The Dark Star Part 60

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 rushing 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 shin.

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, refreshing 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 shipwreck 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.

Into one of these compartments Neeland stepped, hoping for seclusion, but backed out again, the place being full of artillery officers playing cards.

In vain he bribed the guard, who offered to do his best; but the human contents of a Channel pa.s.senger steamer had unwillingly spent the night in the quaint French port, and the Paris-bound train was already full.

The best Neeland could do was to find a seat in a compartment where he interrupted conversation between three men who turned sullen heads to look at him, resenting in silence the intrusion. One of them was the fox-faced man he had already noticed on the packet, tender, and customs dock.

But Neeland, whose sojourn in a raw and mannerless metropolis had not blotted out all memory of gentler cosmopolitan conventions, lifted his hat and smilingly excused his intrusion in the fluent and agreeable French of student days, before he noticed that he had to do with men of his own race.

None of the men returned his salute; one of them merely emitted an irritated grunt; and Neeland recognised that they all must be his own delightful country-men--for even the British are more dignified in their stolidity.

A second glance satisfied him that all three were undoubtedly Americans; the cut of their straw hats and apparel distinguished them as such; the nameless grace of Mart, Haffner and Sharx marked the tailoring of the three; only Honest Werner could have manufactured such headgear; only New York such footwear.

And Neeland looked at them once more and understood that Broadway itself sat there in front of him, pasty, close-shaven, furtive, sullen-eyed, the _New York Paris Herald_ in its seal-ringed fingers; its fancy waistcoat pockets bulging with cigars.

"Sports," he thought to himself; and decided to maintain incognito and pa.s.s as a Frenchman, if necessary, to escape conversation with the three tired-eyed ones.

So he hung up his hat, opened his novel, and settled back to endure the trip through the rain, now beginning to fall from a low-sagging cloud of watery grey.

After a few minutes the train moved. Later the guard pa.s.sed and accomplished his duties. Neeland inquired politely of him in French whether there was any political news, and the guard replied politely that he knew of none. But he looked very serious when he said it.

Half an hour from the coast the rain dwindled to a rainbow and ceased; and presently a hot sun was gilding wet green fields and hedges and glistening roofs which steamed vapour from every wet tile.

Without asking anybody's opinion, one of the men opposite raised the window. But Neeland did not object; the rain-washed air was deliciously fragrant; and he leaned his elbow on his chair arm and looked out across the loveliest land in Europe.

"Say, friend," said an East Side voice at his elbow, "does smoking go?"

He glanced back over his shoulder at the speaker--a little, pallid, sour-faced man with the features of a sick circus clown and eyes like two holes burnt in a lump of dough.

"_Pardon, monsieur?_" he said politely.

"Can't you even pick a Frenchman, Ben?" sneered one of the men opposite--a square, smoothly shaven man with slow, heavy-lidded eyes of a greenish tinge.

The fox-faced man said:

"He had me fooled, too, Eddie. If Ben Stull didn't get his number it don't surprise me none, becuz he was on the d.a.m.n boat I crossed in, and I certainly picked him for New York."

"Aw," said the pasty-faced little man referred to as Ben Stull, "Eddie knows it all. He never makes no breaks, of course. You make 'em, Doc, but he doesn't. That's why me and him and you is travelling here--this minute--because the great Eddie Brandes never makes no breaks----"

"Go on and smoke and shut up," said Brandes, with a slow, sidewise glance at Neeland, whose eyes remained fastened on the pages of "Les Bizarettes," but whose ears were now very wide open.

"Smoke," repeated Stull, "when this here Frenchman may make a holler?"

"Wait till I ask him," said the man addressed as Doc, with dignity.

And to Neeland: