He was not far from the end of the row, and in reaching him I had not to disturb more than three or four people. Though it is inadequate, I have decided that the single word that best expresses the way in which he spoke is the word "careful." He spoke slowly, and, it seemed to me, with extreme care.
"Interesting idea that last, isn't it? Restful. Things go at such a deuce of a rate nowadays that it's a comfort to see anything slow. Well, how are you, George? I haven't seen you for—some little time."
It was precisely three weeks since he had last seen me, and I noted that slight, that very slight hesitation before his last words.
"Do you often come here? I—I rather keep away from these places myself; they put everything through much too quickly; but I rather like this one because of the organ. Of course they only play 'effects'—'Ora Pro Nobis' and the 'Wedding March'—but there's something about an organ.... I say, George," he said a little uncomfortably, "I've a sort of feeling I owe you an apology."
"Well, this is hardly the place for it. We can't talk here. If you've seen all you want suppose we go outside?"
The thing I wanted first of all was to have a good look at him. Already I could see that he no longer had a beard. But my surreptitious glance at him as we passed out into the lighted vestibule and past the box-office told me little. On the pavement of Shaftesbury Avenue he slipped his arm into mine.
"Yes, I fancy I talked an awful lot of rubbish that night—bit of an ass of myself—you remember——"
I did not reply. The important thing was, not whether Iremembered, but whether his memory was all that it should have been, for he was forgetting something even as he spoke. He remembered that other night, he had remembered my name; but if he remembered that he had rooms and belongings in Cambridge Circus he was very deliberately turning down Shaftesbury Avenue instead of up it. But I went where he led me. I was resolved, however, that the moment his arm left mine, mine should go into his. I was not going to let him disappear again.
The typical Soho mixture thronged the pavements: Hebrew physiognomies, Italian, Greek; dark chins, bold eyes, bold noses; rings and scarfpins, fancy socks, the double-heeled silk stockings of women. As I could not very well scrutinise his face at that short range I did the next best thing; I watched the faces that advanced towards us. As if he had been a pretty woman, so heads turned as he passed. They turned as they turn for Billy Wells. It was not so much his size and proportions as his whole personal aura. He stood out among all that flashy cosmopolitanism as if a special and inherent light attended him.
"Which way are we going? Where do you live?" I suddenly asked him. It was not the question I was burning to ask him. That question was, "Whendo you live?" I felt the slight movement of the muscles under his sleeve, but he answered steadily enough—carefully enough.
"Oh, I've been rather lucky about that," he said. "I happened to be in the wine-bar of an hotel in Gloucester Road one night, and I got talking to a fellow. I fancied I'd come across him somewhere in France—as a matter of fact I had, though he didn't remember me. Anyway, we'd started talking, and we went on. Rather an amusing crowd there, George. If I were asked to put in one word the basic domestic factor of their lives, do you know what it would be? A pint of methylated spirits. They don't pay half a crown for it at the chemist's; they pay one-and-twopence at the oilshop. To boil their kettles, of course. They all fought, they're all gentlemen, and they're all doing damn-all to make a living. So they take garrets and rooms over garages, andcook their breakfasts with methylated spirits. This fellow was called Trenchard. Got all messed up at the Brick Stacks, La Bassée way. He had to go out of town for a month, and said I could have his place for the bare rent, twenty-five bob a week, and the use of his furniture for nothing. So that's where I am. This way——"
We turned into Leicester Square Tube Station.
In the train I sat opposite to him; and, now that he had taken his beard off, I couldn't see that he had changed very remarkably in outward appearance after all. Nevertheless I distrusted my own impression. I knew that I was full of pre-conceptions about him, knew too much of his astonishing case to observe impartially and reliably. There are some things—some scents for example—that you have to make up your mind immediately about or else to remain in indecision. The longer you delay the less sure you become. So I found it with his face in the electric-lighted Tube. It was, of course, astoundingly young for a man in the middle forties; but call him thirty-five and much of the wonder disappeared. The most that a casual acquaintance would have been likely to remark was, "How the deuce does Rose manage to keep so extraordinarily young-looking?" True, his friend Trenchard had failed to recognise the man with whom he had fought at La Bassée, but that meant little. There were millions of men in France, each the spit of the rest for mud and momentariness of acquaintance. To-day, by mere association of times and places and battles, these men are in fact resuming acquaintances they have no recollection of ever having begun. "Oh, I've a rotten memory for faces—seen So-and-so lately? And I say, do you know anybody who wants to take a quiet place for a month?" That, no doubt, had been the substance of that conversation in the Gloucester Road wine-bar.... And there was another thing of which I shall have more to say by and by. I began to suspect that whatever strange element in Derwent Rose had brought him to this pass, that element reacted on those of us who knew his secret. He probably became less extraordinary in our eyes as contemplation of him made usnot quite ordinary ourselves. Julia Oliphant (it seemed to me) he had already influenced, constrained, isolated. We were getting used to him. But I shall return to this.
