Of Time and the River (143 page)

“Oh, not long,” he said airily. “I wrote my mother yesterday, and it ought not to take over four weeks to get an answer.”

“Four or five weeks!” the old woman said hoarsely. “What are you saying? Four or five weeks, and you have nine francs sixty-five in your pockets! My God! the man is mad!”

“Oh, that part of it will be all right, I guess,” he said with an easy laugh. “I told my mother all about you and Monsieur and Madame Vatel, and all my other friends here, and how good you had been to me, and how you were always befriending Americans, and how they call you Little Mother. I told her you couldn’t have been kinder to me if you’d been my own mother, and that she didn’t need to worry about me at all. So I guess that part of it’s all right,” he concluded comfortably. “I told her that I’d just put up here at the hotel, and that you and the Vatels would take good care of me until the money comes from home.”

“Put up here! . . . For four or five weeks! . . . Hush, my boy! Hush!” she whispered, clutching him feverishly with her bony little claw and casting an apprehensive glance towards Yvonne, whose dark head was lowered studiously above her ledger, but who suggested, by a certain strained attentiveness of posture, that she was missing none of the conversation.

“Come,” the Countess whispered feverishly again, pulling him towards the stairway as she spoke. “You come with me, my boy. I want to talk to you alone.”

They went upstairs to a parlour on the first floor, deserted, closed, a little stale with its sumptuous bordello furnishings of gilt and crimson plush. There the Countess turned to him and said directly:

“See here, my boy. What you want to do is out of the question. It will be impossible for you to stay here for four or five weeks! Impossible!” she cried, twisting her bony little hands with growing agitation. “It cannot be done!”

He looked surprised, a little pained.

“Why?” he said.

“Because,” she said, and now at last her tone was simple and direct in its quiet assertion, “the Vatels will not keep you here—they will not give you credit for so long a time—”

“And you?” he said quietly.

“My friend,” the old woman answered simply, “I have not got it.” She raised her bony little shoulders in a shrug. “At the present moment I have nothing—not a sou! I get a little money from America on the first and fifteenth of each month—if I had it, I would give it to you, but I have nothing now. And what I get would not be nearly enough to pay your expenses here for five weeks. It cannot be done.”

For the first time since his return he felt respect and sympathy for her; in face of the plain and honest directness of her confession all of his former humour of cynical mockery had vanished. He said:

“In that case it cannot be done. You are right. I must try to get help elsewhere.”

“You have friends in Paris, haven’t you? You know people there— Americans?”

“Yes—I think I could get help from someone if I were in Paris.”

“Then I shall try to help you to get there,” she said quickly. “How much will you need?”

“I think the third-class fare from here is about seventeen francs,” he said.

“And you have—how much? Nine sixty-five?” She calculated swiftly, was silent a moment, and then, with an air of decision, marked by a faint flush of painful embarrassment on her withered cheek as she thought of the unpleasant task before her, she said: “If you will wait here, I will go below and see what I can do with these people. . . . I do not know,” she said shortly, the faint flush deepening as she spoke, “but I will try.”

She left him and presently he heard voices below, mixed in rapid and excited argument. In ten minutes the old woman returned. In her hand she held a ten-franc note.

“Here,” she said, giving it to him. “With what you have, it will be enough to get you to Paris. I have inquired. There is a train in twenty minutes. Now, my boy,” she said quickly, taking him by the arm, “you must go. You will just have time to buy your ticket and get on the train. You have no time to lose.”

He had been surprised and disappointed at the meagre exactness of her loan: he had eaten nothing all day long and suddenly, with no funds to spare and the prospect of a continued and indefinite fast before him, he felt ravenously hungry. And now it was his turn to redden with embarrassment; he found it difficult to speak, and in a moment said hesitantly:

“I wonder if these people here would let me have a sandwich. . . . I’ve had nothing to eat.”

She did not answer; he saw the faint flush deepen on her sallow cheeks again and, already sorry for the additional distress his request had caused her, he said quickly:

“No, it doesn’t matter. I’ll get something when I get to Paris. Besides, there’s not time now, anyway. I’ll have to get that train.”

