Chapter III

The Train de Luxe

The fear of train-sickness happily ended, Dover castle was seen climbing and cresting its bold headland, with the Roman church and Pharos traced against a pale blue sky in the tender wintry sunshine. Arthur had taken her there from Folkestone one sunny autumn day soon after their marriage; they had cycled over the downs, been bumped and rattled up the Castle steeps and across drawbridges, in a rickety pony carriage commanded by a very small and reckless boy, holding on at imminent risk of their lives all the way there and back. She remembered the scent of the thyme, the interest of the place, the pleasure of the day, and wanted to cry, she had no notion what for. But life cannot be all honeymoon; remembering happier things sometimes affects the eyes like that, and the Dover trip had really been a success in its way. Coming back, they had bought prawns, and prawns make a good _hors d'œuvre_ after open-air exercise. That the remembrance of prawns, even in sight and scent of the sea, and near the hour of lunch, should blur the sight was, of course, absurd; but then they had been such glorious prawns, so large, so fresh, so vividly scarlet. One of them had fallen out of the paper bag into Arthur's pocket, leaving an occult and pleasant suggestion of ancient fish there for days before its discovery.

It must have been this defect of vision that made Ermengarde miss Herbert, who, she supposed, must surely have found a place at Victoria, if only in the guard's van or the luggage van in the rear. For, strain her sight as she would, when the endless moving line of blue-jerseyed sea-porters passing the train had at last been brought to a stand-still, no vestige of her brother-in-law was to be found on the platform, and, during the precious moments wasted in vain search, every one of these amphibious porters seemed to have been snapped up and laden with those enormous bags, boxes, and rolls of rugs, that Continental travellers playfully call hand-baggage.

It had become a question whether Ermengarde or her hand-baggage, which she was quite incapable of shouldering personally, or both, should be left behind, when, after wild appeals to various haughty and inaccessible officials, an aged and morose blue jersey was at last raked out of some recess, and with difficulty prevailed upon to hang himself with her various properties. Then, surlily commanding her to follow him along a quarter of a mile or so of sloppy, narrow planking, crowded with people hurrying in every direction, to an invisible and improbable boat, he started off at express speed, easily making a path for himself through the press by the simple process of wedging his burdens into the softest parts of people's ribs and shoulders.

Ermengarde, having no such weapons of offence and defence, not only failed to make any such path for herself, but suffered sadly from the assaults of other armed amphibious monsters; and when, after a long and severe struggle, she arrived, bruised, panting and dishevelled, at a huge vessel that she hoped was the right one, she found her own surly amphibian goaded to savagery by waiting to such an extent that he was only with great difficulty induced to carry his burdens to the upper deck, where a cloudless sky and a windless sea promised a calm and exhilarating passage. But there the blue jersey's remnant of humanity came to an end. Find her a seat or a deck-chair he would not, for love or money or persuasion; but, hurling his burdens to the floor, he demanded double the silver she placed in his hand, received it, and bolted.

Serried phalanxes of deck-chairs already crowded the deck and filled every desirable position; but all were either occupied by happy voyagers, comfortably tucked up in rugs and motor veils and caps, or by wraps and luggage, chiefly masculine. Vainly did the hapless Ermengarde implore the boys and men constantly emerging from the bowels of the vessel, laden with chairs and stools, to fetch one for her. Stony silence, or at best a negative headshake, was all this lone, lorn female could extract from these iron-hearted creatures. She was still very weak; she was also famished; her little strength was exhausted by the preliminary journey; in dread of sea-sickness, she dared not turn her back to the vessel's direction, knowing she could neither walk up and down nor stand, as others did. She dared not descend the companion-ladder after the motion once began, and had she done so, knew herself to be incapable of carrying her rugs and small necessities. Shivering and faint, she was about to subside ignominiously on the planks, when she caught sight of a chair-carrier returning empty-handed to the companion, and once more entreated a chair of him.

