I beckoned the waiter. "Three large cognacs," bawled the bird of ill omen in a voice as if he would settle accounts with a guest in the grave. "Three marks thirty."
The girl turned round.
"Three cognacs in three minutes?
Good going."
"That includes two from yesterday," I explained hastily.
"What a liar!" hissed the athlete at the table behind me.
She had kept silence long enough.
I turned and bowed.
"Happy Christmas, ladies." Then I went quickly.
"Have you been quarrelling?" asked the girl when we were outside.
"Not specially.
I merely have an unfavorable effect on ladies in good circumstances."
"Me too," she replied.
I looked at her.
She appeared to me as from another world.
I simply could not imagine what she was or how she lived.
In the bar I was on surer ground.
Fred, the mixer, was standing behind the counter in the act of polishing the big cognac swill glass, as we entered.
He greeted me as if he were seeing me for the first time and had not had to take me home only two nights ago.
He was trained in a good school and had a vast experience behind him.
The room was empty except for one table where, as usual, sat Valentin Hauser.
I knew him from the war; we had been in the same company.
He once brought me a letter to the front line because he supposed it was from my mother.
He knew I was expecting one, for my mother had recently undergone an operation.
But he was mistaken—it was merely an advertisement for a new warm trench cap made from stinging-nettles.
On his way back he had been hit in the leg.
Shortly after the war Valentin had come into a little money, and had been drinking it ever since.
He considered it his duty to celebrate his good luck in having come out alive.
It was nothing to him that that was now several years ago.
One could never celebrate it enough, he used to explain.
He was one of those with an uncanny memory of the war.
The rest of us had forgotten many things; but he remembered every day and every hour.
I saw that he had already had a good deal, for he was sitting vacantly in his corner, completely submerged.
I raised my hand.
"Salut, Valentin."
He looked up and nodded.
"Salut, Bob."
We sat down in a corner.
The mixer came.
"What will you drink?" I asked the girl.
"A Martini perhaps," she replied. "A dry Martini."
"Fred is a specialist in that," said I.
Fred permitted himself a smile.
"The usual for me," said I.
The bar was cool and dark, with a smell of spilled gin and cognac—a rooty smell, as of juniper and bread.
From the ceiling hung a wooden model of a sailing-ship.
The wall behind the bar was faced with copper.
The dimmed light from a sconce cast red reflections in it as if some subterranean fire were mirrored there.
Of the smaller wrought-iron brackets on the wall only two were lighted—one near Valentin and another by us.
They had yellow parchment shades made from old maps and looked like narrow illuminated sections of the world.