‘Glear avay now,’ said Darco; ‘don’t vaste my dime.’
‘I’m sure I don’t want to waste your time, Mr. Darco,’ said the landlady, ‘but you’ve given me such a turn, sir, I don’t know where I am.’
Darco shook the room again by a new plunge into the armchair, and the trembling landlady cleared away.
‘Now, dake nodes!’ he roared, as she left the room.
‘I shall be very glad to take notice, sir,’ said the landlady.
‘Nodes!’ shouted Darco. ‘Nodes. I am not dalking to you. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary.’
Paul seized a pencil, set a pile of paper before him on the table, and waited. Darco began to prowl about the room, setting chairs in place with great precision, arranging ornaments on the chimney-shelf, and settling pictures on the wall with methodical exactness, muttering meanwhile, ‘Nodes. Dake nodes. I am dalking to my brivade zegredary. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Paul was familiar with his ways, and waited seriously.
‘But this down,’ said Darco, pacing and turning suddenly. ‘No. Don’t but that down. I don’t vant that’ He roamed off again, murmuring: ‘No. Don’t but it down. I don’t vant it. I don’t vant it. Nodes. Dake nodes.’ Then with sudden loudness and decision: ‘But this down.’
He began to talk. Paul tried to follow him on paper, but the task was hopeless. Darco talked with a choking incoherence and at a dreadful pace. It was as if a big-bellied bottle were turned upside down, and as if the bottle were sentient and strove to empty the whole of its contents at once through a narrow neck. At last a meaning began to declare itself—the merest intelligible germ of a meaning—but it grew and grew until Paul clapped his hands with a cry of triumph at it.
‘That is what was wanted.’