Merton paused and sipped his whisky-and-soda, while from the other side of the room came indications that the sleeper still slept.
“I never found out what his real name was,” he continued, thoughtfully. “Incidentally, it doesn’t much matter. We knew him as Mainwaring, and the J. which preceded it in his signature was assumed to stand for James or Jimmy. Anyway, he answered to it, which was the main point. As far as I know, he never received a letter and he never read a paper, and I guess I got to know him better than anyone else in that hole. Every morning, punctual to the second at eleven o’clock, he’d stroll into the bar and have three double-gins. Sometimes he’d talk in his faint, rather pleasant drawl; more often he’d sit silently at one of the rickety tables, staring out to sea, with his long legs stretched out in front of him. But whichever he did—whatever morning it was—you could always see your face in his boots.
“I remember once, after I’d been there about a month, I started to pull his leg about those boots of his.
“ ‘Take the devil of a long time cleaning them in the morning, don’t you, Jimmy?’ I said, as he lounged up to the bar for his third gin.
“ ‘Yes,’ he answered, leaning over the counter so that his face was close to mine. ‘Got anything further to say about my appearance?’
“ ‘Jimmy,’ I replied, ‘your appearance doesn’t signify one continental damn to me. But as the only two regular British habitués of this first-class American bar, don’t let’s quarrel.’
“He grinned—a sort of slow, lazy grin.
“ ‘Think not?’ he said. ‘Might amuse one. However, perhaps you’re right.’
“And so it went on—one sweltering day after another, until one could have gone mad with the hideous boredom of it. I used to stand behind the bar there sometimes and curse weakly and foolishly like a child, but I never heard Mainwaring do it. What happened during those steamy nights in the privacy of his own room, when he—like the rest of us—was fighting for sleep, is another matter. During the day he never varied. Cold, cynical, immaculate, he seemed a being apart—above our little worries and utterly contemptuous of them. Maybe he was right—maybe the thing that had downed him was too big for foolish cursing. Knowing what I do now, a good many things are clear which one didn’t realise at the time.
“Only once, I think, did I ever get in the slightest degree intimate with him. It was latish one evening, and the bar was empty save for us two. I’d been railing against the fate that had landed me penniless in such an accursed spot, and after a while he chipped in, in his lazy drawl: