Читать книгу Paris Vistas - Helen Davenport Gibbons - Страница 13

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"IT was alcohol! He was right, that old buck. It was alcohol!"

We were sitting in the restaurant of the Hotel Terminus in Marseilles. Our month-old baby was lying on the cushioned seat between us. The maître d'hôtel told us she was the youngest lady that had ever come to his establishment. Bowls of coffee were before us on the table, and we were enjoying our French breakfast when Herbert burst out with the remark I have just recorded.

"What is the matter with you?" I asked.

Shaking with laughter, he told me the story.

"You know the basket with breakables in it? And those two champagne bottles Major Doughty-Wylie gave us?"

"One of them had boracic acid in it. Well?"

"Yes, yes, that is just it. The customshouse officer spied the bottles and it did not take him long to uncork one and smell it. He wanted to stick me for duty."

"What did you do?"

"Protested against paying duty on boracic acid solution. I pointed you out to him sitting over there with the baby. He yielded finally—observing that Americans are queer, tough customers, and that their babies must be husky if their eyes can stand such stuff. But he got the wrong bottle. Don't you remember that in the second one is pure grape alcohol, and that is what he sniffed."

Traveling with a baby, when tickets do not allow one to take the rapide sleeping-cars, has its good points. People do not care to spend the night in a compartment with a baby. We got to the train early—very early. We put Christine's wicker basket (her bed) by the door, and found it to be the best kind of a "reserved" sign. Half a hundred travelers poked their heads in—and passed on. The sight of Christine acted like magic to our advantage. The baby started to cry. "Don't feed her yet," ordered her dad. "Until this train starts, the louder she cries the better for her later comfort." As the wheels began to move, a man came in, put his bag on the rack and sat down. Laughing, he closed the door and pulled down the curtain.

"I have been watching you," said he. "Yours is a clever game. I have three little cabbages myself, and I know babies don't disturb people as much as those who have none think. No," he added, "I must correct myself, thinking of my mother and my mother-in-law. Even those who have had many babies forget in the course of time how they were once used to them. We'll have a comfortable night. Have a cigar, monsieur!"

We did have a splendid sleep. Christine has always been one of those wonder babies. So we were ready to see Paris cheerfully. Heaven knows we needed every possible help to being cheerful! For we were embarked upon a venture that looked more serious than it had the year before. A pair of youngsters can knock around happily without worrying about uncertainties. A baby means a home—and certain unavoidable expenses. Where your progeny is concerned, you can't just do without. We had two hundred and fifty francs in cash, and the prospect of a six hundred dollar fellowship, payable in quarterly installments. That was all we could count upon. Our only other asset was some correspondence sent to the New York Herald that had not been ordered, but for which we hoped to be paid.

The Marseilles express used to arrive at Paris at an outlandish hour. It was not yet six when we were ready to leave the Gare de Lyon. Two porters, laden down with hand-luggage, asked where we wanted to go. We did not know. The Paris hotels that had been our habitats in days past were no longer possible, even temporarily. There was no mother to foot my bills, and Herbert wasn't a bachelor with only his own room and food to pay for. I suggested the possibility of a small hotel by the station. The porters took us out on the Boulevard Diderot. Across the street was a hotel (whose gilt letters, however, did not omit the invariable adjective "grand") that looked within our means.

Once settled and breakfasted, the family council tackled the first problem—Scrappie, gurgling on the big bed. Ever since she was born we had been traveling, and she naturally had to be with us all the time. Only now, after five weeks of parenthood, did the novel and amazing fact dawn upon us that no longer could we "just go out." Scrappie was to be considered. Without Scrappie, we could have set forth immediately upon our search for a place to live. With Scrappie—?

There always is a deus ex machina. In our case it was a dea. Marie still lived in Paris. The contact had never been lost, and when we went through Paris on our honeymoon the year before, I had taken my husband to show him off to Marie. It was decided that I should go out immediately and find her. A month before we had written that we were coming to Paris in June, and she would be expecting us. Marie, and Marie alone, meant freedom of movement. I could not think of trusting my baby to anyone else.

The address was at the tip of my tongue—22 Rue de Wattignies. A few people know vaguely of the battle, but how many life-long Parisians know the street? Not the boulevardiers or the faubouriens of Saint-Germain, or the Americans, North and South, of the Etoile Quarter. And yet the Rue de Wattignies is an artery of importance, copiously inhabited. We had gone in a cab last year, and remembered that it was somewhere beyond the Bastille. At the corner of the street beyond our hotel, just opposite the great clock tower of the Gare de Lyon, I saw the Bastille column not far away. Why waste money on cabs? To the right of the Bastille lay the Rue de Wattignies, and not very far to the right. I remembered perfectly, and started out unhesitatingly.

Oh, the Paris vistas! No other city in the world has every hill top, every great open space, marked by a building or monument that beckons to you at the end of boulevard or avenue. No other city in the world has familiar dome or tower or steeple popping up over housetops in the distance to reassure you wherever you may have wandered, that you are not far from, and that you can always find your way to, a familiar spot. The Eiffel Tower, the Great Wheel, the Arc de Triomphe, Sacré Coeur, the Panthéon, Val-de-Grâce, the Invalides, the Tour St. Jacques, give you your direction. But when you dip into Paris streets, on your way to the goal, you are lost. Even constant reference to a map and long experience do not save you from the deceptive encouragement of Paris vistas. You can walk in circles almost interminably.

