Men struggled into their great-coats and put on their hats.
The propinquity in which these persons had sat for a few hours, the pleasant warmth of the Pullman, had made a corporate unity of them, separated as occupants of a coach with its own number from the occupants of other coaches; but now they fell asunder, and each one, or each group of two or three, regained the discreet individuality which for a while had been merged in that of all the others.
In the smoke-laden air, rank with stale tobacco, strong scent, the odour of human bodies and the frowst of steam-heating, they acquired on a sudden an air of mystery.
Strangers once more, they looked at one another with preoccupied, unseeing eyes.
Each one felt in himself a vague hostility to his neighbour.
Some were already queuing up in the passage so that they might get out quickly.
The heat of the Pullman had coated the windows with vapour and Charley wiped them a bit clean with his hand to look out.
He could see nothing.
The train ran into the station.
Charley gave his bag to a porter and with long steps walked up the platform; he was expecting his friend Simon Fenimore to meet him.
He was disappointed not to see him at once; but there was a great mob at the barrier and he supposed that he was waiting there.
He scanned eagerly the eager faces; he passed through; persons struggled through the crowd to seize a new arrival’s hand; women kissed one another; he could not see his friend.
He was so convinced he must be there that he lingered for a little, but he was intimidated by his porter’s obvious impatience and presently followed him out to the courtyard.
He felt vaguely let down.
The porter got him a taxi and Charley gave the driver the name of the hotel where Simon had taken a room for him.
When the Leslie Masons went to Paris they always stayed at an hotel in the Rue St. Honore.
It was exclusively patronized by English and Americans, but after twenty years they still cherished the delusion that it was a discovery of their own, essentially French, and when they saw American luggage on a landing or went up in the lift with persons who could be nothing but English, they never ceased to be surprised.
“I wonder how on earth they happen to be here,” they said.
For their own part they had always been careful never to speak about it to their friends; when they had hit upon a little bit of old France they weren’t going to risk its being spoilt.
Though the director and the porter talked English fluently they always spoke to them in their own halting French, convinced that this was the only language they knew.
But the mere fact that he had so often been to this hotel with his family was a sufficient reason for Charley not to stay there when he was going to Paris by himself.
He was bent on adventure, and a respectable family hotel, where, according to his parents, nobody went but the French provincial nobility, was hardly the right place for the glorious, wild and romantic experiences with which his imagination for the last month had been distracting his mind.
So he had written to Simon asking him to get him a room somewhere in the Latin Quarter; he wasn’t particular about sanitary conveniences and didn’t mind how grubby it was so long as it had the right atmosphere; and Simon in due course had written back to tell him that he had engaged a room at a hotel near the Gare Montparnasse.
It was in a quiet street just off the Rue de Rennes and conveniently near the Rue Campagne Premiere where he himself lived.
Charley quickly got over his disappointment that Simon had not come to meet him, he was sure either to be at the hotel or to have telephoned to say that he would be round immediately, and driving through the crowded streets that lead from the Gare du Nord to the Seine his spirits rose.
It was wonderful to arrive in Paris by night.
A drizzling rain was falling and it gave the streets an exciting mystery.
The shops were brightly lit.
The pavements were multitudinous with umbrellas and the water dripping on them glistened dimly under the street lamps.
Charley remembered one of Renoir’s pictures.
Sometimes a gust of wind made women crouch under their umbrellas and their skirts swirled round their legs.
His taxi drove furiously to his prudent English idea and he gasped whenever with a screeching of brakes it pulled up suddenly to avoid a collision.
The red lights held them up at a crossing and in both directions a great stream of persons surged over like a panic-stricken mob flying before a police charge.
To Charley’s excited gaze they seemed quite different from an English crowd, more alert, more eager; when by chance his eyes fell on a girl walking by herself, a sempstress or a typist going home after the day’s work, it delighted him to fancy that she was hurrying to meet her lover; and when he saw a pair walking arm in arm under an umbrella, a young man with a beard, in a broad-brimmed hat, and a girl with a fur round her neck, walking as though it were such bliss to be together they did not mind the rain and were unconscious of the jostling throng, he thrilled with a poignant and sympathetic joy.
At one corner owing to a block his taxi was side by side with a handsome limousine.
There sat in it a woman in a sable coat, with painted cheeks and painted lips, and a profile of incredible distinction.
She might have been the Duchesse de Guermantes driving back after a tea party to her house in the Boulevard St. Germain.
It was wonderful to be twenty-three and in Paris on one’s own.
“By God, what a time I’m going to have.”
The hotel was grander than he had expected.
Its facade, with its architectural embellishments, suggested the flamboyant taste of the late Baron Haussmann.
He found that a room had been engaged for him, but Simon had left neither letter nor message.
He was taken upstairs not as he had anticipated by a slovenly boots in a dirty apron, with a sinister look on his ill-shaven face, but by an affable director who spoke perfect English and wore a morning coat.
The room was furnished with hygienic severity, and there were two beds in it, but the director assured him that he would only charge him for the use of one.
He showed Charley with pride the communicating bath-room.
Left to himself Charley looked about him.
He had expected a little room with heavy curtains of dull rep, a wooden bed with a huge eiderdown and an old mahogany wardrobe with a large mirror; he had expected to find used hairpins on the dressing-table and in the drawer of the table de nuit half a lipstick and a broken comb in which a few dyed hairs were still entangled.
That was the idea his romantic fancy had formed of a student’s room in the Latin Quarter.
A bath-room!
That was the last thing he had bargained for.