"My dear fellow," said Andrew, with his ear-to-ear grin. "To live in Marseilles and be innocent of bouillabaisse is like having gone through the war without tasting bully beef."
He was for dragging him to the little restaurant up a side street in the heart of the town which is the true shrine of bouillabaisse. But Arbuthnot had heard vaguely of another place, celebrated for the dish, where one could fill one's lungs as well as one's stomach.
"The Reserve."
"That's it. Taxi!" cried Arbuthnot.
So they drove out and sat in the cool gallery of the Reserve, by a window table, and looked on the blue Mediterranean, and the wonderous dish was set before them and piously served by the maître d'hôtel. Rascasse, Loup-de-mer, mostelle, langouste ... a studied helping of each in a soup plate, then the sodden toast from the tureen and the ladles of clear, rich, yellow liquid flavoured with saffron and with an artist's inspiration of garlic, the essence of the dozen kinds of fish that had yielded up their being to the making of the bouillabaisse. The perfect serving of it is a ceremonial in the grand manner.
Arbuthnot, regarding his swimming plate, looked embarrassed.
"Knife, fork and spoon," said Andrew.
They ate for a while in silence. Then Arbuthnot said:
"Do you remember that wonderful chapter in Meredith's Egoist when Sir Willoughby Patterne offers the second bottle of the Patterne Port to Doctor Middleton, Clara's father--and the old fellow says: 'I have but a girl to give?' Well, I feel like that. This is the most wonderful eating that humanity has ever devised. I'm not a glutton. If I were I should have sampled this before. I'm just an uncivilized man from the bush overwhelmed by a new sensation. I'm your debtor, General, to all eternity. And your genius in recommending this wine"--he filled Andrew's glass with Cinzano's Asti Spumante--"is worthy of the man who saw us out at Bourdon Wood. By the way," he added, after a pause, "what really happened afterwards? I knew you got through. But we poor devils of gunners--we do our job--and away we go to loose off Hell at another section and we never get a clear knowledge of the results."
"I'll tell you in a minute," said Andrew, emptying the salt cellars and running a trench-making finger through the salt, and disposing pepper pots, knives and spoons and supplementing these material objects with lead pencil lines on the table-cloth--all vestiges of the bouillabaisse had been cleared away--"You see, here were the German lines. Here were their machine-guns."