Now it passed him by as something that hardly concerned him any more.
He was much more concerned whether he had brought with him enough gut casts and points.
True, he was stopping for a day or two in Paris, but French gut, he said, is rotten stuff.
They don't understand, and they make it so thick that the fish can't help seeing it, even with a wet fly.
His journey to Paris was not very comfortable.
He got on to the steamer in Folkestone harbour at about eleven in the morning, and there they sat till the late afternoon.
Trawlers and drifters and paddle-steamers and yachts, all painted grey and manned by naval ratings, came in and out of the harbour, but the cross-Channel steamer stayed at the quay.
The vessel was crowded, and there weren't enough seats for lunch, and not enough food if there had been seats.
Nobody could tell them what they were stopping for, although it was a pretty safe guess that it was a submarine.
At about four o'clock there were a number of heavy explosions out at sea, and soon after that they cast off and got away.
It was quite dark when they got to Boulogne, and things were rather disorganised.
In the dim light the Douane took an age to pass the luggage, there was no train to meet the boat, and not enough porters to go round.
He had to take a taxi to the station and wait for the next train to Paris, at about nine o'clock.
It was a stopping train, crowded, and running very late.
It was after one o'clock when they finally did get to Paris.
They had taken eighteen hours over a journey that takes six in normal times.
Howard was tired, very tired indeed.
His heart began to trouble him at Boulogne and he noticed people looking at him queerly; he knew that meant that he had gone a bad colour.
However, he had a little bottle with him that he carried for that sort of incident; he took a dose of that when he got into the train and felt a good deal better.
He went to the Hotel Girodet, a little place just off the Champs Elysees near the top, that he had stayed at before.
Most of the staff he knew had been called up for military service, but they were very kind to him and made him comfortable.
He stayed in bed till lunch-time the first day and rested in his room most of the afternoon, but next morning he was feeling quite himself, and went out to the Louvre.
All his life he had found great satisfaction in pictures -real pictures, as he called them, to distinguish them from impressionism.
He was particularly fond of the Flemish school.
He spent some time that morning sitting on a bench in front of Chardin's still life of pipes and drinking-vessels on a stone table.
And then, he told me, he went and had a look at the artist's portrait of himself.
He took great pleasure in the strong, kind face of the man who had done such very good work, over two hundred years ago.
That's all he saw that morning at the Louvre. Just that chap, and his work.
He went on next day towards the Jura.
He was still feeling a little shaky after the fatigue of the crossing, so that day he only went as far as Dijon.
At the Gare de Lyons he bought a paper casually and looked it over, though he had lost all interest in the war.
There was a tremendous amount of bother over Norway and Denmark, which didn't seem to him to be worth quite so much attention.
It was a good long way away.
Normally that journey takes about three hours, but the railways were in a bad state of disorganisation.
They told him that it was because of troop movements.
The Rapide was an hour late in leaving Paris, and it lost another two hours on the way.
It was nearly dinner-time when he reached Dijon, and he was very thankful that he had decided to stop there.
He had his bags carried to a little hotel just opposite the station, and they gave him a very good dinner in the restaurant.
Then he took a cup of coffee and a cointreau in the cafe and went up to bed at about half-past nine, not too tired to sleep well.
He was really feeling very well next day, better than he had felt for a long time past.
The change of air, added to the change of scene, had done that for him.
He had coffee in his room and got up slowly; he went down at about ten o'clock and the sun was shining, and it was warm and fresh out in the street.
He walked up through the town to the Hotel de Ville and found Dijon just as he remembered it from his last visit, about eighteen months before.
There was the shop where they had bought their berets, and he smiled again to see the name, AU PAUVRE DIABLE.
And there was the shop where John had bought himself a pair of skis, but he didn't linger there for very long.
He had his lunch at the hotel and took the afternoon train on into the Jura: he found that the local trains were running better than the main line ones.
He changed at Andelot and took the branch line up into the hills.
All afternoon the little engine puffed along its single track, pulling its two old coaches through a country dripping with thawing snow.
The snow slithered and cascaded off the slopes into the little streams that now were rushing torrents for a brief season.
The pines were shooting with fresh green, but the meadows were still deep in a grey, slushy mess.