nothing to eat; I wanted to get to the Bouillon Robert before dinner would be over. I ran into the Bureau and got a number; then I watched, and the first omnibus that had room I climbed up on the imperiale and watched him try for a seat inside! Ah, I knew he was after me. I felt as if I had stolen something! Then the omnibus started. He had not got a seat. When it is already six you cannot get a seat inside, you know?"
I knew. "He came up with you?" I said.
"On the imperlale also there was no room. I lost sight of him, but on the Pont du Carrousel I saw a fiacre!"
In spite of my earlier feeling I was a little interested, more so when Wladislaw told of his walking into a certain restaurant near the Gare Montparnasse—a restaurant where you dine with hors d'œuvres and dessert at a scoured wood table for 80 centimes, sitting down beside several ouvriers—and seeing the stranger saunter in and take a seat at a corner table.
I feel quite incapable of rendering in English the cat-and-mouse description of the dinner which Wladislaw gave me; so I come to the time when he paid his addition and turning up his coat collar, made his way out and up the Boulevard Montparnasse in the ill-lighted winter night, the stranger appearing inevitably in his wake at each gas-lamp, till the side street was reached in which Wladislaw lived on the fourth floor of a certain number thirteen. At his door Wladislaw, of course, paused, and looked the street up and down without seeing his pursuer.
"But no doubt," said my sly Pole, "he was hiding inside a courtyard door. And now, what do you make of that?"
I had to own that I made nothing of it; and we sat and speculated foolishly for fully half an hour, till we tired of the effort and returned to our equally vapid haverings about "work" and our common difficulties.
