“ ‘I was drugged,’ I said indignantly.
“ ‘The point is immaterial,’ he answered quietly. ‘Drunk or drugged, it’s much the same after you’ve been run over by a train. And we found two of them carrying you along a lane towards the line at half-past eleven. The down goods to Hastings passes at twenty to twelve.’
“And at that moment Providence was kind. I ceased to feel sick. I was.”
| VII | The Old Dining-Room |
I
I don’t pretend to account for it; I am merely giving the plain unvarnished tale of what took place to my certain knowledge at Jack Drage’s house in Kent during the week-end which finished so disastrously. Doubtless there is an explanation: maybe there are several. The believers in spiritualism and things psychic will probably say that the tragedy was due to the action of a powerful influence which had remained intact throughout the centuries; the materialists will probably say it was due to indigestion. I hold no brief for either side: as the mere narrator, the facts are good enough for me. And, anyway, the extremists of both schools of thought are quite irreconcilable.
There were six of us there, counting Jack Drage and his wife. Bill Sibton in the Indian Civil, Armytage in the Gunners, and I—Staunton by name, and a scribbler of sorts—were the men: little Joan Neilson—Armytage’s fiancée—supported Phyllis Drage. Ostensibly we were there to shoot a few pheasants, but it was more than a mere shooting party. It was a reunion after long years of us four men who had been known at school as the Inseparables. Bill had been in India for twelve years, save for the inevitable gap in Mesopotamia; Dick Armytage had soldiered all over the place ever since he’d left the Shop. And though I’d seen Jack off and on since our school-days, I’d lost touch with him since he’d married. Wives play the deuce with bachelor friends though they indignantly deny it—God bless ’em. At least, mine always does.