"Sorry, madam, nothing but camp-stools left," he said, and was despairingly told to bring anything that could be sat upon, which he quickly did--for a stipulated price. All this time an empty deck-chair had been on one side of her, and another, occupied by an exceedingly well-tucked-up, fur-collared and fur-rugged youth of athletic build, on the other. An elderly man, standing talking to a grey-haired woman who lounged in another deck-chair, was the lawful tenant of the empty chair; and when the boy at last appeared with a rickety camp-stool, on to which Ermengarde was about to sink from exhaustion in the standing-place she had with difficulty kept all this time between the two men's chairs, the elderly man suddenly appeared to become aware of her difficulties, and turned to her with a gruff, "Better change your stool for my chair--don't suppose I shall want it--rather walk up and down," and turned sullenly away.

Sinking gratefully upon the long chair, so restful in spite of its wooden hardness, with the sun shining and the sea sparkling to the even movement of the great turbine vessel as they caught the faint breeze of their motion, Ermengarde would now have been happy, but for the fear of that dread penalty the sea exacts from sensitive voyagers, and the impossibility in her giddiness and weakness of opening the straps that held her rugs and shawls. How exasperatingly, aggressively, comfortable people looked, chatting and laughing in their cosy furs; some even shielded themselves from the mild warmth of the wintry sun with parasols, though Ermengarde would have welcomed the glare of a furnace, as she shivered in the sharp sea air.

But others were worse off than she. So much so that she was even moved to offer her own hard-won chair to a pretty, slender French girl, pale and tired-looking, who kept leaning against anything that came in her way till she seemed to become chilled to the bone, when she would move a little and come back to the best place she could find. Presently she leant against an iron balk close to an inviting deck-lounge, which was occupied the whole way across by a hard round hat, a man's fur coat, and some walking-sticks and umbrellas. Ermengarde longed to send these properties flying--especially the hat, which inspired her with peculiarly acute hatred--and lay the pretty, tired French girl upon the comfortable lounge, if only till the owner of the hard hat came to claim it, which he never did, till they went ashore. Had she been certain of her ability to keep her feet, Ermengarde would certainly have yielded her own chair to the girl, and annexed to her own use that sequestrated by the owner of the detestable hat; it would have been such a pleasure to kick and stamp on that hat and hear it boom like a drum, and pop like a burst motor-tyre. But she was by no means certain of her ability to do anything but shiver.

An eternity of shivers and qualms seemed to pass before the spires of Calais appeared between gaps made in groups pacing the deck, an eternity mitigated by the thought that every shiver brought one nearer to the artistically decorated, electric warmed and lighted, flying boudoir, with its voluptuous sofa, etc., in the rightly named _Train de Luxe_--the very sound of which diffused an atmosphere of comfort and peace.

And now at last all fear of the dread penalty of the inexorable sea was at an end, and Ermengarde rose to her feet in the proud consciousness of being able to stand, and even walk, without sudden subsidences to the deck or into the unwilling embraces of indignant fellow-voyagers. Helped by a sailor, who unexpectedly appeared at her side as if from the clouds, and was easily persuaded to carry her things, she got down to the level of the landing-place, and enjoyed the first thrill of foreign parts at the sight of blue-cloaked men in uniform, short and solid, with bristling moustache and complacent strut. How good it is, the first sight of these dear, delightful creatures, who never seem to have anything to do but enjoy dignified and ornamental leisure for the benefit of admiring mankind! And how good, Ermengarde thought, to see a gangway shot into a crowd of laughing, gesticulating, blue-bloused porters--to see them hurl themselves upon the gangway tumultuously, one over the other, in a solid mass, with shouts, songs, and exclamations, and so board the vessel, leaping and laughing, and, falling upon passenger after passenger, tear their precious misnamed hand-baggage from them, strap it across their own shoulders, and, deaf to all entreaties, fight their way back to the gangway, leap ashore, and fly from sight.

She would have followed her own especial robber, but that he forbade her with gay volubility, and bid her accompany the rest of the robbed and find him again at the Custom-house.

"Numéro Quatre," he cried, tapping the brass plate on his cap, and dancing off with the grin and gesture of a good-natured gnome.

