Out and About London

by Thomas Burke

Next moment I got a push in the back, and I thought it had come. But it was the elbow of one of the crew who had rushed forward, and was sorting bits of bunting from an impossibly tangled heap at my side. In about two seconds, he found what he wanted and hauled at a rope. Up went what looked like a patchwork counterpane, until the breeze caught it, when it became a string of shapes and colours, straining deliriously against its fastenings. Then down it came; then up again; then down; then up; then down; and that was the end of that conversation. I don't know what it signified, but half an hour later we were in Boulogne harbour.

More comic business with papers; then to the train. Yes, it was war. The bridge over the Oise had not then been repaired; so we crawled to Paris by an absurdly crab-like route. We left Boulogne just after twelve. We reached Paris at ten o'clock at night. There was no food on the train, and from six o'clock that morning, when I had had a swift cup of tea, until nearly midnight I got nothing in the way of refreshment. But who cared? I was going South to meet an American millionaire, and I had money in my pocket.

I arrived at Paris too late to connect with that night's P.L.M. express, so I had twenty-four hours to kill. I strolled idly about, and found Paris very little changed. There was an air about the people of irritation, of questioning, of petulant suffering; they had a manner expressive of "A quoi bon?" Somebody in high quarters had brought this thing upon them. Somebody in high quarters might rescue them from its evils—or might not. They moved like stricken animals, their habitual melancholy, which is often unnoticed because it is overlaid with vivacity, now permanently in possession.

I caught the night express to Monte Carlo. Our carriage contained eight sombre people, and the corridors were strewn with sleep-stupid soldiers. I was one sardine among many, and, with a twenty-seven-hour journey before me in this overheated, hermetically sealed sardine-tin, I began to think what a fool I had been to make this absurd journey to a place that was strange to me; to meet a millionaire about whom I knew nothing, and who might have changed his mind, millionaire-fashion, and left Monte Carlo by the time I got there; and to undertake a job which I might find, on examination, was beyond me.

Then, with a French girl's head on one shoulder, and my other twisted at an impossible angle into the window-frame, I went to sleep and awoke at Lyons, with a horrible headache and an unbearable mouth, the result of the boiling and over-spiced soup I had swallowed the night before. I think we all hated each other. It was impossible to wash or arrange oneself decently, and again there was no food on the train. But, as only the Latin mind can, we made the best of it and pretended that it was funny. Girls and men, complete strangers, drooped in abandonment against one another, or reclined on unknown necks. A young married couple behaved in a way that at other times would have meant a divorce. The husband rested his sagging head on the bosom of a stout matron, and a poilu stretched a rug across his knees and made a comfortable pillow for the little wife. N'importe. C'était la guerre.

On the platform at Lyons were groups of French Red Cross girls with wagons of coffee. This coffee was for the soldiers, but they handed it round impartially to civilians and soldiers alike, and those who cared could drop a few sous into the collecting basin. That coffee was the sweetest draught I had ever swallowed.

At Marseilles it was bright morning, and I was lucky enough to get a pannier, at a trifling cost of seven francs. These panniers are no meal for a hungry man. They contain a bone of chicken, a scrap of ham, a corner of Gruyère, a stick of bread (that surely was made by the firm that put the sand in sandwich), a half-bottle of sour white wine, a bottle of the eternal Vichy, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.

I had just finished it when we rolled into Toulon, and there I got my first glimpse of the true, warm South. I suffered a curious sense of "coming home." I had not known it, but all my childish dreams must have had for their background this coloured South, for, the moment it spread itself before me, bits of Verdi melodies ran through my heart and brain and I danced a double-shuffle. Since I was old enough to handle a fiddle, all music has interpreted itself to me in a visualization of blue seas, white coasts, green palms with lemon and nectarine dancing through them, and noisy, sun-bright towns, and swart faces and languorous and joyfully dirty people. The keenest sense of being at home came later, when, at Monte Carlo, I met Giacomo Puccini, the hero of my young days, whose music had illumined so many dark moments of my City slavery; who is in the direct line of succession from Verdi.

This first visit to Monte Carlo showed me Monte Carlo as she never was before. Half the hotels were closed or turned into hospitals, since all the German hotel-staffs had been packed home. In other times it would have been "the season," but now there was everywhere a sense of emptiness. Wounded British and French officers paraded the Terrace; disabled blacks from Algeria were on every hotel verandah or wandering aimlessly about the hilly streets with a sad air of being lost. The Casino was open, but it closed at eleven, and all the cafés closed with it; the former happy night-life had been nipped off short. At midnight the place was dead.

I was accommodated at an Italian pension in Beausoleil, which, in peace-times, was patronized by music-hall artists working the Beausoleil casino. The Casino had been turned into a barracks, but one or two Italian danseuses from the cabarets of San Remo were taking a brief rest, so that the days were less tiresome than they might have been. My millionaire was a charming man, who used my services but a few hours each day. Then I could dally with the sunshine and the Chianti and the breaking seas about the Condamine.