The car which they had chartered for a four months’ tour was brought round from a garage at nine o’clock. A few minutes later they were on their way to Rheims.
Elinor drove; Eugene sat beside her; Ann and Starwick were in the rear seat. The car was a good one — a Panhard — and Elinor drove swiftly, beautifully, with magnificent competence, as she did all things, getting ahead of everybody else, besting even the swerve of the taxi-drivers in their wasp-like flight, and doing it all with such smooth ease that no one noticed it.
They seemed to get through the great dense web, the monumental complication of central Paris by a kind of magic. As always, Elinor communicated to everyone and everything the superb confidence of her authority. In her presence, and under her governance, the strange and alien world about them became instantly familiar as the Main Street of one’s native town, making even the bewildering and intricate confusion of its swarming mass wonderfully natural and easy to be grasped. Paris, in fact, under the transforming magic of this woman’s touch, became curiously American, the enchantment beautifully like Eugene’s own far-off visions as a child.
It was astounding. The whole city had suddenly taken on the clear and unperplexing proportions of a map — of one of those beautifully simple and comforting maps which are sold to tourists, in which everything is charming, colourful, and cosy as a toy, and where everything that need be known — all the celebrated “points of interest”— the Eiffel Tower, the Madeleine, and Notre Dame, the Trocadéro, and the Arc de Triomphe, are pictured charmingly, in vivid colours.
Paris, in fact, had this morning become a brilliant, lovely, flashing toy. It was a toy which had been miraculously created for the enjoyment of brilliant, knowing and sophisticated Americans like Elinor and himself. It was a toy which could be instantly understood, preserved and enjoyed, a toy that they could play with to their hearts’ content, a toy which need confuse and puzzle none of them for a moment, particularly since Elinor was there to explain the toy and make it go.
It was incredible. Gone was all the blind confusion, the sick despair, the empty desolation of his first month in Paris. Gone was the old blind and baffled struggle against the staggering mass and number of a world too infinitely complex to be comprehended, too strange and alien to be understood. Gone were all the old sensations of the drowning horror, the feeling of atomic desolation as he blindly prowled the streets among alien and uncountable hordes of strange dark faces, the sensation of being an eyeless grope-thing that crawled and scuttled blindly on the sea-depths of some terrible oceanic world of whose dimensions, structure, quality and purpose it could know nothing. Gone were all those feelings of strife, profitless, strange and impotent futility — those struggles that wracked the living sinews of man’s life and soul with quivering exhaustion and with sick despair, the hideous feeling of being emptied out in planetary vacancy, of losing all the high hope of the spirit’s purpose, the heart’s integrity — of being exploded, emptied out and dissipated into hideous, hopeless nothingness where all the spirit of man’s courage turned dead and rotten as a last year’s apple, and all his sounding plans of work and greatness seemed feebler than the scratchings of a dog upon a wall — a horror that can seize a man in the great jungle of an unknown city and a swarming street and that is far more terrible than the unknown mystery of any Amazonian jungle of the earth could be.
It was all gone now — the devouring hunger, and the drowning horror, and the blind confusion of the old, swarm-haunted mind of man — the fruitless struggle of the Faustian life — and in its place he had the glittering toy, the toy of legend and enchantment and of quick possession.
The French, they were a charming race — so gay, so light, and so incorrigible — so childlike and so like a race of charming toys.
Elinor made their relation to all these good people swarming in the streets around them wonderfully easy, dear, and agreeable. There was nothing strange about them, their ways were unpredictable, since they were French, but they were perfectly understandable. Her attitude, expressed in a rapid, gay and half-abstracted chatter — a kind of running commentary on the life around her as she drove — made the whole thing plain. They were a quaint lot, a droll lot, an incomparable lot — they were charming, amazing, irresponsible, a race of toys and children — they were “French.”
