Outside the club windows the rain fell, glistening and grey; it was making for dusk and the black stream of hansoms and umbrellas were homeward bound. They motioned away the servant who had come to turn on the lights in their corner.
"There are influences," Stanchon began again, abruptly, "currents ... I don't know—they feel them more than we do. And they exert them more, too. We admit one and doubt the other."
He squeezed a half lemon into his glass with a beautiful, firm-wristed wrench, extracted the pips with one deft circuit of the spoon, and poured rock candy into the acid. Over this he dropped in silence a measured amount from a squat foreign bottle at his elbow and filled the glass from a carafe of distilled water.
"It's a queer thing altogether—I don't know what makes me think of it," he began, "and I wouldn't have dared tell it when it happened. Now I can tell anything—I suppose—being sixty and an eminent alienist. Lord! Times goes and goes, and just as you get to where you could use it to advantage—well, the young ones need the room.
"Nervous! What are nerves, anyhow?
"Sometimes I think I know ... a little ... but the time is so short, so short!"
He drank half his glass.
"There comes a time," he said abruptly, "when you first discover what a gnat in a whirlpool you are. I mean that after you've done everything, played perfectly fair and followed all the rules, arranged your combinations and observed the reasonable results for so long that you begin to think you've got hold of the System—something happens, and it's all upset again—flat anarchy. We get it different ways, I suppose. As if a runner bumped into a brick wall on the home-stretch ... strange!
"I was in one of those little cities—Detroit, Cleveland—it doesn't matter. I've lived in both. It's a good size for a doctor—I got all kinds—and I learned fast, there. Nice people, too. I always had an eye for real estate, and what I made, I put into that. I had a good horse, and as I drove about I kept my eye on the property and the way the town was growing. One day I noticed that an oldish looking, comfortable sort of house, a little off from the centre of things, was for sale, and it struck me suddenly that there was a pretty good sort of house to own. It had trees around it and nice paths and a neat little new stable, and there was something in the long, low lines of it—no gingerbread or 'Jim Fisk' business or bands of coloured paint—that appealed to me. It attracted me—you see? Good God!
"I saw the agent and he put a price that surprised me. But the owner wanted to leave town immediately and had made it very low, to get the cash. He'd had hard luck; his wife in a mess with another man, ran up big bills against him—he wanted to get away and never see the town again. So I bought the place and asked the agent to rent it for me, for I was pretty busy just then. A little later he told me he had seen an especially good tenant—a well-to-do jeweller and his family, who seemed disposed to take a long lease and improve the property.