“Well, go up and see what you can get,” she rejoined sceptically, moving aside. Relieved to find the barrier raised, he ascended the dog-legged staircase; his boyish awe resurging. Alas! even the landlady’s disparagement had not prepared him for this dishevelled scene—dirty plates and greasy knives and forks and tobacco-stoppers and sloppy pewter pots that had stamped bleary rims on the fly-haunted table-cloth, and a waiter in his shirt-sleeves dining, like a gentleman, off the ruins.
“Wegetables and pastry is hoff!” murmured this disturbed gentleman.
Will was retreating—bread and cheese at the bar amid the glinting bottles and shining beer-handles seemed more appetizing—but the waiter had sprung up, his mouth still masticating but his coat conjured on, and had him fixed instanter on a Windsor chair at a clean little sun-splashed table by a side window that was refreshingly open and gave on the cheery courtyard.
A cut of the devastated joint, strong mustard pickles, a hunch of good bread, a pint of porter and the freedom of the cheese to follow, soon dispelled the dismalness of the room; an effect to which the attendant magician contributed more literally by his great trick of vanishing crumbs and disappearing plates, including his own half-eaten meal. How good it was, this cold roast beef of old England, how equally redolent of the dear old country those hunting pictures on the low wainscoted walls, with all their gay bravado. There were four of them: The Meet, Breaking Cover, Full Cry, The Death; all populous with spirited pink gentlemen and violently animated dogs and horses, culminating in the leading dog tearing the fox, and the leading gentleman waving his tall hat in rapture. He quaffed voluptuously at his frothing pewter pot. To the Queen of the May—ay, why not drink to her?
“How’s Mr. Gander?” he asked irrelevantly, with a sudden image of the bull-necked landlord and his massive gold scarfpin.
The waiter—on the point of disappearing—materialized himself again, and stared at the questioner.
“He ain’t anyhow,” he gasped at last. “At least that’s a secret ’twixt him and his Maker.”
“Dead?” It was Will’s turn to gasp. Could so much gross vitality be extinct, or even rarefied?
“Dead and married over. She’s Mrs. Mott now, though the old customers will keep on with the Mother Gander, just as I have to bite my tongue not to call her husband Charley.” He lowered his voice. “He was the potboy once.”
Will whistled. “What women are!” was in that knowing note. How pleasant it was thus to discuss—with beer and pickles!—life and death and the sex.