Lost: A man with a brass name-plate in his pocket, probably bent in wrenching. Personal appearance difficult to describe, because something has happened to him that does not happen to the generality of people. When last seen appeared to be about thirty-five, but may look younger. Was wearing dark blue suit and shirt with torn neckband.Missing: Derwent Rose, novelist, late of 120bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Age forty-five, tall and very strongly built, eyes grey-blue, hair chestnut-brown, strikingly handsome features. In possession of money, as his banking account was closed the morning after his disappearance. Served with Second Battalion Royal Firthshire Fusiliers. Is thought not to have left the country.For Disposal: Quantity of black oak furniture, comprising Jacobean oval table with beaded edge (copy), six upright chairs, tallboy, chest; also large brass bedstead, drawers, two pairs heavy damask curtains, crockery, plate, etc., etc. Also several thousand volumes, including small collection medical works, and others Curious and Miscellaneous. The whole may be viewed at 120bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Apply Caretaker.
Lost: A man with a brass name-plate in his pocket, probably bent in wrenching. Personal appearance difficult to describe, because something has happened to him that does not happen to the generality of people. When last seen appeared to be about thirty-five, but may look younger. Was wearing dark blue suit and shirt with torn neckband.
Missing: Derwent Rose, novelist, late of 120bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Age forty-five, tall and very strongly built, eyes grey-blue, hair chestnut-brown, strikingly handsome features. In possession of money, as his banking account was closed the morning after his disappearance. Served with Second Battalion Royal Firthshire Fusiliers. Is thought not to have left the country.
For Disposal: Quantity of black oak furniture, comprising Jacobean oval table with beaded edge (copy), six upright chairs, tallboy, chest; also large brass bedstead, drawers, two pairs heavy damask curtains, crockery, plate, etc., etc. Also several thousand volumes, including small collection medical works, and others Curious and Miscellaneous. The whole may be viewed at 120bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Apply Caretaker.
So the announcements might have run had there been any; but there were none. I saw to that. The police are excellent people, but I considered this a little out of their line and did not call them in. As for the furniture and effects, they remained for the present where they were, I paying his rent and putting his key into my pocket. As for Derwent Rose, novelist, aged forty-five, it might be months before anybody missed him, and it would be supposed that he had gone intoretirement to write a book. As for the man with the torn neckband and the brass name-plate in his pocket, a prudent person would be a little careful how he tried to identify him. You see what I mean. Julia Oliphant and myself were in a class apart; we should know him on sight, since we knew what had happened to him and what we might expect. But nobody else knew, nobody in the whole wide world. Therefore they would be wise to look at him twice before accosting him. Nobody wants to be certified and locked up, and that was what might conceivably happen if anybody insisted too much on resemblance or identity in the case of a man who was obviously fifteen or twenty years younger than he could be proved to be. Much safer to call the fancied resemblance a coincidence and let it go at that.
Therefore—exit Derwent Rose, novelist, aged forty-five.
And enter in his stead—who?
Exactly. That was the whole point. He had not entered. He was somewhere on Life's stage, but behind, or in the wings, or up in the flies, or down underneath the traps. He was his own understudy, but whatever lines he spoke, whatever gestures he made, happened "off." The call-boy ran hither and thither calling his name, but in vain. Oblivion had taken him. It had taken him so completely that he needed to dress no part, to alter himself with no make-up. He was as free to walk about in the limelight as you or I. Freer—far freer——
For where was the birth certificate of this man who had lost ten years in a few months and for all anybody knew might now have lost another ten—twelve—twenty? Of what use was hisdossierin the Military Records Office? Of what value was his name on the register, his will if he had made one, his signed contracts, his insurance policy? Of what validity was the photograph on his passport, or who could call him into Court as a witness? What clergyman or Justice of the Peace could certify that he had known him for a number of years? What musty and mendacious file in Somerset House dare produce a record to show that a man who was obviously so many years younger had been bornin the year 1875? Free, this Apollo for beauty and Ajax for strength? As far as documents were concerned he was more than free. He had side-stepped them all, and was the only completely free man alive.
But he was not free from Julia Oliphant and myself, for we knew all about it. His own brother he might fool, had he had one; he might delude the nurse who had rocked him as a child were she still alive; but us he could not deceive. With us his unimaginable alibi would not serve nor his unique anonymity go down. If he wished to know us, he could come up to us (but to us only) with a proffered hand and an ordinary "How do you do." But if he did not wish to know us he had us to fear. We knew his secret.
But nobody else—nobody in the whole round world else.
That, in its essence, and speaking very roughly, was the position; but it is worth examining a little more particularly. I will leave aside for the moment such questions as why we wanted to find him, whether we ought to try to find him, whether, if a man chose to expunge his identity like that he had not a perfect right to do so. I will assume that he was to be sought and found. On that assumption I reasoned as follows:
Here—somewhere—was a man of unknown age and uncertain personal appearance. When last seen he was, and looked, thirty-five, but he may now be, and look, any age up to, or rather down to, sixteen. That depended entirely on the rate of those backward jerks of which he himself had failed to find the ratio. But where begin to look for him? At what Charing Cross or Clapham Junction, where all the world passes sooner or later, wait for him? What tube station watch? Round what street corner lurk? Examine it, I say, a little more closely.
And take first his two scales of time. As a matter of incontrovertible fact he was living in the year 1920. In theyear 1920 a big and handsome and athletic man was living a daily life, presumably somewhere in London. But for him that year was 1910, and continually, day by day and hour by hour, he must be struggling to reconcile those two periods. It could make no difference that he knew that he was living in both years simultaneously. A hundred times a day he might say to himself, "I quite understand; this is both 1910 and 1920; I've got them perfectly clear and separate in my head." But the hundred-and-first time would catch him tripping. He would stumble over some sudden and unexpected trifle. Let me make this clear by means of a small incident that happened to myself. Not long ago I walked into Charbonnel's for a cup of tea, and was passing through the shop on the ground floor and about to mount the stairs when I was politely fetched back. I was told, with a smile that might have been given to a man just returned from Auckland or Mesopotamia, that the upper room had been closed for some time. I had not been in Charbonnel's since the early days of the war, and was looking, in 1920, for a Charbonnel's that had ceased to exist.
So Derwent Rose, however much he was on his guard, would once in a while find himself looking for something that no longer existed.
