A manufacturer called Frolov, a handsome dark man with a round beard, and a soft, velvety expression in his eyes, and Almer, his lawyer, an elderly man with a big rough head, were drinking in one of the public rooms of a restaurant on the outskirts of the town. They had both come to the restaurant straight from a ball and so were wearing dress coats and white ties. Except them and the waiters at the door there was not a soul in the room; by Frolov’s orders no one else was admitted.
They began by drinking a big wineglass of vodka and eating oysters.
“Good!” said Almer. “It was I brought oysters into fashion for the first course, my boy. The vodka burns and stings your throat and you have a voluptuous sensation in your throat when you swallow an oyster. Don’t you?”
A dignified waiter with a shaven upper lip and grey whiskers put a sauceboat on the table.
“What’s that you are serving?” asked Frolov.
“Sauce Provençale for the herring, sir. …”
“What! is that the way to serve it?” shouted Frolov, not looking into the sauceboat. “Do you call that sauce? You don’t know how to wait, you blockhead!”
Frolov’s velvety eyes flashed. He twisted a corner of the tablecloth round his finger, made a slight movement, and the dishes, the candlesticks, and the bottles, all jingling and clattering, fell with a crash on the floor.
The waiters, long accustomed to pothouse catastrophes, ran up to the table and began picking up the fragments with grave and unconcerned faces, like surgeons at an operation.
“How well you know how to manage them!” said Almer, and he laughed. “But … move a little away from the table or you will step in the caviar.”
“Call the engineer here!” cried Frolov.