Twenty minutes’ pause, by Folkestone clock, for looking at Enchantress
while she eats a sandwich, and at Mystery while she eats of everything
there that is eatable, from pork-pie, sausage, jam, and gooseberries, to
lumps of sugar. All this time, there is a very waterfall of luggage,
with a spray of dust, tumbling slantwise from the pier into the
steamboat. All this time, Demented (who has no business with it) watches
it with starting eyes, fiercely requiring to be shown his luggage. When
it at last concludes the cataract, he rushes hotly to refresh—is shouted
after, pursued, jostled, brought back, pitched into the departing steamer
upside down, and caught by mariners disgracefully.
A lovely harvest-day, a cloudless sky, a tranquil sea. The piston-rods
of the engines so regularly coming up from below, to look (as well they
may) at the bright weather, and so regularly almost knocking their iron
heads against the cross beam of the skylight, and never doing it!
Another Parisian actress is on board, attended by another Mystery.
Compact Enchantress greets her sister artist—Oh, the Compact One’s pretty
teeth!—and Mystery greets Mystery. _My_ Mystery soon ceases to be
conversational—is taken poorly, in a word, having lunched too
miscellaneously—and goes below. The remaining Mystery then smiles upon
the sister artists (who, I am afraid, wouldn’t greatly mind stabbing each
other), and is upon the whole ravished.
And now I find that all the French people on board begin to grow, and all
the English people to shrink. The French are nearing home, and shaking
off a disadvantage, whereas we are shaking it on. Zamiel is the same
man, and Abd-el-Kader is the same man, but each seems to come into
possession of an indescribable confidence that departs from us—from
Monied Interest, for instance, and from me. Just what they gain, we
lose. Certain British ‘Gents’ about the steersman, intellectually
nurtured at home on parody of everything and truth of nothing, become
subdued, and in a manner forlorn; and when the steersman tells them (not
exultingly) how he has ‘been upon this station now eight year, and never
see the old town of Bullum yet,’ one of them, with an imbecile reliance
on a reed, asks him what he considers to be the best hotel in Paris?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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