Part 14 (1/2)
At last we were off, about half-past two o'clock in the morning. It was a beautiful, clear, moonlit night, so clear, indeed, that we could see the Dover lights almost from Calais harbor. But we had considerably more than a capful of wind, and there was a turgent ground-swell on, which made our boat-double-engined, and as trim and tidy a craft as ever sped across the span from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e-behave rather lively, with sportive indulgence in a brisk game of pitch-and-toss that proved anything but comfortable to most of the pa.s.sengers.
When we were steaming out of Calais harbor, our three friends, emerging from beneath their tent, struck up in chorus Campbell's n.o.ble song, ”Ye Mariners of England,” finis.h.i.+ng up with a stave from ”Rule, Britannia!”
But, alas for them! however loudly their throats were shouting forth the sway proverbially held by Albion and her sons over the waves, on this occasion at least the said waves seemed determined upon ruling these particular three Britons with a rod of antimony; for barely a few seconds after the last vibrating echoes of the ”Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!” had died away upon the wind, I beheld the three leaning lovingly together, in fast friends.h.i.+p linked, over the rail, conversing in deep ventriguttural accents with the denizens of Neptune's watery realm.
We had one of the quickest pa.s.sages on record-ninety-three minutes'
steaming carried us across from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. When we were just on the point of landing, I heard the dark senior of the party mutter to his companions, in a hollow whisper and mysterious manner, ”He is gone again;” to which the others, the bearded and the smooth-shaven, responded in the same way, with deep sighs of evident relief, ”Ay, marry! so he is at last.”
This mysterious communication roused my curiosity. Who was the party that was said to be gone at last? Where had he come from? where had he been hiding, that _I_ had not seen him? and where was he gone to now? I determined to know; if but the opportunity would offer, to screw, by cunning questioning, the secret out of either of the three.
Fate favored my design.
For some inscrutable reason, known only to the company's officials, we cheap-trainers were not permitted to proceed on our journey to London along with the mail, but were left to kick our heels for some two hours at the Dover station.
I went into the refreshment-room to look for my party; I had a notion I should find them where the Briton's unswerving and unerring instinct would be most likely to lead them. It turned out that I was right in my conjecture. There they were, seated round a table with huge bowls of steaming tea and monster piles of b.u.t.tered toast and m.u.f.fins spread on the festive board before them. Ay, indeed, there they were; but _quantum mutati ab illis_! how strangely changed from the noisy, rollicking set I had known them in the railway-car and on board the steamer, ere yet the demon of sea-sickness had claimed them for his own! How ghastly sober they looked now, to be sure! And how sternly and silently bent upon devoting themselves to the swilling of the Chinese shrub infusion and to the gorging of indigestible m.u.f.fins. It was quite clear to me that it would have been worse than folly to venture upon addressing them while thus absorbed in absorbing. So I resolved to await a more favorable opening, and went out meanwhile to walk on the platform.
A short time I was left in solitary possession of the promenade; then I became suddenly aware that another traveller was treading the same ground with me-it was the dark elderly leader of the three. I glanced at him as he pa.s.sed me under one of the lamps. He looked pale and sad.
The furrowed lines on his brow bespoke deliberation deep and pondering profound. All the infinite mirth of the preceding few hours had departed from him, leaving him but a wretched wreck of his former reckless self.
”A fine night, sir,” I said to break the ice-”for the season of the year,” I added by way of a saving clause, to tone down the absoluteness of the a.s.sertion.
He looked at me abstractedly, merely reechoing my own words, ”A fine night, sir, for the season of the year.”
”Why look ye so sad now, who were erst so jolly?” I bluntly asked, determined to force him into conversation.
”Ay, indeed, why so sad now?” he replied, looking me full in the face; then, suddenly clasping my arm with a spasmodic grip, he continued hurriedly, ”I think I had best confide our secret to you. You seem a man of thought. I witnessed and admired the patient attention with which you listened to your friend's abstruse talk in the railway-car. Maybe you can find the solution of a mystery which defies the ponderings of our poor brains-mine and my two friends.”
Then he proceeded to pour into my attentive ear this gruesome tale of mystery:
”We three-that is, myself, yon tall bearded Briton,” pointing to the gla.s.s door of the refreshment-room, ”whose name is Jack Hobson, and young Emmanuel Topp, junior partner in a great beer firm, whom you may behold now at his fifth bowl of tea and his seventh m.u.f.fin-are teetotallers--”
”Teetotallers!” I could not help exclaiming. ”Lord bless me! that is certainly about the last thing I should have taken you for, either of you.”
”Well,” he replied with some slight confusion, ”at least, we _were total_ teetotallers, though I admit we can now only claim the character of partial abstainers. The fact is, when, about a fortnight ago, we were discussing the plan of our projected visit to the great Paris Exhibition, Topp suggested that while in France we should do as the French do, to which Jack Hobson a.s.sented, remarking that the French knew nothing about tea, and that a Frenchman's tea would be sure to prove an Englishman's poison. So we resolved to suspend the pledge during our visit to France.
”It was on the second day after our arrival in Paris. We were dining in a private cabinet at Desire Beaurain's, one of the leading restaurants on the fas.h.i.+onable side of the Montmartre-Italiens Boulevard. Our dinner was what an Irishman might call a most 'illigant' affair. We had sipped several bottles of Sauterne, and tasted a few of Tavel, and we were just topping the entertainment with a solitary bottle of champagne, when I became suddenly aware of the presence of another party in the room-a _fourth man_-who sat him down at our table, and helped himself liberally to our liquor. From what I ascertained afterward from Jack Hobson and Emmanuel Topp, the intruder's presence became revealed to them also, either about the same time or a little later. What was he like? I cannot tell. His figure and face remained indistinct throughout-phantom-like. His features seemed endowed with a stronge weird mobility that would defyingly elude the fixing grasp of our eager eyes. Now, and to my two companions, he would look marvellously like me; then, to me, he would stalk and rave about in the likeness of Jack Hobson; again, he would seem the counterfeit of Emmanuel Topp; then he would look like all the three of us put together; then like neither of us, nor like anybody else. Oh, sir, it was a woful thing to be haunted by this phantom apparition. Yet the strangest part of the affair was that neither of us seemed to feel a whit surprised at the dread presence; that we quietly and uncomplainingly let him drink our wine, and actually give orders for more; that we never objected, in fact, to any of his sayings and doings. What seemed also strange was that the waiter, while yet receiving and executing his orders, was evidently pretending to ignore his presence. But then, as I dare say you know as well as I do, French waiters are _such_ actors!
”Well, to resume, there he was, this fourth man, seated at our table and feasting at our expense. And the pranks that he would play us-they were truly stupendous. He began his little game by ordering in half-a-dozen of champagne. And when the waiter seemed slightly doubtful and hesitating about executing the order, Topp, forsooth, must put in his oar, and indorse the command, actually pretending that _I_, who am now speaking to you, and who am the very last man in the world likely to dream of such a preposterous thing, had given the order, and that I was a jolly old brick, and the best of boon companions. Surprise at this barefaced a.s.sertion kept me mute, and so, of course, the champagne was brought in, and I thought the best thing to do under the circ.u.mstances was to have my share of it at least; and so I had-my fair share; but, bless you, it was nothing to what that fourth man drank of it. In fact, the amount of liquor _he_ would swill on this and on the many subsequent occasions he intruded his presence upon us, was a caution.
”We paid our little bill without grumbling, though the presence of the fourth man at our table had added rather heavily to the _addition_, as they call bills at French restaurants.
