"You'd better have a glass too," said he.
"To-morrow," I replied. "I'm going to have something to eat now."
Koster had been looking at me anxiously.
"Don't look at me like that, Otto," said I. "I've only got a little bit tight out of pure joie de vivre. Not from worry."
"Then it's O.K.," said he. "But come and have something to eat all the same."
By eleven o'clock I was as sober as a bone again.
Koster suggested we should have a look at Fred.
We went in and found him lying behind the bar counter as if he were dead.
"Take him next door," said Lenz. "I'll do the serving here in the meantime."
Koster and I brought Fred round again. We gave him some warm milk to drink.
The effect was instantaneous.
Then we sat him on a chair and told him to have a rest for half an hour, Lenz would see to everything outside.
Gottfried did see to it too.
He knew all the prices and the whole gamut of cocktails. He swung the mixer as if he had never done anything else.
After an hour Fred was back again.
He had a cast-iron stomach and recovered quickly.
"Sorry, Fred," said I, "we ought to have had something to eat first."
"I'm in order again," he replied. "Does you good once in a while."
"No doubt about that."
I went to the telephone and rang up Pat.
All I had been thinking was suddenly of complete indifference to me.
She answered.
"I'll be at the front door in a quarter of an hour," I called and hung up quickly.
I was afraid she might be tired and refuse to hear of it.
I wanted to see her.
She did come.
As she opened the front door I kissed the glass where her head was.
She was about to say something but I did not give her the chance.
I gave her a kiss and together we ran down the street till we found a taxi.
It was thundering and there were flashes of lightning.
"Quick, before it rains," I called.
We got in.
The first drops pattered on the roof of the cab.
The car bounced over the uneven cobbles.
It was grand, for with each jolt I felt Pat beside me.
Everything was grand, the rain, the city, the drink, everything wide and splendid.
I was in that clear, overwakeful state that follows being drunk and having got the better of it again.
The inhibitions were gone, the night was charged with a deep power and full of splendour, nothing could happen now, nothing false any more.
The rain began as we got out.
While I was paying, the pavement was still spotted dark with drops, like a panther —but before I reached the door it was black and spouting silver, the water poured down so.
I did not make a light.
The flashes lit up the room.
The storm was over the middle of the town.
Peal rolled upon peal.
"We could shout here now, for once," I called to Pat, "without fear of anyone hearing." The windows flamed.
For an instant the black silhouettes of the trees in the graveyard sprang out against the blue-white sky and were at once felled again with a crash by the night—for an instant between dark and dark Pat's supple figure stood phosphorescent against the windowpanes—I put my arm around her shoulders, she pressed against me, I felt her lips, her breathing, I thought no more.
Chapter XII
Our workshop stood empty as a barn before harvest.
So we had decided not to sell again the taxi we had bought, but to drive it ourselves for a while.
Lenz and I were going to take it by turns.