‘In the words of Othello, sir,’ said Mr. Warr: ‘“I kissed her ere I killed her.”’ He smiled self-consciously, but instantly grew grave again. ‘You know me, Mr. Darco. You have my highly superior word. I never go back on it, sir.’
Mr. Warr kept his word, but he grew insufferably self-righteous, and preached total abstinence to everybody, from Darco to the call-boy. He atoned for this unconsciously by the longing calculations he made.
‘I have consulted the almanac,’ he confided to Paul; ‘it is two hundred and seventy-one days to my next drink.’
After this he offered a figure almost daily: ‘Two seventy. A dry journey, Mr. Armstrong.‘’Two fifty, sir, two fifty. The longest lane must turn, sir.’ Then, after a long spell of yearning: ‘Only two hundred now, sir. I should like to obliterate two hundred. But a Warr’s word is sacred.’
‘Now,’ said Paul one day, ‘why don’t you take advantage of this sober spell to cure yourself of the craving, in place of looking forward to the next outburst and counting the days between? Why don’t you make up your mind to have done with it altogether?
‘Sir,’ said Mr. Warr with intense solemnity, ‘if I thought I had tasted my last liquor, I’d cut my throat.’
‘If ever I find myself disposed to feel like that,’ Paul answered, ‘I will cut my own.’
‘Oh dear no, you won’t, sir,’ said Mr. Warr. ‘If ever you go that way at all, you’ll slide into it. You will always believe that you could drop it at any moment until you find you can’t. Then you’ll be reconciled, like the rest of us.’
Paul had little fear. His temptation, he told himself, did not lie in that direction.