Enlightenment burst upon E. Van Tenner. The prices of the menu, suggesting the daily stock market report before the depression, became clear. Somehow that awful vocality and the hardly less agonizing accompaniment had to be paid for. His green pepper at eighty cents was to pay for it. It was stuffed, that green pepper, not with rice and tomato but with ragtime jazzeries and syncopated shrieks. E. Van Tenner laid the menu on the table and would have risen and escaped, but there hovered over him, portentous and awful, the head waiter himself.
“You haf ordered?” he inquired.
“I—that is—no; I think I won’t order this evening,” quavered the patron.
“There is a table charch of one dollar,” said the official severely.
E. Van Tenner, overawed, reached for the beggar’s purse. It flatly refused to open. As the owner strove with it there was instilled into his veins a calm and chill determination, born of a discovery that he had made—or had the purse magically indicated it?—regarding the menu.
“I shall not pay it,” he said quietly.
“You shouldt haf to pay it.” The head waiter’s threatening tone took on a little more pronounced accent.
“You’re a German, aren’t you?” inquired E. Van Tenner blandly.
“Dot is my bisaness,” retorted the other excitedly. “You pay dot table charch!”
“No; I shall not pay the table charge. But I will do this: I will pay you one dollar for that menu card, which, I observe, has on it two, four, seven, eleven—eleven different kinds of meat, on a Meatless Tuesday! Come; what do you say?”