Evelyn Everett-Green - Squib and His Friends

It amused Squib very much suddenly to hear everybody talking French, and to see the men in their blue blouses, and the fisherwomen in their white caps.

“I wish they wore pretty things like that in England,” he thought as he looked curiously about him, “and what a noise they do make; and how they jabber, and laugh, and move their hands about – just like Mademoiselle when she wants to make us understand. Oh, Uncle Ronald, are we going off already? It is such fun watching the people! I think France is a very pretty, funny country. Are we going to the Douane now? Mademoiselle told me all about that. And shall I have to ‘declare’ Czar? Is he contraband?”

“I don’t think so, but you can ask if you like,” answered Uncle Ronald, laughing. “Come along this way if you want to see the business. Your father is going to the train with the ladies, and Mr. Lorimer will see to the luggage.”

“I should like to go too,” said Squib, keenly interested in the proceedings; and accordingly his uncle led him into a great bare room where luggage was being brought in on the shoulders of blue-bloused men, and where officials were gravely asking questions over the counter on which it was placed, and marking off with white chalk the piles of luggage passed. Squib was greatly amused, especially when one man was detected smuggling tobacco under a lot of books. They could not stay to the end of the altercation, but the gestures of the French official amused the child exceedingly, as well as the laborious efforts of the Englishman to follow, and hold his own in conversation.

Then there was a rush for the train, a confabulation with the authorities about Czar, who was finally permitted to go in the carriage with the party, Uncle Ronald feeling sure that the balance in his favour was turned by Squib’s pretty childish pleading in French, and his confidence that everybody must see the many perfections of his four-footed friend. Perhaps the guard did not particularly desire the companionship of the great hound; perhaps Colonel Rutland’s air of milord Anglais had due effect. Anyway, Czar travelled peacefully to Paris with his owners, and was accorded a like privilege almost the whole way through.

Paris was very gay as the travellers drove through the streets to the hotel in the Rue Rivoli, where Colonel Rutland always stayed. Lady Mary was by this time very tired, and went at once to her room; but Squib was immensely excited by everything, and very anxious to see at least one or two of those sights of Paris over the description of which Mademoiselle had so often grown excited; so Uncle Ronald good-naturedly volunteered to pilot him, provided he would do the talking, to which Squib readily agreed.

First they had some lunch in the Champs Elysées under the trees, which seemed to Squib such a superior arrangement, that he wondered why people ever went indoors to eat. Then they visited the Louvre and spent an hour there, after which a fiacre was chartered to take them to Notre Dame and one or two other places of interest, which Squib felt much elevated by having seen. But the real excitement of the day was when, in returning, Uncle Ronald took him into a shop such as only Paris seems able to produce, and after a great deal of laughing and chaffering with a bright-faced French saleswoman, who was equally amused at Uncle Ronald’s bad and Squib’s good French, a small silver hunting-watch was purchased, together with a silver chain, and presented to the astonished Squib by his young uncle.

“Something to remember your first visit to Paris by, old chap,” he said, as he led him back to the hotel, “and to tell you the time when you get out amongst the mountains, and have nobody to remind you of it, and no big gong carrying a mile to ring you in.”

As for Squib, he hardly knew what to make of his good fortune, and his thanks were so long in coming that it seemed as if Uncle Ronald would have to go without them altogether; but, when they did come, it was with a “chiff and a rush,” as he described it afterwards, which was in itself enough to justify the sobriquet by which his small nephew went. Early upon the following morning, the party started for their long journey across France to Switzerland.

“I don’t call France pretty at all, though Mademoiselle does call it ‘La belle France,’” said Squib from his station at the carriage window, after some hours of silent study. “It’s all flat like a map, and the trees look as if somebody had gone round with an axe and taken all their heads off when they were little, and the rivers look like canals. I like the people and the animals. It’s nice of the cows to help in the fields and to draw the wagons; and the dogs help too, which is very kind of them; and I like the funny clothes the people wear. I should like a blue blouse myself, when I get to Switzerland. But I don’t call it pretty at all; not even the vineyards – and I always thought vineyards would be lovely. England is much prettier – but there’s something funny and queer about France, and that makes it interesting. I like the way they build their châteaux – with such queer little pepper-box towers, and such a lot of red roof. I should like to live in one of those little turrets myself, and have a lot of animals there to keep me company. But I don’t think there’s so very much in France that’s amusing.”

Squib was keenly interested in all he saw, but his longing all the while was for Switzerland, and the chalet in the hills of which he had heard so much, and Lisa, who was to be waiting for them there, with her stories of mountain-spirits and the water-fairies. He was almost sorry when he found that a few days were to be spent at Interlaken before they reached their final destination; yet as soon as they crossed the frontier the sense of interest and delight awoke within him, and he had no time for regrets or useless longings.

Even the railway travelling was more amusing now – the little queer carriages with a passage all down them, the blowing of horns when each station was reached or left behind, the costumes of the peasants as the travellers got more and more into the heart of the country, and the increasing beauty and wildness of the views from the carriage window.

It was dark when they reached Interlaken, and Squib had been for some time asleep, leaning against his father’s shoulder. He did not remember much about the arrival that night, nor how he got into that funny little narrow wooden bed, with its big square pillows and little white eider-down quilt. But after sleeping the sound, dreamless sleep of childhood for a number of hours, Squib suddenly woke up very wide to find the room bright with sunshine, and to realize, after a few moments of utter perplexity, that he was really in Switzerland at last. With a great throb of sudden excitement he got quickly out of bed and pattered across the cold polished floor to the window. A white curtain was drawn across it, but in a moment Squib had pulled this aside, and then he gave one great gasp and stood perfectly still – a little white figure, with a tumbled head of yellow-brown curls, and a pair of big grey eyes fixed immovably upon something outside that window, as though they would never be detached from the sight.

And what was it that Squib saw? A great white dazzling peak rising up in stately grandeur against the glorious blue of the summer sky. The sunlight bathed it in golden light. In that wonderful brilliant clearness of early morning, space seemed annihilated, and the grand snow-peak seemed to Squib to be strangely near – keeping silent watch and ward over the valley below and all the inhabitants of it. It was flanked and supported, as it were, by a whole range of rocky, snow-crowned mountains, yet seemed to stand alone, lifting its majestic head into the very heavens. Squib stood and gazed with wonder, awe, and rapture, until the scene was graven into his memory for ever. What Lisa had said about the spell of the snow-mountains was all true. He had begun already to feel it himself. He stood before the window lost to all sense of his surroundings, hearing none of the sounds about him, knowing nothing of where he was – eyes and heart and soul alike gone out to that lonely queen of the mountains, standing out in dazzling radiance against the brilliance of the morning sky. How long he thus stood he never knew, and he was only brought back to the things of the present by the sound of a laughing voice behind him.