Tony was looking at his watch. It was, it appeared, time for him to go if he wanted to catch his train.
“No,” he said, rising; “I will be d----d if I do that.”
Mr. Wade looked at him curiously, as one may look at a sleeper who for no apparent reason suddenly wakes and stretches himself.
“Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.”
If Major White was not a man of quick comprehension, he was, at all events, honest in his density. He never said that he understood when he did not do so. When he received a telegram in barracks at Dover to come up to London the next day and meet Cornish at his club at one o'clock, the major merely said that he was in a state of condemnation, and fixing his glass very carefully into his more surprised eye, studied the thin pink paper as if it were a unique and interesting proof of the advance of the human race. In truth, Major White never sent telegrams, and rarely received them. He blew out his cheeks and said a second time that he was damned. Then he threw the telegram into a waste-paper basket, which was rarely put to so legitimate a use; for the major never wrote letters if he could help it, and received so few that they hardly kept him supplied in pipe-lights.
He apparently had no intention of replying to Cornish's telegram, arguing very philosophically in his mind that he would go if he could, and if he could not, it would not matter very much. A method of contemplating life, as a picture with a perspective to it, which may be highly recommended to fussy people who herald their paltry little comings and goings by a number of unnecessary communications.
Without, therefore, attempting a surmise as to the meaning of this summons, White took a morning train to London, and solemnly reported himself to the hall porter of a club in St. James's Street as the well-dressed throng was leisurely returning from church.
“Mr. Cornish told me to come and have lunch with him,” he said, in his usual bald style, leaving explanations and superfluous questions to such as had time for luxuries of that description.
He was taken charge of by a button-boy, whose head reached the major's lowest waistcoat button, was deprived of his hat and stick, and practically commanded to wash his hands, to all of which he submitted under stolid and silent protest.