She was a young and pretty woman, certainly a native of the south of France, with splendid eyes, beautiful wavy black hair, which was so thick and long that it seemed almost too heavy for her head. She was dressed with a certain southern bad taste which made her look a little vulgar. Her regular features had none of the grace and finish of the refined races, of that slight delicacy which members of the aristocracy inherit from their birth, and which is the hereditary mark of thinner blood.
Her bracelets were too big to be of gold; she wore earrings with large white stones that were certainly not diamonds, and she belonged unmistakably to the People. One surmised that she would talk too loud, and shout on every occasion with exaggerated gestures.
When the train started she remained motionless in her place, in the att.i.tude of a woman who was indignant, without even looking at us.
Paul began to talk to me, evidently with an eye to effect, trying to attract her attention, as shopkeepers expose their choice wares to catch the notice of pa.s.sersby.
She, however, did not appear to be paying the least attention.
"Toulon! Ten minutes to wait! Refreshment room!" the porters shouted.
Paul motioned to me to get out, and as soon as we had done so, he said:
"I wonder who on earth she can be?"
I began to laugh. "I am sure I don"t know, and I don"t in the least care."
He was quite excited.
"She is an uncommonly fresh and pretty girl. What eyes she has, and how cross she looks. She must have been dreadfully worried, for she takes no notice of anything."
"You will have all your trouble for nothing," I growled.
He began to lose his temper.
"I am not taking any trouble, my dear fellow. I think her an extremely pretty woman, that is all. If one could only speak to her! But I don"t know how to begin. Cannot you give me an idea? Can"t you guess who she is?"
"Upon my word, I cannot. However, I should rather think she is some strolling actress who is going to rejoin her company after a love adventure."
He seemed quite upset, as if I had said something insulting.
"What makes you think that? On the contrary, I think she looks most respectable."
"Just look at her bracelets," I said, "her earrings and her whole dress. I should not be the least surprised if she were a dancer or a circus rider, but most likely a dancer. Her whole style smacks very much of the theatre."
He evidently did not like the idea.
"She is much too young, I am sure; why, she is hardly twenty."
"Well," I replied, "there are many things which one can do before one is twenty; dancing and elocution are among them."
"Take your seats for Nice, Vintimiglia," the guards and porters called.
We got in; our fellow pa.s.senger was eating an orange, and certainly she did not do it elegantly. She had spread her pocket-handkerchief on her knees, and the way in which she tore off the peel and opened her mouth to put in the pieces, and then spat the pips out of the window, showed that her training had been decidedly vulgar.
She seemed, also, more put out than ever, and swallowed the fruit with an exceedingly comic air of rage.
Paul devoured her with his eyes, and tried to attract her attention and excite her curiosity; but in spite of his talk, and of the manner in which he brought in well-known names, she did not pay the least attention to him.
After pa.s.sing Frejus and St. Raphael, the train pa.s.sed through a veritable garden, a paradise of roses, and groves of oranges and lemons covered with fruits and flowers at the same time. That delightful coast from Ma.r.s.eilles to Genoa is a kingdom of perfumes in a home of flowers.
June is the time to see it in all its beauty, when in every narrow valley and on every slope, the most exquisite flowers are growing luxuriantly. And the roses! fields, hedges, groves of roses. They climb up the walls, blossom on the roofs, hang from the trees, peep out from among the bushes; they are white, red, yellow, large and small, single, with a simple self-colored dress, or full and heavy in brilliant toilettes.
Their breath makes the air heavy and relaxing, and the still more penetrating odor of the orange blossoms sweetens the atmosphere till it might almost be called the refinement of odor.
The sh.o.r.e, with its brown rocks, was bathed by the motionless Mediterranean. The hot summer sun stretched like a fiery cloth over the mountains, over the long expanses of sand, and over the motionless, apparently solid blue sea. The train went on through the tunnels, along the slopes, above the water, on straight, wall-like viaducts, and a soft, vague, saltish smell, a smell of drying seaweed, mingled at times with the strong, heavy perfume of the flowers.
But Paul neither saw, looked at, nor smelled anything, for our fellow traveller engrossed all his attention.
When we reached Cannes, as he wished to speak to me he signed to me to get out, and as soon as I did so, he took me by the arm.
"Do you know, she is really charming. Just look at her eyes; and I never saw anything like her hair."
"Don"t excite yourself," I replied, "or else address her, if you have any intentions that way. She does not look unapproachable; I fancy, although she appear to be a little bit grumpy."
"Why don"t you speak to her?" he said.
"I don"t know what to say, for I am always terribly stupid at first; I can never make advances to a woman in the street. I follow them, go round and round them, and quite close to them, but never know what to say at first. I only once tried to enter into conversation with a woman in that way. As I clearly saw that she was waiting for me to make overtures, and as I felt bound to say something, I stammered out, "I hope you are quite well, madame?" She laughed in my face, and I made my escape."
I promised Paul to do all I could to bring about a conversation, and when we had taken our places again, I politely asked our neighbor:
"Have you any objection to the smell of tobacco, madame?"
She merely replied, "Non capisco."
So she was an Italian! I felt an absurd inclination to laugh. As Paul did not understand a word of that language, I was obliged to act as his interpreter, so I said in Italian:
"I asked you, madame, whether you had any objection to tobacco smoke?"
With an angry look she replied, "Che mi fa!"
She had neither turned her head nor looked at me, and I really did not know whether to take this "What do I care" for an authorization, a refusal, a real sign of indifference, or for a mere "Let me alone."
"Madame," I replied, "if you mind the smell of tobacco in the least-"
She again said, "Mica," in a tone which seemed to mean, "I wish to goodness you would leave me alone!" It was, however, a kind of permission, so I said to Paul:
"You may smoke."
He looked at me in that curious sort of way that people have when they try to understand others who are talking in a strange language before them, and asked me:
"What did you say to her?"
"I asked whether we might smoke, and she said we might do whatever we liked."
Whereupon I lighted my cigar.
"Did she say anything more?"