”We sallied forth into the street to get a whiff of fresh air. _He_, the demon, pertinaciously stuck to us; he familiarly linked his arm through mine, and, suggesting coffee as rather a good thing to take after dinner, took us over to the Cafe du Cardinal, where he, however, took none of the Arabian beverage himself (there being only three cups placed for us, as I distinctly saw), but drank an interminable succession of _cha.s.se-cafe_, utterly regardless of the divisional lines of the cognac _carafon_. Part of these he would take neat, another portion he would burn over sugar, gloating glaringly over the bluish flame, while gleams of demoniac delight would flit across his ever-changing features. Jack Hobson and Topp, I am sorry to say, joined him with a will in this double-distilled debauch; and when I attempted to remonstrate with them, they brazenly a.s.serted that _I_, who am now speaking to you, who have always, publicly and privately, declared brandy to be the worst of evil spirits, had taken more of it, to my own cheek, as they slangily expressed it, than the two of them together; and the waiter, who had evidently been bribed by them, boldly maintained that _le vieux monsieur_, as he had the impudence to call me, had swallowed _plus de trois carafons de fine_; whereupon the fourth man, stepping up to him, punched his head, which served him right. Now you will hardly believe me when I tell you that at that very instant Topp forced me back into my chair, while Jack Hobson pinioned my arms from behind, and the waiter had the unblus.h.i.+ng effrontery to stamp and rave at me like a maniac, demanding satisfaction or compensation at my hands for the unprovoked a.s.sault committed upon him by _me, coram populo_!-by _me_, who, I beg to a.s.sure you, am the most peaceable man living, and am actually famed for the mildness of my disposition and the sweetness and suavity of my temper. And, would you believe it? everybody present, waiters and guests, and my own two bosom-friends, joined in the conspiracy against me, and I actually had to give the wretch of a waiter ten francs as a plaster for his broken pate, and a salve for his wounded honor! Where was the real culprit all this time, you ask me-the fourth man? Why, he quietly stood by grinning, and they all and every one of them pretended not to see him, though Topp and Jack Hobson next morning confessed to me that they certainly had an indistinct consciousness of the presence throughout of this miserable intruder.
”How we finished that night I remember not; nor could Jack Hobson or Emmanuel Topp. All we could conscientiously stand by, if we were questioned, is that we awoke next morning-the three of us-with some slight swimming in our heads, and a hazy recollection of a gorgeous dream of brilliant lights and sounds of music and revelry, and bright visions of groves and grottoes, and dancing houris (or hussies, as moral Jack Hobson calls the poor things), and a hot supper at a certain place in the Pa.s.sage des Princes, of which I think the name is Peter's.
”I will not tire your courteous patience by a detailed narrative of our experiences day after day, during our fortnight's stay in Paris. Suffice it to tell you that from that time forward to yesterday, when we left, the _fourth man_, as we, by mutual consent, agreed to call the phantom apparition, came in regularly to our dinner; with the dessert or a little after; that he would constantly suggest a fresh supply of Cote St. Jacques, Moulin-a-Vent, Beaune, Chambertin, Roederer Carte Blanche, and a variety of other, generally rather more than less expensive, wines-and that he somehow would manage to make us have them, too.
”Then he would sally forth with us to the cafe, where he would indulge in irritating chaff of the waiters, and in slighting comments upon the great French nation in general, and the Parisians in particular, and upon their inst.i.tutions and manners and customs.
”He would insist upon singing the Ma.r.s.eillaise; he would speak disparagingly of the Emperor, whom he would irreverently call Lambert; he would pa.s.s cutting and unsavory remarks upon the glorious system of the night-carts; he would call down the judgment of Heaven upon the devoted head of poor Mr. Haussmann; he would go up to some unhappy sergent-de-ville, who might, however unwittingly, excite his ire, and tell him a bit of his mind in English, with sarcastic allusions to his c.o.c.ket-hat and his toasting-fork, and polite inquiries after the health of _ce cher_ Monsieur Lambert, or the whereabouts of _cet excellent_ Monsieur G.o.dinot. The worst of the matter was that I suppose for the reason that man is an imitative animal, a sort of _p?????? ?????_, or Monboddian monkey minus the tail-my two companions were, somehow, always sure to join the wretch in his evil behavior, and to go on just as bad as he did. No wonder, then, that we got into no end of rows, and it is a marvel to me now, how ever we have managed to get off with a whole skin to our bodies.