it was under cover of a fog of leprous brown striated with ochre and acrid with smoke that tristrem entered london. in allusion to that most delightful of cities, someone has said somewhere that hell must be just such another place. if the epigrammatist be right, then indeed is it time that the rehabilitation of the lower regions began. london is subtle and cruel, perhaps, and to the meditative traveller it not infrequently appears like an invocation to suicide writ in stone. but whoso has once accustomed himself to its breath may live ever after in flowerful arcadias and yet dream of its exhalations with regret. in venice one may coquette with phantoms; rome has ghosts and memories of her own; in paris there is a sparkle that is headier than absinthe; berlin resounds so well to the beat of drums that even the pusillanimous are brave; but london is the great enchantress. it is london alone that holds the secret of inspiring love and hatred as well.
tristrem sniffed the fog with a sensation of that morbid pleasure which girls in their teens and women in travail experience when they crave and obtain repulsive food. had he not hungered for it himself? and did she not breathe it too?
the journey from euston square to the hotel in jermyn street at which he proposed to put up, was to him a confusion of impatience and anticipation. he was sure of finding a cablegram from mrs. raritan's attorney, and was it not possible that he might see viola that very night? in jermyn street, however, no message awaited him. under the diligent supervision of a waiter who had the look and presence of a bishop he managed later to eat some dinner. but the evening was a blank: he passed it twirling his thumbs, dumbly irritated, incapable of action, and perplexed as he had never been before.
the next morning his odyssey began. he cabled to mr. meggs, and saw the clerk put beneath the message the cabalistic letters a. p. and then, in an attempt to frighten time, he had his measure taken in saville row and his hair cut in bond street. but in vain—the day dragged as though its wheels were clogged. by noon he had exhausted every possible resource. another, perhaps, might have beguiled the tedium with drink, or cultivated what balzac has called the gastronomy of the eye, and which consists in idling in the streets. but unfortunately for tristrem, he was none other than himself. the mere smell of liquor was distasteful to him, and he was too nervous to be actively inactive. moreover, as in september there are never more than four million people in london, his chance of encountering an acquaintance was slight. those that he possessed were among the absent ten thousand. they were in the country, among the mountains, at the seaside, on the continent—anywhere, in fact, except in the neighborhood of pall mall. and even had it been otherwise, tristrem was not in a mood to suffer entertainment. he had not the slightest wish to be amused. wagner might have come to covent garden from the grave to conduct parsifal in person and tristrem would not have so much as bought a stall. he wanted miss raritan's address, and until he got it a comet that bridged the horizon would have left him incurious as the dead.
on the morrow, with his coffee, there came to him a yellow envelope. the message was brief, though not precisely to the point "uninformed of mrs. raritan's address," it ran, and the signature was meggs.
for the first time it occurred to tristrem that fate was conspiring against him. it had been idiocy on his part to leave new york before he had obtained the address; and now that he was in london, it would be irrational to write to any of her friends—the wainwarings, for instance—and hope to get it. he knew the wainwarings just well enough to attend a reception if they gave one, and a slighter acquaintance than that it were idle to describe.
other friends the girl had in plenty, but to tristrem they were little more than shadows. there seemed to be no one to whom he could turn. indeed he was sorely perplexed. since the hour in which he learned that his father and viola's were not the same he had been possessed of but one thought—to see her and kneel at her feet; and in the haste he had not shown the slightest forethought—he had been too feverishly energetic to so much as wait till he got her address; and now in the helter-skelter he had run into a cul-de-sac where he could absolutely do nothing except sit and bite his thumb. the enforced inactivity was torturesome as suspense. in his restlessness he determined to retrace his steps; he would return to new york, he told himself, learn of her whereabouts, and start afresh. already he began to calculate the number of days which that course of action would necessitate, and then suddenly, as he saw himself once more on fifth avenue, he bethought him of alphabet jones. what man was there that commanded larger sources of social information than he? he would cable to him at once, and on the morrow he would have the address.
the morrow dawned, and succeeding morrows—a week went by, and still no word from jones. a second week passed, and when a third was drawing to a close and tristrem, outwearied and enervated, had secured a berth on a returning steamer, at last the answer came—an answer in four words—"brown shipley, founders' court." that was all, but to tristrem, in his over-wrought condition, they were as barbs of flame. "my own bankers!" he cried; "oh, thrice triple fool! why did i not think of them before?" he was so annoyed at his stupidity that on his way to the city his irritation counterbalanced the satisfaction which the message brought. "three whole weeks have i waited," he kept telling himself—"three whole weeks! h'm! jones might better have written. no, i might better have shown some common-sense. three whole weeks!"
he was out of the cab before it had fairly stopped, and breathless when he reached the desk of the clerk whose duty it was to receive and forward the letters of those who banked with the house.
"i want mrs. raritan's address," he said—"mrs. r. f. raritan, please."
the clerk fumbled a moment over some papers. "care of munroe, rue scribe," he answered.
