“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.
On this occasion, anyhow, my curiosity got the better of my fixed rule.
I decided to lead Chalmers on.
“Do you mean to say that your noble industry is nothing but a poor
substitute for a drug?”
He smiled quaintly. His green eyes shone under his dark eyelashes. Very
taking eyes they were: well set in his head and pleasantly intimate,
with a near-sighted brilliancy.
“I didn’t say it was a poor substitute. And, anyhow, cocaine might
charm away the hours, but only work can charm away the years. I’ve got
into my stride--for eternity, it would seem. And some day, you know, I
may, quite incidentally, do something in spectrum analysis that will be
significant. I’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Are you so sure?”
“Well--it looks as if I were in for a long wait.”
He spoke as unconcernedly as if he had his lease of life locked up in
his safe-deposit drawer.
I drank some whiskey and waited a minute, wondering whether to push his
confidence over the edge, send it spinning into an abyss of revelation.
Finally, I decided.
“I didn’t know that anything but a contract with the devil could make
you so sure.”
“Oh, it doesn’t have to be with the devil.” He sipped his virtuous
apollinaris. “Did you notice the heroine’s sister?” he went on.
I hadn’t noticed her much. I had been paying my money to see Maude
Lansing act, and my frugal eyes had attached themselves to her
exclusively, from the first act to the last.
“A vague little blonde thing, wasn’t she?”
“Blonde, but not so vague as you’d think. At least, I don’t think she’d
be vague if you gave her anything to do. She had to be vague to-night,
of course. But didn’t you see her deliberately subduing herself to the
part--holding herself in, so as not to be too pretty, too angry, too
subtle, too much in love? She did everything vaguely, I imagine, so as
not to hog the stage. But give her a chance, and she’d play up. I was
always expecting, you know, that she _would_ hog the stage. She could
have done it.... It quite got me going.”
“Did you think her better than Maude Lansing?” It was something new, at
least, to have him notice a woman so closely.
Chalmers tasted his _pâté_ and half-nodded approvingly at it.
“Oh, I don’t know anything about that. She is the only woman I have ever
seen who looked like the girl I married.”
I set down my glass quickly. I had drunk most of the whiskey, and
therefore none of it was spilled. Chalmers married! Why--why--we knew
all about him, from cradle to laboratory; or, at least, as much as men
do know of other men who have no scrapes to be got out of. I looked
narrowly at Chalmers. Was it possible that he had been lying low all
these years, with the single intention of perpetrating eventually the
supreme joke? And if he was merely a humorist of parts, why had he not
assembled the crowd? Why had he selected only one of his intimates? His
intimates! That was precisely what we were. Yet none of us knew that he
had been married. Chalmers himself might easily not have mentioned a
dead wife, but no end of people, first and last, had turned up and
contributed to Chalmers’s biography, and it was odd that none of them
should have mentioned his bereavement. Unless----
“No one knows I am married. No one has ever known. If I told you all
about it, you’d see why. And I think I shall. That girl started it all
up again.”
He leaned across the table and laid his hand on my arm. His eyes glinted
encouragingly at me. “Cheer up, old man! You’re not in for anything
sordid. But curious--oh, very, very curious! Yes, I think, without
vanity, I may say _very_ curious.... I meant what I said just now,
coming out of the theatre. There aren’t but three things worth
while--and I mayn’t have them. I mayn’t fight, because I might get
killed before I’ve a right to; I don’t drink, for the sake of the paltry
hours that might be subtracted from the sum of my years if I did; and,
being married, I naturally can’t very well make love. Can I?” He turned
on me with such a tone of ingenuous query that I wondered if it was a
joke, after all.