THE PHANTOM FOURTH.
They were three.
It was in the cheap night-service train from Paris to Calais that Ifirst met them.
Railways, as a rule, are among the many things which they do _not_ orderbetter in France, and the French Northern line is one of the worstmanaged in the world, barring none, not even the Italian _vie ferrate_.I make it a rule, therefore, to punish the directors of, and theshareholders in, that undertaking to the utmost within my limitedability, by spending as little money on their line as I can help.
It was, then, in a third-class compartment of the train that I met thethree.
Three as hearty, jolly-looking Saxon faces, with stalwart frames tomatch, as one would be likely to meet in an hour's walk from theRegent's Park to the Mansion House.
One of the three was dark, the other two were fair. The dark one was thesenior of the party. He wore an incipient full beard, evidently inprocess of training, with a considerable amount of grizzle in it.
The face of one of his companions was graced with a magnificent flowingbeard. The third of the party, a fair-haired youth of some twenty-threeor four summers, showed a scrupulously smooth-shaven face.
They looked all three much flushed and slightly excited, and, I mustsay, they turned out the most boisterous set of fellows I ever met.
They were clearly gentlemen, however, and men of education, withconsiderable linguistic acquirements; for they chatted and sang, anddeclaimed and "did orations" all the way from Paris to Calais, in aslightly bewildering variety of tongues.
Their jollity had, perhaps, just a little over-tinge of the slap-bangjolly-dog style in it; but there was so much heartiness and good-naturein all they said and in all they did, that it was quite impossible forany of the other occupants of the carriage to vote them a nuisance; andeven the sourest of the officials, whom they chaffed most unmercifullyand unremittingly at every station on the line, took their punishmentwith a shrug and a grin. The only person, indeed, who rose against themin indignant protestation was the head-waiter at the Calais stationrefreshment-room, to whom they would persist in propounding puzzlingproblems, such as, for instance, "If you charge two shillings forone-and-a-half-ounce slice of breast of veal, how many fools will ittake to buy the joint off you?"--and what _he_ got by the attempt tostop their chaff was a caution to any other sinner who might have feltsimilarly inclined.
As for me, I could only give half my sense of hearing to theirutterings, the other half being put under strict sequester at the timeby my friend O'Kweene, the great Irish philosopher, who was deliveringto me, for my own special behoof and benefit, a brilliant, albeitsomewhat abstruse, dissertation on the "visible and palpable outwardmanifestations of the inner consciousness of the soul in a trance;"which occupied all the time from Paris to Calais, full eight hours, andwhich, to judge from my feelings at the time, would certainly affordmatter for three heavy volumes of reading in bed, in cases of inveteratesleeplessness--a hint to enterprising publishers.
My friend O'Kweene, who intended to stay a few days at Calais, tookleave of me on the pier, and I went on board the steamer that was tocarry us and the mail over to Dover.
Here I found our trio of the railway-car, snugly ensconced under anextemporized awning, artfully constructed with railway-rugs andgreatcoats, supported partly against the luggage, and partly uponseveral oars, purloined from the boats, and turned into tent-poles forthe nonce--which made the skipper swear wofully when he found it outsome time after.
The three were even more cheery and boisterous on board than they hadbeen on shore. From what I could make out in the dark, they werediscussing the contents of divers bottles of liquor; I counted four deadmen dropped quietly overboard by them in the course of the hour and ahalf we had to wait for the arrival of the mail-train, which was late,as usual on this line.
At last we were off, about half-past two o'clock in the morning. It wasa beautiful, clear, moonlit night, so clear, indeed, that we could seethe Dover lights almost from Calais harbor. But we had considerably morethan a capful of wind, and there was a turgent ground-swell on, whichmade our boat--double-engined, and as trim and tidy a craft as ever spedacross the span from shore to shore--behave rather lively, with sportiveindulgence in a brisk game of pitch-and-toss that proved anything butcomfortable to most of the passengers.
When we were steaming out of Calais harbor, our three friends, emergingfrom beneath their tent, struck up in chorus Campbell's noble song, "YeMariners of England," finishing up with a stave from "Rule, Britannia!"
