He accepted it in perfectly good part. 'I'm sure I shall feel honoured if you will drink with me,' he said, and settled the reckoning with Pierre.
'Name? Name?' a dozen of us cried in scattering chorus.
'I had thought that, among so many Englishmen and Americans, some one would have recognised me,' he replied. 'I am Davis Blake.'
He said it as one might say, 'I am Mr. Gladstone'—or Lord Salisbury—or Bismarck—with dignity, with an inflection of conscious greatness, it is true, but with neither haughtiness nor ostentation. We, however, are singularly ignorant of contemporary English literature in the Latin Quarter—our chief reading matter, indeed, being Maupassant and Le Petit Journal pour Rire—and though, as we shortly learned, here was a writer whose works were for sale at every bookstall in the United Kingdom, lavishly pirated in the United States, and distributed far and wide by Baron Tauchnitz on the Continent, his announcement left us unenlightened.
'Painter?' demanded Chalks.
A shadow crossed his face. 'You are surely familiar with my name?'
'Never heard it that I know of,' answered Chalks; then, raising his voice, 'Any gentleman present ever heard of—what did you say your name was?' he asked in an aside; and being informed, went on, 'of Mr. Davis Blake?'
No one spoke.
'Mud?' queried Chalks.
'Mud?' repeated Mr. Blake, perplexed.