In the meantime I was considerably cheered. He remembered that other night; he wanted to apologise for the lunacy of it; he had given a perfectly coherent account of his present whereabouts and how he came to be there, and his summing-up of the fellows whose basic domestic factor was a pint of methylated spirits had given me a clear and straightforward picture. As for the rest—why he had left Cambridge Circus, what it was that he found restful in those slowed-down films, and especially the measured carefulness of his speech—for the present these things could wait.
We left Gloucester Road Station, turned up towards Princes Gate, and then crossed the road and entered a dark gardened Square. Three minutes further walking brought us to a high stone archway with a heavily carved and moulded entablature, beneath which a cobbled way sloped slightly down into a mews. To right and left were garage-doors, some closed, others open and flinging shafts of orange light across the way. Somewhere an engine was being allowed to "race"; somewhere else a hose was being turned on to the body of a car. High over the roofs of the mews, as if suspended at random in the sky, the oblongs of light of the South Kensington backs showed. One unshaded incandescent burned on a top landing like a star.
"Let me go first; I've got a torch," said Derry, stopping at a narrow side-door next to where the car was being washed. "You'll find the rope on the right."
The moon of his electric torch shone on the broad treads of a steep-pitched ladder that rose to a loft above. Up one side of it ran a hand-rope. He preceded me, and on the upper landing lighted a wire-caged gas-jet. Then I followed him into Trenchard's abode.
He had described the place admirably well when he had spoken of the methylated spirits, adding that Trenchard was a gentleman. A few pieces of furniture—notably a tall walnut hanging-cupboard and a handsome lacquered cabinet—were evidently family possessions; the rest—his cretonne curtains, floor-mats, the blue-and-white check tablecloth on the thick-legged Victorian table and the glimpse into his kitchen—probably represented the greater part of his gratuity-money. Every ledge and angle and cheap bracket was crowded with photographs, and there were trees in his long row of boots. His central incandescent mantle was unshaded. Two deep basket chairs stood one on either side of where the hearth should have been. The portable oil-burning stove was tucked away in a corner.
"You soon get used to the noises," said Rose with a downward nod of his head. "I scarcely hear 'em now.—Lemonade? It's bottled, but not bad; tastes of lemons anyway. There's a siphon behind you there."
He put me into one of the basket chairs and himself took the other. Then, without the least warning, but still with that marked effort at steadiness and care, he said:
"Well, what price the world-political state, George? Not home-politics, but the whole thing—democracy—civilisation if you like——"
If he had asked me what I thought of the theory of relativity I should have been readier with an answer. As it was I looked askance at him and asked him what made him so suddenly ask me that.
"Oh, same old reason," he replied. "I expect it's a subject I shall have to tackle. In a book. I wonder if it's too big! It pulls me enormously. I don't know whether we're in for a general smash-up or not. Sometimes I've the feeling we are."
Something within me, I don't know what, warned me that here it might be well to be as careful as he. The safest thing to do appeared to be to let him run on, and I did so.
"Yes," he continued, his fine smooth brow gathered in thought, "I know it's enormous; perhaps too staggering altogether for one man. But do you know," he laughed a little as if at himself, "I wonder whether itisso enormous after all! There might be quite a simple idea underlying it, I mean. What's more enormous than human nature? Yetevery wretched little novelist tackles that every time he writes a book. It all depends on how much you see in a thing. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't as soon tackle one day of the whole world's life as one single hour of a human being's heart."
I spoke warily. "You haven't tackled it yet?"
He hesitated. "N—o," he said slowly. Then, quickening a little, "The fact is, George, a job like that would have to be rather specially approached. I mean unless you were at the very top of your form you'd be bound to come a cropper. No good starting a thing till you know your tools are sharp—in this case your faculties. I'm—I'm sharpening myself now, if you know what I mean."
At this point I became incautious. I ceased to listen to the voice that warned me too to be careful.
"Well, that's what I want to ask you," I said. "I want to know what you're doing here and why you left Cambridge Circus like that."
I was instantly sorry I had said it. Just as wrestlers on a mat lie locked, with little apparent movement, yet in the fiercest intensity of prolonged strain, so I felt that something struggled in him. I heard it in his voice, I saw it in the boyish grey-blue eyes that sought mine.
