re than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a
conjurer, or the head of a private detective agency. I was sure Soames
didn't want my company; but I asked, as it would have seemed brutal not
to, whether I might join him, and took the chair opposite to his. He
was smoking a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his
plate and a half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him, and he was quite
silent. I said that the preparations for the Jubilee made London
impossible. (I rather liked them, really.) I professed a wish to go
right away till the whole thing was over. In vain did I attune myself
to his gloom. He seemed not to hear me or even to see me. I felt that
his behavior made me ridiculous in the eyes of the other man. The
gangway between the two rows of tables at the Vingtieme was hardly more
than two feet wide (Rose and Berthe, in their ministrations, had always
to edge past each other, quarreling in whispers as they did so), and
any one at the table abreast of yours was virtually at yours. I
thought our neighbor was amused at my failure to interest Soames, and
so, as I could not explain to him that my insistence was merely
charitable, I became silent. Without turning my head, I had him well
within my range of vision. I hoped I looked less vulgar than he in
contrast with Soames. I was sure he was not an Englishman, but what
WAS his nationality? Though his jet-black hair was en brosse, I did
not think he was French. To Berthe, who waited on him, he spoke French
fluently, but with a hardly native idiom and accent. I gathered that
this was his first visit to the Vingtieme; but Berthe was offhand in
her manner to him: he had not made a good impression. His eyes were
handsome, but, like the Vingtieme's tables, too narrow and set too
close together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his
mustache, waxed up behind his nostrils, gave a fixity to his smile.
Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of discomfort in his presence
was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which tightly, and so
unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest. This waistcoat wasn't
wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was somehow all wrong in
itself. It wouldn't have done on Christmas morning. It would have
struck a jarring note at the first night of "Hernani." I was trying to
account for its wrongness when Soames suddenly and strangely broke
silence. "A hundred years hence!" he murmured, as in a t