'Why,' said our friend, 'the fact is I am an engineer (section D of
the Public Works Department) and I have to make an important
measurement in connexion with the Apothegm of the Bilateral which runs
to-night precisely through this spot. My fingers now mark exactly the
concentric of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector should be
drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I have left my Double Refractor
in the cafe hard by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I have
marked; yet I can get no further without my Double Refractor.'
'Do not let that trouble you,' said the short, stout stranger; 'I will
be delighted to keep the place exactly marked while you run for your
instrument.'
The crowd was now swelled to a considerable size; it blocked up the
pavement, and was swelled every moment by the arrival of the curious.
The little fat elderly man put his fingers exactly where the other's
had been, effecting the exchange with a sharp gesture; and each
watched intently to see that it was right to within a millimetre. The
attitude was constrained. The elderly man smiled, and begged the
engineer not to be alarmed. So they left him with his two forefingers
well above his head, precisely twenty-five centimetres apart, and
pressing their tips against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. Then the
three friends slipped out of the crowd and pursued their way.
'Let us go to the theatre,' said the experimenter, 'and when we come
back I warrant you will agree with my remarks on Bureaucracy.'
They went to hear the admirable marble lines of Corneille. For three
hours they were absorbed by the classics, and, when they returned, a
crowd, now enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, stopping the
traffic and filled with a noise like the sea. Policemen were attacking
it with the utmost energy, but still it grew and eddied; and in the
centre - a little respectful space kept empty around him - still
stretched the poor little fat elderly man, a pitiable sight. His knees
were bent, his head wagged and drooped with extreme fatigue, he was
the colour of old blotting-paper; but still he kept the tips of his
two forefingers exactly twenty-five centimetres apart, well above his
head, and pressed against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais.
'You will not match that with your aristocratic sentiment!' said the
author of the scene in pardonable triumph.
'I am not so sure,' answered the Duke of Sussex. He pulled out his
watch. 'It is midnight,' he said, 'and I must be off; but let me tell
you before we part that you have paid for a most expensive dinner, and
have behaved all night with an extravagant deference under the
impression that I was the Duke of Sussex. As a fact my name is Jerks,
and I am a commercial traveller in the linseed oil line; and I wish
you the best of good evenings.'
'Wait a moment,' said the Man in the Big Fur Coat; 'my theory of the
Simple Human Sense of Authority still holds. I am a detective officer,
and you will both be good enough to follow me to the police station.'
And so they did, and the Engineer was fined fifty francs in
correctional, and the Duke of Sussex was imprisoned for ten days, with
interdiction of domicile for six months; the first indeed under the
Prefectorial Decree of the 18th of November 1843, but the second under
the law of the 12th germinal of the year VIII.
In this way I have got over between twenty and thirty miles of road
which were tramped in the dark, and the description of which would
have plagued you worse than a swarm of hornets.
Oh, blessed interlude! no struggling moon, no mist, no long-winded
passages upon the genial earth, no the sense of the night, no marvels
of the dawn, no rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping
villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle of trees - just a
short story, and there you have a whole march covered as though a
brigade had swung down it. A new day has come, and the sun has risen
over the detestable parched hillocks of this downward way.
No, no, Lector! Do not blame me that Tuscany should have passed
beneath me unnoticed, as the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in
full sail. Blame all those days of marching; hundreds upon hundreds of
miles that exhausted the powers of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry
sky of Etruria, that compelled most of my way to be taken at night.
Blame St Augustine, who misled me in his Confessions by talking like
an African of 'the icy shores of Italy'; or blame Rome, that now more
and more drew me to Herself as She approached from six to five, from
five to four, from four to three - now She was but _three_ days off.
The third sun after that I now saw rising would shine upon the City.
I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but it was useless.
After an hour I abandoned it. It was not so much the sun, though that
was intemperate and deadly; it was rather the inhuman aspect of the
earth which made me despair. It was as though the soil had been left
imperfect and rough after some cataclysm; it reminded me of those bad
lands in the west of America, where the desert has no form, and where
the crumbling and ashy look of things is more abhorrent than their
mere desolation. As soon march through evil dreams!
The north is the place for men.
