He took no notice of the men around him. "Brandy, please!" he said. "Why do I drink, do you say?" he added, as Suzon placed the bottle and glass before him.
She was silent for an instant, then she said gravely: "Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were made, and—"
She paused and went no further, for a red-shirted river-driver with brass rings in his ears came close to them, and called gruffly for whiskey. He glowered at Charley, who looked at him indolently, then raised his glass towards Suzon and drank the brandy.
"Pish!" said Red Shirt, and, turning round, joined his comrades. It was clear he wanted a pretext to quarrel.
"Perhaps because you like it; perhaps because something was left out of you when you were made—" Charley smiled pleasantly as Suzon came over to him again. "You've answered the question," he said, "and struck the thing at the centre. Which is it? The difficulty to decide which has divided the world. If it's only a physical craving, it means that we are materialists naturally, and that the soil from which the grape came is the soil that's in us; that it is the body feeding on itself all the time; that like returns to like, and we live a little together, and then mould together for ever and ever, amen. If it isn't a natural craving— like to like—it's a proof of immortality, for it represents the wild wish to forget the world, to be in another medium.
"I am only myself when I am drunk. Liquor makes me human. At other times
I'm merely Charley Steele! Now isn't it funny, this sort of talk here?"
"I don't know about that," she answered, "if, as you say, it's natural. This tavern's the only place I have to think in, and what seems to you funny is a sort of ordinary fact to me."
"Right again, ma belle Suzon. Nothing's incongruous. I've never felt so much like singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs as when I've been drinking. I remember the last time I was squiffy I sang all the way home that old nursery hymn:
"'On the other side of Jordan,
In the sweet fields of Eden,
Where the tree of life is blooming,
There is rest for you.
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for the weary,
There is rest for you!'"
"I should have liked to hear you sing it—sure!" said Suzon, laughing.