We lingered for a moment on the platform, looking stupidly after the red lamp at the end of the last carriage, as it waned swiftly smaller and fainter in the distance.
Presently someone pulled himself together sufficiently to say, “Well, come on.”
And we made our way out of the station into a Paris that was blank and strange. Aubémont (Adolphe) was frankly holding his pocket-handkerchief to his eyes; but we Anglo-Saxons chid and chaffed him till he put it out of sight.
“By Christopher! when I think of the way we treated that girl in the beginning!” cried Chalks, an American, whose lay-name is Charles K. Smith, but he’s called Chalks by all his English-speaking fellow-craftsmen.
Whereat—“Oh, shut up!” came in chorus from the rest of us. We didn’t care to be reminded of those old days.
Then little Schaas-Keym, the Dutchman, proposed that we should finish the evening, and court oblivion, at the Galurin Cassé: and we adopted his suggestion, and drank beer, and smoked, and chattered, and ate cold beef and pickles, till the place was closed, at 2 a. m., when we returned to the Quarter, six in a single cab.
Thus we managed to wear out last night with sufficient comfort. We gave ourselves no time, no chance, to think. We stood together, and drowned our sorrow in the noise we made. And then, by the time we parted, we were sleepy, so that we could go straight to our beds and forget everything.
But—this morning!
It is proverbially on the next morning that a man’s wound begins to hurt. For the others, since I’ve seen none of them, I can speak only by inference: in the morning our little cénacle scatters to the four corners of the town, not to be reunited till the hour of dinner; but what reason is there to doubt that the day will have treated them very much as it has treated me? And oh, the weary, dreary, bright spring day it is! The Luxembourg is fragrant with budding trees, and vocal with half a thousand romping children; the Boule-Miche is at its liveliest, with a ceaseless ebb and flow of laughing young men and women; the terrasse of the Vachette is a mass of gleaming top-hats and flaunting feminine bonnets; and the sky overhead is one smooth blue vault, and the sun is everywhere, a fume of gold: but the sparkle and the joyousness of it all are gone. Turn where I will, I find the same awful sense of emptiness. The streets are deserted, in spite of the crowds: I can hear my solitary footsteps echo gruesomely through them. Paris is like Pompeii.
After luncheon, thinking to obtain relief by fleeing the Quarter (where every blessed stick and stone has its bitter-sweet association with her), I crossed the river, mixed with the throng in the Boulevard, sat for a while at the Café de la Paix. But things were no whit better. The sun shone with the same cheerless brilliancy; the air touched one with the same light, uncomforting caress; the laughter of the wayfarers had the same hollow ring. A blight had fallen upon man and nature. I came back to the Rue Racine, and its ghosts of her.