After Trist had secured his seat and lighted his cigar, there were still five minutes to spare. The two men walked backwards and forwards, smoking placidly, and observing the excited manoeuvres of the British tourist with a slight cynicism.
“I do not,” said the editor, “see anyone I know.”
“Nor I,” replied Trist; “and I am not sorry. Travelling with casual acquaintances is not an unmixed pleasure. Besides, I want to read all the way to Vienna. My ignorance regarding the political intricacies of Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria is positively appalling.”
“What a practical beast you are, Trist!”
“In some things. And even in those it is merely a matter of exercising common sense as against popular sentiment.”
The editor raised his thoughtful gray eyes, and looked round him. There were last greetings in the very atmosphere, and to his ears came snatches of conversation—promises, most of them, and certain of unfulfilment, to write and think of those left behind or going afield; half-shed tears, heaving bosoms, wan smiles, and convulsively crushed handkerchiefs.
“This sort of thing?” inquired the journalist, with a comprehensive wave of his cigar.
“Yes; cultivated sorrow. Tears carefully forced and brought on by artificial fertilization or cheap sentiment. With some people, more especially among women, sorrow is nothing else than a cult—almost a religion. They look upon it as their bounden duty to spin out to the utmost limit of agony their farewells and their wearisome troubles. All these people would be better employed in reading the evening paper at home. They only get in the way of the porters, and puzzle the ticket-collectors at the barrier.”
The editor laughed in a tolerant way. He was a much older man than Trist.
“There seems,” he said suggestively, “to be more of it round the third-class carriages than here.”
“The result, perhaps, of cheap port-wine at home. The poor people are nowhere in the higher walks of sentiment without port-wine.”
The journalist laughed in a somewhat perfunctory way.
“I suppose,” he said, after a pause, “that you would, if you were a railway director, advocate closing the gates of the platform to all tearful relations?”
“Certainly. Seeing people off is an amusement which ought never to have been instituted.”
“Perhaps, then … I had better go.”
It was Trist’s turn to laugh.
“Not at all,” he said, flipping the ash off his cigar with a backward jerk of the hand—“not at all. I do not anticipate that you will stand snivelling at the carriage-window, and, when the train moves away, wave a limp hand and a damp handkerchief, smiling feebly through your tears.”
The older man looked up at the clock, of which the pointers now indicated the hour for starting.
“No,” he answered abstractedly, “I do not recognise in your pleasing picture a portrait of myself. Come! it is time to get in.”
No more words passed between them. Trist stepped into the carriage and closed the door after him. At the same moment the guard signalled, and the heavy train moved slowly away into the darkness. All within the great arched roof was light and life; beyond lay darkness and silence. A turn in the way could be easily followed by watching the glowing red light at the rear of the train, and this presently disappeared.
Then the journalist turned on his heels and walked down the platform.
“That man,” he murmured to himself in his absorbed way, “is in love.”
Thus, without drum or trumpet, Theodore Trist left England, and set forth to meet the horrors of a campaign of which the record will in future history be a red and sanguinary blot upon the good name of a so-called civilized Continent.
Volume II
I
At Sea
One fine day late in the autumn of eighteen hundred and seventy-six, a steamer emerged from the haze that lay over the Atlantic and the northern waters of the Bay of Biscay. Those who were working in the fields behind the lighthouse of the Pointe de Raz saw her approach the land, sight the lighthouse, and then steer outwards again on a course due north through the channel dividing the Île de Sein from the rocky headland jutting out from this most western point of Europe into the Atlantic.
Those on board the steamer, looking across the blue waters, saw the faint outline of a high broken coast, and all round them a sea divided into races and smooth deep pools large enough to anchor a whole fleet had there been bottom within reach. Islands, islets, and mere rocks; some jutting high up, some nestling low. A dangerous coast, and a splendid fishing-ground.
There were further points of interest on the waters; namely, a whole fleet of sardine-boats from Douarnenez and Audierne, scudding here and there with their bright brown sails, sometimes glowing in the sun, sometimes brooding darkly in the shadow. It was a beautiful picture, because the colours were brilliant; the blue sea gradually merged into bright green, and finished off in the distance with yellow sand or deep-brown cliff. The hills towards Breste, to the north, were faintly outlined in a shadowy haze of blue, while close at hand the long Atlantic sweep came bounding in and broke into dazzling white over the rocks.
On the deck of the steamer the passengers paused
