Somewhere, somehow, through that blind sea of fog, there was a sense of morning in the air. The ghosts of towns and villages grew more frequent—the towns were larger now, occasionally Elinor bumped over phantom curbs before the warning shouts of her look-out could prevent her. Twice they banged into trees along unknown pavements. There was a car-track now, the bump of cobbles, the sense of greater complications in the world about them.
Suddenly they heard the most thrilling and evocative of all earth’s sounds at morning—the lonely clopping of shod hooves upon the cobbles. In the dim and ghostly sheeting of that light they saw the horse, the market cart balanced between its two high creaking wheels, laden with sweet clean green-and-gold of carrot bunches, each neatly trimmed as a bouquet.
They could discern the faint ghost-glimmer of the driver’s face, the big slow-footed animal, dappled grey, and clopping steadily towards the central markets.
They were entering Paris and the fog was lifting. In its huge shroud of mist dispersing, the old buildings of the city emerged ghostly haggard, pallidly nascent in the dim grey light. A man was walking rapidly along a terraced pavement, with bent head, hands thrust in pockets—the figure of the worker since the world began. They saw at morning, in grey waking light, a waiter, his apron-ends tucked up, lifting racked chairs from the tables of a café, and on light mapled fronts of bars and shops, the signs Bière—Pâtisserie—Tabac. Suddenly, the huge winged masses of the Louvre swept upon them, and it was grey light now, and Eugene heard Elinor’s low, fervent “Thank God!”
And now the bridge, the Seine again, the frontal blank of the old buildings on the quays, faced haggardly towards light, the narrow lane of the Rue Bonaparte, and in the silent empty street at length, his own hotel.
They said good-bye quickly, hurriedly, abstractedly, as he got out; and drove away. The women were thinking of nothing, no one now, but Starwick, life’s fortunate darling, the rare, the precious, the all-favoured one. In the grey light, unconscious, completely swaddled in the heavy rugs, Starwick still lay pillowed on Ann’s shoulder.
LXXXIV
All day Eugene slept the dreamless, soundless sleep of a man who has been drugged. When he awoke, night had come again. And this concatenation
