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"Look here! you know the big lame man who lives at Paris with Pere Micou; the man who sells for Nicholas; who keeps furnished lodgings, Passage de la Brasserie?" "A big lame man?" "Why, yes; who came here at the end of the autumn from Pere Micou, with a man with monkeys, and two women." "Oh, yes, yes; the lame man who spent so much money?" "I think so; he paid for everybody."
"If you think you look like a vagabond in that get up you're much mistaken," he laughed. "I don't. I know I don't," looking ruefully at her clothes. "But I will before long. You'll see." The village upon closer inspection achieved a dignity which the distance denied it. There was a row of small shops, a brasserie and an inn, all slumbering under the shadows of a grove of trees.
It was a combination of East Side Tivoli and French Brasserie and Hungarian Goulash Rendezvous a tiny cosmopolis in itself and it did a rushing business. So the months dragged along in unending monotony. Poor Von Barwig tried hard to do work that would please the gentlemen who controlled the music trades, but failed.
He told me of one voyage on which the Malay cook went mad, and, escaping into the ratlines, shot down a dozen of the crew before he himself was sniped. The supper tables are separated from the brasserie by a line of stucco arches, and as it was now a quarter to twelve the place was full. At a first glance it seemed that there were no empty supper tables.
There was only one person in that brasserie who did not applaud the African hymn, but no one paid so much attention to it as this man, who had entered the Black Cat just as Mok had begun. He was a person of medium size, with a heavy mustache, and a face darkened by a beard of several days' growth. He was rather roughly dressed, and wore a soft felt hat. He was a Rackbird.
He laughed nervously. 'Oh, the meaning's clear enough. It speaks for itself. 'I don't understand, said I. 'I'm pianist to the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You saw me in the discharge of my duties. 'I don't understand, I repeated helplessly. 'And yet the inference is plain. What could have brought a man to such a pass save drink or evil courses? 'Oh, don't trifle, I implored him.
"I couldn't eat, sir," he said, "I couldn't eat. Bad news takes away the appetite. But I guess I'll go with you, so that I needn't go to table down there at the pension. The old woman down there is always accusing me of turning up my nose at her food. Well, I guess I shan't turn up my nose at anything now." We went to the little brasserie, where poor Mr. Ruck made the lightest possible breakfast.
I explained that I was on my way to Biarritz, stopping for the night between two trains. 'Then it's all the more surprising that you should have stumbled into the Brasserie des Quatre Vents. You've altered very slightly. The world wags well with you? You look prosperous. I cried out some incoherent protest. Afterwards I said, 'You know what I want to hear. What does this mean?
Hawke well knew the final level of misery awaiting the wandering, broken-down artist here in a land where really fine music was a mere drug; where the orchestra was only a cheap lure to enhance the cafe addition. The "Professor" was but a minor staff officer of the grim Teutonic Oberkellner of the Brasserie Concert.
The play, the novel and the picture flourish on the same stem, and the very advertisement posters tell their lies artistically. Paris is the metropolis of ideas. You may catch them there and set up as a prophet on the strength of a fortnight's holiday. Maeterlinck says he learnt all he knows from a man he met in a brasserie. Fancy picking up ideas in a pothouse!
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