“I fancy I have the ear of the public,” he said. He seemed to get satisfaction from the thought.
The train entered Folkestone Harbour. The smell of the sea and the easy send of the boat put a little heart into me, but my spirits were on the down grade. Callan was a trying companion. The sight of him stirred uneasy emotions, the sound of his voice jarred.
“Are you coming to the Grand?” he said, as we passed St. Denis.
“My God, no,” I answered, hotly, “I’m going across the river.”
“Ah,” he murmured, “the Quartier Latin. I wish I could come with you. But I’ve my reputation to think of. You’d be surprised how people get to hear of my movements. Besides, I’m a family man.”
I was agitatedly silent. The train steamed into the glare of the electric lights, and, getting into a fiacre, I breathed again. I seemed to be at the entrance of a new life, a better sort of paradise, during that drive across the night city. In London one is always a passenger, in Paris one has reached a goal. The crowds on the pavements, under the plane-trees, in the black shadows, in the white glare of the open spaces, are at leisure—they go nowhere, seek nothing beyond.
We crossed the river, the unwinking towers of Notre Dame towering pallidly against the dark sky behind us; rattled into the new light of the resuming boulevard; turned up a dark street, and came to a halt before a half-familiar shut door. You know how one wakes the sleepy concierge, how one takes one’s candle, climbs up hundreds and hundreds of smooth stairs, following the slipshod footfalls of a half-awakened guide upward through Rembrandt’s own shadows, and how one’s final sleep is sweetened by the little inconveniences of a strange bare room and of a strange hard bed.