Much that had helped.
“Well, if you won’t, you won’t,” grumbled Old Mother Whiskers. “But I do my best for y’, anyway. Gotchyou a stoodent, here. See?”
Taking a rather closer look than he had taken before, Cosimo saw someone rather tall and rather richly dressed . . . not alone for the South Ward, richly . . . for anywhere, richly. There was something in this one’s appearance for which the word sleek seemed appropriate, from his hat and his moustache down to his highly polished shoes; the man murmured the words, “Melanchthon Mudge,” and held out his hand. He did not take his glove off (it was a sleek glove), and Cosimo, as he shook hands and murmured his own name, felt several rings . . . and felt that they were rings with rather large stones, and . . .
“Mr. Mudge,” said Mother Whiskers; “Mr. Mudge is a real classy gent.” And D. Cosimo D. felt, also that—though Mr. Mudge may have been a gent—Mr. Mudge was not really a gentleman. But as to that, in this matter: no matter.
“Does Mr. Mudge desire to be instructed,” he asked, “in Italian? In calligraphy? Or in advanced geometry? Or in all three?”
Mr. Mudge touched a glossy-leather-encased-finger to a glossy moustache. Said he thought, “For the present, sir. For the present,” that they would skip calligraphy. “Madame here has already told me of your terms, I find them reasonable, and I would only wish to ask if you might care to mention . . . by the way of, as it were, general reference . . . the names of some of your past pupils. If you would not mind.”
Mind? The poor old King of the Single Sicily would not have minded standing on his head if it would have helped bring him a pencil. He mentioned the names of a surveyor now middling-high in the Royal and Imperial Highways and to whom he had taught advanced geometry, of several ladies of quality to whom he had taught Italian, and of a private docent whom he had instructed in calligraphy: still Mr. Mudge waited, as one who would hear more; D. Cosimo D. went on to say, “And, of course, that young Eszterhazy, Doctor as he now is—”
“Ah,” said Mr. Melanchthon Mudge, stroking his moustache and his side-whiskers; “that young Eszterhazy, Doctor as he now is.” His voice seemed to grow very drawn-out and deep.
Plaster and paint, turpentine and linseed oil had all alike long since dried, inside and outside the house at Number 33 Turkling Street, where lived Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy; though sometimes he had the notion that he could still smell it. At the moment, though, what he chiefly smelled came from his well-fitted chemical laboratory, as well as from the more distant kitchen where—in some matters Eszterhazy was old-fashioned—Mrash, his man-cook, reigned. Old Mrash would probably and eventually be replaced by a woman. In the meanwhile he had his stable repertory of ten or twelve French dishes as passed down through generations of army officers’ cooks since the days of (at least) Bonaparte; and when he had run through it and them and before running through them and it again, Mrash usually gave his master a few days of peasant cooking which boxed the culinary compass of the fourth-largest empire in Europe. Ox-cheek and eggs. Beef palate, pigs’ ears, and buckwheat. Potatoes boiled yellow in chicken broth with unborn eggs and dill. Cowfoot stew, with mushrooms and mashed turnips. And after that it was back to boeuf à la mode Bayonne [sic], and all the rest of it as taught long ago to his captors by some long ago prisoner-of-war.
Today, along with the harmless game of “consulting the menu-book,” Mrash had a question, “if it pleased his lordship.” Eszterhazy knew that it pleased Mrash to think that he cooked for a lordship, and had ceased trying to convince him of it not really pertaining. So, “Yes, Mrashko, certainly. What is the question?” There might or might not be a direct answer.
“What do they call that there place, my lordship, a boo?”
Philologists have much informed the world that the human mouth is capable of producing only a certain limited number of sounds, therefore it was perhaps no great feat for Eszterhazy at once to counter-ask, “Do you perhaps mean a zoo?”
“Ah,” said Mrash the man-cook, noncommittally. He might, his tone indicated, though then again he might not.
Eszterhazy pressed on. “That’s the short name for the Royal and Imperial Botanical and Zoological Gardens and Park, where the plants and creatures mostly from foreign parts are.” Mrashko’s mouth moved and seemed to relish the longer form of the name. “It’s the second turning of the New Stonepaved Road after Big Ludo’s Beer Garden,” added ‘his lordship.’
Mrash nodded. “I expect that’s where it come from, then,” he said.
“ ‘Come from’? Where what came from, Cooky?”
Cooky said, simply, “The tiger.”
Eszterhazy recalled the comment of Old Captain Slotz, someone who had achieved much success in obtaining both civil and military intelligence. Captain Slotz had stated, “I don’t ask them did they done it or I don’t ask them did they not done it. Just, I look at them, and I say, Tell me about it.”
“Tell me about it, Mrashko-Cooky.”
The man-cook gestured. “See, my lordship, it come up the lane there,” gesture indicated the alley. “And it hop onto yon wood-shed, or as it might be, coal-shed. Then it lep up onto the short brick bake-building. Then it gave a big jump and gits onto the roof of what was old Baron Johan’s townhouse what his widow live in now all alone saving old Helen, old Hugo, and old Hercules what they call him, who look after her ladyship what she seldom go out at all anymore.” Eszterhazy listened with great patience: “and then it climb up the roof and until it reach the roof-peak. It look all around. It put its front-limbs down,” Mrash imitated this, “and it sort of just stretch . . . streeettch . . .”
Silence.
“And then?”
“Then I get back to me work, me lordship.”
“Oh.”
“Nother thing. I knew that there beast have another name to ‘t. Leopard. That be its other name. I suppose it come from the book. I suppose it trained to go back. Three nights I’ve seen it, nor I haven’t heard no alarm.” He began making the quasi-military movements which indicated he was about to begin the beginning of his leaving.
“Does it have stripes? Or spots?”
Mrash, jerking his arms, moving stiff-legged, murmured something about there being but the one gaslamp in the whole alley, there having been not much of a bright moon of recent, hoped the creature wouldn’t hurt no one nor even skeer the old Baroness nor old Helen; and—finally—“Beg permission to return to duty, your lordship. Hup!”
“Granted—And—Mrash! [Me lord!] The next time you see it, let me know, directly.”
The parade-ground manner of the man-cook’s departure gave more than a hint that the next meal would consist largely of boiled bully-beef in the mode of the Royal and Imperial Infantry, plus the broth thereof, plus fresh-grated horseradish which would remove the roof of your mouth, plus potatoes prepared purple in a manner known chiefly to army cooks present and past all around the world. Eszterhazy looked out the window and across the alley. At ground level, the stones of the house opposite were immense, seemingly set without mortar. Cyclopean, the word came to him. Above these massive courses began others, of smaller pieces of masonry. The last storey and a half were of brick, with here and there a tuft of moss instead of mortar. The steep-pitched roof was of dull grey slate. And though he could see this all quite clearly, he could see no explanation for the story which his old cook, never before given to riotous fancy, had just recounted to him. Long he stared. Long he stared. Long he considered. Then he rang the bell and asked for his horse to be saddled.