Part 60 (1/2)
Lying in his chair, cheek on arm, he continued to ponder on what had happened, until the monotonous vibration no longer interfered with his inclination for a nap. On the contrary, the slight, rhythmic jolting soothed him and gradually induced slumber; and he slept there on the rus.h.i.+ng train, his feet crossed and resting on the olive-wood box.
A hand on his arm aroused him; the sea wind blowing through the open doors of the mail-van dashed in his face like a splash of cool water as he sat up and looked around him.
As he descended from the van an officer of the freight packet greeted him by name; a sailor piled his luggage on a barrow; and Neeland walked through the vista of covered docks to the pier.
There was a lively wind whipping that notoriously bad-mannered streak of water known as the English Channel. Possibly, had it been christened the French Channel its manners might have been more polite.
But there was now nothing visible about it to justify its sentimental pseudonym of Silver Streak.
It was a dirty colour, ominous of ill-temper beyond the great breakwater to the northward; and it fretted and fumed insh.o.r.e and made white and ghastly faces from the open sea.
But Neeland, dining from a tray in a portholed pit consecrated to the use of a casual supercargo, rejoiced because he adored the sea, inland lubber that he had been born and where the tides of fate had stranded him. For, to a New Yorker, the sea seems far away--as far as it seems to the Parisian. And only when chance business takes him to the Battery does a New Yorker realise the nearness of the ocean to that vast volume of ceaseless dissonance called New York.
Neeland ate cold meat and bread and cheese, and washed it down with bitters.
He was nearly asleep on his sofa when the packet cast off.
He was sound asleep when, somewhere in the raging darkness of the Channel, he was hurled from the sofa against the bunk opposite--into which he presently crawled and lay, still half asleep, mechanically rubbing a maltreated s.h.i.+n.
Twice more the bad-mannered British Channel was violently rude to him; each time he crawled back to stick like a limpet in the depths of his bunk.
Except when the Channel was too discourteous, he slept as a sea bird sleeps afloat, tossing outside thundering combers which batter basalt rocks.
Even in his deep, refres.h.i.+ng sea sleep, the subtle sense of exhilaration--of well-being--which contact with the sea always brought to him, possessed him. And, deep within him, the drop of Irish seethed and purred as a kettle purrs through the watches of the night over a banked but steady fire.
CHAPTER XXIV
THE ROAD TO PARIS
Over the drenched sea wall gulls whirled and eddied above the spouting spray; the grey breakwater was smothered under exploding combers; _quai_, docks, white-washed lighthouse, swept with spindrift, appeared and disappeared through the stormy obscurity as the tender from the Channel packet fought its way sh.o.r.eward with Neeland's luggage lashed in the cabin, and Neeland himself sticking to the deck like a fly to a frantic mustang, enchanted with the whole business.
For the sea, at last, was satisfying this young man; he savoured now what he had longed for as a little boy, guiding a home-made raft on the waters of Neeland's mill pond in the teeth of a summer breeze.
Before he had ever seen the ocean he wanted all it had to give short of s.h.i.+pwreck and early decease. He had experienced it on the Channel during the night.
There was only one other pa.s.senger aboard--a tall, lean, immaculately dressed man with a ghastly pallor, a fox face, and ratty eyes, who looked like an American and who had been dreadfully sick. Not caring for his appearance, Neeland did not speak to him. Besides, he was having too good a time to pay attention to anybody or anything except the sea.
A sailor had lent Neeland some oilskins and a sou'-wester; and he hated to put them off--hated the calmer waters inside the basin where the tender now lay rocking; longed for the gale and the heavy seas again, sorry the crossing was ended.
He cast a last glance of regret at the white fury raging beyond the breakwater as he disembarked among a crowd of porters, _gendarmes_, soldiers, and a.s.sorted officials; then, following his porter to the customs, he prepared to submit to the unvarying indignities incident to luggage examination in France.
He had leisure, while awaiting his turn, to buy a novel, ”Les Bizarettes,” of Maurice Bertrand; time, also, to telegraph to the Princess Mistchenka. The fox-faced man, who looked like an American, was now speaking French like one to a perplexed official, inquiring where the Paris train was to be found. Neeland listened to the fluent information on his own account, then returned to the customs bench.
But the unusually minute search among his effects did not trouble him; the papers from the olive-wood box were b.u.t.toned in his breast pocket; and after a while the customs officials let him go to the train which stood beside an uncovered concrete platform beyond the _quai_, and toward which the fox-faced American had preceded him on legs that still wobbled with seasickness.
There were no Pullmans attached to the train, only the usual first, second, and third cla.s.s carriages with compartments; and a new style corridor car with central aisle and lettered doors to compartments holding four.