“What in the world was he talking about?” asked Gerard.
“Marguerite Lambert, I suppose,” replied Ratenay with a laugh. Gerard, for his part, had forgotten all about her. Nor did she dwell at all in his thoughts now. He went vaguely forward and found himself in a grotesque imitation of a Moorish room, cheap tiles of the bathroom kind, pillars carved and painted to mimic the delicate handicraft of Moorish workmen, a blaze of light from unshaded globes, and a long, glittering bar behind which Madame Delagrange presided, a red-faced woman cast in so opulent a mould that he who looked at her perspired almost as freely as she did herself. The bar stood against a wall opposite to the door, and between there were rows of little three-legged iron tables, at which Levantines, clerks, shopkeepers of every nationality and a few French officers were seated. In front of the tables a few couples gyrated in a melancholy fashion to a fox-trot thumped out upon an old and tortured piano by a complacent Greek. If there could be anything worse on this hot night than the glare of light and tawdry decorations, it was the heart-rending racket of the piano. But dancers, decorations, piano and glare were all lost upon Gerard de Montignac.
At the side of the Bar, wide double doors stood open upon a platform roofed over with a vine; and in that doorway stood the officer of the Native Department, of which he was in search.
“Baumann!” he cried, and crossed the room.
Baumann, a middle-aged, stockish Alsatian, long since settled in Algeria, to whom this Bar seemed the very epitome of devil-may-care luxury and pleasure, surveyed the Captain of Chasseurs with deference.
“It is gay here,” he said with a smile. “Life, my Captain, the life of Paris and the Boulevards. You want to speak to me? Yes? We shall be quieter here.”
He turned back with almost a sigh of regret to the boarded verandah under the vines. To Gerard the verandah was a relief. Here at all events it was cool and dark, and the piano did not thump upon the brain with so exasperating a poignancy. There was a table empty at the end where a couple of steps led down into a dark garden.
“Let us sit here!” said Gerard, and when the three were seated and the drinks ordered from a person of indefinable nationality dressed up as a Turk, he leaned forward.
“You have news of Paul Ravenel?”
“News? I couldn’t say as much as that,” replied Baumann. “I was at Meknes when the thing occurred, before Meknes had declared for its new patent Pretender. It’s five months ago.”