He arrived in Paris with the dawn of Sunday morning, and looked out
cautiously. There was no English official visible. However, his papers
were entirely correct, and he climbed up the stairs and wandered along a
corridor in which hands and letters from time to time indicated the lair
of the R.T.O. Arriving, he found another officer waiting, but no R.T.O.
The other was "bored stiff," he said; he had sat there an hour, but had
seen no sign of the Transport Officer. Peter smiled, and replied that he
had no intention whatever of waiting; he only wanted to know the times of
the Boulogne trains. These he discovered by the aid of a railway guide on
the table, and selected the midnight train, which would land him in
Boulogne in time for the first leave-boat, if the train were punctual and
the leave-boat not too early. In any case, he could take the second,
which would only mean Victoria a few hours later that same day. And these
details settled, he left his luggage in a corner and strolled off into
the city.
A big city, seen for the first time by oneself alone when one does not
know a soul in it, may be intensely boring or intensely interesting. It
depends on oneself. Peter was in the mood to be interested. He was
introspective. It pleased him to watch the early morning stir; to see the
women come out in shawls and slipshod slippers and swill down their bit
of pavement; to see sleepy shopkeepers take down their shutters and
street-vendors set up their stalls; to try to gauge the thoughts and
doings of the place from the shop-windows and the advertisements. His
first need was a wash and a shave, and he got both at a little barber's
in which monsieur attended to him, while madame, in considerable
_négligée_, made her toilette before the next glass. His second was
breakfast, and he got it, _à l'anglaise_, with an omelette and jam, in a
just-stirring hotel; and then, set up, he strolled off for the centre of
things. Many Masses were in progress at the Madeleine, and he heard one
or two with a curious contentment, but they had no lesson for him,
probably because of the foreign element in the atmosphere, and he did
not pray. Still, he sat, chiefly, and watched, until he felt how entirely
he was a stranger here, and went out into the sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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