Eating in Two or Three Languages | Page 9

him firmly just back of the armpits, picked him up and brought him over to us and invited us to consider his merits. When we had singly and together declined to consider the proposition of eating him in each of the three languages we knew--namely, English, bad French, and profane--the master sorrowfully returned him to his bed.
Presently two other Americans entered and immediately after them a party of English officers, and then some more Americans. Each time the boss would gather up the lobster and personally introduce him to the newcomers, just as he had done in our case, by poking the monster under their noses and making him wriggle to show that he was really alive and not operated by clockwork, and enthusiastically dilating upon his superior attractions, which, he assured them, would be enormously enhanced if only messieurs would agree forthwith to partake of him in a broiled state. But there were no takers; and so back again he would go to his place by the door, there to remain till the next prospective victim arrived.
We fell into the habit of going to this place in the evenings in order to enjoy repetitions of this performance while dining. The lobster became to us as an old friend, a familiar acquaintance. We took to calling him Jess Willard, partly on account of his reach and partly on account of his rugged appearance, but most of all because his manager appeared to have so much trouble in getting him matched with anybody.
[Illustration: HALF A DOZEN TIMES A NIGHT OR OFTENER HE TRAVELLED UNDER ESCORT THROUGH THE DINING ROOM]
Half a dozen times a night, or oftener, he travelled under escort through the dining room, always returning again to his regular station. Along about the middle of the week he began to fail visibly. Before our eyes we saw him fading. Either the artificial life he was leading or the strain of being turned down so often was telling upon him. It preyed upon his mind, as we could discern by his morose expression. It sapped his splendid vitality as well. No longer did he expand his chest and wave his numerous extremities about when being exhibited before the indifferent eyes of possible investors, but remained inert, logy, gloomy, spiritless--a melancholy spectacle indeed.
It now required artificial stimulation to induce him to display even a temporary interest in his surroundings. With a practised finger, his keeper would thump him on the tenderer portions of his stomach, and then he would wake up; but it was only for a moment. He relapsed again into his lamentable state of depression and languor. By every outward sign here was a lobster that fain would withdraw from the world. But we knew that for him there was no opportunity to do so; on the hoof he represented too many precious francs to be allowed to go into retirement.
Coming on Saturday night we realised that for our old friend the end was nigh. His eyes were deeply set about two-thirds of the way back toward his head and with one listless claw he picked at the serviette. The summons was very near; the dread inevitable impended.
Sunday night he was still present, but in a greatly altered state. During the preceding twenty-four hours his brave spirit had fled. They had boiled him then; so now, instead of being green, he was a bright and varnished red all over, the exact colour of Truck Six in the Paducah Fire Department.
We felt that we who had been sympathisers at the bedside during some of his farewell moments owed it to his memory to assist in the last sad rites. At a perfectly fabulous price we bought the departed and undertook to give him what might be called a personal interment; but he was a disappointment. He should have been allowed to take the veil before misanthropy had entirely undermined his health and destroyed his better nature, and made him, as it were, morbid. Like Harry Leon Wilson's immortal Cousin Egbert, he could be pushed just so far, and no farther.
Before I left Paris the city was put upon bread cards. The country at large was supposed to be on bread rations too; but in most of the smaller towns I visited the hotel keepers either did not know about the new regulation or chose to disregard it. Certainly they generally disregarded it so far as we were concerned. For all I know to the contrary, though, they were restricting their ordinary patrons to the ordained quantities and making an exception in the case of our people. It may have been one of their ways of showing a special courtesy to representatives of an allied race. It would have been characteristic of these kindly provincial innkeepers to have done just that thing.
Likewise,