“Yes,” she said quickly, with relief. “I think you should. That is best. . . . And now, my boy, make haste. You have no more time to lose.”

“Good-bye, Countess,” he said, taking her by the hand, and suddenly feeling for the old, lonely, and penniless woman the deepest affection and respect he had ever felt for her. “You have really been my friend. I’m sorry that I’ve had to cause you this trouble. I’ll send you the money when I get to Paris. Good-bye, now, and good luck to you.”

When she answered, her voice was quiet and her old eyes were sad and tranquilly resigned:

“Ah,” she said, “I was afraid that this would happen to you. I have known so many Americans—they are so reckless, so extravagant, they do not watch their money. . . . Good-bye, my boy,” she now said quietly, clasping his hand. “Take care of yourself and do not get into any more trouble. . . . Let me know if all goes well with you. . . . Good-bye, good-bye. . . . Ah, you are so young, aren’t you? Some day you will learn. . . . Good-bye, God bless you—you must hurry now—good-bye. Good-bye.”

She followed him as he went quickly down the stairs, and stood on the stairs watching him as he departed. His valise had been put out before the bureau, where he could get it easily: Yvonne and Madame Vatel were waiting silently in the office. Yvonne did not speak at all; when he spoke to Madame Vatel, she cocked her head a little and said coldly: “Monsieur?”

He seized the valise and started for the door with it at a rapid limping stride. At the door he paused, turned, and saw the Countess, still standing on the stairs and looking at him with old, sad eyes.

“Good-bye,” he cried in jubilant farewell. “Good-bye, Countess.”

“Good-bye, my boy,” her voice was so weary, old, and sad he could scarcely hear her.

Then he limped rapidly away from the hotel, across the square, and towards the station and the train.

All through the afternoon the train roared up across the fat and fertile countryside towards Paris. A late sun broke through ragged clouds of torn gold: the light was wild and radiant with a prophecy of spring. In the compartment his only companion was a young soldier: a boy of eighteen, tall, gawky, big of hand and foot and limb, looking even clumsier than he really was in his thick-soled army shoes, his blue-olive uniform—his long shanks coarsely wound with bands of olive cloth.

The boy had a friendly, olive-coloured face, a little marred by pimples and fuzzy unshaved hair; he talked constantly, amiably indifferent to his companion’s foreign speech and manner, garrulously friendly in a hoarse boy’s voice.

In the middle of the afternoon he began to unpack various bundles from the staggering impedimenta of military equipment with which he was surrounded. From a pocket of his overcoat he solemnly fished out an enormous tin of sardines. From another package he took out a gigantic bottle of red wine, and with the same gravity began to unfold from its wrapping in a newspaper a three-foot loaf of crusty bread.

Then, with the same deliberate concentration, he opened the sardine tin, uncorked the wine-bottle and took a hearty preliminary swig, pulled out a clasp-knife with an evil-looking six-inch blade and, holding the loaf gripped firmly between his knees, began with a backward motion to carve a crisp and liberal slab out of the crusty loaf. This done, he put the bread aside, solemnly impaled a huge sardine upon the point of his gleaming knife, smacked it down upon the slab of bread and, furnishing himself with another hearty swig of the red wine, began to poke the sandwich happily away towards its intended destination, carrying on a choked but completely unperturbed conversation with his companion as he did so.

And his fellow traveller, gazing on that coarse but appetizing fare, felt the pangs of hunger awake in him again with such maddening insistence that the whole legend of his starved desire must have been written on his yearning face and in his greedy eyes. At any rate, the young soldier, his mouth still crammed with food, uttered some inarticulate but friendly sounds, in which the word “Mangez” alone was intelligible, suddenly thrust loaf, bottle, knife, and sardine tin towards his starved companion, and with a gesture of rude encouragement, hoarsely spattered forth again:

“Mangez!”

The fellow-traveller required no second bidding. He fell to ravenously on sardines, wine, and crusty loaf; they sat there cramming themselves enthusiastically, uttering choked and muffled sounds from time to time and grinning at each other amiably.

