"Have you ever tried drinking beer?"
I admitted I had not.
"Oh, it is beastly stuff," he rejoined with an involuntary shudder.
Rendered forgetful of present trouble by bitter recollection of the past, he puffed away at his pipe carelessly and without judgment.
"Do you often drink it?" I inquired.
"Yes," he replied gloomily; "all we fellows in the fifth form drink beer and smoke pipes."
A deeper tinge of green spread itself over his face.
He rose suddenly and made towards the hedge. Before he reached it, however, he stopped and addressed me, but without turning round.
"If you follow me, young "un, or look, I"ll punch your head," he said swiftly, and disappeared with a gurgle.
He left at the end of the terms and I did not see him again until we were both young men. Then one day I ran against him in Oxford Street, and he asked me to come and spend a few days with his people in Surrey.
I found him wan-looking and depressed, and every now and then he sighed.
During a walk across the common he cheered up considerably, but the moment we got back to the house door he seemed to recollect himself, and began to sigh again. He ate no dinner whatever, merely sipping a gla.s.s of wine and crumbling a piece of bread. I was troubled at noticing this, but his relatives--a maiden aunt, who kept house, two elder sisters, and a weak-eyed female cousin who had left her husband behind her in India--were evidently charmed. They glanced at each other, and nodded and smiled. Once in a fit of abstraction he swallowed a bit of crust, and immediately they all looked pained and surprised.
In the drawing-room, under cover of a sentimental song, sung by the female cousin, I questioned his aunt on the subject.
"What"s the matter with him?" I said. "Is he ill?"
The old lady chuckled.
"You"ll be like that one day," she whispered gleefully.
"When," I asked, not unnaturally alarmed.
"When you"re in love," she answered.
"Is _he_ in love?" I inquired after a pause.
"Can"t you see he is?" she replied somewhat scornfully.
I was a young man, and interested in the question.
"Won"t he ever eat any dinner till he"s got over it?" I asked.
She looked round sharply at me, but apparently decided that I was only foolish.
"You wait till your time comes," she answered, shaking her curls at me.
"You won"t care much about your dinner--not if you are _really_ in love."
In the night, about half-past eleven, I heard, as I thought, footsteps in the pa.s.sage, and creeping to the door and opening it I saw the figure of my friend in dressing-gown and slippers, vanishing down the stairs. My idea was that, his brain weakened by trouble, he had developed sleep-walking tendencies. Partly out of curiosity, partly to watch over him, I slipped on a pair of trousers and followed him.
He placed his candle on the kitchen table and made a bee-line for the pantry door, from where he subsequently emerged with two pounds of cold beef on a plate and about a quart of beer in a jug; and I came away, leaving him fumbling for pickles.
I a.s.sisted at his wedding, where it seemed to me he endeavoured to display more ecstasy than it was possible for any human being to feel; and fifteen months later, happening to catch sight of an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the births column of _The Times_, I called on my way home from the City to congratulate him. He was pacing up and down the pa.s.sage with his hat on, pausing at intervals to partake of an uninviting-looking meal, consisting of a cold mutton chop and a gla.s.s of lemonade, spread out upon a chair. Seeing that the cook and the housemaid were wandering about the house evidently bored for want of something to do, and that the dining- room, where he would have been much more out of the way, was empty and quite in order, I failed at first to understand the reason for his deliberate choice of discomfort. I, however, kept my reflections to myself, and inquired after the mother and child.
"Couldn"t be better," he replied with a groan. "The doctor said he"d never had a more satisfactory case in all his experience."
"Oh, I"m glad to hear that," I answered; "I was afraid you"d been worrying yourself."
"Worried!" he exclaimed. "My dear boy, I don"t know whether I"m standing on my head or my heels" (he gave one that idea). "This is the first morsel of food that"s pa.s.sed my lips for twenty-four hours."
At this moment the nurse appeared at the top of the stairs. He flew towards her, upsetting the lemonade in his excitement.
"What is it?" he asked hoa.r.s.ely. "Is it all right?"
The old lady glanced from him to his cold chop, and smiled approvingly.
"They"re doing splendidly," she answered, patting him on the shoulder in a motherly fashion. "Don"t you worry."
"I can"t help it, Mrs. Jobson," he replied, sitting down upon the bottom stair, and leaning his head against the banisters.
"Of course you can"t," said Mrs. Jobson admiringly; "and you wouldn"t be much of a man if you could." Then it was borne in upon me why he wore his hat, and dined off cold chops in the pa.s.sage.
The following summer they rented a picturesque old house in Berkshire, and invited me down from a Sat.u.r.day to Monday. Their place was near the river, so I slipped a suit of flannels in my bag, and on the Sunday morning I came down in them. He met me in the garden. He was dressed in a frock coat and a white waistcoat; and I noticed that he kept looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and that he seemed to have a trouble on his mind. The first breakfast bell rang, and then he said, "You haven"t got any proper clothes with you, have you?"
"Proper clothes!" I exclaimed, stopping in some alarm. "Why, has anything given way?"
"No, not that," he explained. "I mean clothes to go to church in."
"Church," I said. "You"re surely not going to church a fine day like this? I made sure you"d be playing tennis, or going on the river. You always used to."
"Yes," he replied, nervously flicking a rose-bush with a twig he had picked up. "You see, it isn"t ourselves exactly. Maud and I would rather like to, but our cook, she"s Scotch, and a little strict in her notions."
"And does she insist on your going to church every Sunday morning?" I inquired.
"Well," he answered, "she thinks it strange if we don"t, and so we generally do, just in the morning--and evening. And then in the afternoon a few of the village girls drop in, and we have a little singing and that sort of thing. I never like hurting anyone"s feelings if I can help it."
I did not say what I thought. Instead I said, "I"ve got that tweed suit I wore yesterday. I can put that on if you like."
He ceased flicking the rose-bush, and knitted his brows. He seemed to be recalling it to his imagination.
"No," he said, shaking his head, "I"m afraid it would shock her. It"s my fault, I know," he added, remorsefully. "I ought to have told you."
Then an idea came to him.
"I suppose," he said, "you wouldn"t care to pretend you were ill, and stop in bed just for the day?"
I explained that my conscience would not permit my being a party to such deception
"No, I thought you wouldn"t," he replied. "I must explain it to her. I think I"ll say you"ve lost your bag. I shouldn"t like her to think bad of us."