A more engaging set of animated dead men it had never been my misfortune to travel with. We had left Paris — en route for Genoa — at 9 o’clock the previous evening; we had tumbled out at Modane the next morning to pass the Customs on the Italian frontier (and, incidentally, to partake of a villainous breakfast at the buffet), and during the entire fourteen hours of our enforced association not one solitary word had been spoken by any member of the party until unthinkingly I broke the silence in the manner recorded. It came, therefore, as a somewhat startling surprise when the man whom I had long ago decided was a French commercial traveler, making up his accounts en route, glanced round at me and said, with as fine an accent as ever came out of Cornwalclass="underline" “No — I think not. He is pretty good at the game. I will admit; bur I fancy he won’t go as far as that” and forthwith shoved his notebook into his pocket and edged along the seat until he was beside me.
I do not know which surprised me the more — this sudden spirit of sociability upon his part, or the fact of his being an Englishman, and I was just groping round in my mind for words to express my sentiments, when he flung another piece of intelligence at inc.
“If you like to bet on losing hazards, that fellow will accommodate you,” he said in a carefully lowered tone and with a nod in the direction of the somnolent German. “He understands English.”
“How do you know that?” I inquired. “He hasn’t spoken a syllable since he came in here last night.”
“I am well aware that he hasn’t. Thinks he would make it too agree-able for other people if he did. But he understands English well enough to read it, if you will take the trouble to notice that newspaper sticking out of his coat pocket. It’s a copy of the Paris edition of the Herald “But that proves nothing. He may have bought it for a friend.”
“Not he. If I know anything, I know the human mule when I see him; and if that fellow hadn’t been too far gone when you offered to wager £5 that he would snore the whole way through the tunnel, he would have defeated you on general principles. You can’t trust a man with a mouth and chin like his to let you win anything if he can prevent it. Think he is sleeping because he enjoys that sort of thing? Not a bit of it! His wife, if he has one, or somebody else if he hasn’t, told him to take especial note of the scenery of French Savoy, and to get out his watch and count the minutes it actually docs take the train to pass through the Mont Cenis tunnel; and he kept awake all last night so that he shouldn’t be able to do it. He would have drugged himself if he couldn’t manage to sleep any other way, the contrary beggar!”
I glanced over at the sleeping German and laughed. The man’s face certainly did suggest those characteristics now that my attention was called to the fact, although I had not noticed it before.
“Are you a family connection of Sherlock Holmes’s?” I asked.
“Not the slightest,” he replied, with a curious smile that lifted one corner of his mouth halfway up his check. “That is one of the few lines I have never tackled as yet. But one never knows what cards one may be called upon to play before the end of the game. Je ne me doute de rien — et je ne parle jamais de ce que je fais. I didn’t throw that in for the mere purpose of letting you understand that I know more languages than my own,” he added parenthetically. “I have lived so many years in Paris that the thing has become almost second nature to me; besides — pardon me a moment. We shall be entering the tunnel presently, and I never fail to take a look at this particular bit of landscape.”
He rose as he spoke, and stood with his hand upon the strap which controlled the window, and his eyes fixed upon me with a curious sort of intentness.
“Ever been through the Cenis tunnel?” he asked.
“No, never. This is my first experience,” I replied. “Is the sensation as uncanny as I have been told?”
“It would require a second Poe to do justice to it. As for me—” He lifted the strap of the window, and I could see that his hand shook nervously. “I always liken the passage through it to six-and-twenty minutes in hell, and I never fail to fill my eyes and my memory with the picture of green trees and bright sunlight before I am swung into the place. But then, mine was such an awful, such an unearthly experience—”
A sudden crash cut in upon his words. The window-strap had slipped from his hand, and the sash shot down with a bang that made the sleeping man beside it start up with an excited “Ach! Lieber Gott!” and the reading Italian turn for the first time from his book. And, at the same moment, light and air and landscape were licked up and swallowed, a swirl of darkness swooped down and struck our eyes, a sulphurous blast gripped our throats and stank in our nostrils, and the whole world seemed to have plunged back suddenly into a roaring, reeking chaos.
We were in the tunnel.
“Ich bitte um EntschuIdigung; es war sehr albern von mir,” said the Cornish-man, looking over his shoulder and addressing the scowling German as the tiny spark of light in the dish-shaped lamp in the ceiling began to make its existence manifest. “I suppose I am a fool,” he added, dropping back into English and speaking to me this time, “but I am always more or less nervous and upset when we say ‘Goodbye’ to the world at large and swing into this hell-hole. It was here — while the train was whizzing along just as it is doing now, and the darkness was so thick you could cut it — that the man without a head got in and sat down opposite me — just as our German friend there is sitting opposite you.”
“Gott im Himmel!”
I could hear the suppressed exclamation even through the steady, insistent roar of the train, and I instinctively glanced over at the German. He had drawn himself up into the smallest possible space, and sat, a thing all eyes, crouched as far back in the shadow of his corner as his size would permit. I knew the instant our eyes met that he shared my sudden suspicion of the Cornish man’s sanity, if he did not, indeed, share the sensation of swiftly alternating flashes of heat and cold which were that moment zig-zagging up and down my spinal column.
For half a minute, as we swayed on through the sulphurous blackness, the Cornishman struggled with the window-strap (for the impact had jammed the sash, and it was no easy matter to readjust it), and during that half-minute I think I must have recalled all the stories of encounters with madmen and all the “Hints on Self-Protection in Cases of Emergency” I had ever read, and I fancy that my face must have reflected my thoughts when the man finally got the sash in place and resumed his seat beside me, for the curious smile was again halfway up his cheek.
“I hope you won’t get to thinking that I have escaped from an asylum,” he said; “although I am free to admit that what I said just now would be considered ample grounds for doing so. Nevertheless—” His voice sank, and the smile slid down his cheek and vanished — “it was the plain, unvarnished truth, and it happened as I told you — while we were scudding along through this Inferno-like darkness, just as the train is doing now.”
“But a man without a head!” I ventured to expostulate, reassured by his demeanor. “And to enter a moving train — in a tunnel! The thing is impossible, you know, impossible!”