“You bet I do, Renoux!”
“Bien! So now, if you are quite ready?” he suggested. “Merci, monsieur, et à bientôt!” He bowed profoundly.
Barres, still laughing, walked to Lexington Avenue, crossed northward, and entered the swinging doors of Grogan’s, perfectly enchanted to have his finger in the pie at last, and aching for an old-fashioned Latin Quarter row, the pleasures of which he had not known for several too respectable years.
XX
GROGAN’S
The material attraction of Grogan’s was principally German beer; the æsthetic appeal of the place was also characteristically Teutonic and consisted of peculiarly offensive decorations, including much red cherry, much imitation stained glass, many sprawling brass fixtures, and many electric lights. Only former inmates of the Fatherland could have conceived and executed the embellishments of Grogan’s.
There was a palatial bar, behind which fat, white-jacketed Teutons served slopping steins of beer upon a perforated brass surface. There was a centre table, piled with those barbarous messes known to the undiscriminating Hun as “delicatessen”—raw fish, sour fish, smoked fish, flabby portions of defunct pig in various guises—all naturally nauseating to the white man’s olfactories and palate, and all equally relished by the beer-swilling boche.
A bartender with Pekinese and apoplectic eyes and the scorbutic facial symptoms of a Strassburg liver, took the order from Barres and set before him a frosty glass of Pilsner, incidentally drenching the bar at the same time with swipes, which he thriftily scraped through the perforated brass strainer into a slop-bucket underneath.
Being a stranger there, Barres was furtively scrutinised at first, but there seemed to be nothing particularly suspicious about a young man who stopped in for 266 a glass of Pilsner on a July night, and nobody paid him any further attention.