'Ah!' said he, after a few pointless remarks, 'your friend is over here on business, eh? Right thing, splendid thing. It's only by looking round that one can get real tip-top novelties. Oh! I know Paree and the bouleywards well enough. I was on at the Follee Bergey only a few years ago myself. A good place that—pays well, eh? I shouldn't at all mind taking a trip across the water again. There's nothing like a change, you know. Sets a man up, eh?'
Then mysteriously—lifting his forefinger and lowering his voice, 'Now your friend wants "talent," eh? Real, genuine "talent"! I could put him in the way——'
But I interposed: 'You've applied to the wrong shop,' I said by way of a joke; 'my friend has all the talent he requires. He's quite full up.'
A sorrowful look came over the angular features of the gentleman in the
check suit. 'It's like my luck,' said he; 'there was a fellow over from
Amsterdam the other day, but he'd only take girls. I think the
Continental line's pretty nigh played out.'
He heaved a sigh and glanced in the direction of his empty glass. Then, seeing that the novelist and Desmoulin were rising to join me, he whispered hurriedly, 'I say, guv'nor, you haven't got a tanner you could spare, have you?'
I had foreseen the request; nevertheless I pressed a few coppers into his hand and then hurried out after my wards.
Though it was still early we decided to start at once for Wimbledon. The master, I thought, might like to see a little of the place pending Wareham's arrival.
The journey through Lambeth, Vauxhall, and Queen's Road is not calculated to give the intelligent foreigner a particularly favourable impression of London. Still M. Zola did not at first find the surroundings very much worse than those one observes on leaving Paris by the Northern or Eastern lines. But as the train went on and on and much the same scene appeared on either hand he began to wonder when it would all end.
On approaching Clapham Junction a sea of roofs is to be seen on the right stretching away through Battersea to the Thames; while on the left a huge wave of houses ascends the acclivity known, I believe, as Lavender Hill. And at the sight of all the mean, dusty streets, lined with little houses of uniform pattern, each close pressed to the other—at the frequently recurring glimpses of squalor and shabby gentility—M. Zola exploded.
'It is awful!' he said.