"Don't, please, old fellow," he pleaded anxiously. "If you mean the rot I talked that other night, I apologise now once for all. I've been hoping for months and mon—for a long time, I mean, that I might run across you. You're so magnificently steady. That other place stopped being steady.... This is the place to write that book. I want to write it. I've never wanted anything so much. It would be onVicaragelines, I suppose, but oh—immensely bigger! Freedom, scope! TheVicaragewas well enough in its way, but fussy and niggly and scratchy. I can do this largely, grandly—Iknowso much more, you see—and as long as I don't take any risks——"
Then, in spite of his own last words, he swung suddenly round, and the youthful grey-blue eyes were all a-sparkle. They sparkled with daring, as if, though a risk was a risk,there was sometimes prudence in taking it. The wicker of his chair began to creak under the working of his hand.
"One little talk can't make much difference," he muttered. "Do me good probably—magnificently steady——" Then he flashed brightly round on me—an artist at the height of his power confronting a stupendous and magnificent task.
"You see, don't you, George? You see how I'm placed, don't you?" he demanded.
"Not very clearly."
"Then I'll tell you. Iwantto write this book. I want to write it as Cheops made his Pyramid, as Moses made his Decalogue—to last for ever. If I can't write it no living man can. Why? Because no living man combines in himself what I combine—the ripest and fullest store of knowledge and experience and all the irresistible recklessness and belief of youth at the same time. Here I stand, between the two, and if I can only stay so I shall write—I shall write—oh, such a book as never was dreamed of! So I've got to stand still just where I am now. I haven't got to budge from thirty-three—that, as nearly as I can tell from myself, is the age I am now. You see——"
Uneasily I began to wish myself elsewhere. I knew that I began to be afraid in his presence; it is an eerie thing to hear a man deliberately proposing to manipulate his age. The man down below continued to wash the car; I heard the clank of his bucket, the rushing of his hose.
"Thirty-three," he continued, his eyes still glittering with the excitement of it. "If I can only stay so for six months nothing matters after that! God, just for six months!... But it's not so easy as it sounds, George. You've got to be on the watch every moment. As long as you're moving the thing's simple enough; it's when you try to stop that it's like trying to stand still on a bicycle. Wait, I'll show you. Push that table over. And if you don't mind I'll turn down the gas."
It was not the heavy-legged Victorian table he wanted me to push over, but the one on which our glasses of lemonade stood, a flimsy affair of bamboo and wicker, hardly morethan eighteen inches square. He rose, turned the yellow incandescent down to a glimmer, drew the table up before us, and brought the electric torch from his pocket. He began to speak with very much more volubility, very much less care.
"The line of that table-edge is what I want you to keep your mind on," he began. "Never mind any other dimension. You'll get the idea presently. I want you to imagine that edge a scale of years, with the higher numbers at your end and the lower ones at mine. You're to imagine that, and then you're to imagine that this lamp's my mind, me, my faculties, whatever you like to call it. You'll get on to it presently. Now watch."
The torch was not of the stick-pattern, but of the flask type with a wider angle. In the middle of the table's edge he made a minute notch with his nail. A foot or so of the split-bamboo edge was illuminated, with this notch in the middle of it.
"Now," he said. "You see that notch I've made. That's my present age—thirty-three—dead in the middle of the lighted portion. Now let's start. First of all I've got two memories. I've got one in each direction. I'm the only man who has. And this part of the edge that the torch lights up is my total range both ways. Now watch me move the torch. If I move it your way"—he did so—"I get more of memory 'A' ('A' for Age) and less of memory 'B' ('B' for Boyhood). And if I move it my way"—he moved it his way—"I get less of 'A' and more of 'B.' See?"
I saw. I began to wish I didn't.
"Very well," he went on. "Obviously it's for me to decide where I want to stop, and then—to do so if I can. And now the bother begins. If—that—scale—could be numbered properly"—he divided the words as I have divided them, and I felt cold at the intensity of his emphasis—"if it could be divided as I want it divided, with thirty-three dead in the middle—then forty-five would comehere." He crossed his left hand over the one that held the torch, as a pianist picks out a single treble note, and dug another nick at my end ofthe illuminated portion. "Now," he continued, "let's see what the figure would be at my end. Forty-five less thirty-three is twelve, and twelve from thirty-three's twenty-one. It would be twenty-one." He registered another notch, this time at his own end. "But"—swiftly he slid the torch his way—"twenty-one's no good to me at all. No more good than a sick headache. I've got to be younger than that. You see what I've got to do. I've got to combine the two maximum phases of myself if I'm to write that book. But at the same time I've got to write it when Ididwrite that kind of thing before. What does that mean? Where's a bit of paper?"
He set the torch down on the table, where it made a vivid flat parabola of light, and took an envelope from his pocket. In the semi-darkness he began to jot down figures.
"Here you are. Just a few specimen numbers for trial and error. I'm assuming that the scale's capable of regular division, which it isn't, for many reasons; but let's take it in its simplest form.