Next, there was the question of money—common money, and how much of it he had got. Obviously, and supposing he was to be found, it was no good looking for him in places where he could not possibly afford to be. He would be found in a cheaper place or a more expensive one according to the state of his purse. I had no means of knowing how much money he had withdrawn from the bank. I had never known much about his finances except that sometimes he had been hard-up, at others comparatively "flush," but that he had never, as far as I knew, borrowed. Thus the vulgarest of all considerations had an important bearing on our very first step: Where to look for him?
Next there was to be considered a combination of these things—the factor of money-plus-time. Say he had drawn one hundred pounds or five hundred pounds from the bank—for all I knew it might have been either, or more, or less. Well, we all know that a sum that was sufficient for a man in 1910 does not go very far in 1920. There has been a war.... So was he haunting expensive places, having (as might have been said of anybody but him) "a short life and a gay one," or would he be found spinning out his Bradburys as long as possible on a modester scale? Nay, was he even living on his capital at all? Was it not possible that he had found employment of some kind? If so, of what kind? They ask few questions about identity at the dock-gates; was that it, and was he to be looked for in a workman's early-morning tram? Or had he, a man without a shred of paper to be his warranty, managed to talk somebody into something bigger, and was he one of these ephemeral Business Bubbles, lording it for a few months in somebody else's car and floating the higher because of the hotness of the air inside him? I did not think, by the way, that either of these last two things was very likely; but nothing was more impossible than anything else, and I am merely trying to show the size of the haystack in which we must hunt for our needle.
The merest glance at the problem made it plain that the only starting point was his last actually-known age—thirty-five. All else was the blindest guesswork. And it was equally plain that the best likelihood of finding him lay in the chance that he would more or less repeat (or seek to repeat) his former experiences at that age. Past associations might pull him, he might frequent some places rather than others, some persons or class of persons rather than others. The question was, could his life at thirty-five be so reconstructed that this hope should not be too slender? That was my idea, and I began to ransack my memory in search of indications that might further it.
But almost from the start I despaired. Sketched thus airily the thing had a deluding look of logic and simplicity; but the first contact with actuality scattered all to the winds again. For example, I have hinted at an echo of an earlier wildness that had for some reason or other overtaken him again at thirty-five; but when I came to examine it I foundthat I knew almost nothing at all about it. He had always had the decency to keep these things very much to himself. I had not the vaguest idea of who his companions had been, what his haunts. Added to this was the difficulty that I was approaching the question in reverse. He had slept since I had last seen him, and, sleeping, had presumably once more slipped back. But how far back? He might be (so to speak) at the crest of the wave, farther back still at the beginning of it, or even past it altogether—no longer the man ofAn Ape in Hell, but him ofThe Vicarage of Bray. It was even not impossible that he was sixteen and dead.... So all that I could do was to nail myself firmly down to thirty-five and as much of him at that time as I could remember or ascertain.
And instantly the question loomed up largely: "What about Julia Oliphant? Hadn't she better be left out of this, at any rate for the present?"
Now my position in the world practically forces the conventional attitude on me. All things considered, I think I should adopt that attitude in any case, for I have only to look at any other one and my hesitation doesn't last long. But at the same time I do go to lectures on such subjects as Relative and Absolute Age, and in other things, as I have explained, I liked at that time to keep in step and abreast. I have even made an attempt to understand the mystery that is called the Thermionic Valve.
But neither valve nor age theory is newer or stranger to me than the change that seems to have come over the sex-relationship during these last years. I trust that on the whole I manage to maintain a happy medium—it is the dickens of a thing to have sprung on one latish in life—but I only know that I myself, old-fashioned as I am, sometimes find myself discussing with the nicest women, and as freely as I should discuss them with a man, the—may I say the "rummest" subjects? And as for Julia Oliphant's attitude to all this newness, I will only say that while she might have been ten years behind Madge Aird in matters of dress, she was not ten minutes behind her in anything else.
But discussions "in the air" with her were one thing, but discussions of an actual Derwent Rose at thirty-five quite another. "Oh, I know perfectly well the sort of thing itmighthave been, so don't let that worry you," she had said, and for once, just once, I had had to be precise. But once was enough. Call it the old fossil in me if you will, but it makes a very great difference when a woman has said, as simply as Julia had spoken, "Of course; all my life; not that he ever gave me a thought, but that doesn't matter."
For those few words had placed us, instantly and beyond all recall, on a footing of the last intimacy. They had revealed her once for all, and the matter need never be referred to between us again. And as to a swimmer the wavelet that slaps his face and fills his mouth with salt is of more importance than all the immensities below, so we kept to the level of the trifles of life. Often, at a word or a look, we were ready to quarrel. Perhaps, in view of those still depths beneath, our bickering was a necessity and a refuge.
That there was much of my search that I should have to conduct without her was definitely brought home to me on the very first evening when I took a stroll through the region of the West End theatres, still wearing the suit I had worn all day. I ought to say that as I was paying his rent for him I had allowed myself the use of his rooms, and for the present 120bis, Cambridge Circus, was one of my addresses. There was always the chance that he might have forgotten something in 1920 of which he had need in 1910, and that he might steal in, if only for a moment, any dark night when things were quiet.
It was a beautiful London evening, not quite twilight. A tender after-glow lay over the Circus, and, if jewels can grow, the lamps might have been jewels a few moments after their birth. It was one of those evenings when you delay even to dine, knowing that when you come out againthe glamour will have gone and you will have seen a loved and familiar thing once more and once less. So I strolled, scanning faces, sometimes remembering what I was scanning them for, sometimes forgetting again. It might happen that I should find myself suddenly looking into his face. Of course the chances were millions to one that I should not.
I walked as far as the Hippodrome, and then turned and crossed the road. Even in those few minutes the sky was no longer the same. It was mysteriously bluer, and the soft crocus-quality of the lamps had gone. I found myself opposite a doorway with a coronet of lights over it and a tall commissionaire beneath them. A man had just gone in. He was not in the least like Rose, and there was no reason why I should have followed him more than any other man; but I did follow him, not into the bright and crowded and smoky ground-floor room of which I had a glimpse, but up a staircase with brass-edged treads and the word "Lounge" at the bottom of it. I found myself in an empty upper room with leather-covered sofas set deeply into the walls, numerous little tables with green-tiled tops, and a small quadrant of a bar in one corner. The man I had followed was already at this bar, and the young woman behind it was preparing his drink.
