"Bully!" With this Bate also expired—with joy over his air castles.
Accordingly, at nine p. m., the trio met in rooms Nos. 4-11-44 in the St. Charles hotel, a hostelry of good repute where men of disrepute would sometimes get through the cordon of morality that was strung around it. Monroe had a suite of three rooms, as became a man of quality, as he was, with no disparagement of the "quality." These quarters were furnished, of course, in such magnificence that contrast between the riches of the room and the nature of the man was like the temperate and the frigid zones. His bed room was in white enamel, with cream-colored carpet, a frail white iron bed-stead, with dainty white materials on it. Why the combination? It was that he, when he donned his white night gown, imagined he would be in a little heaven of his own, during his nocturnal sojournings into Dreamland—the only heaven he ever would be enabled to approach, perhaps. He had a lounging room fitted up in gray, in which he lounged during his hours of rest, and in which he received his friends. The other room he called the Bottomless Pit—not that it was bottomless, nor that it was a pit, in the strict sense, but that here was where he refreshed himself and entertained. It was done in dark-brown, probably in commemoration of that old jest, "dark-brown taste the morning after."
Welty and Bate had been there before, so they needed no formal reception to cause them to make themselves at home. So repairing to the Pit, a spread was in waiting. The bill-of-fare (ach, god in himmel, it should be menu) was mushrooms on toast, frogs' legs in butter, calves' brains in cracker meal, squabs in stew, oysters in whisky, rolls in brown, butter in squares, sugar in cubes, coffee in percolator, pickles in acetics, cheese in limburger, nuts in hull, desserts in bottle, and cigars in box. All this in honor of Monroe's erudition as a manipulator of things clandestine in his attempt at circumvention of a certain favored young man.
When they sat down at the table, which was just big enough for three to hear each other across with loud talk, with the load of savory things in china, garnished by genuine sterling, upon it, they were all very hungry, and besides very thirsty.
"Gentlemen," said the stiffness, rising, without a break in his metallic visage, the others rising with him, "gentlemen, a toast to the lady; may the good Lord preserve her."
"The lady! the lady!" cried the two Monroe dupes in unison.
"And to Welty and Bate; may they ever prosper in their new jobs," he continued. "Hah, too conscientiously modest to toast yourselves, are you?—take water, you kids." This last remark was made by him when he saw that Welty and Bate hesitated about toasting themselves. However, they toasted.
Thus they toasted, and they gabbled, and they ate, till all the viands had vanished, and nothing was left upon the board but the smeared platters. Then to the bottles they betook themselves with a wild and merry gusto. Monroe pulled the corks, and poured. He drank, and they drank. He smoked, and they smoked, till the air was a blue haze of whirling objects, only to be dispelled by the dark-brown in the morning.
Once, during a fit of eructation, Monroe thought he would surely die, and got ready to make his will.
"Write it out, Welty," he commanded, in a severe maudlin tone; "and write it out so that She shall get it all, with a codicil that you and Bate are to get one-third of what is left, after I am gone. Whoop! Woe me! Woe me!" he wailed, with his face like that of a gargoyle. "Write it out before I die," he said, as he went staggering against a wall, falling over a chair, crushing down a rocker, flailing his hands like bat's wings, as he retched and perambulated through the Pit.