Page 88 - tender-is-the-night

hap—altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that
she had learned something, though exactly what it was she
did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the af-
ternoon as happy—one of those uneventful times that seem
at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure
but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.
Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the
war, as some railroad stations were:—the Gare du Nord and
Waterloo station in London. In the daytime one is deflated
by such towns, with their little trolley cars of twenty years
ago crossing the great gray cobble-stoned squares in front of
the cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality
of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs. But
after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims
back into the picture—the sprightly tarts, the men argu-
ing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting,
head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of no-
where. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall
enough to release the smoke and chatter and music upward
and obligingly the orchestra launched into ‘Yes, We Have
No Bananas,’—they clapped, because the leader looked so
pleased with himself. The Tennessee girl forgot her sorrow
and enjoyed herself, even began flirtations of tropical eye-
rollings and pawings, with Dick and Abe. They teased her
gently.
Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Wurtemburg-
ers, Prussian Guards, Chasseurs Alpins, Manchester mill
hands and old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution
under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris. They ate

88 Tender is the Night