"Bit quiet, isn't it?" I heard him say. He had rather a pleasing sort of face, of the kind that a year or two ago one associated with the brimmed hat of an Australian trooper. "Say, is this the best London can do for a man nowadays?"
"London nowadays!" the young woman declared with contempt. "Ishould say so! Where'veyoubeen this long time? Where the bluebottles go to in the winter I suppose. Don't you know this is a tea-room now?"
"Go on!"
"A tea-room, I tell you. Ladies not admitted after five. The new sign'll be up to-morrow. Oh, you can bring your old grannie here now!"
"Bit different from Stiff Brown's time then!"
"Different!—--"
The conversation continued, in the same sense. It wasprecisely my Charbonnel's experience over again. Whatever notoriety the place might once have possessed, it was now a perfectly reputable resort, a tea-room in the afternoons, and in the evenings to all intents and purposes the equivalent of my own Club. The woman behind the bar wore a wedding ring, and I distinctly liked the look of her companion. And yet, with dramatic suddenness, the whole prospect before me seemed to be all at once illimitably enlarged.
For if a normal man like my friend at the counter was struck by the changes of the past five years, how must they strike a man who had gone through an experience so utterly abnormal as that of Derwent Rose? Change is the normal condition of all things; the human mind is marvellously able to adapt itself to altered circumstances in a week, a day, an hour; memories lose their fresh edge, novelties amuse and give way to newer novelties still. But all this is only for men who march forward with their fellows. For the man who marches backwards all is turned round. The memories stir and revive and bloom again, the forgotten is re-remembered, laid ghosts begin to walk. The dulled brass edges of staircases become bright again with the rubbing of light and frail and vanished feet, recessed sofas in upper rooms thrill and rustle with whispers and frou-frou and laughter again. Doubtless the living, 1920 successors of those ghosts were to be found elsewhere, but unless I sought Derry in 1910 I knew not where to begin to look for him. Musingly I descended the stairs and walked slowly back towards the Criterion again. I no longer watched faces. The whole thing seemed hopeless. I had about as much chance of finding Derwent Rose in London as I had of catching one given drop of a summer shower.
And then, in that very moment, I saw him.
Or rather it was the hansom that I saw first. It had just started forward with the release of the traffic opposite Drew's, at the top of Lower Regent Street.
Now a hansom in Piccadilly Circus to-day is perhaps not the rarity that a sedan-chair would be; nevertheless hansomsare comparatively few, and therefore conspicuous. The padded leaves of this one were thrown back, and before I saw him I had already seen a white-sheathed ankle and a white satin slipper.
Then he leaned forward for a moment.
It was unmistakably he.
The hansom passed along with the stream.
Unmistakably he—and yet, mingled with the perfect familiarity, there was a change that I could not immediately analyse. Then (I am telling you what flashed instantaneously through my mind in that fraction of time before I had dashed after him)—then I had it! Familiar, yet not altogether familiar! Of course!——
His beard!
At one time in the past Derwent Rose had worn a beard, the softest sprouting of curling golden-brown. In certain lights it had been little more than a glint that had scarcely hid the contours beneath, and it had made him the living image of Du Maurier's drawings of Peter Ibbetson. He now had that young beard again, and he and it and the hansom with the white satin slippers in it had disappeared behind a bus opposite Swan and Edgar's.
I dashed across to the island and dodged in front of the nose of a horse; but I could not see the hansom. There were four directions in which it could have gone: up Regent Street, Glasshouse Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, or east past the Pavilion. Then a taxi slowed down immediately in front of me, and I found myself standing on the step of it, holding the door open with one hand and with the other pointing past the driver's head.
"That hansom in front—follow that hansom——"
We tried Regent Street first, for I remember seeing the revolving doors of the Piccadilly; but no hansom was to be seen. I thrust my head out of the window again.
"Quick—turn—try Shaftesbury Avenue," I cried.
He turned, but not quickly. It was a good two minutes before we reached the Grill Room entrance of the Monico. Then I lost my temper.
"Ahansom, man—damn it, ahansom! Can't you follow the only hansom left in London? Ask that man on point-duty——"
But I got the impression that the police do not look with too much favour on roving orders to follow other vehicles to unspecified addresses. The constable was curt.
"There was a hansom a minute ago. If you've got his number try Scotland Yard. Come along, you can't stop here——"
I sank back cursing. In the very moment when pure chance had given him to me I had lost him again. By this time he was probably half a mile away. There was nothing whatever to be done.
"Where to now?" grunted the driver.
Nothing to be done—nothing whatever.
"Cambridge Circus, 120," I said.
As well there as anywhere else. He might just possibly be on his way there. He still had a key the duplicate of which was in my own pocket.
I descended at Cambridge Circus, let myself in and mounted to his rooms. He was not there, for no light showed under the door. I switched on, hung up my hat in his little recess, and sat down on his sofa. Then, mortified, but trying to tell myself that I was not actually any worse off, I sought to dissect that momentary impression of him that was all that remained to me.
A hansom, and his beard again! That antiquated black-mutton-chop-shape balanced on two spidery wheels, and that fair and tender sprouting! Both were anachronistic, and yet there was a certain suitability about both. Comparatively few young Englishmen have beards nowadays, but then comparatively few young Englishmen are in their forties and their thirties at the same time. He had always looked handsome in his beard, rather like something from a Greek or Roman gallery come to life again, and so he was right to have let it grow. As for the hansom, he might have taken it merely because it was the last vehicle left on the rank, refused by everybody, else, or there might have been asubtler reason for his choice. A browny-gold beard and a hansom! Yes, both were "in the picture."
But neither beard nor hansom helped me to what I most anxiously wanted to know—how far back in years he had now gone. In the ordinary way a beard may make a young man look older; but then Rose was paradoxically younger than he was. He might now be twenty-five who looked thirty-five because of the beard, or he might be thirty-five looking precisely that age.
I would have given fifty pounds at that moment for one long, steady look at him in a good light.
