“Nothing but starve. How about meeting expenses?”
“Why do you ask?” said my friend. “You don’t care.”
“My dear fellow, if you want to make me offer you twenty pounds you set most clumsily about it. You said just now I don’t know you,” Mr. Simmons went on. “Possibly. Come back with me then,” he said kindly enough, “and let’s improve our acquaintance.”
“I won’t go back. I shall never go back.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
Mr. Simmons thought it shrewdly over. “Well, you are sick!” he exclaimed presently. “All I can say is that if you’re working out a plan for cold poison, or for any other act of desperation, you had better give it right up. You can’t get a dose of the commonest kind of cold poison for nothing, you know. Look here, Searle”—and the worthy man made what struck me as a very decent appeal. “If you’ll consent to return home with me by the steamer of the twenty-third I’ll pay your passage down. More than that, I’ll pay for your beer.”
My poor gentleman met it. “I believe I never made up my mind to anything before, but I think it’s made up now. I shall stay here till I take my departure for a newer world than any patched-up newness of ours. It’s an odd feeling—I rather like it! What should I do at home?”
“You said just now you were homesick.”
“I meant I was sick for a home. Don’t I belong here? Haven’t I longed to get here all my life? Haven’t I counted the months and the years till I should be able to ‘go’ as we say? And now that I’ve ‘gone,’ that is that I’ve come, must I just back out? No, no, I’ll move on. I’m much obliged to you for your offer. I’ve enough money for the present. I’ve about my person some forty pounds’ worth of British gold, and the same amount, say, of the toughness of the heaven-sent idiot. They’ll see me through together! After they’re gone I shall lay my head in some English churchyard, beside some ivied tower, beneath an old gnarled black yew.”