Observing that all but a few sturdy and muscular men submitted to this spoliation, and unhesitatingly obeyed the commands of the gnomes, Ermengarde, feeling very lone and lorn, and suddenly forgetting for sheer weariness the whole of the French language in a lump, gave herself up for lost, and was borne passively in the tide of fellow-sufferers, who formed a soft but shifting support, to the gangway, where the pleasing spectacle of a nervous man dropping an open purse of gold into the sea just in front of her in attempting to produce a ticket, showed that every depth has a lower deep, and consoled her with the reflection that her own spare pence were safely bestowed in various inaccessible portions of her attire.

But here she was at last, in the _beau pays de France_, within measurable distance of the much-desired and artistically decorated sofa, etc., if stiff and trembling limbs would but support her through the tourist's purgatory, the Douane. Never again would she dread solitary travel; the sea trip in retrospect grew to be absolutely delicious--if she had only known it at the time--in the exaltation of having survived the awful ordeal of passing through the chops of the Channel--not that she had noticed any chops--she felt capable of penetrating to Central Africa. Actually penetrating only to the centre of the Douane, which at first sight she supposed to be a large stable or coach-house, our poor untravelled traveller sought the friendly face of Numéro Quatre among the long lines of brass-plated gnomes, only to find it, with its elfish grin and the whole of her travelling necessaries, conspicuous by its absence.

It was then, after long and vain search and countless wild and polyglot inquiries of unsympathizing foreigners, and endless courses up and down and round the crowded, many-voiced Douane, that the hapless Ermengarde began to ask herself why she had left the safe and comfortable precincts of her native land, and braved cold and famine and the terrors of the deep, only to become the prey of grinning brigands upon savage and inhospitable shores. Poor little Charlie, unwilling victim of enforced football, but at least happy in ignorance of his mother's fate! London was undoubtedly foggy; but property there was comparatively safe. People there were at least not compelled to part with the whole of their possessions at the bidding of strange monsters. Nor were they obliged there to lose expensive _Train de Luxe_ by waiting for hours in places with nothing to sit upon for people who never came.

Crowds of smiling gnomes, cheerfully hung with other people's property, stood in rank, gaily responding to the cries of rapture with which their respective victims singled them out; there were dramatic meetings between robbers and robbed, joyous recognition of property and gnome, ecstatic greetings on the part of despoiled tourists of Numéro Cinq, Numéro Cent, Numéro everything but Quatre.

Agonized inquiries for Numéro Quatre of other brass-plated caps elicited cheerful replies that he would be here soon; but he was small and Ermengarde was not over tall; and as gnome after gnome was recaptured by long-lost owners, and compelled to unload his spoil upon the long counter, to be marked with mystic runes to a briefly muttered shibboleth in polyglot accents, and the congested crowd thinned and melted, and time and strength and the last remnants of hope in Ermengarde's breast with it, she felt herself on the point of tears, and was just beginning to drag herself empty-handed to the long-desired repose of that artistically decorated stateroom, when, at the far end of the hall, the square and cheerful countenance of the missing Numéro Quatre was at last discerned, and the whole of his sins and her sufferings forgotten in an eye-blink.

As for the gnome, he unblushingly commanded his victim to quicken her trembling steps on pain of losing the train, went through a quick pantomime at the counter, and dashed off with his spoil at express speed, followed at a respectful distance by his exhausted prey, whose fainting spirits rose when at last she saw the long-hoped-for train, with its vases of mimosa, rose, and sweet double stock in the restaurant car windows. Very haughtily she handed her ticket to a magnificently gold-braided person at his demand, expecting to be respectfully conducted to her place "as to a theatre stall"; and sighed with deep content, feeling that the great all-compensating moment of the journey had at last arrived.

