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La Joconde, Berselius's yacht, was berthed at the Messagerie wharf, and after déjeuner at the Hotel Noailles, they took their way there on foot. Adams had never seen the south before as Marseilles shows it. The vivid light and the black shadows, the variegated crowd of the Canabier Prolongue had for him an "Arabian Nights" fascination, but the wharves held a deeper fascination still.
He was rather stout, with an oval, egg-shaped face; his beard, sparse and pointed and tinged with gray, had originally been light of hue; he had pale blue eyes, and he had a perpetual smile. It is to be understood by this that Captain Berselius's smile was, so to speak, hung on a hair-trigger; there was always a trace of it on his face round the lips, and in conversation it became accentuated.
Berselius's cook brought in some coffee, and when they had talked long enough about the Congo trade in its various branches, they went out and smoked their pipes, leaning or sitting on the low wall of the fort. The first quarter of the moon, low in the sky and looking like a boat-shaped Japanese lantern, lay above the forest.
He knew by Berselius's manner that if he did not take the offer now, he would lose it. He reckoned with lightning swiftness that the expedition would bring him in solid cash enough to start in a small way in the States. He was as poor as Job, as hungry for adventure as a schoolboy, and he only had a moment to decide in. "How many men are making up your party?" suddenly asked Adams.
He determined to act; he determined to spare neither Berselius's money nor his own time. But the determination of man is limited by circumstance, and circumstance was at that moment preparing and rehearsing the last act of the drama of Berselius. On the morning after Berselius's conversation with Adams, Berselius left the Avenue Malakoff, taking his way to the Avenue des Champs Elysées on foot.
It was full, blazing day, and the Zappo Zap, standing erect just as he had sprung from sleep, was staring with wrinkled eyes straight out across the land. Two black figures were approaching. They were the two porters who had fled westward, and who, with Félix, were all that remained of Berselius's savage train of followers. The rest were over there
A friend who yesterday was hale and hearty, full of will power and brain, and who to-day is a different person with drooping under-lip, lack-lustre eye, and bearing in every movement the indecision which marks the inferior mind. Berselius's under-lip did not droop, nor did his manner lack the ordinary decision of a healthy man; the change in him was slight, but it was startlingly evident.
You had better come and see me the day before we start, so that we can make our last arrangements. Au revoir." The young man turned down the Avenue Malakoff, after he had left Berselius's house, in the direction of the Avenue des Champs Elysées. In twenty-four hours a complete change had taken place in his life.
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