“Tout le monde en voiture!” Within five minutes, the train was puffing across the wastes of blowing sand that ran along the coast, beyond the town. The child, who had become accustomed to the noise and movement, behaved better than had been expected. She seemed to take pleasure in looking out of the window at the passing trees. Hannah was much struck with this sign of awakening intelligence. It was more than the good nurse showed herself. She scarcely condescended to glance at the panorama of French fields, French hills and streams that were rushing by. How pale and ethereal they were, these Gallic coppices and woodlands! And with what a dainty lightness the foliage spread itself to the sun, French to its graceful finger-tips! That grey old house, with high lichen-stained roof and narrow windows—where but in sunny France could one see its like?—and the little farmsteads and villages, full of indescribable charm. One felt oneself in a land of artists. There was no inharmonious, no unfitting thing anywhere. Man had wedded himself to Nature, and his works seemed to receive her seal and benediction. English landscape was beautiful, and it had a particular charm to be found nowhere else in the world; but in revenge, there was something here that England could not boast. Was it fanciful to see in the characteristics of vegetation and scenery, the origin or expression of the difference of the two races at their greatest?
“Ah, if I were only a painter!”
They were passing some fields where, in the slanting rays of the sun, peasants in blue blouses and several women were bending over their toil. It was a subject often chosen by French artists. Hadria understood why. One of the labourers stood watching the train, and she let her eyes rest on the patient figure till she was carried beyond his little world. If she could have painted that scene just as she saw it, all the sadness and mystery of the human lot would have stood forth eloquently in form and colour; these a magic harmony, not without some inner kinship with the spirit of man at its noblest.
What was he thinking, that toil-bent peasant, as the train flashed by? What tragedy or comedy was he playing on his rural stage? Hadria sat down and shut her eyes, dazzled by the complex mystery and miracle of life, and almost horrified at the overwhelming thought of the millions of these obscure human lives burning themselves out, everywhere, at every instant, like so many altar-candles to the unknown God!
“And each one of them takes himself as seriously as I take myself: perhaps more seriously. Ah, if one could but pause to smile at one’s tragic moments, or still better, at one’s sublime ones. But it can’t be done. A remembrancer would have to be engaged, to prevent lapses into the sublime,—and how furious one would be when he nudged one, with his eternal: ‘Beware!’”
It was nearly eight o’clock when the train plunged among the myriad lights of the great city. The brilliant beacon of the Eiffel Tower sat high up in the sky, like an exile star.
Gaunt and grim was the vast station, with its freezing purplish electric light. Yet even here, to Hadria’s stirred imagination, there was a certain quality in the Titanic building, which removed it from the vulgarity of English utilitarian efforts of the same order.
In a fanciful mood, one might imagine a tenth circle of the Inferno, wherein those stern grey arches should loftily rise, in blind and endless sequence, limbing an abode of horror, a place of punishment for those, empty-hearted, who had lived without colour and sunshine, in voluntary abnegation, caring only for gain and success.
The long delay in the examination of the luggage, the fatigue of the journey, tended to increase the disposition to regard the echoing edifice, with its cold hollow reverberations, as a Circle of the Doomed. It was as if they passed from the realm of the Shades through the Gates of Life, when at length the cab rattled out of the courtyard of the station, and turned leftwards into the brilliant streets of Paris. It was hard to realize that all this stir and light and life had been going on night after night, for all these years, during which one had sat in the quiet drawing-room at Craddock Dene, trying wistfully, hopelessly, to grasp the solid fact of an unknown vast reality, through a record here and there. The journey was a long one to the Rue Boissy d’Anglas, but tired as she was, Hadria did not wish it shorter. Even Hannah was interested in the brilliantly lighted shops and cafés and the splendour of the boulevards. Now and again, the dark deserted form of a church loomed out, lonely, amidst the gaiety of Parisian street-life. Some electric lamp threw a distant gleam upon calm classic pillars, which seemed to hold aloof, with a quality of reserve rarely to be noticed in things Parisian. Hadria greeted it with a feeling of gratitude.
The great Boulevard was ablaze and swarming with life. The cafés were full; the gilt and mirrors and the crowds of consommateurs within, all visible as one passed along the street, while, under the awning outside, crowds were sitting smoking, drinking, reading the papers.