‘I got here this morning,’ Paul answered.
‘I am here four tays,’ said Darco. ‘I shall be here four tays longer. I am puying a gomedy, ant a blay in five agds.’
‘Buying?’ said Paul ‘I thought the one recognised custom was to steal’
‘That’s a vool’s game,’ Darco declared. ‘If you sdeal, and if what you sdeal is worth sdealing, anypoty can sdeal from you. If you burchase it, it is yours, and nopoty can take it away. Honesty is the best policy. And, pesides that, I am Cheorge Dargo. I know my way apout.’
Paul could have hugged him for sheer joy at hearing the familiar brag again: ‘I am Cheorge Dargo.’ The old countersign was like music.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Paul.
‘Ve are koink,’ said Darco, ‘to the Hareng d’Or, where they haf a dry champagne, and where they can give you such a preakfast as you cannot get in the world. Ant I shall have a Cloria with a zeventy-year-old Gogniag in it. Ant the Blat de chour is a Navarin de mouton. I saw that as I passed the house two hours aco. I shall haf two boitions, mind you.’
‘Twenty!’ cried Paul.
‘No,’ said Darco. ‘I could not ead twenty.’
They reached the restaurant, one of those jolly little houses which are all down now—short as is the time since that in which they flourished—where the host knew almost all his guests, and luxury went hand in hand with a sort of camaraderie which cannot breathe in our new palaces. The chef was a treasure, but as yet no American millionaires strove to coax him across the Atlantic. There were no better wines in the world, there was no better coffee, and, by way of a wonder, there were no better cigars. Darco shook hands with the host, and broke out at him in a brash of Alsatian French, which to Paul’s ears was like a rolling of drums. He caught his own name in the torrent of noise, and distinguished the words ‘un homme lidéraire, cheune, gomme fous foyez, mais déjà pien tisdangué.’ The host bowed, and Paul bowed, and blushed a little, and Darco ordered a déjeûner at the host’s discretion, stipulating only for his own double portion of the Navarin de mouton. So there came oysters, with a cobwebbed bottle of old hock in a cradle, and an unknown delicate fish with burnt butter, and then the Navarin with champagne in an ice-pail, and fruit, and delicate foreign cheeses, and coffee which is a dream to the man whose unjaded palate first tries it in perfection. The seventy-years-old cognac was there also, and Paul’s head was humming ever so little before the feast was over.