But, alas for them! however loudly their throats were shouting forth thesway proverbially held by Albion and her sons over the waves, on thisoccasion at least the said waves seemed determined upon ruling theseparticular three Britons with a rod of antimony; for barely a fewseconds after the last vibrating echoes of the "Britons never, never,never shall be slaves!" had died away upon the wind, I beheld the threeleaning lovingly together, in fast friendship linked, over the rail,conversing in deep ventriguttural accents with the denizens of Neptune'swatery realm.
We had one of the quickest passages on record--ninety-three minutes'steaming carried us across from shore to shore. When we were just on thepoint of landing, I heard the dark senior of the party mutter to hiscompanions, in a hollow whisper and mysterious manner, "He is goneagain;" to which the others, the bearded and the smooth-shaven,responded in the same way, with deep sighs of evident relief, "Ay,marry! so he is at last."
This mysterious communication roused my curiosity. Who was the partythat was said to be gone at last? Where had he come from? where had hebeen hiding, that _I_ had not seen him? and where was he gone to now? Idetermined to know; if but the opportunity would offer, to screw, bycunning questioning, the secret out of either of the three.
Fate favored my design.
For some inscrutable reason, known only to the company's officials, wecheap-trainers were not permitted to proceed on our journey to Londonalong with the mail, but were left to kick our heels for some two hoursat the Dover station.
I went into the refreshment-room to look for my party; I had a notion Ishould find them where the Briton's unswerving and unerring instinctwould be most likely to lead them. It turned out that I was right in myconjecture. There they were, seated round a table with huge bowls ofsteaming tea and monster piles of buttered toast and muffins spread onthe festive board before them. Ay, indeed, there they were; but _quantummutati ab illis_! how strangely changed from the noisy, rollicking set Ihad known them in the railway-car and on board the steamer, ere yet thedemon of sea-sickness had claimed them for his own! How ghastly soberthey looked now, to be sure! And how sternly and silently bent upondevoting themselves to the swilling of the Chinese shrub infusion and tothe gorging of indigestible muffins. It was quite clear to me that itwould have been worse than folly to venture upon addressing them whilethus absorbed in absorbing. So I resolved to await a more favorableopening, and went out meanwhile to walk on the platform.
A short time I was left in solitary possession of the promenade; then Ibecame suddenly aware that another traveller was treading the sameground with me--it was the dark elderly leader of the three. I glancedat him as he passed me under one of the lamps. He looked pale and sad.The furrowed lines on his brow bespoke deliberation deep and ponderingprofound. All the infinite mirth of the preceding few hours had departedfrom him, leaving him but a wretched wreck of his former reckless self.
"A fine night, sir," I said to break the ice--"for the season of theyear," I added by way of a saving clause, to tone down the absolutenessof the assertion.
He looked at me abstractedly, merely reechoing my own words, "A finenight, sir, for the season of the year."
"Why look ye so sad now, who were erst so jolly?" I bluntly asked,determined to force him into conversation.
"Ay, indeed, why so sad now?" he replied, looking me full in the face;then, suddenly clasping my arm with a spasmodic grip, he continuedhurriedly, "I think I had best confide our secret to you. You seem a manof
thought. I witnessed and admired the patient attention with which youlistened to your friend's abstruse talk in the railway-car. Maybe youcan find the solution of a mystery which defies the ponderings of ourpoor brains--mine and my two friends."
Then he proceeded to pour into my attentive ear this gruesome tale ofmystery:
"We three--that is, myself, yon tall bearded Briton," pointing to theglass door of the refreshment-room, "whose name is Jack Hobson, andyoung Emmanuel Topp, junior partner in a great beer firm, whom you maybehold now at his fifth bowl of tea and his seventh muffin--areteetotallers----"
"Teetotallers!" I could not help exclaiming. "Lord bless me! that iscertainly about the last thing I should have taken you for, either ofyou."
