The noise of Paris came to him through the open windows, a confusion of trivial sounds utterly different from the solid, strong note that London gave forth. It was the noise of a nursery of children playing with toys—he heard the continuous jingle of bells round the necks of the horses that drew the cabs, the shouts of men crying newspapers, the squeaking horns of motor-cars, and, every afternoon, at this hour, the sound of some pedlar calling attention to his wares, with a trumpet that had a tinny sound.

At intervals the voice of Paris, modified by the height at which he lived and the distance he was from the Grands Boulevards, sent a shout to him that reminded him of London. That was when a heavy rumbling shook the narrow street which was one of the tributaries of the Boulevards, as a monstrous, unwieldy omnibus, drawn by three horses abreast, rolled upwards on its passage to the Gare du Nord. The horses' hoofs slapped the street with the clatter of iron on stone, and the passing of the omnibus drowned every other sound with its thunder, so that when it had gone, and the echoes of its passage had died away, the voice of Paris seemed more mincing and playful than before.

Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.

At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did not know,[284] and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat neglected education—the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris, not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily lives of the people.

And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold, bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had dragged him and his fellows—Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards, and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine—across the black country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday, to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."

To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters, helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint, possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling[285] with one another, their voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.

He was required to explain and explain again to three or four officials; something of a minor, technical point, he gathered, was barring him from his baggage. His French was not quite adequate to the occasion; but it was maddening to see them shrug their shoulders with a movement that suggested that they rejoiced in his discomfiture.... It was all straightened out, somehow, by a uniformed interpreter, a friendly man who came into Humphrey's existence for a moment, and passed out of it in a casual way, a professional dispenser of sympathy and help, expecting no more reward than a franc or so for services that deserved a life-long gratitude.

But when the cabman had shouted at him, and the blue-bloused porters (one had attached himself to each of his four pieces of baggage) had insisted on their full payment, and after there had been an exchange of abuse between the cabman and an itinerant seller of violets, whose barrow had nearly been run down, Humphrey looked out of the window and caught his first glimpses of Paris ... of the light that suggested warmth and laughter.

He saw great splashes of light, and through the broad glass windows of the cafés a vision of cosy rooms, bustling with the business of eating, of white tables at which men and women sat—ordinary middle-class people. The movement of their arms and shoulders and heads showed that conversation was brisk during their meal; they smiled at one another.

As the cab sped softly along on its pneumatic tyres, he saw picture after picture of this kind, set in its frame of light. "I shall like living here," he thought. Chance decreed that the Rue le Peletier was being repaired, and the cab swung out of the narrower streets into the[286] vivid and wonderful brilliance of the Boulevard des Italiens.

The street throbbed with light and life. He was in a broad avenue with windows that blazed with splendid colour in the night. The faces of the clocks in the middle of the avenue were lit up; the lamps of the flower and newspaper kiosks made pools of shining yellow on the pavement; and above him the red and golden and green of the illuminated advertisements came and went, sending their iridescence into the night. It was not one unbearable glare that startled the eyes, but a blend of many delicate and fine luminous tints: one café was lit with electric lights that gave out a soft pale rose colour, another was of the faintest blue, and a third a delicate yellow, and all these different notes of light rushed together in a lucent harmony.

Music floated to him as he passed slowly in the stream of bleating and jingling and hooting traffic. He saw the people sitting outside the cafés near braziers of glowing coal, calmly drinking coloured liquids, as though there were no such thing as work in the world.

And that was the thought that gave Humphrey his first impression of Paris. These people, it seemed, only played with life. There was something artificial and unreal about all these cafés: they played at being angry (that business at the Customs office was part of the game), an agent held up a little white baton to stop the traffic—playing at being a London policeman, thought Humphrey. He wondered whether this sort of thing went on always, with an absurd thought of the Paris he had seen at a London exhibition.

The cab veered out of the traffic down a side-street between two cafés larger than the rest, and, at the last glimpse of people sitting in overcoats and furs by the braziers, he laughed in the delight of it. "Why, they're playing at it being summer," he said to himself.