But the great gold-braided one, muttering a number to the long-lost Quatre, merely waved a hand towards a sort of steep companion-ladder, and turned to resume a broken chat with a friend. The ladder surmounted, and the gnome having plumped the baggage, sadly reduced in quantity and possibly in quality, into the first compartment he came to and vanished with silver in hand, Ermengarde found herself in a narrow slip of a compartment with a wide and springy seat, a tiny, hinged slab under the outside window and just room and no more for the disposal of moderate-sized female limbs without positive discomfort or involuntary kicks against an oblique wooden partition, narrowing to the doorway, varnished, and featureless, a large spittoon filled with water, a fellow traveller with mountains of hand-baggage, and nothing more. The private dressing-room, the airy space, the little hinged seats, "should the passenger wish to change position," etc., where were these?

Our pilgrimage through this vale of tears is mile-stoned by lost illusions, Ermengarde reflected, subsiding with a deep sigh in the best corner of the seat, which her fellow pilgrim had considerately left for her, and feeling too glad to sit upon anything after the long skirmish through the Douane to be over-critical, when suddenly a frightful thought struck her.

"Surely this carriage faces the sea?" she cried in tones of horror.

"Certainly," the other lady returned sweetly.

"And we go backwards? And I can't," she gasped.

Then followed a deadly battle with the conductor, compared with which the skirmish in the Douane ranked as a polite difference of opinion. Gallantly facing this awful gold-braided personage, who at first was to busy to be spoken to, and, on the advice of her fellow victim, bombarding him with reproaches in such scattered remnants of French as an extreme effort of will could summon from the recesses of an exhausted brain, and vainly looking meanwhile in every direction for the civil and paternal Cooks' Interpreter of advertisements and letters, Ermengarde told how she had booked through the perfidious Cook a seat facing the engine, and could not by any means travel in any other way and must have another carriage. A civil flow of idiomatic provincial French, upon which the words Marseilles and Paris floated at intervals, in reply, conveyed nothing but distraction to her mind. Finally she demanded an exchange of seats with some traveller who liked going backwards, in three separate languages, and heard in two that madame had better _monter vite_, as the train was off.

During this engagement she was much annoyed by the efforts of a man in a furred coat, of whose observation she had been indignantly conscious before, to divert the official's attention to himself, in which he at last succeeded by some mystic sign (probably Masonic) conveyed by a touch of the hand in which something glittered in the sunshine. At this juncture the other lady appeared on the car steps, and drawing her inside, explained that it would be all right if she would only wait till the people were settled in the now moving train, and found her a slip seat in the corridor, with which the hapless Ermengarde was obliged to content herself, facing forward, and cherishing deep resentment against the man in the fur collar, whose mysterious and insistent gaze from behind coloured spectacles had continually followed her since her arrival at the train. She felt that in some vague way her misfortunes were owing to this creature's malevolence.

"He looks like an Anarchist or a Nihilist," she confided to the lady. "He's a Russian; these great hairy men always are--unless they are Jews or both."

"Are all Russians Nihilists and Anarchists?" the lady asked.

"Always, when they get out of Russia, unless they are diplomatists. He was hiding a box under his coat. Filled with dynamite, no doubt."

"To blow us all up? Oh! I don't think we are worth that. No celebrities on board to-day. Are you going all the way to the Riviera? You look so tired. Recovering from influenza? So tedious. Pray let me help you all I can."

In spite of her civility there was something repellant to Ermengarde in this young woman, a preoccupation, a reticence, that she mistrusted. Surely that voice was familiar, and the face too; she must have met her, though quite at a loss to say where or when. But at her question on this point there was a brief negative and a sudden retreat from the first cold, calculated approach to friendliness. The face became an utter blank, and vanished behind a periodical.

The train flew; the hairy-faced Nihilist had ended his discussion with the conductor, and was standing in the corridor by a window, surveying the flying landscape and plunged in meditations, dark and evil, no doubt, and probably hatching villainous schemes for the destruction of society. People went up and down the corridor, brushing and stumbling over her skirts, mistaking their compartments, and alternately losing and finding, after much tumult, friends, bags, caps, smoking and restaurant cars. And this was to last all the way to Paris.

