Schaunard closed his door and retired to his office to chuckle over his joke, and Adams walked off down the Rue de la Paix.
Paris was wearing her summer dress; it was the end of the season, and the streets were thronged with foreigners—the Moor from Morocco, in his white burnous, elbowed the Slav from Moscow; the Eiffel Tower had become a veritable Tower of Babel; the theatres were packed, the cafés crowded. Austrian, Russian, English, and American gold was pouring into the city—pouring in ceaselessly from the four corners of the world and by every great express disgorging at the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est, and the Gare de Lyons.
To Adams, fresh from the wilderness and the forest, fresh from those great, silent, sunlit plains of the elephant country and the tremendous cavern of the jungle, the city around him and the sights affected him with vividness and force.
Here, in the centre of the greatest civilization that the world has ever seen, he stood fresh from that primeval land.
He had seen civilization with her mask off, her hair in disorder, her foot on the body of a naked slave and the haft of a blood-stained knife between her teeth, he was watching her now with her mask on, her hair in powder, Caruso singing to her; sitting amidst her court of poets, philosophers, churchmen, placemen, politicians, and financiers.
It was a strange experience.
He took his way down the Rue de Rivoli and then to the Avenue Malakoff, and as he walked the face of the philosophic Schaunard faded from his mind and was replaced by the vision of Maxine Berselius. Opposites in the world of thought often awaken images one of the other, just because of the fact that they are opposites.
Maxine was not at Trouville. She had met them at the railway station on the day of their arrival.
La Joconde had been cabled for from Leopoldsville, and the great yacht had brought them to Marseilles. Nothing had been cabled as to Berselius’s accident or illness, and Madame Berselius had departed for Trouville, quite unconscious of anything having happened to her husband.
Maxine was left to discover for herself the change in her father. She had done so at the very first sight of him, but as yet she had said no word.