Adams, Nick (Fictitious character) -- Fiction; American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
There was smoke from many tall chimneys—coming into Marseilles, and the
train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the
station. The train stayed twenty-five minutes in the station at
Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of _The Daily Mail_ and a
half-bottle of Evian water. She walked a little way along the station
platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes,
where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal
of departure and she had only gotten on just in time. The American lady
was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure
were given and that she did not hear them.
The train left the station in Marseilles and there was not only the
switch-yards and the factory smoke but, looking back, the town of
Marseilles and the harbor with stone hills behind it and the last of the
sun on the water. As it was getting dark the train passed a farmhouse
burning in a field. Motor-cars were stopped along the road and bedding
and things from inside the farmhouse were spread in the field. Many
people were watching the house burn. After it was dark the train was in
Avignon. People got on and off. At the news-stand Frenchmen, returning
to Paris, bought that day’s French papers. On the station platform were
negro soldiers. They wore brown uniforms and were tall and their faces
shone, close under the electric light. Their faces were very black and
they were too tall to stare. The train left Avignon station with the
negroes standing there. A short white sergeant was with them.
Inside the _lit salon_ compartment the porter had pulled down the three
beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night
the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a _rapide_
and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The
American lady’s bed was the one next to the window. The canary from
Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was out of the draft in the
corridor that went into the compartment wash-room. There was a blue
light outside the compartment, and all night the train went very fast
and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.
In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had
come out from the wash-room, looking very wholesome and middle-aged and
American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the
birdcage and hung the cage in the sun, she went back to the
restaurant-car for breakfast. When she came back to the _lit salon_
compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made
into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that
came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.
“He loves the sun,” the American lady said. “He’ll sing now in a little
while.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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