A SPRING JOURNEY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22069, 27 September 1933, Page 11

A SPRING JOURNEY

By G. S. Cox.

V.—THE LAST STAGES I planned to spend the night in the little village which grouped itself picturesquely under the great ruined castle. It turned out to be quite an extensive place, with a big empty chateau sheltering under the. hillside. Its grounds were piled with firewood, and its arches filled with all sorts of old machinery and junk. Opposite was a hotel, newly done up, looking attractive enough. Nearby was another smaller place, rather cheap and grubby in appearance, I forgot that all the cafes in which I had met with friendliness had been just as dirty from the outside, and I turned into the smarter place. As'soon as I was in I knew I had made a. mistake. The dining room into which I stepped reeked with bourgeois artificiality and presumptuousness. It was full of new, smart, cheap furniture, pink paper . lamp shades, poor brightly coloured pictures. In the corner a radio blared. And the bedrooms, when I saw them, had pink tasselled bedspreads and more paper lamp shades. All these fripperies were so out of sympathy with the simplicity of the village outside and the natural beauty through which I had been passing all the afternoon that they appeared blasphemous, disgusting. But I was tired, and felt self-conscious in my old clothes amid all this pretentiousness. I had not the courage to march out and finally took a room at 15 francs—the same price as I had paid at L’Hotel du Cygne at Totes. I passed a miserable evening. The dinner was bad. The proprietor and bis curt, shrewd little wife were unfriendly, distant, interested in nothing but the amount of money I was going to spend. On any other day I would not have minded the place so much. But the rest of ray day had been so perfect, with beauty and spontaneous friendliness on every hand, that the atmosphere of this hotel seemed a sacrilege. My dreaming, my peaceful mood had been completely shattered. Instead ,of a quiet dinner and an hour or two of friendly conversation I had to put up with a half-cooked chop and lumpy, semi-cold mashed potatoes “a la Anglaise,” and for company the sight and sound of the proprietress ridding herself of her venom by quarrelling with her children. Oh, how I hated the whole family of them! The picture was completed when I leamt later, in Paris, that this hotel is a favourite spot for Parisians who wish to conduct an afternoon or evening love affair unobserved by their friends. Rooms by the hour, no questions asked, and so on.^ The experience showed me one thing. It proved to me that the French were not all gay, unaffectedly friendly folk, as my earlier acquaintance with 1 the lorry drivers and cafe keepers Jed me to assume. I had been accrediting to the whole nation the virtues of its working class. Now I was_ meeting' te bourgeoisie. I can well imagine how tourists, meeting, as tourists always do, chiefly the bourgeois hotelkeeper and restaurant proprietor type of Frenchman, can go away with the impression that the French are an avaricious, shrewd, materially minded people. On following up this train of thought 1 realised that many of the virtues which, from my encounters earlier in the trip, I had ascribed as peculiarly national traits of the French, were really characteristics of the working -classes almost anywhere, and not merely in any one country. The truth was that this trip had brought me into closer contact with working people than I had been for many months, and I had ascribed my appreciation of their frankness, their lack of scared reserve, and their formality to their country rather than to thenclass. I remembered then the friendliness, certainly less vociferous and less expressive, but in every way as sincere, which I had encountered in the bar room of Oxfordshire inns, in Devonshire farmhouses, in “ Slice off the joint and two ‘ vegs,’ ” eating houses in the East End of London. I remembered a smiling bus conductress in Glasgow, a young shepherd with whom I tramped for miles through the heather’ on Ben More, a Manchester mill hand whose cheerful, rough-hewn philosophising I had enjoyed in a Blackpool-bound train, arid discussions with trade unionists on Ruskin in Oxford. Yes, it was the bourgeois I hated that night, not Prance. So I flung the tasselled bedspread into a corner of the room, and went to sleep. I was on the road early in the morning. My last gesture on leaving the outskirts of the village was to tear up my hotel bill and throw it into a sewer grating, i To-day I cannot even remember the name, of the place. The morning was gusty, with patches of vivid blue sky showing between the ragged grey clouds. For some time I walked through what was apparently a Parisian summer holiday district. Dapper houses, in gay colours, stood in prim, neatly clipped gardens, fenced in by high white wooden trellises. At the moment they were almost all closed. I could picture them in the summer peopled by the sort of holidaymaker who is always well dressed “ a la sport,” in silk shirt and resplendent flannels, with unruffled hair gleaming with pomatum. Another picture came into my mind—an old whare at Stewart Island in a bush clearing just above the sea; two sunburnt, laughing boys on the veranda drying themselves in the sun after an early dip; another, in grey shirt and shorts, frying eggs over an open wood fire; and an aloof, noisy weka scraping around in the scraps at the back door. Yes, I felt, as I tramped along , that French road, there is no doubt that Katherine Mansfield was right. It is “the people in the remote places who inherit the earth,”

After a time I passed out of the holidaying district, and was in the country proper once more. I trudged on through a little village on the banks of the Seine, where fat, grey-waistooated pigeons pottered about in the cobbled square. In a side street a carpenter had set up his trestles outside his shop, and was carrying on his work in the open roadway. From this village to Mantes I had about 10 kilometres to cover, through the most beautiful countryside I encountered on the whole of my journey. One view I shall never forget. Ahead of me stretched the road, white, curving at last to enter a poplar-lined village street. On the edge of the village, flanking it like a fortification, was the grey wall of the cemetery, the tips of the gravestones showing over its redtiled edge. At one end a slender black cypress swayed in the wind. Beyond were the roofs of the village, grey or brownish red in colour, with, dominating them all, a big grey stone church. Behind them, the wind sent masses of grey clouds racing across the blue sky. The village followed the slope of the hill, so that it seemed to lean, as the cypress did, away from this wild March ■wind which came sweeping across the wide, tree-filled valley, through the orchards on the river bank, and on up the hillside towards the purplish, leafless woods on the skyline. The whole scene was full of the exuberance of early spring. I felt as if the wind might pick me up and sweep me too over the village and on, on, over the fields, over the crest of the hill, as it did with the scattered clouds.

It was so beautiful that I sat down on the stone marking the kilometres, and sketched the scene on my notebook. I had only a pen, however, with which to draw, and after two attempts gave it up, and put on my rucksack again. But I had not gone 50 yards before I was cursing myself for my slackness. Any sketch, however bad, would be worth having' as a reminder of the charm of

this village on the hillside. Nor was there any use postponing the task by pretending that I could draw it later from memory and the rough outlines I had already jotted down. So I went back to my stone, and put in half an hour’s work with pen and paper until the gentle chimes of the church clock called me to be oh my way again.

I had only three or four more kilometres of country road. Then, suddenly, the fields seemed to run up to the walls of a factory, and stopped dead, and I found myself in the streets of Mantes. I stopped in an empty section to polish my shoes, put oh a tie, and straighten out my clothes. Five minutes later I boarded the bus for Paris, and in an hour’s time I was standing at the Porte Maillott, with the Arc de Triomphe looming up before me.