Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Fellow Travellers

'No more of yesterday's howling over yonder to-day, Sir; is there?'

'I have heard none.'

'Then you may be sure there is none. When these people howl, they
howl to be heard.'

'Most people do, I suppose.'

'Ah! but these people are always howling. Never happy otherwise.'

'Do you mean the Marseilles people?'

'I mean the French people. They're always at it. As to
Marseilles, we know what Marseilles is. It sent the most
insurrectionary tune into the world that was ever composed. It
couldn't exist without allonging and marshonging to something or
other--victory or death, or blazes, or something.'

The speaker, with a whimsical good humour upon him all the time,
looked over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of
Marseilles; and taking up a determined position by putting his
hands in his pockets and rattling his money at it, apostrophised it
with a short laugh.

'Allong and marshong, indeed. It would be more creditable to you,
I think, to let other people allong and marshong about their lawful
business, instead of shutting 'em up in quarantine!'

'Tiresome enough,' said the other. 'But we shall be out to-day.'

'Out to-day!' repeated the first. 'It's almost an aggravation of
the enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we ever
been in for?'

'For no very strong reason, I must say. But as we come from the
East, and as the East is the country of the plague--'

'The plague!' repeated the other. 'That's my grievance. I have
had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like
a sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can't stand the suspicion of
the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to
suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had
it--and I have got it.'

'You bear it very well, Mr Meagles,' said the second speaker,
smiling.

'No. If you knew the real state of the case, that's the last
observation you would think of making. I have been waking up night
after night, and saying, NOW I have got it, NOW it has developed
itself, NOW I am in for it, NOW these fellows are making out their
case for their precautions. Why, I'd as soon have a spit put
through me, and be stuck upon a card in a collection of beetles, as
lead the life I have been leading here.'

'Well, Mr Meagles, say no more about it now it's over,' urged a
cheerful feminine voice.

'Over!' repeated Mr Meagles, who appeared (though without any ill-
nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last word
spoken by anybody else is a new injury. 'Over! and why should I
say no more about it because it's over?'

It was Mrs