“Brower smiled at him, nodded, and put his paper away. Davidson made a brash circled
thumb-and-finger, and chased away to get the others. Brower and I drew up to the green-felted table, and when I offered him a drink he declined with thanks and ordered his own bottle. I suspected it might have something to do with his odd fetish and said nothing. I have known men whose horror of germs and disease stretched that far and even further… and so may many of you.” There were nods of agreement.
” ‘It’s good to be here,’ Brower told me reflectively. ‘I’ve shunned any kind of
companionship since I returned from my post. It’s not good for a man to be alone, you know. I think that, even for the most self-sufficient of men, being isolated from the flow of humanity must be the worst form of torture!’ He said this with a queer kind of emphasis, and I nodded. I had experienced such loneliness in the trenches, usually at night. I experienced it again, more keenly, after learning of Rosalie’s death. I found myself warming to him in spite of his self-professed eccentricity.
‘Bombay must have been a fascinating place,’ I said. ‘Fascinating… and terrible! There are things over there, which are undreamed of in our philosophy. Their reaction to motorcars is amusing: the children shrink from them as they go by and then follow them for blocks. They find the airplane terrifying and incomprehensible. Of course, we Americans view these contraptions with complete equanimity — even complacency! — but I assure you that my reaction was exactly the same as theirs when I first observed a street-corner beggar swallow an entire packet of steel needles and then pull them, one by one, from the open sores at the end of his fingers. Yet here is something that natives of that part of the world take utterly for granted.
‘Perhaps,’ he added somberly, ‘the two cultures were never intended to mix, but to keep their separate wonders to themselves. For an American such as you or I to swallow a packet of needles would result in a slow, horrible death. And as for the motorcar…’ He trailed off, and a bleak, shadowed expression came to his face.
“I was about to speak when Stevens the Elder appeared with Brower’s bottle of Scotch,
and directly following him, Davidson and the others.
“Davidson prefaced the introductions by saying, ‘I’ve told them all of your little fetish, Henry, so you needn’t fear for a thing. This is Darrel Baker, the fearsome-looking fellow with the beard is Andrew French, and last but not least, Jack Wilden. George Gregson you already know.’
“Brower smiled and nodded at all of them in lieu of shaking hands. Poker chips and three fresh decks of cards were produced, money was changed for markers, and the game began.
“We played for better than six hours, and I won perhaps two hundred dollars. Darrel
Baker, who was not a particularly good player, lost about eight hundred (not that he would ever feel the pinch; his father owned three of the largest shoe factories in New England), and the rest had split Baker’s losses with me about evenly. Davidson was a few dollars up and Brower a few down; yet for Brower to be near even was no mean feat, for he had had astoundingly bad cards for most of the evening. He was adroit at both the traditional five-card draw and the newer seven-card-stud variety of the game, and I thought that several times he had won money on cool bluffs that I myself would have hesitated to try.
“I did notice one thing: although he drank quite heavily — by the time French prepared to deal the last hand, he had polished off almost an entire bottle of Scotch — his speech did not slur at all, his card-playing skill never faltered, and his odd fixation about the touching of hands never flagged. When he won a pot, he never touched it if someone had markers or change or if
someone had ‘gone light’ and still had chips to contribute. Once, when Davidson placed his glass rather close to his elbow, Brower flinched back abruptly, almost spilling his own drink. Baker looked surprised, but Davidson passed it off with a remark.