“That’s me.  But it’s only my legs.  My head is astonishingly clear.  And I do wish you would try, just for once in a way, to follow my meaning.  Be reasonable, for a change!  I mean to say that a man has talents for all sorts of things.  I, for example, have pronounced views upon agriculture.  But what’s the use of farming without capital?  What I mean to say is this:  we see the blue sea and the orange tints on the mountains, and all that, I mean, and we don’t seem to realize, I mean, that we may die at any moment and never see them again.  How few people grasp that simple fact!  It’s enough to make one sick.  Or do you think it’s a laughing matter?”

“Bally rotten, I call it.  You’re quite right.  People don’t realize things the way they ought, except in a few selected moments.  They live like animals.  I shall be sick in a minute, old man.”

“Like animals.  Good Lord!  You’ve hit the nail on the head this time.  How true that is.  Like animals.  Like animals.  Like animals.”

“I know what we want.  We want fresh air.  No more Parker’s poison for me.  Let’s take a stroll.”

“I would if I could.  But I can’t get off this chair, damn it.  I shall fall down if I move an inch.  I can hardly turn my head round, as it is.  Awfully sorry.  You don’t mind, do you?”

“Gad!  That’s awkward.  Couldn’t we take your chair along with us, somehow?  I’m going to be sick, I tell you, this very minute.”

“Not here, not here!  Third on the left.  But surely, my dear fellow, you can put it off a little longer?  Can’t you be reasonable, for once in your life?  Just for once in your life?  Do listen to what those inebriated lunatics are saying on the balcony. . . .”

“What did you do to that skunk, Charlie?”

“Not if I know it, young man.  I promised my mother I’d never tell.  Another day, perhaps, when I’ve got a little whiskey inside me.  It’s too funny for words.”

“You oughtn’t to go tickling young girls, Charlie.  It’s not polite, at your age. . . .”

They all cleared out, as it seemed, after midnight; some on all fours, many of them fairly perpendicular.  But when the serving lad entered the premises in the sober light of morning, to clear up the debris, he was surprised to perceive a human form reclining under a table.  It was the young Norwegian professor.  He lay there wide awake, with disheveled hair and an inspired gleam in his eye, tracing on the floor, with the point of a corkscrew, what looked like a tangle of parallelograms and conic sections.  He said it was a map of Trinidad.

CHAPTER XXV

As to Miss Wilberforce—­she was becoming a real problem.

Once again she had shocked the Faithful.  She had misconducted herself by interrupting the torchlight procession with some of those usual or unusual antics, a detailed description of which, while entertaining to a few lost souls, would certainly mortify the majority of decent folks.  The cup of endurance was full, overbrimming.  Once again she had passed the night in the lock-up.  Questioned as to her motives for this particular incident, she artlessly blamed the darkness which misled her, she said, into the regrettable delusion that it was night; “and at night, you know. . . .”