CHAPTER XV
The usual happened to James Cleland; for the first two months in Paris he was intensely lonely. Life in an English-speaking pension near the Place de l'Etoile turned out to be very drab and eventless after he returned to his rooms, fatigued from sight-seeing and exploration. The vast silver-grey city seemed to him cold, monotonously impressive and oppressive; he was not in sympathy with it, being totally unaccustomed to the splendour of a municipal ensemble with all its beauty of reticence and good taste. The vast vistas, the subdued loveliness of detail, the stately tranquillity of this capital, he did not understand after the sham, the ignorance, the noisy vulgarity of his native municipality.
Here were new standards; the grey immensity of the splendid capital gave him, at first, an impression of something flat and almost featureless under the horizon-wide sweep of sky. There were no sky-scrapers. With exquisite discretion, Notre Dame dominated the east, the silvery majesty of the Pantheon the south; in the west the golden bubble of the Invalides burned; the frail tracery of the Eiffel Tower soared from the city's centre.
And for the first two months he was an alien here, depressed, silenced, not comprehending, oblivious of the subtle atmosphere of civil friendliness possessing the throngs which flowed by him on either hand, unaware that he stood upon the kindly hearthstone of the world itself, where the hospitable warmth never grew colder, where the generous glow was for all.
He went to lectures at the Sorbonne; he attended a class in philology in the Rue des Ecoles; he studied in the quiet alcoves of the great Library of Ste. Genevieve; he paced the sonorous marble pavements of the Louvre. And the austere statues seemed to chill him to the soul.
All was alien to him, all foreign; the English-speaking landlady of his pension, with her eternal cold in the head and her little shoulder shawl; the dreary American families from the Middle West who gathered thrice a day at the pension table; passing wayfarers he saw from the windows; red-legged soldiers in badly fitting uniforms, priests in shovel hats and black soutanes, policemen slouching by under cowled cloaks, their bayonets dangling; hatless, chattering shop girls, and the uninteresting types of civilian citizens; men in impossible hats and oddly awful clothes; women who all looked smart from the rear and dubious from the front.
He found an annoying monotony in the trees of the Bois, a tiresome sameness in square and circle and park and boulevard. He found the language difficult to understand, more difficult to speak. Food, accommodations, the domestic régime, were not to his liking. French economies bored him.
At lectures his comrades seemed merely superficially polite and not very desirable as acquaintances. He felt himself out of place, astray from familiar things, out of touch with this civilization, out of sympathy with place and people. He was intensely lonely.
In the beginning he wrote to Stephanie every other day. That burst of activity lasted about two months.
Also, in his rather dingy and cheerless suite of rooms, he began a tragedy in five acts and a pessimistic novel called "Out of the Depths." Also, he was guilty of a book of poems called "Day Dreams."