“That is deuced awkward,” said that gentleman blandly. “Just excuse me for a moment or two, Fazz.”
He hurried out, leaving Simpkins confronting Mr. Zealander in some confusion. Fazz poked his flaming coal. “This fire! Did you ever see such a morbid conflagration?”
“Rather nice, I thought,” replied Simpkins affably; “quite cool to-night, outside, rather.”
The host peered at him through those dim glasses. “There’s a foggy humidity about everything, like the inside of a cream tart. But sit down,” said Fazz, With the geniality of a man who was about to be hung and was rather glad that he was no longer to be exposed to the fraudulent excess of life, “and tell me a bawdy story.”
Simpkins sank into an armchair and was silent.
“Perhaps you don’t care for bawdy stories?” continued Fazz. “I do, I do. I love vulgarity; there is certainly a niche in life for vulgarity. If ever I possess a house of my own I will arrange—I will, upon my soul—one augustly vulgar room, divinely vulgar, upholstered in sallow pigskin. Do tell me something. You haven’t got a spanner on you, I suppose? There is something the matter with my bed. Once it was full of goose feathers, but now I sleep, as it were, on the bulge of a barrel; I must do something to it with a spanner. I hate spanners—such dreadful democratic tools; they terrify me, they gape at you as if they wanted to bite you. Spanners are made of iron, and this is a funny world, for it is full of things like spanners.”
Simpkins timidly rose up through the waves of this discourse and asked if he could “do” anything. He was mystified, amused, and impressed by this person; he didn’t often meet people like that, he didn’t often meet anybody; he rather liked him. On each side of the invalid there were tables and bottles of medicine.
“I am just going to take my temperature,” said Fazz. “Do have a cigarette, dearie, or a cigar. Can you see the matches? Yes; now do you mind surrounding me with my medicines? They give such a hopeful air to the occasion. There’s a phial of sodium salicylate tabloids, I must take six of them in a minute or two. Then there are the quinine capsules; the formalin, yes; those lozenges I suck—have one?—they are so comforting, and that depressing laxative; surround me with them. Oh, glorious, benignant, isn’t it? Now I shall take my temperature; I shall be as stolid as the sphinx for three minutes, so do tell me that story. Where is my thermometer, oh!” He popped the thermometer into his mouth, but pulled it out again. “Do you know L. G.? He’s a blithe little fellow, oh, very blithe. He was in Jacobsen’s rooms the other day—Jacobsen’s a bit of an art connoisseur, you know, and draws and paints, and Jacobsen drew attention to the portrait of a lady that was hanging on the wall. ‘Oh, dear,’ said L. G., ‘what a hag! Where did you get that thing?’ just like that. Such a perfect fool, L. G. ‘It’s my mother,’ says Jacobsen. ‘Oh, of course,’ explained L. G., ‘I didn’t mean that, of course, my dear fellow; I referred to the horrible treatment, entirely to the horrible treatment; it is a wretched daub.’ ‘I did it myself!’ said Jacobsen. You don’t know L. G.? Oh, he is very blithe. What were you going to tell me? I am just going to take my temperature; yesterday it was ninety odd point something. I do hope it is different now. I can’t bear those points, they seem so equivocal.”
Fazz sat with the tube of the thermometer projecting from his mouth. At the end of the test he regarded it very earnestly before returning it disconsolately to the table. Then he addressed his visitor with considerable gloom.
“Pardon me, I did not catch your name.”