16:33:50—21:33:45—30:33:36
We needn't bother about the last one; I only put it in to show that thirty-three's got to come in the middle by hook or by crook. Now do you see what I'm up against? Imusthave sixteen at one end, Imusthave forty-five at the other, and Imustif possible have thirty-three in the middle, because if I don't write this as I wroteThe Vicarage of Bray, only infinitely more so, I shan't write it at all. But thirty-three's a false middle. Thirty's the true middle, and thirty's perfectly useless to me. I was doing quite other things when I was thirty before.... But as matters stand, if I'm thirty-three I can only remember forty-five and twenty-one. If I'm thirty-three and remember sixteen, which is what I'm after, then ... God knows what would happen at your end; I should have to remember fifty, I suppose, and I've never been fifty to remember. So something's wrong, and I'm trying to fake it."
"Derry!" I choked. "For the love of God turn up that light!"
"Eh? Certainly. Then I can show you my diagrams. This is all elementary stuff, but I thought it would give you a faint idea of the problem. Now the most important factor of all——"
But I didn't want to see the hideous thing in diagram form. It even added to my horror that he didn't seem to see it as hideous at all. He was perplexed, impatient, angry even, but for the rest he had approached his problem as methodically and dispassionately as if he had merely been taking the reading of his gas-meter. Just so in the past he had approached that sufficiently-enormous work,The Vicarage of Bray—and in the intervals had taken Julia Oliphant to Chalfont, jumped five-barred gates, and had posed for her, stripped to the waist with her sewing-machine held above his head.
He had turned up the gas again, and was hunting in a corner—for his diagrams, I supposed. Suddenly I rose, crossed over to him, and put my hand on his shoulder.
"Leave it alone, old man," I said in a shocked voice. "I don't want to see them. I won't look at them. I'm too afraid. Give that book up now. We aren't meant to write books of that kind. Give it up, clear out of here, and let's go away together somewhere."
I don't think I altered his resolution in the least. He merely patted my shoulder, humouring me.
"Oh, we'll start it anyway, George. Once I get fairly going I don't mind taking a day or two or a week off with you. I always enjoyed stealing a few days when I was busiest. No, the thing's got hold of me, and it will have to run its course, like measles. I may possibly be able to split the difference between thirty and thirty-three. I'm doing my very utmost."
"How?"
It seemed to me that he became evasive. "Oh—just little dodges——"
"Like watching slowed-down pictures?"
He became still more evasive. "If I hadn't spoken to you to-night you'd never have seen me, you know," he reproached me.
"I've been looking for you though. And I did see you once."
"Where was that?" he asked quickly.
"In a hansom, in Piccadilly Circus."
He winced. "Don't, George," he begged me.
"And you weren't alone."
"George—I say, George—you see how I'm trying to keep steady. Must you throw me all over the shop again like this?"
But somehow I was no longer afraid of him. It seemed to me that it might be no ill thing to anger him. Anger was at least a more human feeling than those hideous speculations of his.
"What have you been doing since you left Cambridge Circus?" I demanded.
My plan looked like working. He confronted me.
"And what's that got to do with you?" he said.
"I think I could tell you what you've been doing. Naturally I shan't."
He looked coldly down on me. "No," he said slowly, "I don't think I would if I were you.... And if you've seen me, I've seen you too," he added menacingly.
"Before to-night?"
"Yes, before to-night."
"Where was that?"
There was contempt in his tone. "Oh, nowhere discreditable. You're too magnificently steady for that."
I cannot tell you why we were standing together in one corner of the room, body to body, with all the rest of the room empty. I only know that I was not afraid of him, and that my intention to provoke him was now fixed. Quite apart from those inhuman figures and graphs, this book that he was contemplating approached—I will risk saying it—the impious.
"Well, where was it?" I asked again.
His eyes were unwinkingly on mine. "You were coming out of my place, if you must know. And I imagine my place is still mine. Since we're friends, I haven't asked you what you were doing there."
"Then I'll tell you without asking. I've been staying there, on the chance of your coming back for something you'd forgotten. I've got your key in my pocket now, and I'm going back there to-night."
He muttered, his eyes now removed from mine. "Damned good guess. I did come back. But I saw you across the road and turned away again."
"What did you come back for?"
"That Gland book. But I got a copy somewhere else."
"I hope you found it useful."
Then, all in a moment, the thing for which I was longing happened. He broke down completely. Instead of a man trying to maintain an insane tight-rope-balance on an indeterminable moment of time, there pitched against me, crushing me against the wall and bringing down a shower of Trenchard's photographs, a man who could be met on common ground of normal experience. His arms were folded over his face. I heard his groan within them.
"Lord have mercy upon me!... I oughtn't to have talked—I oughtn't to have talked ... all unsettled again ... but Ican'tlet sixteen go ... perhaps it won't let me go...."
"For heaven's sake forget that nightmare!"
