.
She observed, as she struggled through in her brother-in-law's wake,
that every seat was ticketed, and by this time most were occupied, if
not by travellers, by their hand-baggage, and at last found herself
in a corner facing the engine, but without any hand-baggage, hers
having been variously confided piece-meal to porters and friends.
She began to picture the possibilities of twenty-four hours of
empty-handed travel with some sinking of heart, while Herbert
bestowed silver and injunctions for her comfort on the conductor, and
five heavy trucks bearing trunks like Noah's Arks, each inscribed in
large letters "The Lady Emily Appleton," and accompanied by cockaded
men, wedged their way past her door, and were followed at uncertain
intervals by her mother, panting and anxious, with a lunch package,
and her half-dozen friends, each with the same number of papers,
periodicals, baskets of fruit and bouquets, and, finally, after
prolonged skirmishing, a porter with a hold-all and a dressing-bag.
Herbert had vanished to get a ticket for himself and accompany her to
Dover, much moved by the forlorn and bewildered expression on poor
untravelled Ermengarde's face, when she looked from her window (the
door being hopelessly blocked by fellow-travellers and their
followings of friends); and occasionally darted forward to catch a
paper or a flower from a friend's hand outstretched over the heads of
the crowd blocking the door; or tried to hear some shouted assurance
that her ticket was at least all right for the Calais train, that the
sea was like glass, and the sun coming out. Her seat not being
reserved, she dared not leave it to say the innumerable last words
that rise to the lips of lady householders at such moments, and could
only make signs to an anxious and much hustled mother in the far
distance, who responded without in the least knowing what it was all
about.
The tumult was subsiding, travellers were being respectfully but
firmly recommended to take places, and Ermengarde was about to make
one last wild effort to say good-bye to her mother, when a distracted
female wedged herself up to the carriage, gold-handled eyeglass in
hand, and anxiously sought for her name and number, which the
conductor found for her above the seat in the corner opposite
Ermengarde's, to the lady's great indignation and despair. She had
expressly written "to face the engine," she cried. But this was
abominable; she could not possibly travel backwards; she must have a
forward corner; the man might look at the ticket, and so forth and so
forth, with a much-burdened maid and a porter waiting behind her.
The conductor was sorry, he told Ermengarde, but there had been some
mistake, the other lady was unfortunately entitled to the corner,
whence Ermengarde was obliged to move, finding, luckily for her, a
middle seat, but losing all possibility of any but signalled
farewells, and seeing Herbert no more at all.
The sunlight broadened, the fog thinned, as the long train left dear,
dirty, smoky London behind, and the squalor of endless suburb
diminished, and the smell of country air came through a chink of
opened window. But Ermengarde's heart sank, and she felt herself a
lone, lorn female, utterly incapable of confronting the unknown
perils and discomforts of travel after this bad beginning. She was
pulling herself together with delicious dreams of the artistic _Train
de Luxe_, when the lady who had ejected her from her corner, and who
evidently regarded her with wrath and indignation as an interloper
and semi-swindler, suddenly shivered and commanded her maid, sitting
opposite, to shut the little saving chink in the window.
Ermengarde's doom was now sealed; she would be train-sick.
She counted the minutes to be gasped through till Dover, and nerved
herself to ask the least forbidding of the two laced and furred dames
dragoning the windows for a little air before things reached a fatal
crisis. But even at that dread moment the fascinating vision of the
_Train de Luxe_, with its sofa, and wide window at command, its
flying landscape, little tables, artistic furniture and decorations,
warmth and electric lights, came like balm to her troubled breast.