“Another whiskey, Miss,” said the choirboy, and turning back to Spandrell almost wept over his misfortunes. He had loved, he had married—sacramentally; he insisted on that. He had been happy. They had both been happy.
Spandrell raised his eyebrows. “Did she like the smell of whiskey?”
The other shook his head sadly. “I had my faults,” he admitted. “I was weak. This accursed drink! Accursed!” And in a sudden enthusiasm for temperance he poured his whiskey on the floor. “There!” he said triumphantly.
“Very noble!” said Spandrell. He beckoned to the barmaid. “Another whiskey for this gentleman.”
The choirboy protested, but without much warmth. He sighed. “It was always my besetting sin,” he said. “But I was always sorry afterward. Genuinely repentant.”
“I’m sure you were. Never a dull moment.”
“If she’d stood by me, I might have cured myself.”
“A pure woman’s help, what?” said Spandrell.
“Exactly,” the other nodded. “That’s exactly it. But she left me. Ran off. Or rather, not ran. She was lured. She wouldn’t have done it on her own. It was that horrible little snake in the grass. That little …” He ran through the sergeant major’s brief vocabulary. “I’d wring his neck if he were here,” the choirboy went on. The Lord of Battles had been in his fifth whiskey. “Dirty little swine!” He banged the counter. “You know the man who painted those pictures in the Tate; Bidlake? Well, it was that chap’s son. Walter Bidlake.”
Spandrell raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. The choirboy talked on.
At Sbisa’s, Walter was dining with Lucy Tantamount.
“Why don’t you come to Paris too?” Lucy was saying.
Walter shook his head. “I’ve got to work.”
“I find it’s really impossible to stay in one place more than a couple of months at a time. One gets so stale and wilted, so unutterably bored. The moment I step into the airplane at Croydon I feel as though I had been born again—like the Salvation Army.”
“And how long does the new life last?”
Lucy shrugged her shoulders. “As long as the old one. But fortunately there’s an almost unlimited supply of airplanes. I’m all for Progress.”
The swing doors of the temple of the unknown god closed behind them. Spandrell and his companion stepped out into the cold and rainy darkness.
“Oof!” said the choirboy, shivering, and turned up the collar of his rain coat. “It’s like jumping into a swimming bath.”
“It’s like reading Haeckel after Fénelon. You Christians live in such a jolly little public house of a universe.”
They walked a few yards down the street.
“Look here,” said Spandrell, “do you think you can get home on foot? Because you don’t look as though you could.”
Leaning against a lamp post the choirboy shook his head.
“We’ll wait for a cab.”
They waited. The rain fell. Spandrell looked at the other man with a cold distaste. The creature had amused him, while they had been in the pub, had served as a distraction. Now, suddenly, he was merely repulsive.
“Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?” he asked. “They’ll make you drink burning whiskey there. A perpetual Christmas pudding in your belly. If you could see yourself! The revolting spectacle …”
The choirboy’s sixth whiskey had been full of contrition. “I know, I know,” he groaned. “I’m disgusting. I’m contemptible. But if you knew how I’d struggled and striven and …”
“There’s a cab.” Spandrell gave a shout.
“How I’d prayed,” the choirboy continued.
“Where do you live?”
“Forty-one Ossian Gardens. I’ve wrestled …”
The cab drew up in front of them. Spandrell opened the door.
“Get in, you sot,” he said, and gave the other a push. “Forty-one Ossian Gardens,” he said to the driver. The choirboy, meanwhile, had crawled into his seat. Spandrell followed. “Disgusting slug!”
“Go on, go on. I deserve it. You have every right to despise me.”
“I know,” said Spandrell. “But if you think I’m going to do you the pleasure of telling you so any more, you’re much mistaken.” He leaned back in his corner and shut his eyes. All his appalling weariness and disgust had suddenly returned. “God,” he said to himself. “God, God, God.” And like a grotesque derisive echo of his thoughts, the choirboy prayed aloud. “God have mercy upon me,” the maudlin voice repeated. Spandrell burst out laughing.
Leaving the drunkard on his front door step, Spandrell went back to the cab. He remembered suddenly that he had not dined. “Sbisa’s Restaurant,” he told the driver. “God, God,” he repeated in the darkness. But the night was a vacuum.
“There’s Spandrell,” cried Lucy, interrupting her companion in the middle of a sentence. She raised her arm and waved.
“Lucy!” Spandrell took her hand and kissed it. He sat down at their table. “It’ll interest you to hear, Walter, that I’ve just been doing a good Samaritan to your victim.”
“My victim?”
“Your cuckold. Carling; isn’t that his name?” Walter blushed in an agony. “He wears his horns without any difference. Quite traditionally.” He looked at Walter and was glad to see the signs of distress on his face. “I found him drowning his sorrows,” he went on maliciously, “in whiskey. The grand romantic remedy.” It was a relief to be able to take some revenge for his miseries.
XVIII
At Port Said they went ashore. The flank of the ship was an iron precipice. At its foot the launch heaved on a dirty and slowly wallowing sea; between its gunwale and the end of the ship’s ladder a little chasm alternately shrank and expanded. For a sound pair of legs the leap would have been nothing. But Philip hesitated. To jump with his game leg foremost might mean to collapse under the impact of arrival; and if he trusted to the game leg to propel him, he had a good chance of falling ignominiously short. He was delivered from his predicament by the military gentleman who had preceded him in the leap.
“Here, take my hand,”