However, certain things were in their way reassuring. He was in London, and apparently he was not avoiding its most central places. He had worn a hat of soft grey velours that I had not seen before, and a new-looking, well-cut jacket of grey cheviot. As he had disappeared in navy-blue, he thus had money to spend on clothes. He had further looked in magnificent health, and a man who has health, money, youth and a pretty satin-slippered foot near his own has a number of very good things indeed. I might therefore dismiss the workmen's-tram and dock-gates side of the affair. If Derwent Rose was not having a good time he ought to have been.
And yet at the same time I was uneasy. I will not put on any airs about the reason for my uneasiness. White satin slippers in hansoms had very little to do with it, and tearooms that had once been something else even less. These are ordinary everyday things, and there must be something wrong with the eyes of a man who does not see them at every turn—I had almost added something wrong with the mind of a man who magnifies these beyond their proper importance. But when you propose to find a friend by a process of reconstruction of the past phases of his life, you must be prepared for a shock or two; and what I did now begin extraordinarily to resent, among these vulgar and everyday things, was Rose's not being a vulgar everyday man.
For what had the author ofThe Hands of EsauandThe Vicarage of Brayto do with all this? True, he had been init, whether of it or not, as we can none of us shake off the trammels of the flesh until we do so once for all; but the only Derwent Rose with whom properly I had any concern was the man who, into whatever suspect place he had penetrated, had kept something fair and secret and unsullied all the time.
Yet here I was, proposing to look for what was precious and enduring in him, yet prepared to set (as it were) my trap with the grossest possible bait. I was going to catch the best of him by means of the worst, and was deliberately and cold-bloodedly laying my plans to that end.
I flushed at the thought; and then I found myself growing angry with him also. Suddenly I resented the fact that he was alive at all. Why, instead of having contracted this nightmare of a thing that he had contracted, couldn't he have died? Why couldn't he have got himself killed in the war? We respect the decency of the dead; why must I violate his, who had chosen this extraordinary alternative to death? Was this the way to write a friend's epitaph? Must immortelles of this common and saddening mortality be laid on his unlocated grave? Why not write him off—treat him as dead—give up a search that honoured neither him nor me—go back to Julia and tell her that the thing simply couldn't be done?
It seems to me, knitting my brows there that night in his room, that I could do nothing better than that.
But precisely there was the dickens of it. He wasnotdead. How regard a man as dead whom you have seen in the flesh not an hour before? Dead? He was alive, well-dressed, driving a woman somewhere in a hansom, and certainly looking as if he ate four square meals a day and enjoyed them.Hadhe been dead, well and good; but since he was about as alive as a man could be, the tombstone virtues I was concocting to his memory looked unpleasantly like a sentimental shirking of the whole question. They reminded me of hypocrite mourning, with a drop of something warm with sugar to take the edge off the grief. They looked as if I wanted to have him off my mind, to feel luxuriously about him, to be able to say to myself, "Thisfriend of mine was a good and exemplary man"—and then perhaps at any moment to hear his step behind me, that of a man not good or exemplary in this sense at all. I seemed to hear him softly laughing at me: "Sothat'sthe yarn you're going to put about, is it: that I was all barley-sugar and noble prose? But let me tell you that Shakespeare and I hit on some of our best notions with a mug of beer in our hands! Great stuff, beer; nearly as good as music.... Don't be a humbug, George."
So it looked as if I was for seeking him only in the politer places, knowing all the time that I should not find him there; and I reflected a little bitterly that had the boot been on the other leg he would have known where to look for me. He would have walked straight into the first place where easygoing people take the softest way with one another, give praise for praise, and by and by get knighthoods for it. He would have looked for me there. And he would have had an excellent chance of finding me.
I hope I have not wearied you with these quasi-heroics about friendship. They were dispelled quickly enough. Suddenly there happened something that arrested the beating of my heart.
I heard the sound of feet on the stairs outside. They were accompanied by a woman's soft laugh and a man's deeper muttering.
My skin turned crisp with fright. I am afraid I lost my head as completely as ever I lost it in my life. Friendship or no friendship, I gave him the benefit of not one single doubt. If he was coming in there was one thing to do and one only—to make a dash and get away out of it.
Again I heard the laugh. It came from the landing immediately below. A step or two higher, and——
I sprang to the electric light and switched it off.
The little curtained hat-and-coat recess stood just within the door. I made a tiptoe leap for it. As I did so I remembered with thankfulness one of the recess's peculiarities. It abutted so close up to the door-frame on the side where the lock and handle were that Rose had had the switch movedto the other side. The opening door would therefore be between him and the switch. That would be my moment. He would see my things scattered about his room the moment he turned on the light, but that could be explained later. To get away was the urgent thing.
Violently agitated, the curtains grasped in my hand, I stood prepared to make my spring. The feet had stopped outside the door. I heard the striking of a match. I waited for the touch of the key on the lock.
Then, "What, up again?" I heard the man's voice say....
The feet passed on to the floor above. I never knew who lived there. Rose's bell was the third of four, counting from the bottom.
I have not told you the foregoing because I am proud of it. At the best I had behaved childishly, at the worst—but we will come to that presently. Had it really been he I should probably not have had the remotest chance of ever getting past him. He would have vaulted a handrail in the dark, taken a flight in two bounds, and would have had his hand—that hand that tore books in two—on my neck. Had he recognised me he would have wanted to know what the devil I was doing in his rooms. Had he failed to recognise me I should as likely as not have gone through the window. One takes risks when one intrudes on the loves of the giants.
At the same time, I will do myself the justice to say that physical risks were not my first consideration. Vast as his strength was, it was the part of him I least feared. What I did fear, what I was now beginning to think I had not nearly sufficiently allowed for, was the enormous spiritual and mental range of the man.
Up to that moment in his life when he had become so mysteriously turned round, this very width and range had resulted in a state of balance, as the tightrope-walker is balanced by the length of his pole. But to consider either of his extremes separately was to have a cold shiver. Often Ihad thought, "I'm thankful I haven't your burden of personality to bear, my friend. Much better to be the millionth man and take everything on trust. The way to be happy on this earth is to be just a shell of useful and comfortable and middling habits. Stick to the second-hand things of life and let the new ones alone. Any kind of singularity is a curse, and your life is one dreadful yawning question. You've no business to have the first dawn in your eyes and the last trump in your ears like that. The world has no need of that kind of man. What you need is another world somewhere else."
And he had marvellously contrived to find this other world, and had it all, all to himself.
And here was I proposing to dig him out of it.
