It was not the porter who spoke now: it was some kind of official relic or shadow or mouchard left from the old custom-house, and suffered to hang on the railway-station as an ornament. His costume, half uniform and half fatigue-dress, compromised nobody, and was surmounted by a skull cap. His pantaloons were short, his figure was paunchy, authoritative and German. His German, however, was spoken with a French accent. As I mused in stupefaction upon the hint he had uttered, he pointed with his hand. "The train is starting," he observed.
The reader probably knows Prudhon's great picture in the Louvre, originally painted for the Palace of Justice, and entitled "Divine Justice and Vengeance in Pursuit of Crime"? This picture, which I had not thought of, I suppose, for an age, suddenly seemed to be realized before me, but the heavenly detectives were changed into mortal gendarmes. The porter and the nondescript threw back the gate, preventing my passage. The terrors of Prudhon's avenging spirits were all expressed, to my thinking, in the looks which these two official people exchanged in my favor, and then bent on me. We stood in a triangle.
"One moment: I propose a plan," I cried in desperation. "I do not know a soul in Strasburg, and the friend who brought me here is gone, I cannot tell whither. But I have an acquaintance in the British consulate at Carlsruhe—Berkley, you know," I explained with an insane familiarity, "my old friend Berkley's nephew. Admit me to the train, and we will telegraph to him. His reply will come in ten minutes, and will show you my responsible character. I have come fifteen minutes in advance of the starting-hour."
"The wire to Carlsruhe," said the porter, "is under repairs."
"The train to Paris," said the second man, "is off."
Some fate was pursuing me. Rudely rejected at the wicket, and treated as a man without a nationality, I felt as if I had but one friend now available on earth—the friend who had come into my head while conversing with the railway guard. Old Mr. Berkley, Mr. Sylvester. Berkley and I had once breakfasted together at Brighton, the first sitting in a tub, the second eating nothing but raw macerated beef, and I for my part devouring toast and Icelandic poetry. The nephew had since gone into diplomacy to strengthen his bile. I had not seen him for years.
I approached the schedule of distances hanging on the wall. My movements were those of a man prostrated and resigned. I ran my forefinger over the departures from Kohl to Carlsruhe.
In three hours I was in the latter city.
It was not in beggar's guise that Paul Flemming would fain be seen in the capital of the grand duchy—the most formal capital, the most symmetrical capital, the most monumental capital, as it is the youngest capital, in Europe. Nor was it as a vagabond that he would wish to appear in that capital, before a friend who happened to be a diplomatist. I recollected the engaging aspect in which I had offered myself to the reflections of the Rhine when last beside that romantic stream—a comely youth, with Stultz's best waistcoats on his bosom and with ineffable sorrows in his heart. Frau Himmelauen used to say, at Heidelberg, that my gloves were a shade too light for a strictly virtuous man. The Frau has gone to her account, and Stultz, the great Stultz, is defunct too, after achieving for himself a baronetcy as the prize of his peerless scissors, and founding a hospital here in Carlsruhe. Not to insult the shade of Stultz, I determined to renew my youth, at least in the matter of plumage. A shop of ready-made clothing afforded me lavender gloves, silk pocket handkerchief, satin cravat, detachable collar and a cambric shirt: the American dickey, in which some of my early sartorial triumphs were effected, is not to be had in Rhineland. My ornaments purchased, the trouble was—to change my shirt. The great hotel, the Erbprinz, was no place for a man without a passport and without baggage: not for the world would I have faced a hotel-clerk with his accusing register. Yet the street was not to be thought of: only cats are allowed by etiquette to freshen their linen on the doorstep.