"thank god!" tristrem exclaimed; "and thank you. send my letters there also."
that evening he started for paris, and the next morning he was asking in the rue scribe the same question which he had asked the previous afternoon in founders' court. there he learned that mrs. raritan had sent word, the day before, that all letters should be held for her until further notice. she had been stopping with her daughter at the h?tel du rhin, but whether or not she was still there the clerk did not know. the rue scribe is not far from the place vend?me, in which the h?tel du rhin is situated, and it took tristrem a little less than five minutes to get there. the concierge was lounging in her cubby-hole.
"madame raritan?" tristrem began.
"partie, m'sieu, partie d'puis hier—"
and then from tristrem new questions came thick and fast. the concierge, encouraged by what is known as a white piece, and of which the value is five francs in current coin, became very communicative. disentangled from layers of voluble digression, the kernel of her information amounted to this: mrs. raritan and her daughter had taken the orient express the day before. on the subject of their destination she declared herself ignorant. suppositions she had in plenty, but actual knowledge none, and she took evident pleasure in losing herself in extravagant conjectures. "bien le bonjour," she said when tristrem, passably disheartened, turned to leave—"bien le bonjour, m'sieu; si j'ose m'exprimer ainsi."
the orient express, as tristrem knew, goes through southern germany into austria, thence down to buda-pest and on to constantinople. that viola and her mother had any intention of going farther than vienna was a thing which he declined to consider. on the way to vienna was stuttgart and munich. in munich there was wagner every other night. in stuttgart there was a conservatory of music, and at vienna was not the opera world-renowned? "they have gone to one of those three cities," he told himself. "viola must have determined to relinquish the italian school for the german. h'm," he mused, "i'll soon put a stop to that. as to finding her, all i have to do is go to the police. they keep an eye on strangers to some purpose. let me see—i can get to stuttgart by to-morrow noon. if she is not there i will go to munich. i rather like the idea of a stroll on the maximilien strasse. it would be odd if i met her in the street. well, if she isn't in munich she is sure to be in vienna." and as he entered the grand h?tel he smiled anew in dreams forecast.
tristrem carried out his programme to the end. but not in stuttgart, not in munich, nor in vienna either, could he obtain the slightest intelligence of her. in the latter city he was overtaken by a low fever, which detained him for a month, and from which he arose enfeebled but with clearer mind. he wrote to viola two letters, and two also to her mother. one of each he sent to the rue scribe, the others to founders' court. when ten days went by, and no answer came, he understood for the first time what the fable of tantalus might mean, and that of sisyphus too. he wrote at length to his grandfather, describing his odyssey, his perplexities, and asking advice. he even wrote to jones—though much more guardedly, of course—thanking him for his cable, and inquiring in a post-scriptum whether he had heard anything further on the subject of the raritans' whereabouts. these letters were barely despatched when he was visited by a luminous thought. the idea that viola intended to relinquish italian music for that of wagner had never seemed to him other than an incongruity. "idiot that i am!" he exclaimed; "she came abroad to study at milan, and there is where she is. she must have left the orient express at munich and gone straight down through the tyrol." and in the visitation of this comforting thought tantalus and sisyphus went back into the night from which they had come; in their place came again the blue-eyed divinity whose name is hope.
it is not an easy journey, nor a comfortable one, from vienna to milan, but hope aiding, it can be accomplished without loss of life or reason. and hope aided tristrem to his destination, and there disappeared. in all milan no intelligence of viola could be obtained. he wrote again to her. the result was the same. "i am as one accursed," he thought, and that night he saw himself in dream stopping passers in the street, asking them with lifted hat had they seen a girl wonderfully fair, with amber eyes. he asked the question in french, in german, in italian, according to the nationality of those he encountered, and once, to a little old woman, he spoke in a jargon of his own invention. but she laughed, and seemed to understand, and gave him the address of a lupanar.
he idled awhile in milan, and then went to florence, and to rome, and to naples, crossing over, even, to palermo; and then retracing his steps, he visited the smaller cities and outlying, unfrequented towns. something there was which kept telling him that she was near at hand, waiting, like the enchanted princess, for his coming. and he hunted and searched, outwearied at times, and refreshed again by resuscitations of hope, and intussusceptions of her presence. but in the search his nights were white. it was rare for him to get any sleep before the dawn had come.
early in spring he reached milan again. he had written from bergamo to the rue scribe, asking that his letters should be forwarded to that place, and among the communications that were given him on his arrival was a cablegram from new york. come back, it ran; she is here. it was from his grandfather, dirck van norden, and as tristrem read it he trembled from head to foot. it was on a tuesday that this occurred, and he reflected that he would just about be able to get to havre in time for the saturday steamer. an hour later he was in the train bound for desenzano, from which place he proposed to go by boat to riva, and thence up to munich, where he could catch the orient express on its returning trip to france.