Toward midnight Charles Anderson finished some notes on a talk he had had with a newspaper editor at lunch--nothing very important, but he thought he ought to keep Bingay decently informed.
The hour and the completion of the task seemed to call for a drink, so he went to the bathroom for some water and then to his suitcase for the silver flask that he always carried on these junkets and tried to keep replenished. He was not much of a whisky drinker so he would say of himself when he ordered wine , but he liked a nightcap either in bed before turning out the light or during that last half hour of dressing-gowned pottering when he would tidy up the affairs of the day both in his mind and on his desk.
He was tidy by nature, and years of experience had made him save, whenever possible, some small but relaxing job for a final one, even if it were only an entry in his diary or a jotting for the book he was one day going to write. Tonight, however, there was no doubt as to what the job should be. He had been thinking of it, off and on and with increasing satisfaction, all day; it had been a sort of protective armor at moments when he had needed it. And now, with the drink at his elbow and the sounds of the city pleasantly audible from beyond the closed and curtained windows, he took a sheet of hotel notepaper and wrote:.
That done, and the envelope addressed care of Thomas Cook's, Lucerne, Charles finished his drink in bed and went quickly to sleep. He was a good sleeper, not because he had nothing to worry about, but because as a rule he had worked hard enough to be tired and conscientiously enough to be untroubled by conscience; lately, though, he had begun to feel sometimes too tired.
But there need not be much more of it, he consoled himself; he would soon be on pension, and with each recent year ambition had withdrawn less reluctantly from the probably unscalable cliffs and had begun to settle for the long comfortable valley just round the corner. When Charles had digested this he happily made a note in his engagement book, and then muttered, in the presence of Sir Malcolm Bingay's secretary: "I don't mind 'okay,' but ' make it' Charles was a handsome man for his age, which was fifty-two.
