Читать книгу The Joss: A Reversion онлайн

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Firandolo’s is something like a restaurant. Including vegetables, and sweets, and cheese, I have counted sixty-seven dishes on the bill of fare at one time, so that you have plenty of choice. For a shilling you can get a perfectly splendid dinner. And for sixpence you can get soup, and bread and cheese and butter; and they bring you the soup in a silver basin which is full to the brim.

At night it is generally crowded, but it was perhaps because the weather was so bad that there were only a few persons in the place when we went in. Directly after we entered someone else came in. He was a big man, and wore a reefer coat and a bowler hat. Seating himself at a table immediately opposite ours, taking off his hat, he wiped his forehead with an old bandanna handkerchief; though what there was to make him warm on a night like that was more than I could say. He had a fringe of iron-grey hair all round his head on a level with his ears. It stood out stiffly, like a sort of crown. Above and below it he was bald. He wore a bristly moustache, and his eyes were almost hidden by the bushiest eyebrows I had ever seen. I could not help noticing him, because I had a kind of fancy that he had been following us for some time. Unless I was mistaken he had passed me just as I had come out of Cardew & Slaughter’s; and ever since, whenever I looked round, I saw him somewhere behind us, as if he were keeping us in sight. I said nothing about it to the others, but I wondered, all the same. I did not like his looks at all. He seemed to me to be both sly and impudent; and though he pretended not to be watching us, I do not believe he took his eyes off us for a single moment.