“Yes,” he said, “let it be beef. I know your mutton. It tastes like the smell of goat. So give us beef—your railway beef, which has travelled so far, but not by train. It has come on foot, to be killed and cut up by a locomotive, to be served by a waiter who has assuredly failed as a stoker.”
He sat down as he spoke, and rearranged the small table, covered by a doubtful cloth, through which could be felt the chill of the marble underneath. Deulin always took the lead in these small matters, and Cartoner accepted his decision without comment. The Frenchman knew him so well, it seemed, that he knew his tastes, or suspected his indifference. While he thus rattled on he glanced sharply from time to time at his companion, and when the waiter was finally sent away with a hundred minute instructions, he turned suddenly to Cartoner.
“You are absorbed. What are you thinking about?” he said.
“I was thinking how well you speak Polish. And yet you have only been here once before,” answered the Englishman, bluntly.
“When I was a young man there were opportunities of learning Polish in Paris,” said Deulin. “Yes—I learned Polish when I was young——”
He had arranged the table to his satisfaction, had picked up several objects to examine them and replace them with care on the exact spot from whence he had taken them, and was now looking round the room with large, deep-lined eyes which were always tired and never at rest.
“When one is young, one learns so much in a short time, especially if that time is ill-spent,” he said, airily. “That is why the virtuous are such poor company; they have no backbone to their past. With the others—'nous autres'—it is the evil deeds that form a sort of spinal column to our lives, rigid and strong, upon which to lean in old age when virtue is almost a necessity.”
Finally he came round in his tour of inspection to the face opposite to him.
“Do you know,” he said, sharply, “you are devilish absent-minded. It is a bad habit. It makes the world think that you have something on your mind. And having nothing on its own mind—or no mind to have anything on—it hates you for your airs of superiority.”
He took up the bottle of wine which the waiter had set upon the table in front of him, inspected the label, and filled two glasses. He tasted the vintage, and made a wry face. Then he raised his shoulders with an air or reconciliation to the inevitable.