Can you guess now what it was that I had begun to fear more than his physical strength? It was the whole ungauged pressure of his personality. In behaving as foolishly as I had just behaved I had wished to spare both myself and him the humiliation of an intrusion on a vulgar amour. Now it occurred to be, Why a "vulgar" one at all? Vulgarity is for us smaller people, who are vulgar enough to think that anything that is created is vulgar. But Derwent Rose had so striven that every dawn was the first dawn of creation for him. He had no habits, had daily sought to see the world as if it had never been seen before. Abysses must open for him every time he passed a huddle on a park bench, protoplasmic re-beginnings stare out at him from every chance glance of a street-walker's eyes.... Oh, I am far from envying him. I should blench to have a mind like that. To no possession that I have do I cling half so dearly as I do to my narrowness and to my prejudice. Iamthe millionth man, and I thank God on my knees for it. One of the other kind has been my friend....
Suppose then that one day I should surprise him in some act, stupid and meaningless to myself, but as fraught with tremendousness for him as was that first command, "Let there be Light!" What would happen then? You see what I am driving at. Up to now my idea had been, quite simply,to find him. I had sought him much as I might have sought a truant schoolboy, who would consent to be scolded and brought back to ordinary life again. Small practical difficulties, mostly in connection with his altered appearance, I had anticipated, but these I had intended to deal with as they arose. In a word, I had assumed his willingness, his also, to be the millionth man.
But how if he should refuse with scorn? What was the state of his balance, not in my eyes, but in his? When I had last seen him he had trembled in equilibrium, and to his fluctuations I had off-handedly applied the terms "worse" and "better." But what were such terms to him?... I will do as I did before—try to set it out in parallel columns. Here was a missing man, a man of unusual range and powers, to whose state of poise something had happened. It was this man's daily endeavour to accept nothing at second-hand, to disregard all names, labels, customs, tags, appearances, verdicts, records, precedents. His life was one long probing into the essential nature of things. I might, therefore, expect to find:
The Derwent Rose who had said, when I had offered him the whisky, "No, no—blast it, no—water!"orThe Derwent Rose who might have replied, "Whisky? Well, it has interesting effects sometimes. Somebody once called it a short cut to a psychic experience. If a psychic experience is what you are after, why take the roundabout way? Let's try it."The Derwent Rose who had torn off his collar, but who had also cried, "Good God, man, I'm not bragging of my conquests—don't think I'm not ashamed!"orThe Derwent Rose who might have growled, "Well, what is there extraordinary about that? Perhaps it isn't anything to make a song about, but don't pretend you've never heard of such a thing before. It happens every night, you know."The Derwent Rose who had sat in a hansom with a white satin slipper as openly and innocently as I might have sat to Julia Oliphant for my portrait.orThe Derwent Rose who might have said, "Men are men and women are women. This is also Piccadilly Circus. Look round. Can'tyoufind anything better to do than to hunt for a man who is—not at home to anybody this evening?"The Derwent Rose who loved beauty and hated ugliness.orThe Derwent Rose who cared nothing for the name of anything, destroyed stale and outworn canons of beauty with a laugh, and sought a fresher loveliness in a world where nothing is common or unclean.
But once more I had to give it up. That baffling down of golden beard had obliterated every physical indication. He might be in a church—for an assignation. He might be in a drinking-hell—lost in images of beauty and sweetness and power.
And what kind of aSalle des Pas Perdusis London in which to look for a man like that? The whole thing became an illimitable phantasmagoria of virtue and vice, nobility and degradation, expressed in terms of bricks and stones and buildings and streets. Sitting brooding among his black oak furniture, I tried to envisage even that merest fragment of it all that was being enacted within a quarter of a mile at that moment. Whitfield's Tabernacle—and for all I knew an opium den within a biscuit's toss of it; the Synagogue—and the lady upstairs. I pictured the tenements behind the Shaftesbury with their iron balconies and emergency-ladders; and I saw young lovers in their stalls at the Palace. I saw the bright Hampstead buses, and the masked covertness of the flitting taxis. I heard the slap and thump of beer-pumps, children's simple prayers. Images floated before me of the gloom of cinema-interiors, the green-shaded glow-lamps of orchestras, the rippling of incandescent advertisements, the blackness of the jam factory yard. There were pockets with money in them, money to buy all the world has to sell; and there were pockets empty of the price of a cup of coffee at the back-street barrows. There were hearts with love in them, love as boundless as heaven's blue, and there were hearts from which love had passed, hearts as musty as the graves that waited for them. All but Infinity itself was to be found within a few hundred yards of where I sat.
And flitting uniquely through it all was this man whose privacy was so public, whose publicness was so unutterably private. He might be met at any step, and yet, of all the millions living, there was not one he could call contemporary. For he was the only man in the world who was growing younger instead of older. He of all men alone was passing from experience to innocence, through the murk of his former sins to the perfection of his own maximum and the unimpaired godhead of his prime.
"But you mightn't see him again for another twenty years!" Julia protested, shaking out her napkin and laughing for the sheer bewilderment of it.
I had chosen the small restaurant in Jermyn Street because it had no band to distract us.
"I know all that," I retorted. "But if you think that just sitting there loving him is going to produce him, your way may take even longer than mine."
"Pooh!" she said, breaking her roll. "You're wasting your time."
"Don't be irritating, Julia." It irritated me because it was so true. "It's my time anyway."
"No it isn't, not all of it. What about my sittings?" (There had not yet been any, by the way.) "The canvas is ready as soon as you are."
"I'll grow a beard, and then you won't want to paint me," I replied.
Her eyes had sparkled when I had told her about Derry'sbeard; I had thought she was going to clap her hands. Except for Derry's golden one (she had said) she had never seen a beard that wasn't nasty. I myself (she had informed me) should look a perfect horror in one, and unless I remained clean-shaven she refused to be seen about with me.... So our customary quarrel blew up. We wrangled about one trifle and another half-way through dinner. It probably did us good, for underneath we were both badly on edge. Then along the edge of the table she slid a bent little finger. It was her way of making up. The finger rested in mine for a moment.
"Well," I sighed, "I told you all I saw. I'm afraid that beard threw me quite out of my reckoning."
