Burminster was delivering a spirited defence of Bacchus, and the rest joined in, but Sandy took the other side.
“There’s a good deal in that Latin tag,” he said. “There are places in the world where total abstinence is reckoned a privilege. Did you ever come across the Ulai tribe up the Karakoram way?” He was addressing Medina. “No? Well, the next time you meet a man in the Guides ask him about them, for they’re a curiosity. They’re Muhammadan and so should by rights be abstainers, but they’re a drunken set of sweeps, and the most priest-ridden community on earth. Drinking is not only a habit among them, it’s an obligation, and their weekly tamasha would make Falstaff take the pledge. But their priests—they’re a kind of theocracy—are strict teetotal. It is their privilege and the secret of their power. When one of them has to be degraded he is filled compulsorily full of wine. That’s your—how does the thing go?—your hominum dominatus.”
From that moment I found the evening go less pleasantly. Medina was as genial as ever, but something seemed to have affected Sandy’s temper and he became positively grumpy. Now and then he contradicted a man too sharply for good manners, but for the most part he was silent, smoking his pipe and answering his neighbours in monosyllables. About eleven I began to feel it was time to leave, and Medina was of the same opinion. He asked me to walk with him, and I gladly accepted, for I did not feel inclined to go to bed.
As I was putting on my coat, Sandy came up. “Come to the Club, Dick,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” His manner was so peremptory that I opened my eyes.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve promised to walk home with Medina.”
“Oh, damn Medina!” he said. “Do as I ask or you’ll be sorry for it.”
I wasn’t feeling very pleased with Sandy, especially as Medina was near enough to hear what he said. So I told him rather coldly that I didn’t intend to go back on my arrangement. He turned and marched out, cannoning at the doorway into Burminster, to whom he did not apologise. That nobleman rubbed his shoulder ruefully. “Old Sandy hasn’t got used to his corn yet,” he laughed. “Looks as if the madeira had touched up his liver.”
It was a fine still March night with a good moon, and as we walked along Piccadilly I was feeling cheerful. The good dinner I had eaten and the good wine I had drunk played their part in this mood, and there was also the satisfaction of having dined with good fellows and having been admitted into pretty select company. I felt my liking for Medina enormously increase, and I had the unworthy sense of superiority which a man gets from seeing an old friend whom he greatly admires behave rather badly. I was considering what had ailed Sandy when Medina raised the subject.
“A wonderful fellow Arbuthbot,” he said. “I have wanted to meet him for years, and he is certainly up to my expectations. But he has been quite long enough abroad. A mind as keen as his, if it doesn’t have the company of its equals, is in danger of getting viewy. What he said tonight was amazingly interesting, but I thought it a little fantastic.”
I agreed, but the hint of criticism was enough to revive my loyalty. “All the same there’s usually something in his most extravagant theories. I’ve seen him right when all the sober knowledgeable people were wrong.”
“That I can well believe,” he said. “You know him well?”
“Pretty well. We’ve been in some queer places together.”
The memory of those queer places came back to me as we walked across Berkeley Square. The West End of London at night always affected me with a sense of the immense solidity of our civilisation. These great houses, lit and shuttered and secure, seemed the extreme opposite of the world of half-lights and perils in which I had sometimes journeyed. I thought of them as I thought of Fosse Manor, as sanctuaries of peace. But tonight I felt differently towards them. I wondered what was going on at the back of those heavy doors. Might not terror and mystery lurk behind that barricade as well as in tent and slum? I suddenly had a picture of a plump face all screwed up with fright muffled beneath the bedclothes.
I had imagined that Medina lived in chambers or a flat, but we stopped before a substantial house in Hill Street.
“You’re coming in? The night’s young and there’s time for a pipe.”
I had no wish to go to bed, so I followed him as he opened the front door with a latchkey. He switched on a light, which lit the first landing of the staircase but left the hall in dusk. It seemed to be a fine place full of cabinets, the gilding of which flickered dimly. We ascended thickly-carpeted stairs, and on the landing he switched off the first light and switched on another which lit a further flight. I had the sensation of mounting to a great height in a queer shadowy world.
“This is a big house for a bachelor,” I observed.
“I’ve a lot of stuff, books and pictures and things, and I like it round me.”
He opened a door and ushered me into an enormous room, which must have occupied the whole space on that floor. It was oblong, with deep bays at each end, and it was lined from floor to ceiling with books. Books, too, were piled on the tables, and sprawled on a big flat couch which was drawn up before the fire. It wasn’t an ordinary gentleman’s library, provided by the bookseller at so much a yard. It was the working collection of a scholar, and the books had that used look which makes them the finest
