Mightier than the Sword

by Alphonse Courlander

The noise of Paris came to him through the open windows, a confusion of trivial sounds utterly different from the solid, strong note that London gave forth. It was the noise of a nursery of children playing with toys—he heard the continuous jingle of bells round the necks of the horses that drew the cabs, the shouts of men crying newspapers, the squeaking horns of motor-cars, and, every afternoon, at this hour, the sound of some pedlar calling attention to his wares, with a trumpet that had a tinny sound.

At intervals the voice of Paris, modified by the height at which he lived and the distance he was from the Grands Boulevards, sent a shout to him that reminded him of London. That was when a heavy rumbling shook the narrow street which was one of the tributaries of the Boulevards, as a monstrous, unwieldy omnibus, drawn by three horses abreast, rolled upwards on its passage to the Gare du Nord. The horses' hoofs slapped the street with the clatter of iron on stone, and the passing of the omnibus drowned every other sound with its thunder, so that when it had gone, and the echoes of its passage had died away, the voice of Paris seemed more mincing and playful than before.

Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.

At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did not know, and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat neglected education—the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris, not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily lives of the people.

And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold, bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had dragged him and his fellows—Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards, and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine—across the black country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday, to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."

To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters, helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint, possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling with one another, their voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.

He was required to explain and explain again to three or four officials; something of a minor, technical point, he gathered, was barring him from his baggage. His French was not quite adequate to the occasion; but it was maddening to see them shrug their shoulders with a movement that suggested that they rejoiced in his discomfiture.... It was all straightened out, somehow, by a uniformed interpreter, a friendly man who came into Humphrey's existence for a moment, and passed out of it in a casual way, a professional dispenser of sympathy and help, expecting no more reward than a franc or so for services that deserved a life-long gratitude.

But when the cabman had shouted at him, and the blue-bloused porters (one had attached himself to each of his four pieces of baggage) had insisted on their full payment, and after there had been an exchange of abuse between the cabman and an itinerant seller of violets, whose barrow had nearly been run down, Humphrey looked out of the window and caught his first glimpses of Paris ... of the light that suggested warmth and laughter.

He saw great splashes of light, and through the broad glass windows of the cafés a vision of cosy rooms, bustling with the business of eating, of white tables at which men and women sat—ordinary middle-class people. The movement of their arms and shoulders and heads showed that conversation was brisk during their meal; they smiled at one another.

As the cab sped softly along on its pneumatic tyres, he saw picture after picture of this kind, set in its frame of light. "I shall like living here," he thought. Chance decreed that the Rue le Peletier was being repaired, and the cab swung out of the narrower streets into the vivid and wonderful brilliance of the Boulevard des Italiens.