The onlookers stamped and clapped, the ‘Bignou’ player blew with a possessed frenzy, and the little old women circled tirelessly, like witches on the Brocken. I do not know how long the dance lasted, but as we went back in the darkness to the château we felt as if the music had gone to our heads; and when I lay down under my mosquito curtains, the dark figures whirled and swung giddily before me, as if the spirit of the Médoc had been expressed in them as intoxicatingly as in its wine.
CHAPTER XII.
HE lamps were all lighted on the long bridge over the Garonne; the lights quivered and lengthened in the sleek broad ripples; other lights twinkled on the masts and in the rigging of the half-seen shipping, and but for the trams and the traffic all things were as they had been at our midnight arrival in Bordeaux. It was only 6.30 o’clock, but autumn was catching up to us even in the Médoc, robbing us daily of more and more light, and blunting our regret for a portmanteauful of soiled white skirts by impressing the melancholy fact that this year we should have no further need of them. We had said good-bye to the Médoc and its kind people, and our faces were turned for the bleak North.
There were four large dark hours to be disposed of before the departure of the Paris train, and, as we stood in the blue electric glare of the station, the question of what we were going to do with ourselves rose solemnly and awfully before us. Shopping in the dark was intolerable, even if we had known one shop from another, and there had been anything we wanted to buy; the conventional resource of going to see a church was obviously out of the question; the rather unconventional one of going to see ‘La Femme à Papa’ at the big colonnaded theatre was tempting, but would either impose in the future an exhausting burden of secrecy upon us, or would finally overthrow whatever confidence our relations might still retain in our discretion. There remained dinner as an occupation, and, leaving the arid brilliance of the station, we prowled forth along the quays in search of a suitable restaurant. We were ready to endure much for the sake of interest or picturesqueness, but there is neither one nor the other to be found in a room with a sawdusted floor, a block tin bar, and a contiguous billiard-table; and these features discounted successively the charms of the restaurants of ‘The Antilles,’ ‘The Brazil,’ ‘The Spain and Portugal,’ the ‘Hôtel à la Renommée de l’Omelette,’ and the ‘Café au Bon Diable,’ outside all of whose flaring windows we paused and surveyed with exceeding disfavour the company within.
We reached again the long bridge, with the trams going to and fro upon it like fireflies, and with the power of fulfilling it came the desire for respectable comfort at the Hôtel de Bayonne, where we had lunched with the A.’s on our way to Loudenne. We stopped a tram and confided our wishes to the conductor. His tram did not go there, but we could ‘correspond;’ it would be quite simple—The end of the explanation was lost in the jerk with which we were hoisted on to the step, and in the blatant braying of the driver’s signal-horn as the tram plunged forward again. We began our journey by standing in a throng on the platform of the tram, and though a light rain had begun, the samples of the atmosphere of the interior that from time to time were wafted to us prevented us from being specially grateful when two gorgeous red-and-blue soldiers politely gave us their seats. After ten or fifteen minutes, however, there was no lack of room; the tram, having taken its way through promising thoroughfares, shook itself free of all passengers saving ourselves, and headed for the open country at a round pace. Before the conductor permitted us to part from him it seemed to us that we might have corresponded not only with every other line in Bordeaux, but with our relatives in Galway as well; and when, somewhere in a dark and silent suburb, we changed to the rival tram, there was a further half-hour before we sank exhausted on our chairs in the Hôtel de Bayonne.
The advantages of an introduction were shown in the effusion of the proprietor’s greeting, and under the ministrations of Alphonse, the head waiter, we revived. We were late for the ordinary dinner, and for some time the clean, electric-lighted dining-room had us for its only occupants, as we sat in a trance of repose and quietness, while Alphonse, with his decorous hooked nose and clerical black whiskers, gave us his serious and undivided attention. It was not until after the delicious omelette au rhum had come in, in its winding-sheet of spectral blue flame, that a party entered and took possession of a table near us. From the unhurried way in which they
ALPHONSE.