But he mumbled despairingly on. "Shall have to be thirty ... no way out of it ... why did I let myself talk!... Give us a hand, there's a good fellow——"
I got him into his chair again. I soothed him. I talked to him as if he had been a child. I told him he should be whatever age he wished, should write any kind of book he pleased, should come abroad with me. Then for a minute or so he seemed to go to sleep. I watched him. The sounds of car-washing had ceased, up the yard somebody whistled, and I heard a voice call "Good night." Past Trenchard's cretonne curtains that star of an incandescent on the upperlanding went suddenly out. It must have been half-past eleven. A more peaceful beauty stole over and possessed his face.
But he was not asleep. He opened his eyes. He smiled faintly at me.
"Well, George——" he said with a heavy sigh.
Then he told me the history of his past three weeks.
Of his past three weeks or his past two or three years, whichever you like; for it was both. And now that he was in comparative peace I wished to spare him questions. That illustration with the flash-lamp on the table's edge had scared me half out of my wits; and if the determination of "ratios" or what not meant much of that kind of thing, for the present we were as well without them.
He had gone back to the point where, returning that afternoon to Cambridge Circus to fetch a book, he had seen me coming out of his house and had turned tail again.
"The Gland book, you said?" I asked. "But I thought you'd decided that that road led nowhere."
"So I had," he replied, "but in the meantime I'd seen a doctor."
"Ah! You've seen a doctor? When was that?"
"Not quite a fortnight ago. I'd been in here just two days; I've now been fourteen in all; I've got every day and hour down in my diary; as you may imagine, I've studied myself with the greatest care and tried all sorts of things by way of experiment. I simply must know how much is exact repetition, and if it isn't where the variations come in, you see. But it all ends the same way. There's always an unaccountable 'x' that's constantly shifting, I suppose," he sighed.
"But tell me about the doctor. I thought you'd decided that this was quite out of their line."
"So I had, and so it is," he replied promptly. "I didn't go to a doctor to ask him to cure me."
"Then why——?"
"Well, I'd several reasons. One was that I'd met this man just once before, and for that reason alone he was part of my investigations. So far I'd experimented on people who'd met me twice, or three or four times before. I'm still experimenting, but at present the result seems to be that the better people know me the less they recognise me, and those who only knew me slightly take me for granted, I suppose."
"And did this doctor recognise you?"
"Well—there you are. I simply couldn't tell. I waited for him in the full light of a window; I gave him every chance; but—well, I'd had to send my name up, and he was expecting me, you see. He simply said 'How d'you do, Mr Rose' and shook hands. Probably he never looked at me. He knew that Mr Rose was waiting, and therefore the person who was waiting must be Mr Rose."
"So that was a wash-out. What else did you want to see him about?"
"Next, I wanted to be thoroughly vetted—as a man of thirty-three, you understand. It's all very well looking young, but you want to know whether you're really as young inside as you look. So I told him some sort of a yarn about an insurance policy and wanting to be overhauled for my own satisfaction before going to the company's doctor. So he asked me my age—thirty-three, I said—and ran all over me; and he was good enough to say that I was a very fine man and needn't worry about not being passed as a first-class life."
"And then?"
"Then I told him another cock-and-bull story. It was as an author that he'd met me before, you see, so I told him I was writing some fantastic sort of a book, and wanted one or two medical facts right. I had to go rather carefully here, of course, but I gave him, as nearly as I dared, an outline of what had happened, and asked him what about it."
"And what did he say?"
"He saw nothing very extraordinary in it," said Derwent Rose.
I jumped half out of my chair. "What!What madman was this?"
Then I saw the faint flicker of his smile, and sat down again.
"Quite a distinguished madman, George; incidentally he's a Knight.... But I don't want to pull your leg, old fellow. He didn't put it quite that way. What he actually did say was that the more a man studied these things the less he would swear that anything was an impossibility. And he's a remarkable man, mind you. I've not much use for the average doctor, but this fellow's big enough to use plain English and when he doesn't know a thing to say so. His knowledge isn't just how to conceal his ignorance. And he might have been a novelist himself from the way he instantly grasped what I wanted to know."
Not an impossibility!... I couldn't have spoken. I waited enthralled. Derry continued.
"So he began to talk about the ductless glands. Not just the thyroid. Everybody's got thyroid on the brain nowadays, but the thyroid's only one of them. There are a dozen others. And then he told me that practically nothing was known about them."
As I hadn't the faintest idea what a ductless gland was I continued silent.
"'Well, Mr Rose,' he said at last, 'if you want something of that sort to happen to one of your characters I should put him through the War and let him get a bash over the pineal gland.'
"'Where's that situated?' I asked.
"'Here,' he said."
And Rose tapped the middle of the back of his head with his forefinger.
"'And what would the effect of that be?' I asked; and he laughed.
"'Heaven above knows. You can say whatever you like. It might be anything.'
