Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 6, 2025
B. said calmly, extracting his own spoon from beneath his mattress on which we were seated: "They'll give you yours downstairs and when you get it you want to hide it or it'll be pinched" and in company with Monsieur Bragard, who had refused the morning promenade, and whose gentility would not permit him to hurry when it was a question of such a low craving as hunger, we joined the dancing roaring throng at the door.
Count Bragard had declined the evening promenade in favour of The Enormous Room, but I perceived in the crowd the now familiar faces of the three Hollanders John, Harree and Pompom likewise of The Bear, Monsieur Auguste, and Fritz. In the course of the next hour I had become, if not personally, at least optically acquainted with nearly a dozen others.
The Surveillant smiled and bowed and wound and unwound his hands behind his back and denied anything of the sort. It seems that B. had heard that the kindly nobleman wasn't going to Paris at all. Moreover, Monsieur Pet-airs had said to B. something about Count Bragard being a suspicious personage Monsieur Pet-airs, the R.A.'s best friend.
"I don't need it," he said simply and pathetically. Now, as I have said, a change in our relations came. It came at the close of one soggy, damp, raining afternoon. For this entire hopeless grey afternoon Count Bragard and B. promenaded The Enormous Room. Bragard wanted the money for the whiskey and the paints. The marmalade and the letter to Vanderbilt were, of course, gratis.
A little ahead Monsieur Auguste's voice protested. Count Bragard brought up the rear. When we reached the corridor nearly all the breath was knocked out of me. The corridor being wider than the stairs allowed me to inhale and look around. B. was yelling in my ear: "Look at the Hollanders and the Belgians! They're always ahead when it comes to food!"
I have already noted the fact that Count Bragard conceived an immediate fondness for this rolypoly individual, whose belly as he lay upon his back of a morning in bed rose up with the sheets, blankets and quilts as much as two feet above the level of his small, stupid head studded with chins.
"No, no, straight through," Count Bragard corrected me. "There's a lovely bit of landscape," he said sadly. "If I only had my paints here. I thought, you know, of asking my housekeeper to send them on from Paris but how can you paint in a bloody place like this with all these bloody pigs around you? It's ridiculous to think of it.
Bragard was leaving us. Now was the time to give him money for what we wanted him to buy in Paris and London. I spent my time rushing about, falling over things, upsetting people, making curious and secret signs to B., which signs, being interpreted, meant be careful! But there was no need of telling him this particular thing.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking