He could not force his way all at once through the palpable perfumes; but he returned to the light again and again like the singed moth. At last he discovered that the various smells did not entirely mix, no fiend being there to stir them round. Odour of family predominated in two corners, stewed rustic reigned supreme in the centre, and garlic in the noisy group by the window. He found too, by hasty analysis, that of these the garlic described the smallest aërial orbit, and the scent of reeking rustic darted farthest; a flavour, as if ancient goats or the fathers of all foxes, had been drawn through a river, and were here dried by Nebuchadnezzar.
So Gerard crept into a corner close to the door. But though the solidity of the main fetors isolated them somewhat, the heat and reeking vapours circulated and made the walls drip: and the home-nurtured novice found something like a cold snake wind about his legs, and his head turn to a great lump of lead; and next he felt like choking, sweetly slumbering, and dying, all in one.
He was within an ace of swooning, but recovered to a deep sense of disgust and discouragement, and settled to go back to Holland at peep of day: this resolution formed, he plucked up a little heart, and, being faint with hunger, asked one of the men of garlic whether this was not an inn after all?
"Whence come you who know not 'The Star of the Forest?'" was the reply.
"I am a stranger; and in my country inns have aye a sign."
"Droll country yours! What need of a sign to a public-house, a place that every soul knows?"
Gerard was too tired and faint for the labour of argument: so he turned the conversation, and asked where he could find the landlord.
At this fresh display of ignorance the native's contempt rose too high for words; he pointed to a middle-aged woman seated on the other side of the oven, and, turning to his mates, let them know what an outlandish animal was in the room. Thereat the loud voices stopped one by one, as the information penetrated the mass, and each eye turned as on a pivot, following Gerard, and his every movement, silently and zoologically.
The landlady sat on a chair an inch or two higher than the rest, between two bundles. From the first, a huge heap of feathers and wings, she was taking the downy plumes, and pulling the others from the quills, and so filling bundle two; littering the floor ankle deep, and contributing to the general stock a stuffy little malaria, which might have played a distinguished part in a sweet room, but went for nothing here. Gerard asked her if he could have something to eat.
She opened her eyes with astonishment. "Supper is over this hour and more."