rolls. Behind her came la petite Rose, dressed in her Sunday best, with a large black straw hat, a tight black overcoat, and white socks. She looked very uncomfortable.
Howard said kindly in French: 'Good morning, Rose. Are you coming with us to England?'
She said: 'Oui, monsieur.'
The femme de chambre said: 'All night she has been talking about going in the train, and going to England, and going to live with her father. She has hardly slept at all, that one.' There was a twist in her smile as she spoke; it seemed to Howard that she was not far from tears again.
'That's fine,' he said. He turned to the femme de chambre.
'Sit down and have a cup of coffee with us. Rose will, won't you, Rose?'
The woman said: 'Merci, monsieur. But I have the sandwiches to prepare, and I have had my coffee.' She rubbed the little girl's shoulder. 'Would you like another cup of coffee, ma petite?'
She left Rose with them and went out. In the bedroom Howard sat the children down, each with a buttered roll to eat and a cup full of weak coffee to drink. The children ate very slowly; he had finished his own meal by the time they were only half-way through. He pottered about and packed up their small luggage; Rose had her own things in a little attache case on the floor beside her.
The children ate on industriously. The femme de chambre came back with several large, badly-wrapped parcels of food for the journey, and a very large wine bottle full of milk. There,' she said unsteadily. 'Nobody will starve today!'
The children laughed merrily at the poor joke. Rose had finished, and Ronnie was engulfing the last mouthful, but Sheila was still eating steadily. There was nothing now to wait for, and the old man was anxious to get to the station for fear that they might miss a train. 'You don't want that,' he said to Sheila, indicating her half- eaten roll. 'You'd better leave it. We've got to go now.'
'I want it,' she said mutinously.
'But we've got to go now.'
'I want it.'
He was not going to waste energy over that. 'All right,' he said, 'you can bring it along with you.' He picked up their bags and shepherded them all out into the corridor and down the stairs.
At the door of the hotel he turned to the/emme de chambre. 'If there is any difficulty I shall come back here,' he said.
'Otherwise, as I said, I will send a telegram when we reach England, and Rose is with her father.'
She said quickly: 'But monsieur must not pay for that, Henri will send the telegram.'
He was touched. 'Anyway, it will be sent directly we arrive in London. Au revoir, mademoiselle.'
'Au revoir, monsieur. Bonne chance.' She stood and watched them as he guided the three children across the road in the thin morning sunlight, the tears running all unheeded down the furrows of her face.
In the station there was great confusion. It was quite impossible to find out the times or likelihood of trains, or whether, amongst all the thronging soldiers, there would be seats for children. The most that he could learn was that trains for Paris came in at Quai 4 and that there had been two since midnight. He went to the booking-office to get a ticket for Rose, but it was closed.
'One does not take tickets any more,' a bystander said. 'It is not necessary.'
The old man stared at him. 'One pays, then, on the train, perhaps?'
The man shrugged his shoulders. 'Perhaps.'
There was nobody to check tickets as they passed on to the platform. He led the children through the crowd, Sheila still chewing her half-eaten roll of bread, clutched firmly in a hand already hot. Quai 4 was practically deserted, rather to his surprise. There did not seem to be great competition to get to Paris; all the traffic seemed to be the other way.
He saw an engine-driver, and approached him: 'It is here that the train for Paris will arrive?'
'But certainly.'
The statement was not reassuring. The empty spaces of the platform oppressed the old man; they were unnatural, ominous. He walked along to a seat and put down all the parcels and attache cases on it, then settled down to wait until a train should come.
The children began running up and down the platform, playing games of their own making. Presently, mindful of the chill that had delayed him, he called Ronnie and Sheila to hun and took off their coats, thinking to put them on when they were in the train. As an afterthought he turned to Rose.
'You also,' he said. 'You will be better playing without your coat, and the hat.'
He took them off and put them on the seat beside him. Then he lit his pipe, and settled down to wait in patience for the train.
It came at about half-past eight, when they had been there for an hour and a half. There were a few people on the platform by that time, not very many. It steamed into the station, towering above them; there were two soldiers on the footplate of the engine with the train crew.
To his delight, it was not a crowded train. He made as quickly as he could for a first-class compartment, and found one occupied only by two morose officers of the Armee de l'Air. The children swarmed on to the seats and climbed all over the carriage, examining everything, chattering to each other in mixed French and English. The two officers looked blacker; before five minutes had elapsed they had got up, swearing below their breath, and had removed to another-carriage.
Howard looked at them helplessly as they went. He would have liked to apologise, but he didn't know how to put it.
Presently, he got the children to sit down. Mindful of chills, he said: 'You'd better put your coats on now. Rose, you put yours on, too.'
He proceeded to put Sheila into hers. Rose looked around the carriage blankly. 'Monsieur - where is my coat? And my hat, also?'
He looked up. 'Eh? You had them when we got into the train?'
But she had not had them. She had rushed with the other children to the carriage, heedless, while Howard hurried along behind her, burdened with luggage. Her coat and hat had been left on the station bench.
Her face wrinkled up, and she began to cry. The old man stared at her irritably for a moment; he had thought that she would be a help to him. Then the patience borne of seventy years of disappointments came to his aid; he sat down and drew her to him, wiping her eyes. 'Don't bother about it,' he said gently. 'We'll get another hat and another coat in Paris. You shall choose them yourself.'
She sobbed: 'But they were so expensive.'
He wiped her eyes again. 'Never mind,' he said. 'It couldn't be helped. I'll tell your aunt when I send the telegram that it wasn't your fault.'
Presently she stopped crying. Howard undid one of his many parcels of food and they all had a bit of an orange to eat, and all troubles were forgotten.
The train went slowly, stopping at every station and occasionally in between. From Dijon to Tonnerre is seventy miles; they pulled out of that station at about half-past eleven, three hours after leaving Dijon. The children had stood the journey pretty well so far; for the last hour they had been running up and down the corridor shouting, while the old man dozed uneasily in a corner of the compartment.
He roused after Tonnerre, and fetched them all back into the carriage for dejeuner of sandwiches and milk and oranges. They ate slowly, with frequent distractions to look out of the window. Sandwiches had a tendency to become mislaid during these pauses, and to vanish down between the cushions of the seats. Presently they were full. He gave them each a cup of milk, and laid Sheila down to rest on the seat, covered over with the blanket he had bought in Dijon. He made Rose and Ronnie sit down quietly and look at Babar; then he was able to rest himself.
From Tonnerre to Joigny is thirty miles. The train was going slower than ever, stopping for long periods for no apparent reason. Once, during one of these pauses, a large flight of aeroplanes passed by the window, flying very high; the old man was shocked to hear the noise of gunfire, and to see a few white puffs of smoke burst in the cloudless sky far, far below them. It seemed incredible, but they must be German. He strained his eyes for fighters so far as he could do without calling the attention of the children from their books, but there were no fighters to be seen. The machines wheeled slowly round and headed back towards the east, unhindered by the ineffective fire.
