The Train by Georges Simenon Read Free Book Online Page B

hills covered with woods and farmhouses standing in huge clearings.
    Julie was asleep, her mouth half open, her blouse undone. The young woman in the black dress was sitting with her back against the side of the car, and a lock of hair hanging over one cheek. I wondered whether she had stayed like that all night and whether she had been able to sleep. Her eyes met mine. She smiled at me, on account of the bottle of water.
    “Where are we?” asked one of my neighbors, waking up.
    “I don’t know,” answered the man sitting in the doorway with his legs hanging out. “We’ve just passed a station called Lafrancheville.”
    We passed another decked with flowers and deserted like the rest. On the blue-and-white sign I read the name: BOULZICOURT .
    The train started rounding a bend, through some fairly flat country; the man with the dangling legs took his pipe out of his mouth to exclaim in comical despair:
    “Hell!”
    “What is it?”
    “The swine have shortened the train!”
    “What’s that you say?”
    There was a rush toward the door, and, hanging on with both hands, the man protested:
    “Stop pushing, you! You’re going to shove me out on the line. You can see for yourselves there are only five carriages in front of us. Well, what have they done with the others? And how am I going to find my wife and kids? Hell! Oh, damn it to hell!”

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    “I KNEW PERFECTLY WELL THAT THE ENGINE couldn’t pull all those carriages. They must have realized that in the end and decided to cut the train in two.”
    “The first thing to do was to tell us, wasn’t it? What’s going to happen to the women?”
    “Perhaps they’re waiting for us at Rethel. Or at Rheims.”
    “Unless they’re going to give them back to us, like soldiers’ wives, when this damned war finishes—if it ever does!”
    I tried automatically to distinguish between sincerity and sham in these angry complaints. Wasn’t this above all a sort of game these men were playing with themselves, because there were witnesses?
    Personally I wasn’t upset, nor really anxious. I stayed where I was, motionless, a little startled in spite of everything. Suddenly I had the feeling that a pair of eyes were gazing insistently at me.
    I was right. The face of the woman in black was turned toward me, paler in the dawn light, and not as clear-cut as the day before. She was trying, with her gaze, to convey a message of sympathy to me, and at the same time I had the impression that she was asking a question.
    I interpreted it as:
    “How are you standing up to the shock? Are you terribly upset?”
    This put me in a quandary. I didn’t dare to show her my lack of concern, which she would have misinterpreted. I accordingly assumed a sad expression, but without overdoing it. She had seen me on the track with my daughter and must have deduced that my wife was with me too. As far as she could see, I had just lost them both, temporarily, but lost them nonetheless.
    “Courage!” her brown eyes said to me over the others’ heads.
    I responded with the smile of a sick man whom somebody is trying to reassure but who feels no better as a result. I am almost certain that if we had been closer to one another she would have given my hand a furtive squeeze.
    In behaving like that, I didn’t intend to deceive her, as one might imagine, but, with all those heads between us, it wasn’t the time to explain how I felt.
    Later on, if we happened to be brought together and if she gave me the opportunity, I would tell her the truth, since I wasn’t ashamed of it.
    I was no more surprised by what was happening to us than I had been, the day before, on hearing of the invasion of Holland and the Ardennes. On the contrary, my idea that it was a matter between Fate and myself was reinforced. It was becoming more obvious. I had been separated from my family, which was a personal attack and no mistake.
    The sky was rapidly brightening, as pure and clear as the day before when, in my garden, I had