He felt that Tub was the finest and most lovable man living; that he was beyond belief lucky to have such a friend; and they returned to the Continental in a high state of philanthropy and Yalensianism.
Matey looked them over and sighed, “Well, you aren’t much drunker than I thought you’d be, and now you better go in and wash your little faces in the bathroom and have a coupla Bromo Seltzers—believe me, Sam, traveling with that man, I never fail to have some real genuine American Bromo along—and then if you can both still walk, we’ll go out and have the handsomest dinner in Paree.”
He took them to Voisin’s, but when they were seated Tub looked disappointed.
“Not such a lively place,” he said.
“No, I know it isn’t, but it’s a famous old restaurant, and perhaps the best food and wine in town. What kind of a place would you like? Find it for you tomorrow.”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what I did think a Paris restaurant would be like but—Oh, I thought there’d be a lot of gilt, and marble pillars, and a good orchestra, and lots of dancing, and a million pretty girls, regular knockouts, and not so slow either. I better watch meself, or I’ll be getting Matey jealous.”
“Hm,” said Matey. “Tub has a good, conscientious, hardworking ambition to be a devil with the ladies—our fat little Don Juan!—but the trouble is they don’t fall for him.”
“That’s all right now! I’m not so bad! Say, can you dig us up a place like that, tomorrow?”
“I’ll show you a good noisy dance place tonight,” said Sam. “You’ll see all the pretty chickens you want—and they’ll come and tell you, in nine languages, that you’re a regular Adonis.”
“They don’t need to tell me that in more than one language—the extrabatorious language of clinging lips, yo ho!” yearned the class-wit.
“You’re wrong, Sam,” said Matey. “He doesn’t make me sick—not very sick—not worse’n a Channel crossing. And you’re wrong about thinking that I secretly wish he would go out with one of these wenches and get it out of his system. Not at all. I can get much more shopping money out of the brute while he’s in this moon-June-spoon-loon mood. And when his foot does slip, how he’ll come running back to his old Matey!”
“I don’t know whether I will or not! Say, do we eat?”
The head waiter had been standing at attention the while. Sam was aching to show off his knowledge of restaurant French, and he held out his hand for the menu, but Tub seized it and prepared to put into the life of Voisin’s all the liveliness and wit and heartiness he felt lacking.
“Do you sprechen Sie pretty good English?” he demanded of the head waiter.
“I think so, sir.”
“Attaboy! Been in England, son?”
“Sixteen years, sir.”
“Um, not so bad—not so bad for a Frog! Well now, look here, Gooseppy, we want Mrs. Voisin to shake us up something tasty, and you take the orders from me, François, and you bring me the check afterwards, too, see, and don’t have anything to do with that big stiff there. He’s a Scotch Jew. If you let him order, he’d stick us with stew, and then he’d make you take ten percent off the check. Now listen. Have you got any nice roast elephant ears?”
Tub winked at Sam, tremendously.
The head waiter said patiently, but not too patiently, “May I recommend the canard aux navets?”
But Tub was a conscientious Midwestern Humorist—he was a Great Little Kidder—he had read Innocents Abroad and had seen The Man from Home, and he knew that one of the superbest occupations of an American on the grand tour was “kidding the life out of these poor old back numbers of Europeans.” He tried again:
“Not got any elephants’ ears, Alberto? Well, well! I thought this was a first-class hash-house—right up to the Childs class. And no elephants’ ears?” The head waiter said nothing, with much eloquence. “How about a nice fricassee of birds’ nests?”
“If the gentleman wishes, I can send to a Chinese restaurant for it.”
“Tub,” Matey observed, “the comedy isn’t going over so big. You give Sam that menu now, and let him order, hear me?”
“Well, it was kind of a flop,” Tub said morosely. “But I told you this was a dead hole. I may not be the laddie buck that locks up the Bullyvards every evening, but I know a live joint from a dead one when it comes up and bites me. Well, shoot the works, Sam.”
With a quiet superiority for which he would have deserved to be flogged, except that with Fran’s monopolization of that pleasure he rarely had a chance at it, Sam swiftly ordered foie gras, consommé, frogs’ legs, gigot of mutton, asparagus, and a salad, with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and though he ordered in French, so well trained were the head waiter and the sommelier that they understood him perfectly.
And again the luxurious inquiries about Home—was Emily really well?—how was Harry Hazzard’s Lincoln sedan standing up?—what was this business about building a new thirty-story hotel?
They had dined at nine. It was eleven when Sam took them to Montmartre, to the celebrated Caverne Russe des Quarante Vents, where Tub was satisfied in finding the Paris he had pictured. The Caverne was so large, so noisy, with such poisonously loud negro jazz-bands, such cover-charges, such incredible coatroom charges, such abominable champagne at such atrocious prices, such a crowded dancing-floor, such a stench of cigarette smoke and perfume and perspiration, such a sound of the voices of lingerie-buyers from Fort Worth and Milwaukee,
