David Adley interrupted, and although he was smiling, I don’t think he was joking at all.
“And was Stevens here back then, George?”
George looked around at the butler. “Was it you, Stevens, or was it your father?”
Stevens allowed himself the merest ghost of a smile. “As 1919 was over sixty-five years ago, sir, it was my grandfather, I must allow.”
“Yours is a post that runs in the family, we must take it,” Adley mused.
“As you take it, sir,” Stevens replied gently.
“Now that I think back on it,” George said, “there is a remarkable resemblance between you and your… did you say grandfather, Stevens?”
“Yes, sir, so I said.”
“If you and he were put side by side, I’d be hard put to tell which was which… but that’s neither here nor there, is it?”
“No, sir.”
“I was in the game room — right through that same little door over there — playing
patience the first and only time I met Henry Brower. There were four of us who were ready to sit down and play poker; we only wanted a fifth to make the evening go. When Jason Davidson told me that George Oxley, our usual fifth, had broken his leg and was laid up in bed with a cast at the end of a damned pulley contraption, it seemed that we should have no game that night. I was contemplating the prospect of finishing the evening with nothing to take my mind off my own thoughts but patience and a mind-blotting quantity of whiskey when the fellow across the room said in a calm and pleasant voice, ‘If you gentlemen have been speaking of poker, I would very much enjoy picking up a hand, if you have no particular objections.’
“He had been buried behind a copy of the New York World until then, so that when I looked over I was seeing him for the first time. He was a young man with an old face, if you take my meaning. Some of the marks I saw on his face I had begun to see stamped on my own since
the death of Rosalie. Some — but not all. Although the fellow could have been no older than twenty-eight from his hair and hands and manner of walking, his face seemed marked with
experience and his eyes, which were very dark, seemed more than sad; they seemed almost
haunted. He was quite good-looking, with a short, clipped mustache and darkish blond hair. He wore a good-looking brown suit and his top collar button had been loosened. ‘My name is Henry Brower,’ he said.
“Davidson immediately rushed across the room to shake hands; in fact, he acted as
though he might actually snatch Brewer’s hand out of Brewer’s lap. An odd thing happened:
Brower dropped his paper and held both hands up and out of reach. The expression on his face was one of horror.
“Davidson halted, quite confused, more bewildered than angry. He was only twenty-two
himself — God, how young we all were in those days — and a bit of a puppy.
” ‘Excuse me,’ Brower said with complete gravity, ‘but I never shake hands!’
“Davidson blinked. ‘Never?’ he said. ‘How very peculiar. Why in the world not?’ Well,
I’ve told you that he was a bit of a puppy. Brower took it in the best possible way, with an open (yet rather troubled) smile.
” ‘I’ve just come back from Bombay,’ he said. ‘It’s a strange, crowded, filthy place, full of disease and pestilence. The vultures strut and preen on the very city walls by the thousands. I was there on a trade mission for two years, and I seem to have picked up a horror of our Western custom of handshaking. I know I’m foolish and impolite, and yet I cannot seem to bring myself to it. So if you would be so very good as to let me off with no hard feelings…’
” ‘Only on one condition,’ Davidson said with a smile. ” ‘What would that be?’
” ‘Only that you draw up to the table and share a tumbler of George’s whiskey while I go for Baker and French and Jack Wilden.’