RESOLVED THAT DEATH ALONE SHOULD PART US FROM BELLOWS’ DICTIONARY.
My second cousin answered diffidently that she desired fine net as a—as a—in short, for a veil against the—the flies that bite.
The shopwoman looked at her with compassion, and offered me a handsome long black lace veil, and with it the assurance that mademoiselle would find it very becoming. At this stage in the negotiation the two purchasers began to laugh with the agonising laughter that has too often overtaken them in shops, and the shopwoman, as is usual in such cases, was obviously convinced that she was being laughed at, and haughtily replaced the lace veil in its box. Having wept profusely and idiotically before her for some moments, we recovered sufficiently to ask for white muslin, and succeeded in buying a suitable piece, with which we slunk out of the shop, resolved that in future death alone should part us from Bellows’ Dictionary.
CHAPTER II.
‘Twenty minutes—half an hour—three-quarters—what mademoiselle pleases!’
This was what the waiter said when we asked him how long it would take to drive to the Gare d’Orléans on the morning that we left Paris. We selected half an hour, and by so doing as nearly as possible missed our train—in fact, when we arrived at the Quai d’Austerlitz the station clock was already at the hour of departure. It was consoling to be told officially that it was five minutes fast, but five minutes does not go far in the maddening routine of French stations, and we were wrecks, mentally and physically, by the time we had wedged ourselves into the crowded carriage, labelled ‘Bordeaux—Bastide,’ that was to be our portion. French railway officials never weary of this little practical joke of keeping the outside clock of the station five minutes fast. If they did it always it would lose its piquancy, but they guard against this by occasional deviations into truth, so that the nerve of the public is effectively shattered, and the station officials never fail of amusement.
Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time, especially when the train goes through a country that, after a first hour or so of picturesqueness, lacks absolutely any distinction of colour or outline. Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side, without a fence, without a boundary, except for the occasional rows of housemaids’ mops and birch-rods that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of poplars are inseparable from French travelling; they haunt the ridges of the plains like the ghosts of worthier trees, with all the dejection befitting those who know that they are only worth a few francs, and can hope for no better transmigration than a kitchen table or a pig’s trough. The country seemed silent and empty after the harvest; we saw very few living things except flocks of sheep, and we meditated with an ever-growing wonder on what might be the moral suasion that kept each of these on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing from the more than demoniacal perverseness of Irish sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to us that the French must have hit on the supreme expedient of offering no resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed at one blow the essential joy of trespass.
The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us time to observe all wayside objects: we could have counted the big citrouilles that lay in magnificent obesity, with their sunset-hued cheeks glowing like fire on the colourless fields, suggestive of immeasurable pumpkin squash, and we could see on the low bushes that we had at first taken for currant trees, the black clusters that told we had at last come into the wine country. It was not so pleasant to see in the waiting-room at Poitiers the black clusters of men, each enveloped in his own halo of garlic or bad tobacco smoke, that told us our chance of getting a cup of coffee was not worth the attendant horror of elbowing our way through them to the buffet. We had not got over the strangeness of knowing that at any or every small hotel or railway station we could have a really good cup of coffee, unflavoured by chicory, liquorice, blackbeetles, or whatever may be the master ingredient in the muddy draught that is invariable at such places in England, and we had looked forward to Poitiers with an enthusiasm quite unconnected with the Black Prince, or any other romantic memory of Mrs. Markham’s History of England.
By the time we reached Angoulême it was quite dark, and we had fallen into the sodden stupefaction of travel. The carriage was nearly empty, and the lamp cast a distorted light upon the puckered faces of the old lady and gentleman who were our only fellow-travellers, as their heads nodded and rolled in anxious, uneasy slumber. The small stations became more frequent, and we were drearily aware of the same routine at each: the half-dozen lights of a village across the fields, the nasal bellow of an unintelligible name, the thump of a box or two on the platform, and finally a sound that we took at first for the bleat of a tethered kid, but which we discovered to be the note of a small trumpet or horn, wound by the guard as the signal for departure. It was only towards the end of the journey that this implement had replaced the ordinary whistle, and for about eight or ten stations we laughed at it; after that the lament of the kid added itself seriously to the general gloom.