I had done this so often in the old days when I escaped from my governess. I did so again when I tried to find the Rue de Wattignies. Perhaps I did not try very hard: for one never minds wandering in Paris. The life of the streets is a witchery that makes one forgot time and distance and goal. When I lost sight of the Bastille column, the labyrinth of St. Antoine streets led me on until I had crossed the canal and found myself by the Hôpital St. Louis. After the year in the East, and years before that in America, old houses and street markets held me in a new world. It was a glorious June day to boot, and after steamer and train, walking was a keen pleasure. Marital and parental responsibilities were forgotten. The Hôpital St. Louis brought me back to the realities of life. I knew that it was north of the Bastille, and not in the direction of the Rue de Wattignies. Suddenly there came uneasily into my mind the picture of a husband, a prisoner, patiently waiting in a very small room in a very small hotel, and a baby demanding lunch. Conscience insisted upon a cab: for nearly two hours had passed since I started forth to find Marie. I had left the hotel early enough to catch her before she might have gone out. What if Marie should not be at home? "Hurry, cocher!"

My panic was unjustified. Marie was at home. Delighted to hear of our arrival, and eager to see her petite Hélène's baby, she put on her funny little black hat, and went right down to the waiting cab.

When we got to the hotel, Herbert was eating a second mid-morning petit déjeuner. He had a copy of the Paris edition of the New York Herald, and showed me, well played up in a prominent place, the last of the Adana massacre stories he had forwarded by mail from Turkey. This was the first time he realized that his "stuff" had been exclusive. There was a pleasant prospect of drawing a little money. So my long absence brought forth no remark, specially as Scrappie had slept like an angel.

"We played a wise game," said Herbert, "when we sent the stories smuggled through Cyprus to the Herald. We shall not have to correspond with New York on a slim chance of a newspaper's gratitude. We can get at James Gordon Bennet right here in Paris." Then he showed me some advertisements picked out in the column of pensions as promising and within our means. We had decided to consider nothing outside of the Latin Quarter.

Marie had not changed a bit. She could not say the same for me although she fussed over me as if I were five going on six. She forgot that twenty years had gone since the last time she combed my hair. She communicated to me the old sense of security. She bathed the baby. She brought me food and sat beside me, observing that long ago she had to coax me to take one more mouthful to please her.

"You always were fussy about your food. Ma chère petite Hélène, you don't eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. You are a naughty one."

She insisted upon my drinking a cup of camomile tea, and took me straight back to my sixth year by calling it pipi du chat. Knowing that name for camomile tea is one of the tests of whether one really knows French.

"Marie," I begged, "show me how English people speak French—the way you used to do!"

But Herbert, who had gone out to get the Daily Mail for its pension list, was coming in the door, and Marie would not show off before Monsieur. Never did she call me chère petite Hélène when he or any other person was present. It was always Madame before company. The Mail had many advertisements of pensions in streets near the Luxembourg. Marie helped us pick them out. The Luxembourg Garden was an integral part of the Latin Quarter, and we had to think of Scrappie's outing.

After lunch we turned Christine over thankfully to Marie and went out pension-hunting together.

"You were lucky in finding Marie," was all Herbert said.

"Yes," I answered, "I really couldn't have left the baby with anyone else."

"But is Marie the only person in the world? Without her, would you be a slave for ever and ever? There must be plenty of people that we could get to look after Scrappie."

"You don't know what it means to have a child!" said Scrappie's mother.

"I guess I look pretty healthy for a fellow who has just landed in Paris with a wife and a baby and 250 francs!" said my husband.

"Can't make us mad," said I; "we're in Paris."

You pile up on one side of the scale heaps of things that ought to worry you, but if you put on the other side the fact that you are in Paris, down goes the Paris side with a sure and cheerful bang, up goes the other side, and the worries tumble off every which way into nowhere.

The main threads of the world's spider web start very far from Paris in all directions and the heaviest urge of traffic is towards the centre. Paris was the centre of the spider web long before Peace Delegates came here to discover the fact. Students, diplomats, travel-agencies, theatrical troupes knew it and whole shelves of books have been written, down the years, to prove it. If Paris is your birth-place, you learn that you are in the capital of the world long before you know how to read the books. If you are an expert on ancient coins, if you are a wood-carver, if you are a singer wanting a voice that will make your fortune because it was trained in France, if you are a baker, if you are a burglar, if you are a silk merchant, if you are a professor from Aberdeen hunting for manuscripts that will prove your thesis concerning Pelagius, if you are an apache, if you are an English nursemaid,—you'll never be lonely in Paris. No matter how isolated or queer or misunderstood you were where you came from, in Paris you'll find inspiration, competition, companionship, opportunity and pals. The papers tell us every week that the birth rate is going down. But the population of Paris is increasing. So in peace, in war and in peace again, there was one constant quantity underpinning existence—Paris, the centre of the spider web. The spider that lures is liberty to work out one's ideas in one's own way in a friendly country. It is a wonder the men who make maps in France can draw lines latitudinally and longitudinally. What difference did it make then if we had only two hundred and fifty francs?