"Well," he replied with some slight confusion, "at least, we _weretotal_ teetotallers, though I admit we can now only claim the characterof partial abstainers. The fact is, when, about a fortnight ago, we werediscussing the plan of our projected visit to the great ParisExhibition, Topp suggested that while in France we should do as theFrench do, to which Jack Hobson assented, remarking that the French knewnothing about tea, and that a Frenchman's tea would be sure to prove anEnglishman's poison. So we resolved to suspend the pledge during ourvisit to France.
"It was on the second day after our arrival in Paris. We were dining ina private cabinet at Desire Beaurain's, one of the leading restaurantson the fashionable side of the Montmartre--Italiens Boulevard. Ourdinner was what an Irishman might call a most 'illigant' affair. We hadsipped several bottles of Sauterne, and tasted a few of Tavel, and wewere just topping the entertainment with a solitary bottle of champagne,when I became suddenly aware of the presence of another party in theroom--a _fourth man_--who sat him down at our table, and helped himselfliberally to our liquor. From what I ascertained afterward from JackHobson and Emmanuel Topp, the intruder's presence became revealed tothem also, either about the same time or a little later. What was helike? I cannot tell. His figure and face remained indistinctthroughout--phantom-like. His features seemed endowed with a strongeweird mobility that would defyingly elude the fixing grasp of our eagereyes. Now, and to my two companions, he would look marvellously like me;then, to me, he would stalk and rave about in the likeness of JackHobson; again, he would seem the counterfeit of Emmanuel Topp; then hewould look like all the three of us put together; then like neither ofus, nor like anybody else. Oh, sir, it was a woful thing to be hauntedby this phantom apparition. Yet the strangest part of the affair wasthat neither of us seemed to feel a whit surprised at the dreadpresence; that we quietly and uncomplainingly let him drink our wine,and actually give orders for more; that we never objected, in fact, toany of his sayings and doings. What seemed also strange was that thewaiter, while yet receiving and executing his orders, was evidentlypretending to ignore his presence. But then, as I dare say you know aswell as I do, French waiters are _such_ actors!
"Well, to resume, there he was, this fourth man, seated at our table andfeasting at our expense. And the pranks that he would play us--they weretruly stupendous. He began his little game by ordering in half-a-dozenof champagne. And when the waiter seemed slightly doubtful andhesitating about executing the order, Topp, forsooth, must put in hisoar, and indorse the command, actually pretending that _I_, who am nowspeaking to you, and who am the very last man in the world likely todream of such a preposterous thing, had given the order, and that I wasa jolly old brick, and the best of boon companions. Surprise at thisbarefaced assertion kept me mute, and so, of course, the champagne wasbrought in, and I thought the best thing to do under the circumstanceswas to have my share of it at least; and so I had--my fair share; but,bless you, it was nothing to what that fourth man drank of it. In fact,the amount of liquor _he_ would swill on this and on the many subsequentoccasions he intruded his presence upon us, was a caution.
"We paid our little bill without grumbling, though the presence of thefourth man at our table had added rather heavily to the _addition_, asthey call bills at French restaurants.
"We sallied forth into the street to get a whiff of fresh air. _He_, thedemon, pertinaciously stuck to us; he familiarly linked his arm throughmine, and, suggesting coffee as rather a good thing to take afterdinner, took us over to the Cafe du Cardinal, where he, however, tooknone of the Arabian beverage himself (there being only three cups placedfor us, as I distinctly saw), but drank an interminable succession of_chasse-cafe_, utterly regardless of the divisional lines of the cognac_carafon_. Part of these he would take neat, another portion he wouldburn over sugar, gloating glaringly over the bluish flame, while gleamsof demoniac delight would flit across his ever-changing features. JackHobson and Topp, I am sorry to say, joined him with a will in thisdouble-distilled debauch; and when I attempted to remonstrate with them,they brazenly asserted that _I_, who am now speaking to you, who havealways, publicly and privately, declared brandy to be the worst of evilspirits, had taken more of it, to my own cheek, as they slangilyexpressed it, than the two of them together; and the waiter, who hadevidently been bribed by them, boldly maintained that _le vieuxmonsieur_, as he had the impudence to call me, had swallowed _plus detrois carafons de fine_; whereupon the fourth man, stepping up to him,punched his head, which served him right. Now you will hardly believe mewhen I tell you that at that very instant Topp forced me back into mychair, while Jack Hobson pinioned my arms from behind, and the waiterhad the unblushing effrontery to stamp and rave at me like a maniac,demanding satisfaction or compensation at my hands for the unprovokedassault committed upon him by _me, coram populo_!--by _me_, who, I begto assure you, am the most peaceable man living, and am actually famedfor the mildness of my disposition and the sweetness and suavity of mytemper. And, would you believe it? everybody present, waiters andguests, and my own two bosom-friends, joined in the conspiracy againstme, and I actually had to give the wretch of a waiter ten francs as aplaster for his broken pate, and a salve for his wounded honor! Wherewas the real culprit all this time, you ask me--the fourth man? Why, hequietly stood by grinning, and they all and every one of them pretendednot to see him, though Topp and Jack Hobson next morning confessed to methat they certainly had an indistinct consciousness of the presencethroughout of this miserable intruder.
