Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 20

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There is a sort of dreadful comfort in knowing that their going off is over.

They are gone.

The women saw them off, helped them hurry their things together—those bundles, boots, something to eat in the train. Every one had laughed.

The last things are over—the last night, when he slept so well and she watched; the last sitting down at the table together; the last standing together in the room; his last look around it, and her last seeing of him there; the going out at the door.

The last going out of the door together. There was the bundle to carry, and to laugh over. Everybody's motor had been taken, everybody's chauffeur was gone with all the other husbands and sons. Omnibuses and taxis were gone. The metro was not running, nor the tram. How to get to the station—such confusion, and such laughing over it.

The station, somehow. And the crowd—such a crowd. And all the crowd was just one man going off, and one woman who could bear it.

There had been just one bearing of it, and then it was over.

How silent Paris is!

It is one of those hot veiled days, when everything is tensely strung, high pitched, and yet nothing seems to be quite real.

The leaves are falling in the Tuileries Gardens. I remembered, crossing there, that this is the anniversary day of a fallen kingdom.

The little Dauphin shuffled his feet through the fallen leaves as he went to the burial service of kingdoms, across the garden, in the old riding academy.

I imagine his loving the sound of the dead leaves about his feet, as I used to love it when I was a child.

The sense of autumn and the end of things is heavy upon Paris.

All the news is good. It is just the sadness of autumn—

Les sanglots longs

des violons

de l'automne.

I went to meet Chantal in the Cour la Reine.

We sat on the top of the river wall. No boats passed along the river, and few people passed under the slowly falling leaves.

We were very alone with Paris.

An old shabby man came by, reading an evening paper as he walked slowly. We asked him what the news was. He stopped and stood by the wall with us and read good news to us. He said, "I fought through '70. It was just so in '70."

Chantal said to me, "How dreadful to be old! The night of the first big victory, let's get somebody to take us out with the crowd on the boulevards."