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Updated: June 6, 2025
'We're not such gulls as all that, to swallow your words whole. But he stood unmoved near the fire. She stood with one hand resting on the zinc-covered bar, the sergeant sat with legs crossed, smoking, on the seat halfway between them, the three young soldiers in their shirts and braces stood wavering in the gloom behind the bar. There was silence.
A zinc table cover is preferred by some housewives, as it absorbs no grease and is readily brightened with scouring soap and hot water. Separate zinc-covered table tops can be had for $1.50. The marble-topped table is not desirable, for, though it undoubtedly is an aid to the making of good pastry, it stains easily, dissolves in some acids, and clogs with oils.
Another tap on the back sent the shorn lamb into a room furnished with great tubs of water and with about six inches of soap suds on the zinc-covered floor.
These two persons had met by chance at a coffee-stand one beautiful summer dawn in one of the markets, the Tréiné, most likely, where, perched on high stools at a zinc-covered counter, with the smell of fresh blood on the right and of stale fish on the left, they had finished half their cup of café au lait before they awoke to the exhilarating knowledge of each other's presence.
When customers did come in they seldom sat at the round metal tables, but went direct to the zinc-covered bar, ordered their fluid and drank it standing, seeming in a hurry to get away.
Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect-like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un-English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc-covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then scrawling a chalk-mark.
"Why, they're surely fighting together in there," the customer would say, as he put his glass down on the zinc-covered counter, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Oh, there's no fear of that," Monsieur Lebigre tranquilly replied. "It's only some gentlemen talking together."
The zinc-covered spire of the little village church, nearly half a mile away, glittered and shone in the fairy light like burnished silver. The quaint whitewashed cottages that dotted the road to the village looked far different from what they did in the daytime; somehow the charitable moon had forgotten to reveal the cracks and stains that time in its relentless march had made.
On our left I glimpsed a dim closet where a woman with fat arms was dipping milk out of what looked like a zinc-covered box. On our right rose the steepest, most winding staircase imaginable; and close to the wall beside the stairs towered a giant grapevine whose stem was as thick as a man's arm. After an eccentric curve or two, this amazing vine disappeared through a convenient hole in the roof.
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