"How we finished that night I remember not; nor could Jack Hobson orEmmanuel Topp. All we could conscientiously stand by, if we werequestioned, is that we awoke next morning--the three of us--with someslight swimming in our heads, and a hazy recollection of a gorgeousdream of brilliant lights and sounds of music and revelry, and brightvisions of groves and grottoes, and dancing houris (or hussies, as moralJack Hobson calls the poor things), and a hot supper at a certain placein the Passage des Princes, of which I think the name is Peter's.
"I will not tire your courteous patience by a detailed narrative of ourexperiences day after day, during our fortnight's stay in Paris. Sufficeit to tell you that from that time forward to yesterday, when we left,the _fourth man_, as we, by mutual consent, agreed to call the phantomapparition, came in regularly to our dinner; with the dessert or alittle after; that he would constantly suggest a fresh supply of CoteSt. Jacques, Moulin-a-Vent, Beaune, Chambertin, Roederer Carte Blanche,and a variety of other, generally rather more than less expensive,wines--and that he somehow would manage to make us have them, too.
"Then he would sally forth with us to the cafe, where he would indulgein irritating chaff of the waiters, and in slighting comments upon thegreat French nation in general, and the Parisians in particular, andupon their institutions and manners and customs.
"He would insist upon singing the Marseillaise; he would speakdisparagingly of the Emperor, whom he would irreverently call Lambert;he would pass cutting and unsavory remarks upon the glorious system ofthe night-carts; he would call down the judgment of Heaven upon thedevoted head of poor Mr. Haussmann; he would go up to some unhappysergent-de-ville, who might, however unwittingly, excite his ire, andtell him a bit of his mind in English, with sarcastic allusions to hiscocket-hat and his toasting-fork, and polite inq
uiries after the healthof _ce cher_ Monsieur Lambert, or the whereabouts of _cet excellent_Monsieur Godinot. The worst of the matter was that I suppose for thereason that man is an imitative animal, a sort of [Greek: pithekosmyoros], or Monboddian monkey minus the tail--my two companions were,somehow, always sure to join the wretch in his evil behavior, and to goon just as bad as he did. No wonder, then, that we got into no end ofrows, and it is a marvel to me now, how ever we have managed to get offwith a whole skin to our bodies.
"He would insist upon taking us to Mabille, the Closerie des Lilas, andthe Chateaurouge, where he would indulge in the maddest pranks andantics, and somehow lead us to join in the wildest dances, and make uslift our legs as high as the highest lifter among the _habitues_, maleor female.
"One night, at about half-past two in the morning (_Hibernice_), he hadthe cool assurance to drag us along with him to the then closed entranceto the Passage des Princes, where he frantically shook the gate, andinsisted to the frightened concierge, who came running up in hisnight-shirt, that Peter's must and ought to be open still, as _we_ hadnot had our supper yet; and Topp and Jack Hobson, forsooth, must join inthe row. I have no distinct recollection of whether it was our phantomguest or either of my companions that madly strove to detain the hastilyretreating form of the concierge by a desperate clutch at the tail ofhis shirt; I only remember that the garment gave way in the struggle,and that the unhappy functionary was reduced nearly altogether to theprimitive buff costume of the father of man in Paradise ere he had puthis teeth into that unlucky apple of which, the pips keep soinconveniently sticking in poor humanity's gizzard to the present day.And what I remember also to my cost is, that the sergent-de-ville, whomthe bereaved man's shouts of distress brought to the scene, fastenedupon _me_, the most inoffensive of mortals, for a compensation fine oftwenty francs, as if _I_ had been the culprit. And deuced glad we were,I assure you, to get off without more serious damage to our pocket andreputation than this, and a copious volley of _sacres ivrognes Anglais_,fired at us by the wretched concierge and his friend of the police, who,I am quite sure, went halves with him in the compensation. Ah! they area lawless set, these French.
"On another occasion we three went to the Exhibition, where we visitedone of our colonial departments, in company with several Englishfriends, and some French gentlemen appointed on the wine jury. We wentto taste a few samples of colonial wines. _He_ was not with us _then_.Barely, however, had we uncorked a poor dozen bottles, which turned outrather good for colonial, though a little raw and slightly uneducated,when _who_ should stalk in but our fourth man, as jaunty andunconcerned as ever. Well, _he_ fell to tasting, and he soon greweloquent in praise of the colonial juice, which he declared would, inanother twenty years' time, be fit to compete successfully with the bestFrench vintages. Of course, the French gentlemen with us could not stand_this_; they spoke slightingly of the British colonial, and one of themeven went so far as to call it rotgut. I cannot say whether it was thespirit of the uncompromising opinion thus pronounced, or the coarselyindelicate way in which the judgment of our French friend was expressed,that riled our phantom guest--enough, it brought him down in full forceupon the offender and his countrymen, with most fluent Frenchvituperation and an unconscionable amount of bad jokes and worse puns,finishing up with a general address to them as members of the_disgusting_ jury, instead of jury of _degustation_. Now, this I shouldnot have minded so much; for, I must confess, I felt rather nettled atthe national conceit and prejudice of these French. But the wretch, inthe impetuous utterance of his invective, must somehow--though I was notaware of it at the time--have mimicked my gestures and imitated the verytones and accent of my voice so closely as to deceive even some of myEnglish companions: or how else to account for the fact of their callingme a noisy brawler and a pestilent nuisance? _me_, the gentlest andmildest-spoken of mortals!
"Before our departure from London we had calculated our probableexpenses on a most liberal scale, and we had made comfortable provisionaccordingly for a few weeks' stay in Paris. But with the additionalheavy burden of the franking of so copious an imbiber as our fourth manthus unexpectedly thrown on our shoulders, it was no great wonder thatwe should find our resources go much faster than we had anticipated; sowe had already been forcedly led to bethink ourselves of shortening ourintended stay in the French capital when a fresh exploit of the phantomfourth, climaxing all his past misdeeds, brought matters to a crisis.
"It was the day before yesterday, the 4th of September. We had beendining at Marigny, and dancing at Mabille. Our eccentric guest had comein, as usual, with the champagne, and had of course, after dinner, takenus over to the enchanted gardens. We were all very jolly. _He_ suggestedsupper at the Cascades, in the Bois de Boulogne. We chartered a _fiacre_to take us there and back. We supped rather copiously. _He_ somehow madeour coachman drunk, and took upon himself to drive us home. Need I tellyou that he upset us in the Avenue de l'Imperatrice, and that we had towalk it, and pretty fast too? It was a mercy there were no bones broken.
"Well, as we were walking along, just barely recovering from the shockof the accident, he suddenly took some new whim into his confoundednoddle. Nothing would do for him but he must drag us along with him tothe great entrance of the Elysee Napoleon (which erst was, and maybe issoon likely to be once more, the Elysee Bourbon), where he had thebrazen impudence to claim admittance, as the Emperor, he pretended, hadbeen graciously pleased to offer us the splendid hospitality of thatrenowned mansion. What further happened here, neither I nor either ofmy friends can tell. Our recollections from this period till nextmorning are doubtful and indistinct. All we can state for certain is,that yesterday morning we awoke, the three of us, in a most wretchedstate, in a strange, nasty place. We learn soon after from a gentlemanin a cocked hat, who came to visit us on business, that the imperialhospitality which we had claimed last night had indeed been extended tous--only in the _violon_, instead of the Elysee. Our phantom guest wasgone: he would alway, somehow sneak away in the morning, when there wasnothing left for him to drink--the guzzling villain!
