She was very tired, for still they were kept standing there for so long, long a time, until her arms too ached, and the child grew leaden in its weight. Then the woman took the baby back again, and said something that Marie-Louise could not understand--but the touch of the brown hand as it patted gratefully on her arm brought a quick mist to her eyes, because it was human, a human touch, and out of all the strangeness around her, out of her loneliness it seemed so priceless a thing to win.
And then there came harsh, strident commands, and the press around her, carrying her with it, began to surge forward; and presently she found herself inside the shed on the pier--and then it was like the deck of the ship again, for she stood and waited so long and so interminably. Why did they still have to wait? It could not be here that one must be examined before one could go out into those streets whose rumble and noise was louder now! Some one on board, a man who knew a few words of French, who had made the voyage before, had told her that every one must be examined; only he had said it was in a vast hall where there were two big American flags that hung out over it from the gallery, and that men sat at high desks at the end of long rows of benches, and that one was towed to it in droll-looking barges that had two decks and were all closed in like arks. So it could not be here--that place! And then, more attentive to the details about her, she remembered the _octroi_ when she had entered Paris from Bernay-sur-Mer. One's things too must be examined--and she opened her bundle until one of the men with uniforms should have come and looked at it.
After that, she waited again; and then she was carried forward once more with the movement of those about her; and, passing out of the shed, was crowded onto a barge such as the one that the man on the ship had described to her.
And then here again they waited; for all these people could not get on one barge, even though it held so many and was so closely packed--and there were other barges to be filled. She could not see very much, for she was in the centre of the crowd on the barge's upper deck, and could only occasionally obtain a glimpse through the little windows that were in rows on each side--but, at last, she could tell by the motion that they had started.