The man of mystery might as well let off his infernal machine at once, and have done with it; the slip-seat was narrow, the train rocked as it flew, and Ermengarde, aching wherever it is possible for humanity to ache, felt as if she was breaking in halves at the waist. But what was her surprise and pleasure in the misery of this dark moment to hear a respectful voice at her ear requesting madame to be kind enough to take possession of a forward compartment to Paris in the next carriage, and to find herself at last, as if by enchantment, in the identical state-room of her dreams and the International Sleeping Car Company's pictured advertisement, with its private dressing-room, its airy space, its slip-seat under the window--"should the passenger desire to change position"--and, better still, the whole compartment to herself, but _jusqu' à Paris_ only. What bliss to sink upon the deep, springy seat, to cast aside heavy coat, furs, and hat; and close tired eyes for a moment, and then open them and see the flying foreign landscape, chill, bleak, powdered with snow, and bounded by sea, as they drew near Boulogne!

But what gave the country that unlikeness to English chalk and heath-lands, that charming unlikeness, so dear to new travellers, that gives the feeling of being _somewhere else_, the true foreign touch? To this pleasure she surrendered herself with drowsy content, forgetful of recent sufferings, forgetful of the superb _ragout_ peculiar to Calais somebody had solemnly charged her to take at lunch in the long wait between train and boat, forgetful of lunch to be had on the car, till the spectacle of a waiter carrying tea past the door reminded her that "perfect meals are served," and that none approaching that description had fallen to her lot since that far-off yesterday, when the luxuries of travel had still been a dream. After many and vain requests to the "civil attendants" to bring tea, she staggered to the dining-car, wondering why the waiters all looked so absurdly drunk, and the tables behaved as if they were at spirit-rapping _séances_, and wondering still more when the modest cup of tea "for about tenpence" took a couple of francs to pacify the staggering, taciturn waiter's demand. It was evident that foreigners, civil and talkative when sober, are surly and taciturn when drunk, just as Britons, surly and taciturn by nature, become over-civil and garrulous in liquor.

Snow lay here and there on the bleak levels flying past the windows. How small the cottages were! Cottages? No--huts--cottage was too cosy a word for these poor cabins. What a poverty-stricken country; the very trees lopped and starved of branch, starved houses, starved peasants ploughing with horse-ploughs, no comfort, no prosperity anywhere; all like a pinched, starved England, till after Boulogne, where sand blowing about from the great dunes was a distinct foreign note. What if the train was over-hot? Cold, cold it was outside, and, if the windows were opened, the wind cut in like a sword. A city of a splendid tower lay in the cold light after a pale pink sunset; the rushing, rocking train came to a stop by a dusky, empty platform, where a solitary, starved-looking boy stood motionless, cold in the cold twilight, his arms rolled in his apron, listless, benumbed. This must be Amiens, or else some dim city of twilit dreamland; mortal railway station it could hardly be, so dim, so chill, so empty, so silent, with no passengers, no officials, only that one ghostly train, whence none descended and whither none climbed, hissing furtively in the greyness, while vague figures in blouses passed silently by, tapping thoughtfully at the wheels now and then, and the thin, hunger-pinched boy looked listlessly about him, his bare arms rolled in his apron. Evidently nobody ever goes to French cathedral cities except to stay there; perhaps even the boy was only a statue, the latest triumph of realistic art.

This grey, starved country, so different from rich, cosy England, would have been depressing but for the swift rush of the rocking train, the warm, downy comfort of the carriage, and the fairy-like strangeness that gave everything an air of unreality. If only Charlie were there, his clear eyes wide with pleasure, sharing the fascination, enjoying the motion, asking impossible questions, and making bewildering comments! Monstrous to send such a baby to a school of rough boys. She was not spoiling him, as his father declared; he was not getting womanish ways; children need tenderness, and a boy may have charming manners and be a delightful companion without being unmanly. At Easter he would come home, steeped in savagery, inarticulate and slangy, full of the surly self-consciousness that dreads to be thought anything but brutal, or to vary by a pin's head from "other fellows." Arthur would be delighted, and say he liked boys to be boys. Arthur, whose one aim in life appeared to be to avoid showing the least sign of emotion or humanity, or anything comforting and pleasant. When it came to saying good-bye, at his sudden departure on the eve of hers, she had choked miserably and said nothing, her eyes brimming over; but he--

"Well, good-bye, dear," she seemed still to hear in a cheerful, indifferent, staccato voice, with a cold, light kiss on the face she lifted, trembling and speechless. "Hope you'll enjoy it. Plenty of hats in Paris."

