“I remember it very well. We rejoiced together in town. It was just before I took Orders.”
“Yes. I remember that dinner! I had taken a pretty good degree, and after that I had to go to an expensive crammer for three months to be sure of a decent place in that exam. I was nearly at the top in classics, history and law, but my higher maths let me down. Good God! the things one knew then! The Civil Service candidate has to do a lot of mental vomiting after his exam before he is quite human again. However, having demonstrated my amazing acquirements as a scholar, they gave me a job in the Printed Book Department of the British Museum. I had to lick the labels for the backs of new volumes of the Supplementary Catalogue.
“No, I’m not joking,” he broke off in answer to my glance, “that is literally what I had to do. There was a man there who had been doing it for twelve years. He had been crammed even tighter than me for the exam., and he was quite unfit for anything else, poor chap! I didn’t see my way to become Chief Librarian either, and I was frightened of getting cancer of the tongue. I wrote to an uncle of mine who was then one of Cromer’s men out here, and he got me a billet in the Ministry of the Interior. I rather took to the languages, and happened to make myself useful in the Criminal Investigation Department, and—here I am.”
“But what about the army? What are you doing now?”
“Let’s go and have our coffee in the lounge,” he said. “It’s a bit public here for chatting.”
We found a retired sofa at the end of the wide cool lounge, and a white-gowned Arab with crimson sash brought us coffee.
“What liqueur will you have?” asked Brogden. “Don’t drink before sunset in the hot weather, but don’t go to bed teetotal if you want to keep fit. Their cognac is not fit to drink without some curaçoa in it.”
He had evidently taken charge of me; apparently someone always did, so I let him order the liqueurs.
“You haven’t told me yet what you are doing now,” I reminded him.
He bent forward mysteriously and whispered one word, “hashish.”