She mused. "I once drew him with his beard, from memory. In armour. He looked just like King Arthur come to life again. I've got it yet.... But let's look at the thing reasonably, George. I admit there's something to be said for having apied-à-terrein his rooms. He might just possibly turn up there. It might also be—hm!—awkward if he did.... But the rest, all this hunting for him, that's a wash-out. You know it is."
I was silent. Then again I saw in her eyes what I had seen before—the beginning of a soft deep shining, as if some diver's lamp moved beneath the waters at night.
"No, I prefer my way," she said, suddenly sitting straight up.
"Doing nothing at all?"
"Fiddlesticks!I'msupposed to sit and listen respectfully whenyoutalk, butyounever listen to whatI'vegot to say. I told you what my way was. I'll tell you again. I had tea at Daphne Bassett's flat this afternoon."
"I hope you found Puppetty well," I remarked.
The kindling eyes were steadily on mine.
"Puppetty," she said slowly, "is in the greatest favour. Puppetty has wing-portions for dinner and bovril to go to bed with. Puppetty's to have a new quilt for being a good little doggles and protecting his mummie——"
"What on earth——" I began.
Then I sat up as suddenly as if I had been galvanised.
"Julia! You don't mean——?"
She nodded, darkling devils of mischief under that cool smooth brow.
"What, thathe'sstill looking forher?"
"He's found her. He spoke to her a couple of days ago."
"And she recognised him?"
"I didn't say that."
"Didn't she recognise him?"
"Didn't know him from Adam."
"Then how do you know it was he?"
I cannot convey the lightness of her disdain. "How do I know!—--"
I leaned back in my chair. To think that I had not thought of this, the oldest of all stratagems!Guettez la femme!Runaways are caught by it every day, and always will be. They are released from custody and placed under observation so that they may walk straight into the trap. That is why the trick is old—it never fails. And I had not thought of it!
She wore her triumph with such present moderation that I knew I had not heard the last of it.
"Yes," she continued, "she told me all about it. It was on Monday evening, about seven o'clock, and she was coming up the little street by St. James's Church, where the Post Office is. She fancied she'd noticed a man following her, a very big handsome man with a golden beard."
"Is that her description of him?" I interrupted.
"Yes. That's why I wasn't much surprised when you told me about his beard. Then outside the Post Office the outrage happened. He spoke to her. Spoke to her, George. Try to realise it."
"Well, if she'd no idea who he was it wasn't a pleasant thing to have happen."
She gave a soft laugh. "He's very good-looking," she said brazenly.
"Julia, if you were naturally a catty sort of woman——"
"Don't interrupt, George. I am artificially then. If youdon't want to hear go out and look for hansoms. And whatever else you're sententious about don't be sententious about women. Now I've forgotten what I was going to say."
"You said he spoke to her outside the Post Office."
"Behave yourself then. He did speak to her, and she set Puppetty at him."
"What!" I cried.
"Quite so, dear George.Asyou say. Fearfully pleased and excited really. Quite a romance. And of course she'd have given anythingnotto set Puppetty at him."
"Then why in the name of goodness did she?"
Julia gave an exhausted sigh. "If ever you marry, George, heaven help Lady Coverham!... Why did she? Because she had to. She's that sort. They've got to do certain things because that sort does, but theydoso wish they needn't! Virtue's a funny thing. If you don't want that ice may I have it?"
"But look here," I said presently. "If he'd said straight out, as any man in his position would have done, 'I say, I know this is a bit unusual, but my name's Derwent Rose, and there's something I want to explain'—and so on—you see what I mean. Then she'd have known who he was."
"Well, I'm afraid I'm not responsible for what he didn't say."
"What exactly did he say?"
She gave a shrug. "What do men say? They don't stopmeoutside post offices. You never did; if all this hadn't happened I don't suppose I should ever have known you one scrap better. I dare say he was a bit rattled too. Anyway she didn't stop to think. She just set the dog at him, legged it, and she's as pleased as Punch still."
"You're quite sure she didn't recognise him?"
"Oh, quite. She'd tell me in a minute. She'd love to be able to say she'd had Derwent Rose at her feet."
"I suppose so," I sighed. "Did you ask her what aged man this—marauder—looked?"
"What do you think? Of course I did. Doesn't everything turn on that? But she could only tell me, 'Oh, aboutthirty-three or four—thirty-five perhaps.' The very thing we want to know ... but she was in such a hurry to be virtuous...."
Her brow was no longer smooth. Her voice rose a little and then dropped again.
"You see how much turns on which it is—thirty-five or thirty-three. You say he was struggling with himself that night, sweating with funk, wanting to hang on. And yet the moment you turned your back he bolted, and he's riding about with ladies in hansoms."
"Come, my dear!" I protested. "There's nothing in that! All men drive about with women. For that matter I drove you part of the way here."
But she cut me impatiently short.
"Oh, I don't mean that at all! That's nothing to me! I don't care who he takes in hansoms; I've nothing to gain and nothing to lose. I want him to have just whatever he wants. But I told you he knew nothing about women. He's never been in love in his life. Oh, I'm explaining badly, but what I mean is that if you're going to find him by going through London with a dustman's besom and scraper, that's as much as to say that he isn't happy. That's what hurts me. He was miserable at thirty-five before—miserable and ashamed.But the moment he's thirty-three again——"
I watched the long white fingers that tapped softly for a minute on the table before she resumed.
"Thenhe's all right," she said in a low and moved voice. "He was writing theVicaragethen. I saw—oh, quite lots of him. He used to 'blow in,' as he called it, with a 'Hallo, Julia! I'm having rather a devil of a good time these days; writing a book that will make some of 'em sit up and take notice; I've done a quarter of it in three weeks; how's that for a little gentle occupation?' Yes, I saw quite a lot of him at thirty-three. I had a studio near Cremorne Road. It wasn't really a studio, but a sort of gutted top floor, big enough to have given a dance in, and my bed was behind a curtain that was drawn right across one end. I used to give him tea there—Patum Paperium sandwiches he liked—andhe was sweet. Once I'd an illustration to do for some stupid story or other, about a sort of Sandow-and-Hackenschmidt all rolled into one, and do you know what he did? He looked at my drawing, took it to the window, and then laughed. 'I say, Julia, this will never do!' he said. 'When a man lifts a heavy thing like that he does itfrom the earth, you understand—you do everything that's worth doing from the earth. So you've got to see his feet are right. Anybody likely to come in here? No? Right; I don't mind you. Got anything heavy here? You get your paper and pencil.' And he stripped to the belt and picked up my sewing-machine and posed for me. He did...."