"'Would it account for actual morphological changes of tissue?' I asked.
"'I wouldn't say it wouldn't; that would depend on the changes; but I should be very pleased to look through those portions of your proofs, Mr Rose,' he said....
"So that was that. I went straight off to Cambridge Circus to get the Blair-Bell book, but, as I say, I saw you across the road, so I got the book somewhere else."
"The pineal gland!" I murmured, dazed.
"Yes. One name for it's The Third Eye. Don't ask me to explain it. But if I understand my doctor-man the idea's something like this: There are these degenerated organs that man in his present stage of development has outgrown. A lizard's got what they call The Third Eye, and so has a lamprey, and lots of creatures. And the whole thing's the wildest nightmare imaginable. Takes you right back to fecund mud and the first seminal atom. One fellow, I forget his name, has a most hair-raising theory. He says that what they call the 'ancestral type' lived in the sea, rolling about like a log I suppose—anyway it doesn't seem to have mattered whether he was upside-down or not. So its back and front were both alike. But as time went on it was more often one way up than another, and the creature began to adapt itself. It grew new eyes where it found them most convenient and stopped using the old one. Very likely the old one's the pineal gland. Or words to that effect.... So if you're now a 'bilaterally symmetrical animal with forward progression,' and your front's where you back used to be, and anything goes wrong, you're a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways, with two memories like me and all the rest of it.... And a whole philosophy's been built up on it. Roughly, a man's spirit and matter interpenetrate throughout every particle of him so that there's no dividing them—everywhere except in one place. There they exist independently and side by side. All the mystery of life and death's supposed to be located there. And that place is the pineal gland."
Remember, please, that this conversation took place, not in Bedlam, but in South Kensington. We were sitting in a commonplace loft over a garage, on ordinary chairs, with twohalf-emptied glasses of everyday lemonade before us. A gas-jet in an incandescent mantle hung from the ceiling, and in the neighbouring houses average people were beginning to think of their accustomed beds. They had pineal glands too, and might "get a bash over them," or fall downstairs, or collide with something, or meet with a street accident. Would they, respectable ratepayers of South Kensington, revert to that dim time before the waters were divided from the dry land, when they had rolled about like logs, slumbering and amorphous and unspecialised types, creation's first blind gropings towards the glory that at present is man? Would they develop an "A" memory and a "B"? Would these "bilaterally symmetrical animals with forward progression" resuscitate that degenerated Third Eye in the backs of their heads and do this Widdershins-Walk back to their beginnings? Rose's friend the doctor had said that nobody knew anything about these things. Man was only on the verge of this knowledge. It belonged to to-morrow and the days to come.
And for the first time in my life I found myself wondering whether I did want to know so very much about those morrows after all.
At last I found my voice. "Then you accept that explanation?" I said.
"No," he replied.
"Thank God for something! Why not?"
"Oh, for various reasons. In the first place I only got it as a sort of fiction-stunt, remember. He merely said that nobody could contradict me."
"And in the second place?"
"In the second place, I still think yours is the better explanation—not biology at all, but simple right and wrong, good and evil. Nothing of that kind ever did happen to me in the War that I know of—I never got any whack over the head—and there's one other thing that seems to me to prove it."
"What's that?"
"That I do know the difference between the better and the worse, and want the better all the time."
"In other words—God?"
"I think God comes before a gland," he replied.
Quite apart from his extraordinary interview with his doctor, the past few weeks had been a series of the commonest everyday incidents mixed up with sheer impossibilities in the most bewildering fashion. As I stoutly refused to see his diagrams and the details of his diary (though I saw them later), I could only touch the fringe of his experience at that time. I gathered, however, that in those slowed-down pictures he had found a certain relief, as also in some music, particularly organ-music; and he had other alleviations of a similar nature. But I noticed that obstinately (as it seemed to me) he chose to regard the interval of time since I had last seen him, not as the three weeks it really was, but as the fortnight he had spent in that loft over the garage. Of the first of the three weeks he spoke not one single word. I need hardly mention the reason. He was looking farther back still. As he had been at thirty-five, so he had been in the twenties. Those "A" memories, so recent, were "B" memories too.... But that was a long way off yet.
Yet among so much vagueness and fluctuation one thing was abundantly clear. He had left behind him the last vestige of the man who had writtenAn Ape in Hell. At the very least he was now the man who had writtenThe Vicarage of Bray, and not impossibly he was an earlier man still. And here I had better say a word or two about theVicarage, not as describing the book itself, but as isolating the stage he had reached and differentiating between his former and his present experiences of it.