[287]

Six months had passed since that day, and he had seen Paris in many aspects, yet nothing could alter his first impression. The whole city was built as a temple of pleasure, a feminine city, with all the shops in the Rue Royale or the Avenue de l'Opera decked with fine jewels and sables. Huge emporiums everywhere, crowded with silks and ribbons and lace; wonderful restaurants, with soft rose-shaded lights and mauve and grey tapestries, as dainty as a lady's boudoir. Somewhere, very discreetly kept in the background, men and women toiled behind the scenes of luxury and pleasure ... those markets in the bleak morning, and the factories on the outskirts of the city, and along the outer Boulevards one saw great-chested men and narrow-chested girls walking homewards from their day's work. But there was pleasure, even for these people: the material pleasure of life, and the spiritual pleasure of art and beauty. The first they could satisfy with a jolly meal in the little bright restaurants of their quarter with red wine and cognac; and of the second they could take their fill for nothing, if they were so minded, for it surrounded them in a scattered profusion everywhere.

Humphrey, in the Paris office of The Day, on the fourth floor of an apartment building in the Rue le Peletier, sat dreaming of all that had happened in the past six months. Wonderful months had they been to him! They had altered his whole perception of things. Here, in a new world and a new city, he was beginning to see things in a truer proportion. Fleet Street receded into the far perspective as something quite small and unimportant; the men themselves, even, seemed narrow-minded and petty, incapable of thinking more deeply than the news of the day demanded.

Humphrey, from the heights of his room in Paris, began to see how broad the world was, that it was finer[288] to deal with nations than individuals, and from his view Fleet Street appeared to him in the same relation as Easterham had appeared to him in London.

The clock struck five. Rivers and Neckinger and Selsey would be going into the conference now in Ferrol's room to discuss the contents of the paper.

"Anything big from Paris?" some one would be asking, or "What about Berlin?"... And he knew that every night they looked towards Paris, where amazing things happened, and he, Humphrey Quain, was Paris. That splendid thought thrilled him to the greatest endeavour. He was The Day's watchman in Paris, not only of all the news that happened in the capital, but of all the happenings in the whole territory of France.

A pile of cuttings from the morning's papers were on his desk. Here was a leading article on the Franco-German relations from the Echo de Paris—an important leading article, obviously inspired by the Quai D'Orsay. There was a two-column account of the Hanon case—an extraordinary murder in Lyons which English readers were following with great interest. There was a budget of "fait-divers," those astonishing events in which the fertility of the Paris journalist's imagination rises to its highest point. They supplied the "human interest." He had received a wire from London to interview a famous French actress, who was going to play in a London theatre, and that had kept him busy for the afternoon. The morning had been devoted to reading every Paris paper.

At five o'clock Dagneau arrived with the evening papers, bought from the fat old woman who kept the kiosk outside the Café Riche. He let himself into the flat with a latch-key, and appeared before Humphrey, a young man, immaculately dressed, with a light beard fringing his fat cheeks. Humphrey could never quite[289] overcome the oddness of having a bearded man as his junior. Dagneau was only twenty-two, but he had grown a beard since he was twenty; that was how youths played at being men. Humphrey called Dagneau "the lamb."

"Hullo," he said. "Anything special?"

Dagneau's pronunciation of English was as bad as Humphrey's pronunciation of French, but in both cases the vocabulary was immense.

"They're crying 'Death of the President' on the Boulevards," said Dagneau.

Humphrey leapt up. "Great Heavens! You don't say so!" he shouted, going to the telephone.

"Be not in a hurry, mon vieux." (Though Dagneau was his assistant, they dropped all formalities between themselves.) "It is in La Presse."

"But—"

"Calm yourself. La Presse is selling in thousands. The news is printed in great black letters across the front page."

"Is it true?" gasped Humphrey.

"It is true that the President is dead—but it is the President of Montemujo or something like that in South America, and not M. Loubet."

Dagneau laughed merrily and slapped the papers on the table. He took Humphrey by the shoulders and shook him playfully.

"I—would I let my old and faithful Englishman down?" he asked. The newspaper phrase spoken as Dagneau spoke it sounded delightful.

"By George, you gave me a shock," Humphrey laughed. "I thought I'd been dozing for an hour with the President dead. Dagneau, you are an espèce de—anything you like."

"Any telegra............