“But it’s yours, my dear chap,” I suggested.
He looked puzzled for a second, and then his face cleared. “I forget what you ordered,” he observed softly, looking interrogatively at the waiter and at me. We informed him simultaneously, “Nothing,” and the waiter respectfully mentioned the price of the drink. My friend’s left hand plunged into his trousers pocket, while his right carried the glass to his lips. Perhaps his left hand did not know what his right was about, or perhaps his mind was too far away to direct the motions of either with safety. Anyhow, the result was deplorable. He swallowed an uncomfortable gulp of air-bubbles and ginger—and choked—over me, over the waiter and tray, over his beard and clothes. The floating lump of ice bobbed up and hit his nose. I never saw a man look so surprised and distressed in my life. I took the glass from him, and when his left hand finally emerged with money he handed it first vaguely to me as though I were the waiter—for which there was no real excuse, since we were not in evening dress.
When, at length, order was restored and he was sipping quietly at the remains of the fizzing liquid, he looked up at me over the brim of his glass and remarked, with more concentration on the actual present than he had yet shown:
“By the way, you know, I’m going away to-morrow—going abroad for my holiday. Taking a lot of work with me, too——”
“But you’ve only just come back!” I expostulated, with a feeling very like anger in my heart.
He shook his head with decision. Evidently that choking had choked him into the living present. He was really “up” this time, and not likely to go down again.
“No, no,” he replied; “I’ve been here all the summer in town looking after old Podger——”
“Old Podger!” I remembered a dirty, down-at-heel old man I once met at my friend’s rooms—a poet who had “smothered his splendid talent” in drink, and who was always at starvation’s door. “What in the world was the matter with Podger?”
“D.T. I’ve been nursing him through it. The poor devil nearly went under this time. I’ve got him into a home down in the country at last, but all August he was—well, we thought he was gone.”
All August! So that was how my friend’s summer had been spent. With never a word of thanks probably at that!