“Where did he come across you?”
“In a kursaal at Homburg. We were down in the mouth then. Six weeks of lentils and sour bread. I saw him looking at me across the petits chevaux table—curse his brute’s face! We never got rid of him after that. Give me some drink. My heart’s dancing like a pea on a drum.”
“There’s water on the wash-hand stand.”
“Don’t talk like that. There’s a fire here no water can reach.”
“I see there is. You’ve added another strand to the rope that’s dragging you down.”
He fell back on the bed, writhing and moaning.
“What’s the good of moralizing with a poor fool condemned to perdition? It’s my only means of escaping out of hell for a moment. Sometimes, with that in me, I’m a man again.”
“A man!”
“There—get it for me, like a dear old chap, and don’t talk. It’s so easy for a saint to point a moral.”
He was so obviously on the verge of utter collapse that I felt the lesser responsibility would be to humor him. I fetched what he begged for and he gulped down a wineglassful of the raw stuff.