"The gentleman in the cocked-hat pressingly invited us to pay a visit tothe Commissaire du Quartier. That formidable functionary received uswith the customary French-polished veneer of urbanity which, as a rule,constitutes the _suaviter in modo_ of the higher class of Gallicofficials. He read us a severe lecture, however, upon the allegedimpropriety of our conduct; and when I ventured to protest that it wasnot to us the blame ought to be imputed, but to the _quatrieme_, hemistook my meaning, and, ere I could explain myself, he cut me shortwith a polite remark that the French used the cardinal instead of theordinal numbers in stating the days of the month, with the exception ofthe first, and that he had had too much trouble with our countrymen (hetook us for Yankees!) on the 4th of July, to be disposed to look with anover-lenient eye upon the vagaries we had chosen to commit on the 4th ofSeptember, which he supposed was another great national day with us. Hewould, however, let us off this time with a simple reprimand, uponpayment of one hundred francs, compensation for damage done to thecoach--drunken cabby having turned up, of course, to testify against us.Well, we paid the money, and handed the worthy magistrate twenty francsbesides, for the benefit of the poor, by way of acknowledgment for theimperial hospitality we had enjoyed. We were then allowed to depart inpeace.
"Now, you'll hardly believe it, I dare say, but it is the truthnotwithstanding, that we three, who have been fast friends for years,actually began to quarrel among ourselves now, mutually imputing to oneanother the blame of all our misadventures and misfortunes since ourarrival in Paris, while yet we clearly knew and felt, each and every ofus, that it was all the doings of that phantom fourth.
"One thing, however, we all agreed to do--to leave Paris by the firsttrain.
"To fortify ourselves for the coming journey, we went to indulge in theluxury of a farewell breakfast at Desire Beaurain's. Of course weemptied a few bottles to our reconciliation. I do not exactly rememberhow many, but this I _do_ remember, that
our irrepressible incubuswalked in again, and took his place in the midst of us rather soonereven than he had been wont to do; and he never left us from that time tothe moment of our landing at Dover harbor, when he took his, I hope andtrust final, departure with a ghastly grin.
"I dare say you must have thought us a most noisy and obstreperous lot:well, with my hand on my heart, I can assure you, on my conscience,that a quieter and milder set of fellows than us three you are notlikely to find on this or the other side the Channel. But for thatmysterious phantom fourth----"
Here the whistle sounded, and the guard came up to us with a hurried,"Now then, gents, take your seats, please; train is off in half aminnit!"
"What can have become of Topp and Jack Hobson?" muttered my new friend,looking around him with eager scrutiny. "I should not wonder if theywere still refreshing." And he started off in the direction of therefreshment-room.
I took my seat. Immediately after the train whirled off. I cannot saywhether the three were left behind; all I know is that I did not seethem get out at London Bridge.
Remembering, however, that the appalling secret of the supernaturalvisitation which had thus harassed my three fellow-travellers had beenconfided to me under the impression that I might be likely to find asolution of the mystery, I have ever since deeply pondered thereon.
Shallow thinkers, and sneerers uncharitably given, may, from aconsideration of the times, places, and circumstances at and under whichthe abnormal phenomena here recited were stated to have been observed,be led to attribute them simply to the promptings and imaginings ofbrains overheated by excessive indulgence in spirituous liquors. But I,striving to be mindful always of the great scriptural injunction tojudge not, lest we be judged, and opportunely remembering my friendO'Kweene's learned dissertation above alluded to, feel disposed topronounce the apparition of the phantom of the fourth man, and all thesayings, doings, and demeanings of the same, to have been simply so manyvisible and palpable outward manifestations of the inner consciousnessof the souls of the three, and more notably of that of the elderlysenior of the party, in a succession of vino-alcoholic trances.
My friend O'Kweene is, of course, welcome to such credit as may attachto this attempted solution of mine.