Nothing he had ever eaten tasted as good as that coarse fare; the strong, plain wine was pulsing warmly in his veins, the food made a warm glow in his grateful belly; outside, the sun had broken through in stripes of ragged gold and bronze, above the wheels he could hear great roars of hearty country laughter from another compartment, the high, rich, sanguinary voice of a Frenchman as he cried “Parbleu!”

And he was going back to Paris again, without a penny, a prospect, or a plan, and he felt no care nor pain nor trouble any longer— nothing but wild joy and jubilant happiness such as he had never felt before. He did not know why.

XCIX

Early in April money came from home, and he was on his way again. This time he started South in true earnest, hurtling southward on one of the crack trains of the P. L. M., his nose flattened against the window of the compartment and his eyes glued on the landscape with such an unwinking intensity, a desperate and insatiate greed, that his fellow-passengers stared at him curiously and then looked at one another with quiet smiles and winks.

As it had always done, the movement and experience of the train filled him with a sense of triumph, joy, and luxury. The crack express, with its gleaming cars, its richly furnished compartments, its luxurious restaurant, warm with wine and food and opulence and suave service, together with the appearance of the passengers, who had the look of ease and wealth and cosmopolitan assurance that one finds among people who travel on such trains, awoke in him again the feeling of a nameless and impending joy, the fulfilment of some impossible happiness, the feeling of wealth and success which a train had always given him, even when he had only a few dollars in his pocket, and that now, in the groomed luxury of this European express, was immeasurably enhanced.

On such a train, indeed, the compact density of the European continent became thrilling in its magical immediacy: one felt everywhere around him—in the assured and wealthy-looking men, the lovely and seductive-looking women—even in the landscape that stretched past with its look of infinite cultivation, its beautifully chequered design of fields, its ancient scheme of towns and villages and old farm buildings—the sense of a life rich with the maturity of centuries, infinitely various and fascinating in its evocation of a world given without reserve to pleasure, love, and luxury—in short, the American’s dream of “Europe,” a world with all the labour, pain, and fear, the rasping care and fury of his own harsh world, left out.

At Lyons, midway on his journey to the South, he left the train. And again, he did not know the reason for his stopping: he had been told that “there was nothing to be seen,” but the place was a great city; his old hunger for new cities conquered him, he paused to stay a day and stayed a week.

Later he could remember just four things that had held him there in that great provincial town. They were a river, two restaurants, and a girl. The river was the Rhône; it came foaming out of the Alps to form at Lyons its juncture with the Saône. Day after day he sat on a café terrace looking at the river; it foamed past bright and glacial, green as emerald, cold and shining, bearing in for ever its message of the Alps, the thaw of crystal ice, the coming on of spring. All of the coming of the spring was somehow written in the cold, sparkling and unforgettable green loveliness of that shining water; it haunted him like something he had always known, like something he had found, like something he would one day discover.

The food in the town was incomparable. It was a native cookery, a food belonging to the region—plain, pungent, peasant-like and nobly good; there is in all the world no better cooking than can be found in the great provincial town of Lyons.

At two places there, La Mčre Guy’s and La Mčre Filliou’s, they call their best cooks by the name of “mother.” They offer eating fit for kings, yet all so reasonable and plain that almost any man can afford it. La Mčre Guy’s establishment is in an old house with various old rooms all used as restaurants. The floor is sanded, there are no suave carpets, no low murmuring of refined voices, no thin tinkle of musical glasses, none of the suave, worldly luxury that one finds in the great restaurants of Paris. It is a place not made for tourists—for Lyons is not a tourist town, and what tourist before ever came there to eat?—It is a place made for the Lyonnais—according to their taste—and one will find them there at Mother Guy’s and Filliou’s, in all their robust, straightforward eating earnestness. Mother Filliou’s is a more open sort of place than Mother Guy’s; it is across the river, away from the central part of Lyons, which is on an island formed by the green girdling of the Rhône and Saône. At Mother Filliou’s one can look inside; when the weather permits, most people eat outside on a terrace: Mother Filliou’s has more sunlight, open air, and gaiety, but the rooms at Mother Guy’s have a more convenient, closed, and homely appearance. Both places are crowded with solid-looking Lyonnais of both sexes, their faces filled with sanguinary life, their voices loud and robust, their napkins tucked in under their chins, as they set heartily to work.