“But look here, some one must have attended to getting my places, I suppose,” cried Campton wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable travellers, but who explained to him, patiently, that his sleepings had certainly not been engaged, as no trains were leaving Paris for the present. “Not for civilian travel,” he added, still more patiently.
Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris “for the present”? But then people like himself—people who had nothing on earth to do with the war—had been caught like rats in a trap! He reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brant would not be able to return to Deauville, and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day. He asked: “How long is this preposterous state of things to last?”—but no one answered, and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried upstairs.
He was confident that George would be there waiting; but the sitting-room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island, with the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world.
After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin’s house, and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left Paris.
“Left—for where? For how long?”
And then the eternal answer: “The doctor is mobilised. It’s the war.”
Mobilised—already? Within the first twenty-four hours? A man of Fortin’s age and authority? Campton was terrified by the uncanny rapidity with which events were moving, he whom haste had always confused and disconcerted, as if there were a secret link between his lameness and the movements of his will. He rang up Dastrey, but no one answered. Evidently his friend was out, and his friend’s bonne also. “I suppose she’s mobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.”
At last, from sheer over-agitation, his fatigued mind began to move more deliberately: he collected his wits, laboured with his more immediate difficulties, and decided that he would go to Fortin-Lescluze’s house, on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started.
“Ten to one he won’t go till to-morrow,” Campton reasoned.
The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever, and no taxi was in sight down the whole length of the rue Royale, or the rue Boissy d’Anglas, or the rue de Rivoli: not even a horse-cab showed against the deserted distances. He crossed to the métro, and painfully descended its many stairs.