It was, of course, the "Tite Barnacle" portions of the book that had pleased the public, supposing the public to have been pleased at all. Yet, witty as these were, they were the least essential parts of the work. The book had to be classed as Political, Social, Economic, or some welding of all threedescriptions; and Rose was never the man to approach a subject of this kind with his mind already made up. He recognised frankly (for example) that the mere mechanism of a Ministry or a Department is a gigantic thing, the men with the habit of running it necessarily few, and that to give control to an unpractised hand would be fatal. Thus his book was no mere slap at what it was the fashion some little time ago to call The Old Gang. He refrained from the common gibe that the surest qualification for success in one department is to have failed in another. Instead, he examined, first the machine, and then the man in charge of it. Between these two an accommodation has always to be found. No system of government will prove altogether a failure if it is in the hands of the right men, and equally none will work if it is in the hands of the wrong ones. So he sought the equilibrium between the two.
Not one reader in a million, laughing over that merciless and iridescent book that Julia Oliphant said he had written in little more than three months, had the faintest idea of the sheer burden of merely intellectual work that lay behind it. Piece by piece he had dissected the whole of our national economy before setting pen to paper at all. Bear with me for a moment if I take one little piece only—Shipping. It will give an idea of the scale, not so much of theVicarageonly as of that far vaster thing—the book he now projected and for the sake of which he clung so desperately to his "false middle" of thirty-three.
Men (he argued) need ships; but, over and above those who actually handle them, ships need men no less. From one standpoint ships exist in order that men may be carried from one place to another; but from the opposite standpoint a ship is merely a hungry belly that must be constantly fed with its human food—passengers. Without its meal of passengers it cannot live for a week. Thus, the Thing must move the Man from one place to another whether he wishes it or not, whether in itself it is desirable that he should be moved or not. The ships of one nation snarl at those ofanother for this sustenance. Where then is the balance? Where does blind force get the upper hand, and where wise control? What happens if the power is usurped by a "Vicar" who can by no means be dislodged?... I need say no more. You see the yawning immensities of it.
And that was only Shipping. There were a hundred other things. He had applied his brilliant intellect to them all in turn, and had (as I may say) so "orchestrated" the whole that in the result it seemed the easiest of improvisations.
And now think what his present plan was!
He contemplated, not an analysis of one system,but a welding of analyses of all systems!
That was why he sought to juggle with his own years—that he might combine the enthusiasm of sixteen with the grasp and certainty and power of forty-five, and at the same time assure the coincidence between his past and his present impulses to create.
Montesquieu had never dreamed of such a work—Moses' task had been simpler.
Therefore I saw the position as follows:
He was thirty-three.But thirty-three was a falsemiddle.He was in a rage to attempt work for which no man had ever been equipped as he was equipped.But the dazzling endeavour might elude him at any moment.He would make that python-meal of material and produce a super-Vicarage.But he might be thirty again before he digested it.He was still hanging on, his enthusiasm at its keenest, his experience at its richest.But he was hanging on as a straphanger hangs on—totteringly, insecurely.Once he had got going he would take a week off with me, a day with Julia Oliphant.But not until he got going.
One thing was clear. He would have to give it up. If necessary he would have to be made to give it up. If I couldn't persuade him, Julia must. But already I saw the cost to him. He was an artist, with a passionate need to create. He was an artist so highly specialised that the creation of a small thing merely irritated him. But see where he was placed! So close to the dreamed splendour that he brushed it with his fingertips, and then perhaps to see it recede, diminish, go out! To be conscious of that inordinate power, and to have the agony of knowing that it could not last long enough for the task to be completed! To be unique, as he was unique, and yet to be forced to share the common bitterness and humiliation and despair!... A few moments ago I risked the word "impious." To my way of thinking it was impiety. If it was not impiety I do not see why Prometheus was bound.
For what was this monstrous right that Derwent Rose claimed, to put all the rest of us into the shadow of his own overweening and presumptuous glory? Who was he, to seize on immortality like this? Not satin slippers with poor little feet inside them that would soon, too soon be dust—not this was the sin. It was this other that is not forgiven. And man is forbidden to call his brother by the name that fitted Derwent Rose.
Poor Derry! Apparently he could do nothing right. As Julia had said, his whole life had been one marvellous mistake after another.
Suddenly I introduced Julia's name.
He had not moved since his last words some minutes ago—that he thought God was more than a gland. The mews outside had come to life again. Cars were returning from suppers and the theatres; the glare of their headlights played palely about the upper part of his window-frame. He now turned his head and smiled.
"Good sort, Julia. But she's forgotten all about me long ago."
"What makes you think that?"
But instead of answering my question he went musinglyon. "Funny, that. Dashed funny. I forgot all about Julia when I was making those notes."
"What notes?"
"Why, of the way I strike people. Those who remember me and those who don't. I remembered that doctor, who'd only seen me once, but Julia, who's known me practically all my life, I go and forget all about. In fact there's only about one other person who's known me as long as Julia has, and she absolutely failed to recognise me when I spoke to her a year or so ago."