I seemed to see the scene in bright illumination, him in that upper room with the curtains drawn across one end, his jacket and shirt tossed on to a chair, his great torso stripped to the buff, the sewing-machine held aloft. She would be at her board or easel, sketching—pretending to sketch—I don't know what. He had merely said, "Anybody likely to come in? No? Right! I don't mind you!"
It was true. He hadn't minded her. Otherwise he would never have displayed himself so gloriously before her eyes.
"Did that illustration ever appear?" I asked without looking at her.
I knew without looking that she smiled as she shook her head.
"Not that one. You know it didn't. The first one was good enough for them."
And she still had the King Arthur sketch too.
"And that was when he was thirty-three?"
Now that she was off there was no stopping her, even had I wished it.
"Yes. Did you know—will you believe—that he wrote hisVicaragein just over three months?"
"He was a furious worker."
"That's just where you're wrong, George," she said eagerly. "At that time at any rate. He was as cool as this ice. He just digested those gigantic masses of information, and then, except for the trouble of writing it down, he never turned a hair. I'll tell you the things that did make him furious; those were his rottenest short stories, the things he used to have to do to pay his rent. He always knew they were the wrong sort of rottenness. Any kind of rottenness won't do for the public. You've got to be rotten in quite a specialised way."
"Thank you."
"But the bigger a thing was the easier he always found it. He used to say that if a thing was hard work there was something wrong somewhere. Why, he'd take whole days off when he was at his very busiest. He came into my place one morning—the same place, Cremorne Road—before half-past eight. I was just finishing breakfast; I hadn't done my hair; if you must know, I was rather a sloven at that time. He was in his breeches and cap and a soft collar. 'Down tools, Julia,' he said; 'we're off into the country for the day.' 'But, Derry, your book!' I said, rather aghast (he'd told me a day or two before that theVicaragewas a race against time or else bankruptcy for him in the autumn). 'Oh, that's all right; it's finished as far as I'm concerned; the pen'll do the rest; come along just as you are.' So I put my hair up, and we went to Chalfont, and got horribly midge-bitten, and there was an old man playing the harp outside a little public-house where we had tea, and I remember Derry jumped over a five-barred gate with his stick in his hand and his pipe in his mouth...."
She remembered every detail. I don't think she had ever once seen him but she remembered what he had on, how he had looked, what he had talked about. These were the still depths I spoke of, of which the rest was no more than the salt spray surface. I might be hanging about Cambridge Circus on the off-chance of his coming for a paper or a bookor something; but I believe that in her heart something was already rekindling, and that she was even then waiting to receive him again in that upper room off Cremorne Road.
"Well," she said at last, "this is all very well, but it isn't getting us much forrader. Of course he may be thirty-five still. In that case I suppose you'll carry on as you are doing. But let's suppose for a moment he's back at thirty-three. I'm afraid that'll mean a good deal of work for you, George. You've got to start on an entirely new set of places. Let me see, what year would that be? Yes, 1908. Where was he mostly in 1908?"
"In your studio apparently."
"Oh, he was never there very much really. I dare say he only came at all because it was near and he'd drawn a blank somewhere else; he lived in Paulton's Square, you know. No, you'd have to look for him in the British Museum Reading Room, or the lobby of the House of Commons, or wherever the Blue Books are kept, or some other place where he'd be digging out all that terribleVicaragestuff. Or if it happened to be a Thursday night you might try the Eyre Arms; he used to go up there to the Belsize Boxing Club. Cheer up, George. I'm only showing you what you've let yourself in for."
"Well, it's no good looking for him in the fourth dimension. He's got to be in some sort of a place. And I admit that I was a fool, and that you found him simply by sitting in Mrs Bassett's pocket."
"I didn't do that at all," she remarked composedly.
"Then I'm afraid I haven't understood you."
"Then let me tell you. I didn't sit in Daphne Bassett's pocket. I sat in Daphne Wade's."
I stared at her. Was she suggesting that while she herself had loved him since childhood, he for his part had loved Daphne Wade?
"Surely you're wrong there. If there was ever anything between her and him I'm no judge of men."
"There may not have 'been anything.' But there was everything for all that," she replied.
"That's merely enigmatic. Never mind 'everything.' Tell me what thing."
"All his dreams and ideals when he was a boy," she answered promptly. "Isn't that everything in a man like him—the everything he's on his way back to?"
"But he never loved her in the least, nor she him, as far as I'm aware."
"That I shallneverforgive her.... Don't you know yet why he never knew anything about real women? It was simply because he was too wrapped up in his dreams. He was so full of them that he couldn't see anything truly for them. And now I'm afraid I'm going to dispel one of your most cherished illusions, George. Do you know why his dreams all settled on Daphne Wade? Oh, it had nothing to do with loving her!... It was simply because she had that coloured hair. Itwasrather like an aureole when she was a child. And her eyeswereblue. In fact she'd all the conventional angelic appliances except the wings, and he supplied those. She'd nothing whatever else—little fool."
I frowned. Certainly she was entitled to speak of those early days towards which his face was once more set, since she had known him then, and I had not.
"Have some more coffee," I said. "I want to think this over."
But she only laughed softly.
"Oh, you needn't. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by simply taking my word for it. In any case it's getting on for thirty years ago. Oh, don't I just remember!... I was nine and he was fourteen; I was ten and he was fifteen; I was eleven and he was sixteen. She's just a year older than I am. Our pew was half-way down the church, but she sat up one of the aisles, right under a stained-glass window there was. It used to make that light on her hair. My hair was the wrong colour—I knew it then—just a dark mop—but anyway it was full of life. It would still have been dark, of course, even if I'd sat under the window instead of her, but I've sometimes thought it might have made a difference. Then there was all the rest; Dicksee's 'Harmony' sort of effect; all so cool and dim and saintly; and the organ and the Psalms.That'swhat filled his head, and I honestly believe that unless women are just animals to him he sees them like that still—just about as much flesh and blood as that window was. All she had to do was to have that hair and those eyes and to sit in the vicarage pew. Things are made very simple for some women."
