Humphrey had been in Paris six months now, but the first impression that the city gave had never been erased from his mind.
At first the name had filled him with a curious kind of awe: Paris and the splendour of its art and life, and the history which linked the centuries together; all the history of the Kings of France which he did not know, and the rest that he knew with the vagueness of a somewhat neglected education--the bloody days of the Revolution, the siege, the Commune; Paris, the cockpit of history and the pleasure-house of the world. There was some enchantment in the thought of going to Paris, not as a mere visitor, but as a worker, one who was to share the daily lives of the people.
And he had arrived in the evening of a February day, in the crisp cold, bewildered by the strangeness of the station. The huge engine had dragged him and his fellows--Englishmen chiefly, travelling southwards, and eastwards, and westwards in search of sunshine--across the black country of France, into the greener, sweeter meadows of the Valley of the Loire, with tall poplars on the sky-line, through the suburbs with their red and white houses looking as if they had been built yesterday, to the vaulted bareness of the Gare du Nord. There, as it puffed and panted, like a stout, elderly gentleman out of breath, it seemed to gasp: "I've done my part. Look after yourselves."
To leave the train was like leaving a friend. One stepped to the low platform and became an insect in a web of blue-bloused porters, helpless, eager to placate, afraid of creating a disturbance. It seemed to Humphrey in those first few moments that these people were inimical to him; they spoke to him roughly and without the traditional politeness of French people. The black-bearded ticket-collector snatched the little Cook's pocket-book from his hand, tore out the last tickets, and thrust it back on him, murmuring some complaint, possibly because Humphrey had not unclasped the elastic band. There was bother about luggage too; Heaven knows what, but he waited dismally and hungrily in the vast room, with its flicker of white light from the arc-lamps above the low counters at which the Customs-men, in their shabby uniforms, seemed to be quarrelling with one another, their voices pitched in the loud key that is seldom used in England.