How can I describe Bordeaux as we saw it through that musty cab window? Low and little and picturesque. It was like stepping into a stereopticon picture and finding it alive. Little houses and shops, with bright signs all in French, and foreign-looking people in the streets, and many soldiers and many, many widows. Queer-painted carts and little houses and little narrow alleys with uneven houses, dark and aged, huddled together with lights over the doors—you know what I mean—adorable. The town itself is quite a place—good hotels and shops and cafés, with blue and red and yellow wicker chairs and tables on the sidewalk.
We piled our luggage in the lobby of the hotel and then filed into a dismal parlor and faced one another over a marble table (for ornament only). I was ready for bed and it was quarter of ten. The train for Paris left at one—three hours to wait and we so tired we couldn’t budge. How that parlor rocked and reeled after the steamer! Mrs. Bigelow said, “This is France.” It made me think of “As You Like It” where Rosalind and Celia and Touchstone arrive in the forest.
After I had slept a little, sitting bolt upright in the lobby, we walked about town. The little back streets were so tiny that only one could walk on the sidewalk at a time. Even Boston can go one better than that. I walked in the middle of the street and never felt bigger in my life. Miss Short sent a cable, and I went by myself into a little shop and bought a copy of the “Marseillaise”—my first venture in commerce, and I was mighty embarrassed because I don’t believe there is such a word as “copie” anyway, but I got it and was pleased to death to have actually achète-ed something.
It didn’t seem long until train-time, and we got into crowded but comfortable first-class carriages. After our elaborate good-byes, we found nearly every one from the steamer on the train, the Ambulance men and everybody. In our compartment there were a very fat French woman, a young girl, and her maid. The young girl—I had planned to spend hours in describing her, but I can’t stop now. I’ll just say she was Elsie Ferguson in “The Strange Woman,” and let you picture her. The prettiest, most charming, and warmest creature I ever met. It was the first time I had heard a girl speak high French. There were no French women on the boat, you remember, and it was like music. The country we passed was the prettiest I’ve ever seen, more perfect than England even. So many poplars, and hills,—and such houses. There were acres of vineyards and lovely farms and with autumn foliage,—fainter than ours, of course,—lovely yellows and reds, and leaves dropping, and blue mists and more poplars, it was like a dream-land.
It was a long trip, but the steamer people visited back and forth and bought things at the stations and stood in the corridors and talked, and it didn’t seem long. The fat French woman joined our conversation after the French girl got out at Poitiers—I must tell you that she is married and her husband is an officer and has just recovered from being badly wounded. She is going to find out on Sunday if he has to go back, because, you see, he’ll never be strong again, and she is praying that he’ll be réformé for good. Oh, she does seem to love him so. If he isn’t réformé he’ll have to go back to the front. She is so brave and so beautiful!
Well, after she got out, a nice old Frenchman got in and a typical Englishman (who spoke French) and we had the most wonderful time. Of course we didn’t speak at first, but the fat woman and I would say things across the compartment to one another and they would offer a remark now and then, until we all got to talking. I shall have to write some of these things down, I fancy. I’d hate to forget them. I thanked Heaven for the 'steenth time for my French, which is a bruised reed, right enough, but a perfect joy just the same.
I was expecting to fall into Miss Curtis’s arms, but it would have been an empty fall, for she wasn’t there. I didn’t know, when I wired her, that there were two stations, so I suppose she didn’t know which to choose. I could have gone with Mrs. Bigelow and the others, but I thought Miss Curtis would have engaged a room for me here, so I wanted to try this place, anyway. One of the Ambulance men, Mr. Baxter, offered to bring me here and see me installed. There were no taxis left, and it was still drizzling, and you know my luggage,—the eleventh hour Altman winter flannels boiling out of the carryall with price-marks dangling and soiled from constant exposure,—and me tired and dirty with the ship still going round in my head, standing alone by a dark and empty cabstand at 10.30 p.m. in Paris, the unknown. The others all rattled off, and Mr. Baxter disappeared to find a taxi, and I sidled up behind a big French soldier for comfort. I saw the fat French woman to say good-bye and thanked her for being so bien gentille to me. I told her that “elle m’avait fait senter la bien venue en France,” which was rotten French, and she said, “Mais Mlle. est si aimable.” I could have hugged her, and I felt as though she were a great big mother, twice, three times, your size, Mother.
Mr. Baxter manufactured a taxi out of nothing and we bundled in the bag and baggage without any idea how far our place was from the Quai d’Orsai. It was nice to be on terra-cotta—to be in a place where you don’t have to show your birth certificate before you can order an egg, as he said. The only thing that any one has told me that’s true is that Paris is dark. I don’t see how the taxi-men can drive at all. We rattled along, and finally came to a street that looked like a tunnel—a faint light at the other end—that’s all. At the very blackest point we stopped, the driver said, “C’est l’hôtel,” and by the light of a match we could see a black sign with gold letters beside a door that looked like the door of a stable, saying that, indeed, it was Hôtel des St. Pères—but oh, so dark. It looked as though Louis Treize’s sub-valet de chambre had boarded it up and gone away and that no one had ever been there since. We knocked and knocked, and after ages we heard a shuffling step and the great black doors swung open. There stood the sleepiest, wall-eyed person, almost entirely covered by a big spotted butcher’s apron. I asked in uncertain tones if they had place for Miss Root, and he shook his head and I asked if he knew Miss Curtis, and he said no, and then I asked if I could get a room. It was the most awful-looking place. I didn’t know just what to do. He made for a dark flight of stairs,—the janitor, I mean,—and I started to follow him. I asked Mr. Baxter if he supposed the janitor was a concierge, and he told me that jardinière was the nearest he could get to it. Upstairs we went on dark-red carpet, past maroon walls—up and up and up. Very high ceilings and long black corridors. Finally he opened a room on the fourth floor, and it looked clean, and I said I’d stay. I went down to get my things and to thank Mr. Baxter for being so kind. I should have been so forlorn all alone. So he drove off to the Ambulance Headquarters. I could hear the taxi going off down the street and the “jardinière” tumbling over my bags. I do think American men are wonderful!
We climbed again to this eyrie and he wished me “bon soir.” Again I was so glad for French because, as he was turning down my bed,—I told him that “je viens de venir d’Amérique,” and that I did not wish “que l’on me réveille.” He was quite genial and said good-night all over again.
My room is the queerest of the queer. There is a worn red carpet with rainbow figures, the paper is green and yellow striped—mild, but incontestably green and yellow. The ceiling is slanted and I have one dormer window. There is a marble mantelpiece and a huge bed; also a marble washstand, which I feel must be a bit of ornamentation looted from Napoleon’s tomb. I looked out of the window, but it’s perfectly black. There may be a blank wall six inches away, or a court or a forest of trees or almost anything for all I can see. I stood in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips and looked around and smiled. There was my own fur coat which is Northampton to me, and my black sweater which is Bailey’s, and my suitcases and myself—all of us dropped into this garret room.