He was off before the last word, and had banged the door, and sprung into his cab by the time her choke was overcome. If only he had not said "dear," that commonplace symbol of conjugal indifference; "Ermengarde," with the faintest inflection of tenderness, would have made all the difference--she could even have borne the reference to hats had he said something nicer than "dear."

The twilight deepened, and the train became a flying meteor of linked lights; she grew more and more inclined to accept the rift in the lute and make the best of it. Her man had his good points, and all men seemed to be made of hard, unloving stuff; why seek sympathy in the impossible region of rocky male hearts? As for the scene in the study, she may have put a wrong interpretation upon it; she would not admit that she had ever given it the worst; it might mean some passing infatuation, resisted, perhaps overcome, at the utmost--or some harmless mystery, that five words would have made clear. Of course, men should not have secrets from their wives; but equally of course, men did. It was well to be away for a time; new experiences would put all this trouble in the background and show it in true perspective; she would wipe it clean off her memory and begin again, harden her heart, take all cheerfully, without show of feeling, answering chaff with chaff; weakness had made her over-sensitive, returning health would harden her, and, perhaps, who could tell? the man himself might soften, and miss and long for her. She hoped he would be very uncomfortable and mislay everything and have no one to find it, and no one to protect him from the zeal of housemaids, the carelessness of cooks, and the importunity of men of business.

But what was this cry of the man with the napkin? "_Diner est servi!_" Blissful announcement, if one could only stagger through the rocking corridor without serious mishap. How excellent a thing is dinner--at the proper time. There was the Anarchist, whose grim visage had more than once startled her meditations as he passed her door--"Tramping up and down like a wild beast," she confided to her fellow traveller in the dining-car, while enjoying the really "perfect meal" for which the long fast had prepared her.

How deft the staggering waiters were, dancing with their dancing dishes to the dancing tables, and always contriving to land the portions safely in the plates! How delightful this flying repast through the flying night--providing one faced the engine. Even the Anarchist was judged with lenience; if he did send furtive glances in her direction, her back hair and hat were unconscious of them. _Timbale de Paris_ on the menu had an attractive look, the same, sliding about the dish balanced unsteadily over her head, was even more fascinating, lodged triumphantly on her plate after five abortive attempts, it was beyond words delicious, when--was it an earthquake or a collision?--a series of bumps and crashes, and passengers tumbling together and apart like nuts shaken in a bag, and the darkened outside world, starred with the lights of Paris, beginning to run away backwards. Farewell, exquisite iced _Timbale_! The only safety is in instant flight. The train has turned.

The true inwardness of the phrase "_jusqu' à Paris_" was now realized, when Ermengarde found herself in great peace, though only half fed, facing the engine in her own compartment, while the lights of Paris twinkled past for some twenty minutes. Then another convulsion of nature seemed to take place, and the world again began to run away backwards from her dizzied sight. "It will turn again at Marseilles," her fellow traveller said cheerily, and at this terrible news there was nothing for it--since the other compartment was now occupied by two men--but to stand, facing the seat, and occasionally fall hither and thither in the rocking of the train, until her companion piled their two bundles of rugs together against the wooden partition and she sat on them, her back stiffened miserably against the straight wooden partition, and her legs jammed between knee and ankle hard against the edge of the seat, and her feet hanging (the space between wall and seat being about fifteen inches, and she a full-sized and shapely lass) in a position to which St. Lawrence's gridiron was luxury, and which soon produced such faintness as had to be treated with brandy.

"And if this," said Ermengarde, when the spirit ran through her veins and restored her speech, "if this is a _Train de Luxe_, give me the commonest third-class carriage, with at least a floor to sit and fall upon!"