“If he ever does come back,” I thought, “it will be in the company of five or six large gendarmes.”
But when he came back he came alone.
“Here,” he said abruptly, “is your passport. You will be permitted to go to Paris. We will keep track of you there.” And he bowed me out of the joint.
The crowd down-stairs seemed as great as ever, and as scared. I picked my way through it with my head held high, a free man.
I decided on a fiacre for my trip from hotel to station. It would be safer, I thought. But I learned, on our interminable way, that defensive fighting in the streets of Bordeaux is far more terrifying, far more dangerous than the aggressive taxi kind. We were run into twice and just missed more times than I could count, and besides my conveyance was always on the verge of a nervous breakdown. ’Spite all the talk of periscopes and subs, the journey across the ocean was parlor croquet compared to my fiacre ride in Bordeaux.
While awaiting my turn at the ticket window I observed at the gate a French soldier wearing a large businesslike bayonet. “Probably to punch tickets with,” I thought, but was mistaken. Another gentleman attended to that duty, and the soldier did not give me so much as the honor of a glance.
Outside on the platform were a few of the Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. men of our ship, and I learned from them that one of their number had suffered a sadder fate than I. He had tried to get by on a Holland passport, viséed at the French consulate in New York, and been quietly but firmly persuaded to take the next boat back home.
I shared a compartment on the train with a native of the Bronx, and a French lady who just couldn’t make her eyes behave, and two bored-looking French gentlemen of past middle age, not to mention in detail much more baggage than there was room for. The lady and the two gentlemen wore gloves, which made the Bronxite and me feel very bourgeois.
Our train crew, with the possible exception of the engineer and fireman whom I didn’t see, was female, and, thinking I might some time require the services of the porter, I looked in my dictionary for the feminine of George.
To try my knowledge of française, I had purchased at the station a copy of Le Cri de Paris. I found that I could read it very easily by consulting the dictionary every time I came to a word.