“You’ve nothing at all to worry about, sir. They won’t bother you. It’s only the gentlemen at the university they’re after.”
“How do they know I’m not there?”
“That I couldn’t tell you, sir,” he answered cheerfully, “but they’ave a way of knowin’! Ah, yes!” he said with satisfaction, slapping a wet cloth down upon the bar. “They’ave a way of knowin’, right enough! They’re a clever lot, those chaps. A very clever lot, sir, and they always’ave a way of knowin’when you’re not.” And smiling cheerfully, he made a vigorous parting swipe across the wood, and put the cloth away below the counter.
Eugene’s glass was almost empty and he looked at it, and wondered if he ought to have another. He thought they made them very small, and kept thinking of the governors of North and South Carolina. It was a fine, warm, open sort of pub, and there was a big fire-place just behind him, crackling smartly with a fire of blazing coals: he could feel the warmth upon his back. Outside, in the fog-numb air, people came by with lonely rapid footsteps and were lost in fog-numb air again.
At this moment the bar-maid, who had bronze-red hair and the shrewd witty visage of a parrot, turned and called out in a cheerful, crisply peremptory tone: “Time, please, gentlemen. Closing time.”
Eugene put the glass down empty on the bar again. He wondered what the way of knowing was.
It was October, about the middle of the month, at the opening of the Michaelmas term. Everywhere there was the exultant thrill and bustle of returning, of a new life, a new adventure beginning in an ancient and beautiful place that was itself enriched by the countless lives and adventures of hundreds of years which had come and gone. In the morning there was the smoky old-gold yellow of the sun, the numb excitement of the foggy air, a smell of good tobacco, beer, grilled kidneys, ham and sausages, and grilled tomatoes, a faint nostalgic smell of tea, and incredibly, somehow, in that foggy old-gold light, a smell of coffee—an intolerable, maddening, false, delusive smell, for when one went to find the coffee it would not be there: the coffee was black liquid mud, bitter, lifeless, and undrinkable.
Everything was very expensive and yet it made you feel rich yourself just to look at it. The little shops, the wine shops with their bay windows of small leaded glass, and the crusty opulence of the bottles of old port and sherry and the burgundies, the mellow homely warmth and quietness
