He sat alone, feeling alone and lost, drinking coffee at a café on the plaza, with the sea in front, the casino on one side, and on the other, the plaster railway station. If on the steamer he had been glad to avoid noisy inquiries about the state of his family, now he would have rejoiced if someone he had known long ago, almost anyone he had ever known, had come up behind him, assaulted his back and bellowed, ‘Well, you old so-and-so! What you doing here?’

He tried to read the last crop of American newspapers.

What was all this about this new labour organization called the Committee on Industrial Organization? He wasn’t sure what he could do about it, but he felt that he ought to dash right over to Michigan and show the boys, on both sides, how to act nicely. He puzzled over the President’s proposal to change the Supreme Court. He could do nothing here in Belfayol; these foreigners, these Frenchman, didn’t seem to think he was an authority on their politics; but if he were back in America, where he belonged, he’d certainly have something to say that would help the President.

In Belfayol, not so far from Spain, there was a backwash of the great rebellion; now and then he saw refugees, bewildered with bundles, but he had already discovered the queer fact of how little a world calamity changes streets and customs.

As he always did, when he was here alone, he studied the tramway passengers debarking at their end of the line. He saw a young couple, American by their voices, and longed to pick them up, but they were too worldly for him: the girl in slacks and sweater, the man in beret, flappy blue trousers, espadrilles. No. Prob’ly they had a villa up the mountain; prob’ly been coming here for years; prob’ly think he was only a vulgar tourist. Well, and maybe he was. But doggone it, in Sachem they didn’t think he was just a tourist.

More dramatic than the tramway was the railway station, at which the Paris train was now due. Sometimes whole squads of Americans got out. Once he had gloriously seen, coming from the train, a Kansas City man he had met at a Triumph convention in Atlantic City! The coachmen before the station were waking up; their horses were shaking off flies. The porters were streaming inside, yelling at one another as though war had started. The sellers of oranges were gathered. From the station straggled the passengers. Suppose there should again be a man from Kansas City! Or even from incomparable Sachem!

Fred watched the doorway like a trysting lover. He noticed a young woman in clothes that he guessed were American. She was carrying a very young baby and looking feverishly back at the porter, ahead at the carriages, shaking her head over the crowd’s volubility, comforting the howling baby — altogether clean flustered.

‘Wonder if I could help her any way?’ thought Fred, not much concerned.