All doctors are agreed that waiting has a lowering effect on the mind, but this morning Major Cypress looked, as has been stated, even more depressed than usual. And long he leant against the railings watching his brother-in-law’s extraordinary behaviour before opening his lips: when, a noise of a friendly nature being created, he waited patiently for an answer, which he did not get. He then tried to attract Tarlyon’s attention by making a noise like money, but in vain.
“George,” he shouted at last, “may I ask why you are behaving in that peculiar way?”
“You may,” snapped Tarlyon, and, approaching him with a look of absent-minded savagery, cast a little of the powder over his breeches, squirted him with the syringe, and continued with his labours. Poor Hugo.
“George,” said Major Cypress, disregarding the man’s rudeness, “I am depressed this morning. Guess why.”
“Hugo,” said Tarlyon bitterly, “I would be depressed every morning if I were you. Now please go away at once. These worms aren’t rising half so well since you came. And I have a pain in my left side.”
“A pain, George? I thought you looked sick, but I didn’t like to say anything. What sort of a pain?”
“A hell of a pain,” said Tarlyon. “It gets me when I breathe.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Hugo. “I too have a pain. And it gets me when I eat, drink, breathe and sleep. George, my pain is in my heart.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” snapped Tarlyon, “and I hope it gives you such a swelling in the feet that you can’t follow me about like a moneylender after a dud cheque.”
“George, I am not, and never was, a moneylender. I am, by the grace of God, a money-lendee. But to return to your pain, I shouldn’t wonder if you had pneumonia. You have been very liable to pneumonia ever since you took that bath on Armistice Day. And merely from the way your face has all fallen in I should say pneumonia, quite apart from the fact that your breath is coming in painful gasps.”