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On the day of departure Berselius was entertained at déjeuner by the Cerele Militaire. He brought Adams with him as a guest.
Nearly all the sporting members of the great club were present to speed the man who after Schillings was reckoned on the Continent the most adventurous big-game hunter in the world.
Despite what Stenhouse, Duthil, and Schaunard had said, Adams by this time inclined to a half-liking for Berselius; the man seemed so far from and unconscious of the little things of the world, so destitute of pettiness, that the half liking which always accompanies respect could not but find a place in Adams’s mind.
Guest at a table surrounded by sixty of the wealthiest and most powerful officers of a military nation, Berselius did not forget his companion, but introduced him with painstaking care to the chief men present, included him in his speech of thanks, and made him feel that though he was taking Berselius’s pay, he was his friend and on a perfect social equality with him.
Adams felt this keenly. On qualifying first he had obtained an appointment as travelling physician to an American, a prominent member of the New York smart set, a man of twenty-two, a motorist, a yachtsman, clean shaved as an actor and smug as a butler, one of those men who make the great American nation so small in the eyes of the world—the world that cannot see beyond the servants’ hall antics of New York society to the great plains where the Adamses hew the wood and draw the water, build the cities and bridge the rivers, and lay the iron roads, making rail-heads of the roar of the Atlantic and the thunder of the Pacific.
This gentleman treated Adams as a paid attendant and in such a manner that Adams one morning lifted him from his bed by the slack of his silk pajamas and all but drowned him in his own bath.
He could not but remember the incident as he sat watching Berselius so calm, so courtly, so absolutely destitute of mannerism, so incontestably the superior, in some magnetic way, of all the other men who were present.
Maxine and M. Pinchon, the secretary, were to accompany them to Marseilles.
A cold, white Paris fog covered the city that night as they drove to the station, and the fog detonators and horns followed them as they glided out slowly from beneath the great glass roof. Slowly at first, then more swiftly over rumbling bridges and clicking point, more swiftly still, breaking from the fog-banked Seine valley, through snarling tunnel and chattering cutting, faster now and freer, by long lines of poplar trees, mist-strewn, and moonlit ponds and fields, spectral white roads, little winking towns; and now, as if drawn by the magnetic south, swaying to the rock-a-bye of speed, aiming for the lights of Dijon far away south, to the tune of the wheels, “seventy-miles-an-hour—seventy-miles-an-hour.”
Civilization, whatever else she has done, has written one poem, the “Rapide.” True to herself, she makes it pay a dividend, and prostitutes it to the service of stockbrokers, society folk, and gamblers bound for Monaco—but what a poem it is that we snore through between a day in Paris and a day in Marseilles. A poem, swiftly moving, musical with speed, a song built up of songs, telling of Paris, its chill and winter fog, of the winter fields, the poplar trees and mist; vineyards of the Côte d’Or; Provence with the dawn upon it, Tarascon blowing its morning bugle to the sun; the Rhone, and the vineyards, and the olives, and the white, white roads; ending at last in that triumphant blast of music, light and colour, Marseilles.
La Joconde, Berselius’s yacht, was berthed at the Messagerie wharf, and after déjeuner at the Hotel Noailles, they took their way there on foot.
Adams had never seen the south before as Marseilles shows it. The vivid light and the black shadows, the variegated crowd of the Canabier Prolongue had for him an “Arabian Nights” fascination, but the wharves held a deeper fascination still.
Marseilles draws its most subtle charm from far away in the past. Beaked triremes have rubbed their girding cables against the wharves of the old Phocée; the sunshine of a thousand years has left some trace of its gold, a mirage in the air chilled by the mistral and perfumed by the ocean.
At Marseilles took place the meeting between Mary Magdalen and Laeta Acilia, so delightfully fabled by Anatole France. The Count of Monte Cristo landed here after he had discovered his treasure, and here Caderouse after the infamy at “La Reservée” watched old Dantès starving to death. Multitudes of ships, fabled and real, have passed from the harbour to countries curious and strange, but never one of them to a stranger country than that to which La Joconde was to bear Berselius and his companion.
Gay as Naples with colour, piercing the blue sky with a thousand spars, fluttering the flags of all nations to the wind, shot through with the sharp rattle of winch-chains, and perfumed with garlic, vanilla, fumes of coal tar, and the tang of the sea, the wharves of Marseilles lay before the travellers, a great counter eternally vibrating to the thunder of trade; bales of carpets from the Levant, tons of cheeses from Holland, wood from Norway, copra, rice, tobacco, corn, silks from China and Japan, cotton from Lancashire; all pouring in to the tune of the winch-pauls, the cry of the stevedores, and the bugles of Port Saint Jean, shrill beneath the blue sky and triumphant as the crowing of the Gallic cock.
Between the breaks in the shipping one could see the sea-gulls fishing and the harbour flashing, here spangled with coal tar, here whipped to deepest sapphire by the mistral; the junk shops, grog shops, parrot shops, rope-walks, ships’ stores and factories lining the quays, each lending a perfume, a voice, or a scrap of colour to the air vibrating with light, vibrating with sound, shot through with voices; hammer blows from the copper sheathers in the dry docks, the rolling of drums from Port St. Nicholas, the roaring of grain elevators, rattling of winch-chains, trumpeting of ship sirens, mewing of gulls, the bells of Notre Dame and the bells of St. Victor, all fused, orchestrated, into one triumphant symphony beneath the clear blue sky and the trade flags of the world.
La Joconde was berthed beside a Messagerie boat which they had to cross to reach her.
She was a palatial cruising yacht of twelve hundred tons’ burden, built somewhat on the lines of Drexel’s La Margharita, but with less width of funnel.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they went on board; all the luggage had arrived, steam was up, the port arrangements had been made, and Berselius determined to start at once.
Maxine kissed him, then she turned to Adams.
“Bon voyage.”
“Good-bye,” said Adams.
He held her hand for a fraction of a second after his grasp had relaxed.
Then she was standing on the deck of the Messagerie boat, waving good-bye across the lane of blue water widening between La Joconde and her berth mate.
At the harbour mouth, looking back across the blue wind-swept water, he fancied he could still see her, a microscopic speck in the great picture of terraced Marseilles, with its windows, houses, flags, and domes glittering and burning in the sun.
Then the swell of the Gulf of Lyons took La Joconde as a nurse takes an infant and rocks it on her knee, and France and civilization were slowly wrapped from sight under the veils of distance.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VI
