When he came back I asked him if he had had a good breakfast.
“Yes, I had breakfast,” he said, and maintained a gloomy silence.
Whether my glowing description had led him to expect too much, or whether the prices were unsatisfactory, or whether he had been taken with one of his facetious attacks and had gotten himself into trouble with the decorous and decorative dining-car conductor, or whether his domestic troubles had gained the ascendency and spoiled his breakfast, or whether a good meal did not agree with him as well as a good drink, or whether it was getting too far past the time for another “smile,” or what not, I could not ascertain. So I left him alone with his full stomach and empty bottle and went to my seat in the sleeper.
When I returned a little later he was saying to two men who were smoking with him:
“Gentlemen, I can’t help speaking of it. I have been buried in the pine woods for three months and am now going home to bury my wife. Oh, it’s hard! Where’s the porter? I must have another drink.”
We tried to dissuade him and refused to join him, but he got his drink in spite of our efforts.
“It’s hard, gentlemen. I remember how when my mother died, my father called my brother and me to him and said, ‘Boys, your mother is dying. She’ll never sit at the table with us again, never again.’ And to think that now I am going home to tell my boys the same thing. Oh, it’s hard! I must have another drink. I can’t stand it.”
His voice was broken with emotion and his eyes full of tears as he tried to persuade us to take a drink with him, but he had to take one alone. We had no excuse for getting drunk. We could not say, Joliet like, “Drinking is such sweet sorrow, that I shall keep on drinking till it be morrow.”
By noon he had taken five drinks that I knew of, besides having finished his own bottle before breakfast, and was again telling jokes. He had a specific remedy for grief.
The old man was a true American in his feelings and actions. He had hesitated about paying a dollar for a breakfast on wheels with its flying luxuries, and was not ashamed to be frugal in his diet, yet had spent more than a dollar since breakfast for drinks, and had offered to “treat” like a prince. And the fact that he was on his way home to the bedside of a dying wife was not sufficient even temporarily to break up his drinking habit. Surely we Americans are creatures of habit, especially of the treating habit, which leads to the drinking habit. We are the most hospitable people in the world. In other countries people treat and entertain for a purpose; we do so without a purpose.