The Train by Georges Simenon Page A

anymore?”
    As if it had become aright.
    Right away, seeing that we were now in a civilized part of the world, I said to Anna:
    “Are you coming?”
    “Where?”
    “To have something to eat.”
    Our first instinctive action, for all of us, once we were on the platform, where we suddenly had too much room, was to look at our train from one end to the other, and it was a disappointment to find that it was no longer the same train.
    Not only had the engine been changed, but, behind the tender, I counted fourteen Belgian carriages, as clean-looking as on ordinary trains.
    As for our cattle cars and freight cars, there were only three of them left.
    “The swine have cut us in two again!”
    The doors opened in front, and the first person to getout was a huge, athletic priest, who went over to the stationmaster with an air of authority about him.
    They talked together. The stationmaster seemed to be agreeing to something, and afterward the priest spoke to the people who had stayed in the carriage, and helped a nun in a white coif to get down onto the platform.
    There were four nuns in all, two of them very young, with baby faces, to help out and line up like schoolchildren about forty old men dressed in identical gray woolen suits.
    It was an old people’s home which had been evacuated, and we learned later that the train to which we had been joined while we were asleep came from Louvain.
    The men were all very old, and more or less infirm. Beards had grown, thick and white, on faces as clear-cut as in old pictures.
    The extraordinary thing was their meekness, the indifference which you could read in their eyes. They allowed themselves to be taken to the second-class refreshment room, where they were installed as in a refectory while the priest spoke to the manager.
    Once again Anna looked at me. Was it because of the priest and the nuns, because she thought that I was familiar with that world? Or was it because the old men in a line reminded her of prison and a discipline which I didn’t know but of which she had experience?
    I don’t know. We kept darting these brief, probing glances at each other like this, only to resume an impassive expression immediately afterward.
    THE LIEGE FORTS IN GERMAN HANDS .
    I read this headline on a newspaper on the stall, and, in smaller letters:
    PARACHUTISTS ATTACK ALBERT CANAL .
    “What do you want to eat? Do you like croissants?”
    She nodded.
    “Light coffee?”
    “Black. If we’ve got time, I’d like to tidy up first. Would you mind lending me your comb?”
    As we had sat down at a table and all the others had been taken, I didn’t dare to get up to follow her. Just as she was going through the glass door, I felt my heart sink, for the idea occurred to me that I might never see her again.
    Through the window I could see a quiet square, some taxis on a rank, a hotel, and a little blue-painted bar where the waiter was wiping the tables on the terrace.
    There was nothing to stop Anna from going.
    “Had any news of your wife and daughter?”
    Fernand Leroy was standing in front of me, a bottle of beer in his hand, an ironical look in his eye. I said no, trying not to blush, for I realized that he knew what had happened between Anna and myself.
    I have never liked Leroy. The son of a sergeant-major in the cavalry, he used to explain to us at school:
    “In the cavalry, a sergeant-major is much more important than a lieutenant or even a captain in any other branch of the army.”
    He always managed to get other boys punished instead of him and the masters were taken in by his innocent expression, something which didn’t prevent him from making faces behind their backs.
    I learned, later on, that he had failed his
baccalaureat
twice. His father was dead. His mother worked as a cashier in a movie house. He got a job at Hachette’s bookshop and, two or three years later, married the daughter of a rich contractor.
    Did he marry her for her money? That’s none of my business. It was