Now, so far from liking my meat “bien saignant” I cannot even abide the sight of it rare, and I told him so. But he repeated “bien saignant,” and vanished.
He came again, though; or rather his Jesuitical head protruded itself over the top of the box where I sat (there were boxes at His Lordship’s) and asked:
“Paint portare? p’lale? ole’ ale?”
I was nettled, and told him sharply that I would try the wine, if he could recommend it. Whereupon there was silence, and then I heard a voice crying down a pipe, “Paint portare!”
He brought me my dinner, and I didn’t like it. It was bien saignant, but it wasn’t beef, and it swam in a dead sea of gravy that was not to my taste; fat from strange animals seemed to have been grafted on to the lean. I did not get on better with the potatoes, which were full of promise, like a park hack, and unsatisfactory in the performance. I tried some plum-pudding afterwards; but, if the proof of the pudding be in the eating, that pudding remains unproved to this day; for, when I tried to fix my fork in it, it rebounded away across the room, and hit the black man on the leg. I would rather not say anything about the porter, if you please; and perhaps it is well to be brief on the subject of the glass of hot gin-and-water I tried afterwards, in a despairing attempt to be convivial; for it smelt of the midnight-lamp like an erudite book, and of the midnight oilcan, and had the flavour of the commercial terebinthium, rather than of the odoriferous Juniperus. I consoled myself with some Cheshire cheese, and asked the waiter if he had the Presse.
“Ze Time is gage,” he answered.
I did not want the Times. I wanted the Presse.
“Sare,” he repeated wrathfully, “Ze Time is gage. Le Journal Anglais (he accentuated this spitefully) is gage.”
He would have no further commerce with me after this; and, doubtlessly thinking that an Englishman who couldn’t eat his beef under-done or indeed at all, and preferred the Presse to the Times newspaper, was an outcast and a renegade, abandoned me to my evil devices, and contented himself with crying “Voila!” from the murky distance without coming when I called. He even declined to attend to receive payment, and handed me over for that purpose to a long French boy in a blouse, whose feet had evidently not long been emancipated from the pastoral sabots, whose hair was cropped close to his head (in the manner suggesting county gaol at home, and ignorance of small toothcombs abroad), and who had quite a flux of French words, and tried to persuade me to eat civet de lièvre that was to be served up at half-past seven of the clock.
But I would have borne half a hundred disappointments similar to this dinner for the sake of the black man. Legs and feet! he was a character! He sat opposite to me, calm, contented, magnificent, proud. He was as black as my boot, and as shiny. His woolly head, crisped by our bounteous mother Nature, had unmistakeably received a recent touch of the barber’s tongs. He was perfumed; he was oiled; he had moustaches (as I live!) twisted out into long rats’-tails by means of pommade Hongroise. He had a tip. He had a scarlet Turkish cap with a long blue tassel. He had military stripes down his pantaloons. He had patent leather boots. He had shirt-studs of large circumference, pins, gold waistcoat-buttons, and a gorgeous watch-chain. I believe he had a crimson under-waistcoat. He had the whitest of cambric handkerchiefs, a ring on his forefinger, and a stick with an overpowering gold knob. He was the wonderfullest nigger that the eye ever beheld.