eyebrows, silver hair, the lean, bitten and incisive face, the cropped moustache of a man who has seen service in old wars and commanded garrisons in India, and after clearing his throat with a low menacing growl, he would peer fiercely out at Morison beneath his bushy brows, and say: “Well, young man?”—to which Morison would be able to make no answer, but would just stand there in a state of guilty dejection.
And the talk that then passed between the outraged father and the prodigal son was, from Morison’s own account, astonishing. It was a talk that was no talk, a talk that was almost incoherent but that each understood perfectly, another language, not merely an economy of words so spare that one word was made to do the work of a hundred, but a series of grunts, blurts, oaths and ejaculations, in which almost nothing was said that was recognizable as ordered thought, but in which the meaning of everything was perfectly conveyed.
The last outrageous episode that had brought Morison in to his present position of guilt “upon the carpet” was rarely named by name or given a description. Rather, as if affronted decency and aristocratic delicacy could not endure discussion of an unmentionable offence, his fault was indicated briefly as “that sort of thing” (or simply “sort of thing,” spoken fast and slurringly)—and all the other passions and emotions of anger, contrition, stern condemnation and reproof, and, at length, of exhausted relief and escape, were conveyed in a series of broken and jerky exclamations, such as: “After all!” “It’s not as if it were the first time you had played the bloody fool!” “What I mean to say is!” “Damn it all, it’s not that I mind the wine-woman-song sort of thing—young myself once—no plaster saint—never pretended that I was—man’s own business if he keeps it to himself—never interfered—only when you do a thing like this and make a bloody show of yourself—you idiot!—sort of thing men can understand but women!—it’s your mother I’m thinking of!” and so on.
Morison’s own speech, in fact, was largely composed of phrases such as these: he blurted them out so rapidly, scarcely moving his lips and slurring his words over in such a broken and explosive way that when one first met him it was hard to understand what he was saying:—his speech seemed to be largely a series of blurted-out phrases, such as “sort of thing,” “after all!” “what I mean to say is!” and so on. And yet this incoherent and exclamatory style was curiously effective, for it seemed to take the listener into its confidence in rather an engaging manner
