‘This is like home,’ he said, ‘bar the celestial straw, the use of which these blahsted Continentals have not learned. This is quite like home. Three years I have been roughing it, up hill and down dale, camp and field Seen a little bit o’fightin’ on the Burmah side ‘long of your British troops.
Mr. Armstrong; better boys I do not want to meet And here’s to them and you, sir. But, Lord!’—he caressed his tumbler with a lean brown hand, and looked contemplatively into space—‘I must smoke. Try a Burmese cigarette, sir. Lord ‘I land here last night after three years. I just break my journey on the way to London, and I run against the little girl that broke my heart when I was fifteen years of age, and broke it again when I was one-and-twenty, and would just go on breaking it for the mere fun of the thing for the next million years, if she and me could only live as long.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said Paul, in a cold insolence which made him hot to think of a thousand times later, ‘have you been drinking?’
‘Well, I guess,’ said Mr. Brunton, and, leaning back in his deck-chair, drew a great volume of smoke into his lungs, expelled it in a cloud, and laughed; ‘after a three years’ drought, the man who is not game to drink deserves to go dry. But, by Heaven, sir, to strike up against that mighty little flirt after a space of fifteen years—to come across it all again by accident! Look here! I land out of the Grande Marie de Luxembourg at Naples, with no more idea of revivin’ old times than of escapin’ into the next century, and who’s the first person that I meet but little Gertie, and what’s the first word that I hear but the isolation of the soul!’
Paul sat in a chill, tense agony.
‘I was,’ said the Colonel, growing more and more clearly articulate in accordance with his needs, ‘about as full up as any Christian need be when I landed, and I was going to bed like a clean Christian gentleman. Then I ran up against Gertie. I have been Turkish bathed, I have been sluiced and washed and shaved and perfumed, and I can stand and talk straight. What do you say? What would you have said about me amongst the oranges and lemons in the garden there?’ He sat up in a momentary fierceness. ‘Am I intoxicated, or, at least, was I till I turned the lock-gate winch and set the waters foaming? No, sir, but in that profoundly philosophic observation of life your works declare you will have observed the state in which a man becomes drunk-sober.
He brims over after that stage. That I allow. He brims over, sir—he brims over, sir. If it is of any humorous value to you to make observations of the present case, I am brimming over, sir.’
The clean-cut, travel-hardened, sun-stained man was slipping from his original place in Paul’s mind, like a statue built in clay too soft to support its own weight. He slipped at the chin, at the mouth, at the base of the nostril, at the eyebrow, and yet, in spite of these deflections from the original, he appeared to recover himself with an extraordinary swiftness at moments, and to be again the alert, adventurous creature of the woods and wilds his extraordinary career proclaimed him.
It was in a moment of supreme sobriety that he touched Paul’s arm and said:
‘I’ll tell you all about little Gertie right away.’