Читать книгу Journal of Small Things - Helen Mackay - Страница 8

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I went up to Paris. I thought if I could feel how Paris felt to-day, I would know if the menace is real. Here one knows nothing.

There is sunshine and rain, and the fields are white to the harvest, the heat hangs over the long white roads, and the shade of the forests is grateful.

The people of the little town go about their ways; their sabots clatter on the cobbles, and their voices have part with the shrilling of cigale and the call of the swallows. The children out of school, at noon and at sunset, play in the Place aux Armes, and the women come there to market in the mornings, under the limes, and after work the men lounge there against the moat wall.

But since Sunday I have so strange a feeling, a sense of its being the end of things. The end of—I don't know what. I want to make notes of things, not of the great things that are happening, but of the little things. I want to feel especially all the little everyday dear accustomed things, to take hold of the moods of them, and gather up their memories, to be put away and kept, and turned back to always afterwards.

I want to make notes of the sweetness of my room to wake to, all the garden coming in through the drawn blinds.

I want to put away and keep my memory of the fragrance of the garden, and its little voices, bird and bee and grasshopper and cricket and stirring leaf. I want to remember things I saw from my window—the terrace with its grey stone mossy parapet; the steps between the pots of heliotrope and roses; the parterres, the old vague statues, the crouching sphynxes—beautiful because they are broken and deep in roses—the trimmed yews, the paths and box borders and formal beds of flowers; the wall of trees around; the glimpses through the trees of the town's stained, blurred roofs, and of grain fields and the forests.

I want to remember the little clover leaf table for my breakfast tray, the bowl of sweet-peas, the taste of the raspberries.

I want to remember the Long Gallery, the château smell in it; the clear green stir of the limes in the entrance court under its windows; the stairs that I kept dreaming about, with the dark Spanish pictures hung along them, and the armour on their turnings.

I want to remember the bird's nest in the lantern over the entrance door, and the begonias in the beds along the wall; the big dogs dragging at their chains to come and meet me, the huge tumbling puppy, the gardener's babies, Thérèse and Robert, bringing Thérèse's new rag doll to show me.

I started, motoring, only about 10 o'clock for Paris.

It was market day in the Place; there were the rust-red and burnt-umber awnings and the women's blue aprons and clattering sabots.

There were many magpies in the road. "Une pie, tant pis; deux pies, tant mieux," and one must bow nine times to each of them.

The country was dim and blue in the gauze lights of the morning. The road was empty between the poplar trees. It was good to see the peasants at work in the fields, and the life of the villages going its way in the morning streets.

I tried to get the papers in Compiègne, but they were not yet come.

There were many soldiers about.

It was the road through Senlis and Chantilly.

The trainers had the race-horses out at exercise in the misty forest roads.

I thought, "There can't be war."

Luzarches and Ecouen, and St. Denis and then Paris.

I got out of the car on the boulevards. There were many people out and I went with the swing of the crowd up and down. It was good to be in the swing of a crowd. People hurried and people dallied; people stood and looked into shop windows; people sat and sipped things on café terraces; people pushed and elbowed; people stopped and stood where they were, reading the noon papers; strangers spoke to one another, if the swing of the crowd threw them for an instant together; everybody looked at one another with a queer new sudden need of each the other, and they all felt, more or less, one thing together.

After a while I went to my own home.

I thought I had never seen the Place de la Concorde more beautiful, oval and white, or crossed the bridge with a deeper sense of going home.

My own little Place was very quiet, all the big houses closed; nobody left but the sentinels before the Palace and the concierges in their doorways with their cats and canaries.

Our concierges and I were more glad even than usual to see one another. Old Boudet in his habitual shirt-sleeves, feeling, evidently, particularly socialistic, was yet quite tolerant of me; and sweet, slow, fat, very respectable mother Boudet, whose gentleness always seems begging one to excuse shirt-sleeves and politics, was so ready to cry that I kissed her.

Our rooms were sad, things moved back and covered over, blinds closed. I did not stay long in those rooms.

I did not try to see any one. It was not people I had wanted, only Paris. I started back early.

I want to remember all the things of the way back into the country; every thing of the fields, red warm ploughed earth and fresh-cut grass and tall clover; every thing of the forests, lights and mists and shadows, depths of moss and fern; every thing of the villages, stone stairways and hearth fires, the pot-au-feu, cows and people's living.

At Compiègne I stopped in the Grand' Place to read the news scrawled in chalk on the blackboard before the Mairie.

A sense of things that were happening came to me less from the words on the bulletin than from the faces of the people in the crowd before it.