He ordered lunch the next day in the great room of the Savoy.
“I’m having my son,” he said to the maître-d’hotel, with a thrill at the new and unfamiliar word. “He has been wounded. I want the very best you can do for us.” The maître-d’hotel, pencil and pad in hand, made profuse suggestions. But Baltazar had forgotten the terms and indeed the items of European gastronomy. “I leave it in your hands. The best the Savoy can do. It’s the first meal I’ve had with my son—since—— And wine. Champagne. What do you recommend?”
The maître-d’hotel pointed to a 1904 vintage on the list. There was nothing better, said he. Baltazar agreed, suddenly aware that he knew no more of vintage wines than of artillery drill. His ignorance irritated him.
“Do you mind if I look at that for a little?”
The maître-d’hotel handed him the wine list, and for half an hour he sat by a table in the great empty restaurant studying the names of the various wines and their vintages. Then, having mastered the information, he began long before the appointed hour to pace up and down the vestibule with an eye on every taxi-cab that swung round the rubber-paved courtyard and deposited its fares at the door, as impatient as any young subaltern waiting for his inamorata.
Very proudly he conducted Godfrey to the reserved table in the middle of the room. He would have liked to proclaim to each group of lunchers as he passed: “This is my son, you know. Wounded and decorated for valour.” To those who regarded them with any attention, they were obviously father and son. But this Baltazar did not realize.
“My boy,” said he, when the waiter had filled the two glasses, “I hope you like champagne. For myself I am a confirmed teetotaller. But I come from a land of strict ceremonial—and ceremonial ideas have got into my bones. Our first meal together—we must drink in wine to what the future has in store for us.”
He smiled and held out his glass across the table. They touched rims. Baltazar took a sip, then put his champagne aside and filled a tumbler with mineral water. Godfrey was struck by the courtesy and suavity of manner with which his father conducted the little ceremony; also, as the lunch progressed, by his perfect hostship and by his charming conversation. The disconnected dynamo could be, when he chose, a very pleasant gentleman. By his tone and attitude he conveyed a man of the world’s suggestion that this might be the beginning of an agreeable acquaintance. Godfrey began to revise his first impression of his father. Confidence increasing, he yielded to subtle pressure and spoke in his English objective way about himself; about his schooldays, his ambitions, his entrance scholarship, his brief University career. He explained how his intimacy with Sister Baring sprang from the unfruitful pages of Routh’s Rigid Dynamics.
“Oh! that’s how she spotted you——?”
“That’s how, sir. And then she told me she had read with you—and eventually all the rest came.”