The hour we spent together in his little inner room before dinner was served stands out among my strangest, loveliest memories of Armour. He was divinely caught up, and absurd as it is to write, he seemed to carry me with him. We drank each a glass of vermouth before dinner sitting over a scented fire of deodar branches, while outside the little window in front of me the lifted lines of the great empty Himalayan landscape faded and fell into a blur. I remembered the solitary scarlet dahlia that stood between us and the vast cold hills and held its colour when all was grey but that. The hill world waited for the winter; down a far valley we could hear a barking deer. Armour talked slowly, often hesitating for a word, of the joy there was in beauty and the divinity in the man who saw it with his own eyes. I have read notable pages that brought conviction pale beside that which stole about the room from what he said. The comment may seem fantastic, but it is a comment--I caressed the dog. The servant clattered in with the plates, and at a shout outside Armour left me. He came in radiant with Signor Strobo, also radiant and carrying a violin, for hotel-keeping was not the Signor’s only accomplishment. I knew Strobo well; many a special dish had he ordered for my little parties; and we met at Armour’s fireside like the genial old acquaintances we were. Another voice without and presently I was nodding to Rosario and vaguely wondering why he looked uncomfortable.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Armour, as we sat down, ‘I’ve got nothing but beer. If I had known you were all coming, no vintage that crawls up the hill would have been good enough for me.’ He threw the bond of his wonderful smile round us as we swallowed his stuff, and our hearts were lightened. ‘You fellows,’ he went on nodding at the other two, ‘might happen any day, but my friend John Philips comes to me across aerial spaces; he is a star I’ve trapped--you don’t do that often. Pilsener, John Philips, or Black?’ He was helping his only servant by pouring out the beer himself, and as I declared for Black he slapped me affectionately on the back and said my choice was good.
The last person who had slapped me on the back was Lord Dufferin, and I smiled softly and privately at the remembrance, and what a difference there was. I had resented Dufferin’s slap.