THE TORTOISE
“There are only three things worth while—fighting, drinking, and making love.” It was Chalmers who said it to me as we came out of the theatre, and were idling along towards the club. We had been seeing a very handsome—almost elegant—melodrama. Very impressionable chap, Chalmers, I thought, for I was quite sure that he had never done any fighting; he was apparently a total abstainer; and he positively ran—as whole-heartedly as a frightened cow—from a petticoat.
“What about work?” I asked, as we turned into the club. Chalmers is a fiend for work: always shut up in his laboratory, dry-nursing an experiment.
“Work is an anodyne—a blooming anodyne.” He hunched his shoulders, and his brown coat—the coat of a toilsome recluse, if ever there was one; there’s something peculiarly unworldly about brown tweed for a man’s wear—creased into lumpier curves than ever.
“It’s a mighty slow one. If I wanted a quick effect, I think I’d take to cocaine. Must be exciting, slewing round the corners of Montmartre, dropping your francs into a basket that swings down from God knows where, with the blessed stuff all in it waiting to be inhaled. And all over inside of a year.” Thus I to Chalmers, knowing that we were very far from Montmartre. Chalmers, I should say, was magnificently dependable; you were as safe in dropping a lurid suggestion on him as on the shell of an ancient turtle. I rather liked that idea, which struck me just then; in fact, his clothes were much the color of tortoise-shell.
“But I don’t want it over. You see ... I’ve agreed to hang on.” His keen glance at me, more than his words, savored of explanation.
“Oh!” I made the syllable as non-committal as possible. The lips at one moment so fluent in confession will grow stiff with resentment after the hour of confidence is over. For that reason, I dislike to have people tell me things: I always expect that they will some day hate me, merely because they told.
We sat down at a table, and I ordered a high-ball. Chalmers fussed for a moment, and then committed himself to a pâté sandwich with apollinaris. I didn’t think of asking him to join me. We had been trying for five years to get Chalmers to take a drink. For a year, there were always bets going on it; but it had been a long time now since any of us had made or lost anything on the chance of Chalmers’s potations.
At the same time, my curiosity was aroused. There had never been any mystery about Chalmers. There isn’t any about a tortoise, if it comes to that. The beast has been made much of mythologically, I believe; but even in India they only accuse him of holding up the world. No one pretends, so far as I know, that he keeps anything under his shell except himself. But Chalmers didn’t seem to be even bearing a burden. He was simply Chalmers. He had come among us, an accredited student of physics, with letters of introduction from German professors and Colonial Dames; he had performed the absolutely necessary conventional duties; he was vaguely related to people that every one knew; he was so obviously a gentleman that no one would ever have thought of affirming it. His holidays were all accounted for—in fact, he usually spent them with one or another of our own group. There wasn’t—there isn’t now—a single thing about Chalmers that any one could have the instinct to investigate. It had never occurred to any of us that we didn’t know as much about Chalmers as we did about the people we had been brought up with. We happened not to have been brought up with him, because he had happened to be brought up abroad. His father had been a consul somewhere.