“All right, my dear,” she would murmur to herself as a fat taxi-driver snaked recklessly in ahead of her and came to a triumphant stop —“have it your own way, my darling — have it your own way — I shan’t argue with you — God!” she would cry, throwing her head back with a sudden rich burst of laughter —“look at the old boy with the whiskers over there at the table — did you see him twirl his gay moustachios and roll his roguish eyes at that girl as she went by? SIMPLY incredible!” she cried with another laugh, and bit her lips, and shook her head in fine astonishment. “Thank you!” she murmured politely, as the gendarme shrilled upon his whistle and beckoned with his small white club. “Monsieur l’Agent, vous êtes bien gentil”— as she smoothly shifted gears and shot past him.
In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious shops and great cafés, an animated and beautiful design of a million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all filled with joy, all with something so vivid, bright, particular and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved itself into a thousand charming and brilliant pictures, each wonderful and unforgettable, and all fitting instantly into the single structure, the simple and magnificent clarity of the whole design.
They swept through the huge central web of Paris, and were passing through the great shabby complication of the Eastern Quarters, the ragged, ugly sprawl of the suburbs.
And now, swift as dreams, it seemed, they were out in open country, speeding along roads shaded by tall rows of poplars, under a sky of humid grey, whitened with a milky and soul-troubling light.
Elinor was very gay, mercurial, full of sudden spontaneous laughter, snatches of song, deep gravity, swift inexplicable delight. Ann maintained a sullen silence. As for Starwick, he seemed on the verge of collapse all the time. At Chateau-Thierry he announced that he could go no farther: they stopped, got him into a little café, and fortified him with some brandy. He sank into a stupor of exhaustion, from which they could not rouse him. To all their persuasions and entreaties he just shook his head and mumbled wearily:
“I can’t! — Leave me here! — I can’t go on!”
Three hours passed in this way before they succeeded in reviving him, getting him out of the café— or estaminet — and into the car again. Ann’s face was flushed with resentful anger. She burst out furiously:
“You had no right to make him come along on this trip! You knew he couldn’t make it; he’s dead on his feet. I think we ought to take him back to Paris now.”
“Sorry, my dear,” said Elinor crisply, with a fine bright smile, “but there’ll be no turning back! We’re going on!”
“Frank can’t go on!” Ann cried angrily. “You know he can’t! I think it’s a rotten shame for you to insist on this when you see what shape he’s in.”
“Nevertheless, we’re going on,” said Elinor with grim cheerfulness. “And Mr. Starwick is going with us. He’ll see it through now to the bitter end. And if he dies upon the way, we’ll give him a soldier’s burial here upon the field of honour. . . . Allons, mes enfants! Avancez!” And humming gaily and lightly the tune of Malbrouck, she shifted gears and sent the car smoothly, swiftly forward again.
It was a horrible journey: one of those experiences which, by the grim and hopeless protraction of their suffering, leave their nightmare image indelibly upon the memories of everyone who has experienced them. The grey light of the short winter’s day was already waning rapidly when they drove out of Chateau-Thierry. As they approached Rheims dark had almost come, the lights of the town had begun to twinkle, sparsely, with provincial dismalness, in the distance. No one knew the purpose of their visit; no one knew what the trip was for, what they were coming to see — no one had enquired.
It was almost dark when they entered the town. Elinor drove immediately to the cathedral, halted the car, and got out.
“Voilà, mes amis!” she said ironically. “We are here!”
And she made a magnificent flourishing gesture towards the great ruined mass, which, in the last faint grey light of day, was dimly visible as a gigantic soaring monument of shattering arches and demolished buttresses, a lacework of terrific stone looped ruggedly with splinters of faint light, the demolished fa?ades of old saints and kings and shell-torn towers — the twilight ruins of a twilight world.
“Magnificent!” cried Elinor enthusiastically. “Superb! — Frank! Frank! You must get out and feast your eyes upon this noble monument! I have heard you speak so often of its beauty. . . . But, my dear, you MUST!” she said, answering with fine persuasion his feeble and dispirited groan. “You’d never forgive yourself, or me either, if you knew you’d come the whole way to Rheims without a single loo............