A long silence fell between us. Evidently she was back in that church, an adoring wrong-coloured-haired girl of eleven, shifting in her seat to see, past intervening bonnets and bald heads, Derry's browny-gold crown, while he watched Daffy Wade and the window.
"But," I said at last, "aren't you rather anticipating? I thought we'd settled he was thirty-five or thirty-three. That's making him sixteen already."
She rose abruptly.
"George, do you realise that we're the last people here and that they've turned half the lights out?" Then, drawing forward her furs from the back of her chair, "It isn't making him anything of the sort. You're more than thirty-five; but you sometimesrememberwhat you were at sixteen, don't you?... Come and put me into my Tube and off you go to bed. Who knows?—he might 'blow in' to Cambridge Circus——"
"You sometimes remember what you were at sixteen!"
I wondered, as I walked slowly up Shaftesbury Avenue that night, whether she realised what she had said. I hoped not. I prayed not; because her words seemed to me to murder her own cherished hope—that he was safely past that turbulent phase and back at thirty-three again.
For that poignancy of remembrance, I am glad to think, is more frequently a man's than a woman's. It is the man who, slipping away, away from his youth and innocence, down, down, slip after slip into the mire of life, lifts his red and weeping eyes to what he used to be. And when does that vision shine most agonisingly fair? Not in the hours of his philosophy, when nothing unduly elates him andnothing too much casts him down, but when he is in the slough as deep as he can get. Oh, I know it, for I have sinned myself, have myself wept, for that impossible heart-break—to be as I once was. And if Julia was right, and he was not seeking Mrs Bassett at all, nor even Daphne Wade, but merely his remembered self at sixteen, then he wasnotthirty-three at all. He hadnotyet passed beyond that phase he had dreaded to re-live. He was still in the mud, to have had that tear-blurred vision; still a sinful man of thirty-five who remembered the morning star.
Well, Julia must not know that. This dark corollary was for my shouldering, not hers. And as I resolved to keep it from her I wondered at the marvel her own inner life had been.
For nearly thirty years it had consisted of Derwent Rose and of nothing whatever else! None would have guessed it, none but I knew it, nothing but Derry's unprecedented adventure would have dragged it from her. She was a busy painter, of but moderate talent, and with her living to earn. She could purr when she was pleased, but had claws ready to scratch with as well. And, deep and unguessed behind it all, lay the story of those Sussex fields and lanes, of that dreaming and ecstatic and unheeding boy, of that same boy, grown-up and still unheeding, who had stalked in and out of her studio, borne her off to Chalfont, held aloft her sewing-machine. It seemed to me that her case was little less extraordinary than his. I saw her as a woman who had never grown. She was as she had always been, her life stultified with beauty, a poised and arrested development of love.
And, unless I was mistaken, she had hardly sought to conceal her joy that, as it had been, so it was to be again.
For he was journeying back to a place that in this sense she had never left; and so he was journeying back to her. What though he had never loved her? At any rate she was now rid of her last living rival. That had been put to the test when Daphne Bassett had failed to recognise the man who had spoken to her outside the Post Office in St. James's.She would recognise him less and less as time went on. As for him, he would merely go deeper and deeper into the heart of his inconceivable solitude, and there, in the last and the centre of it, he would find Julia Oliphant waiting for him—waiting for her always loved and lordly boy of sixteen.
But how much must happen before then! For the first time I envisaged it in its heartbreaking beauty. Lovely, apparently inevitable the close ... but the way there? What, steeling her heart, must she see before that meeting?
She must see a man whose last kiss was his first one, who unlived a thousand adventures to become virgin in the end. She must see a man living so unutterably long that he lived to write his first poem again. She would see a man who had fought through a war of flame and poison puckering his smooth brows over his first percussion-cap pistol. She would see the dust of his athletic laurels stir, reassemble, bloom anew. She would see the miracle of youth synthesised, the grail of his purity mystically reappear. Not even Joshua saw what those liquid and already tired brown eyes of hers must see—the sun of a man's life pause at noon, swing contrary to its orbit, and move back to set where it rose.
And all at once there came over me a whelming of passionate emotion for this woman so singled out. It was the emotion one feels over an infant whose eyes open for the first time on the world—compassion and ache and hapless tenderness and hope for the best. Would she be able to bear her destiny? Would she, had such a thing been possible, have elected never to have been born rather than bear it? Could I help her? If things should unfold as they were well in motion to unfold, could any power on earth help her?
I began to suspect that, unless she renounced him once for all, and that quickly, no power on earth would be able to help her.
I don't know why I did not pack up my things and go back to Haslemere. I no longer pretended to be looking forDerwent Rose in London, and I had not given one single sitting for my portrait. Yet, though I could not help Julia, I felt myself unable to leave her. If I did not see her for an evening I was disturbed, lost what to do with myself. Several of these evenings came, and still I lingered on.
Then, I think on the fourth evening after I had given Julia dinner in Jermyn Street, the history of Derwent Rose moved forward—or backward—once more.
I had thought of looking up Madge Aird that evening, but at the last moment had changed my mind. I did not feel up to Madge's liveliness. So I hung round that now so-drearily-familiar neighbourhood instead—the neighbourhood between Leicester Square Tube Station and Tottenham Court Road. I walked till I was tired, and then, more for the sake of sitting down than for any other reason, I entered a picture-house on the west side of Shaftesbury Avenue. I did not choose that one in particular. It was just like any other picture-house except that it had a small organ built into the wall high up in one corner. This organ was ceasing to play as I entered. The principal drama of the programme was just over.
As it chanced, I had arrived just in time for one of those rather curious effects that are obtained when the film is put through the machine extremely slowly. You know the kind I mean. A racehorse in full career picks up and puts down his legs as if they were fronds of seaweed moving lazily in water; a golf-ball trickles uncannily across the green, rising and falling idly over each minute obstacle, and then floats gently down into the hole. In spite of my languor I found myself interested in these analyses of motion. It is curious to see instantaneousness taking its time over a thing like that.
Then that series also finished, and I felt in my pocket for my cigarette case. As I drew out a cigarette and struck a match somebody behind me leaned forward and touched me lightly on the shoulder.
"I say, isn't your name Coverham?" a man's voice said.
The match was still in my fingers. I looked over my shoulder in the light of it. Then I dropped the match.
I had not found him. He had found me. It was Derwent Rose.