Mrs. Perk had the old-fashioned-woman’s naïve confidence in the importance of woman’s cooking; for that matter, how did she know that Rose-Ann could cook? Most probably she couldn’t! Girls like Rose-Ann didn’t nowadays.... And besides, how could Mrs. Perk be expected to understand the pleasures of a man living alone, free, able to keep what hours he chose—the sheer lazy charm of a masculine establishment, however inefficient!
Yes, Felix really enjoyed this happy-go-lucky kind of existence. As long as there was plenty of good coffee, and cigarettes, nothing else mattered very much—not even Eddie Silver.
He had commenced to come again. At first his visits were welcome as a relief from the monotony of Canal street life. But he was becoming a nuisance.... He would come in at all hours, but preferably when they had just gone to bed—pounding on the doors until they awoke and let him in. If the hall-door downstairs chanced to be locked, he would stand in the street and call to them, and throw pebbles—or dollars—against their front windows.... They would be drifting peacefully into dreams when something would wrench violently and painfully at their attention—they would try to ignore it and go on dreaming, but it would come again, determined, familiar, insistent—and they would reluctantly awake enough to become conscious of a voice in the street calling out their names. “Don! Roger! F’li-i-ix!”
“It’s that damned Eddie Silver!” they would groan, and finally somebody, with a brain aching for sleep, would stumble down the stairs and let him in.
“Wake up there, F’lix—I brought you nice li’l’ bo’l’ Swinburne!” he would call, rattling Felix’s doorknob, until he rose and joined in the festivities.
So strong is the power of association that Felix came to loathe the poetry of Swinburne—it had the smell of whiskey on it....
It was increasingly hard to keep awake in the afternoons, however much he drugged himself with coffee. Getting up in the morning became a tragedy—his whole being cried out for the sleep he could not have. Sometimes during the day, in the midst of a story, his mind would suddenly go blank for a minute. His appetite failed, and there were pains in his stomach that nothing but whiskey would relieve. He caught a bad cold, and had a cough that would not go away. And then, one morning in the eighth week of his stay in the Canal street menage, he found himself too ill to go to the office.
3
Roger and Don ministered to him with hot coffee, and called in a doctor who lived in the same building. The doctor had long white locks that fell picturesquely about the collar of his coat. He stuck a thermometer in Felix’s mouth, took out his watch and held Felix’s wrist, then shook his head gravely.
“What do you want to do with him?” he asked.