of compartment doors, with a great tumult of voices, with the vigorous excitement of robust and talkative people.
They were a good-natured crowd, and seemed to know one another, if not actually by name, with the even completer familiarity of race and kind and region. At the sudden pauses at dim-lit country stations one could hear them shouting greetings and farewells, and see them streaming away along a muddy road towards the dim light and shine of a little town with all the utter, common, and dreary familiarity of March. And the train, in those abrupt and sudden halts and pauses, seemed to be almost as casual a means of transportation as a street-car: it would rattle up to a station halt, the people would stamp in and out with a banging of doors and with many shouts, cries, greetings, and farewells, then the shrill little whistle would make its fifing note and the train would rattle out into the wet and wintry countryside again.
In the compartments the lights were very low and dim, and cast flickering shadows on the faces of the passengers. Somewhere in the train, in another compartment, there was a noisy and jolly crowd of soldiers and robust country people. One man in particular dominated the whole train with his jolly energy, his vulgar and high-spirited good nature. The man’s rich voice was charged indescribably with the high, sanguinary vitality of the Frenchman. The voice, to a foreigner, was at once inimitably strange in accent, quality and intonation, and yet familiar as all life, all living. It was packed with the juice of life, and had the full rich qualities of a good wine.
For the youth, that voice heard there in the flickering shadows of the little train, heard with all its robust and full-blooded penetration at the casual and abrupt halts and pauses at little stations, was to be a strangely haunting one. A thousand times thereafter the tone of that rich voice would return to him and reverberate in his memory with the haunting, strange and wonderful recurrence with which the “little” things of life—a face seen one time at a window, a voice that passed in darkness and was gone, the twisting of a leaf upon a bough—come back to us out of all the violence and savage chaos of the days—the “little” things that persist so strangely, vividly, and inexplicably when the more sensational and “important” events of life have been forgotten or obscured.
So, now, the jolly voice of this unseen Frenchman, as it shouted out good-natured but derisive comments on the customs, the appearance, and the inhabitants of every little town at which they stopped, as it was answered in like fashion by the people on the station platforms,
