Half a dozen nondescript members, looking considerably the worse for wear, loafed about moodily or snored in deck chairs.  Two or three were writing letters.  It was the sulkiest hour of the day.  Mr. Heard noticed a slender young Indian and a blond-haired fellow—­probably a Scandinavian.  They were arguing about cigars with a rosy-cheeked old reprobate whom they called Charlie.  An adjoining apartment, the card-room, contained a livelier party, among whom the bishop recognized Mr. Muhlen.  He had lost no time in making himself popular.  He must have found congenial spirits here.

“Well?” asked Keith.

“Cheap and nasty,” suggested the other.

“That’s it!  They call it the Alpha and Omega Club, to shadow forth its all-embracing international character; it’s just a boozing institution, where you run to seed.  They come in here, and say the south wind makes them thirsty.  Red and Blue Club would be a more appropriate name.  That is the whisky they have to drink.”

“Why cannot they drink wine or—­or ginger beer?”

“He tries to stop that.  He would not be able to make any profits on wine.”

“Who?”

“The President.”

And Mr. Keith proceeded to sketch the history of the establishment.

The Alpha and Omega Club had led a precarious existence.  Often its life dangled by a thread for lack of members, or because those members who owed subscriptions were unable or unwilling to pay them.  Such had been the case before the accession of the new President.  It hung its drooping head; had almost withered away.  Mr. Freddy Parker tended the languid flower, and watered it—­with whisky of his own composition.

It revived.  Or rather (which amounts to the same thing) Mr. Parker revived—­sufficiently, at all events, to pay off some of the more pressing of his private debts.  Napoleon, or somebody, once remarked:  “L’ETAT, C’EST MOI.”  Mr. Parker thought highly of a strong character like Napoleon.  He used to say, when talking things over with his lady in her “boudoir” at the Residency: 

“The Club, that’s me.”

Declaring that wine was the ruin of the place, he imported—­it was the lady’s idea, originally—­the far-famed “Red-and-Blue” brand of whisky in barrels.  The liquid was bottled in the cellars of the Residency.  What happened during that process was never revealed.  It was affirmed, none the less, that one barrel of the original stuff was more than enough for three barrelfuls of the bottled product.  Cultured members, on drinking it, were wont to say things about Locusta and Borgia.  The commoner sort swore like hell at Freddy Parker.  It made you feel squiffy after the sixth glass—­argumentative, magisterial, maudlin, taciturn, erotic, sentimental, sea-sick, ecstatic, paralysed, lachrymose, hilarious, pugilistic—­according to your temperament.  Whatever your temperament it gave you a thundering head next morning, and a throat like Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace.  It was known as “Parker’s poison.”