My nerves became all jangled again. "Derry—howlong ago?"
"About a year.... As you were. What am I talking about? Must stick to one scale of time, I suppose. I ought to have said about ten days ago."
"What was all this?" I asked, though I knew well enough; and he became grave as he unfolded another aspect of his singular case to me.
"It's difficult to explain to you, George, because you know the whole thing—though how you kept your reason when I told you I can't imagine; magnificently steady!... As a matter of fact this other person I mean was Mrs Bassett; you remember I'd been looking for her. Well, I met her one day and spoke to her"—he coloured a little at the memory of the details he suppressed; "and by Jove, it was a lesson to me! A perfectly hideous risk! I was on the point of telling her who I was when I drew back, just in time. God, how I sweated! I'm cold now when I think shemighthave recognised me.... Imagine the scene, George; woman screaming and falling down in a fit in the street because she thinks a ghost's spoken to her. And the ghost himself—this ghost"—he tapped his solid chest—"a ghost marched off between a couple of policemen—if two could hold me—I don't believe ten could—my strength's immense—immense——"
"But—but—then haven't you even anameto anybody who sees you more than once or twice?"
Slowly he shook his head. "You see. You see as well as I do. It seems to me that to everybody but you I'm simply dead. I can't go about giving people fits like that. That was a lesson to me, speaking to Daphne Bassett. I'll never do such a thing again.... So that cuts out Julia Oliphant. Pity, because she was a good sort. Always the same to me; just a pal. She used to give me expensive paste-sandwiches for tea when I knew she couldn't afford it; I used sometimes to stop away on that account. That was when she lived in Chelsea. Then I lost sight of her for a bit, but I've thought a good deal of her lately. I never had a sister.... Don't mind my running on like this, old fellow. I've nobody but you to talk to, nobody at all. Funny sort of situation, isn't it—a ghost like me mourning for living people? That's practically what it amounts to."
At something in his tone I interposed abruptly.
"Derry," I said, "you haven't been thinking of putting an end to yourself, have you?"
He stared at me for a moment.
"Eh?" he said. "Why not? Of course I have. One of the first things I did think of. I've been pretty near it, and if I find I can't write that book I shall be near it again. And"—he bent the grey-blue eyes solemnly on mine—"shall I tell you whatwouldcompletely settle it? If anybody should see that ghost and scream!... I've got a most fearful power, George. A man who can make people scream as I could oughtn't to be at large. Ghosts ought to get where they belong—off the map altogether. My God, if it slipped out one day when I didn't mean it—just these three words—'I'm Derwent Rose'——"
Then suddenly his voice shook pitiably. He spread out his hands.
"George, old fellow, you can't imagine what a joy it was to see you at that place to-night! You haven't realised it yet—you don't know what I went through before I plucked up courage to speak to you. You're the only living creature I used to know that Icanknow now—the only one—the onlyone on earth. I know them, but I daren't—daren't—let them know me. It gets very, very, very lonely sometimes——"
Lonely sometimes! My heart ached for him. It seemed to me that that loneliness was a gulf that all the pity in the universe could not fill. No, I had not realised. I had thought I had, but I hadn't. It now came quite home to me that, while he was free to make a new acquaintance at any moment he pleased, that acquaintance could hardly last longer than the moment in which it was made. For say it lasted for three weeks. At the end of those three weeks the hand he had taken would be three weeks older, but his own hand might be a hundred weeks younger. And so it must go on: hail—and farewell. He, beyond measure gifted, was denied this gift. He could not stop by the way to make a single friend. For others the calm and gentle progress to age, the greetings among themselves, the accosting by the loved familiar name; but Derwent Rose had no name. Without a name Daphne Bassett had set a dog on him; what would she have set on him had he said "I'm Derwent Rose"? Lightning was safer to handle than that name of his. It might miss—but it might hit, make mad, kill.
Sooner or later, I supposed, I should have to tell him that Julia Oliphant knew as much about his state as I knew myself. I had had no shadow of right to betray him to her thus. But in the meantime he was resolved that he would not turn that voltage of his identity either on to her or anybody else.
In its way, one of the most singular portions of our conversation occurred when I asked him how he was placed as regards money. After all he must have money. Even a man who lives his life backwards must eat and have his boots soled, and pay twenty-five shillings a week for a loft over a garage. At first he seemed reluctant to answer me.
"I'm afraid I ran through rather a lot just at first," he said hesitatingly—his first admission that he had not inhabited Trenchard's garret for the whole of the time since I had last seen him. "But that will be all right. I can make lots of money."
"How?" ("Not by that book of yours," I said emphatically to myself.)
"Oh, you needn't worry about that. I assure you I can. I've thought it all out most carefully."
"I wish you'd tell me."
Then, eagerly, jerkily, he unfolded his maddest idea yet.
"I told you you hadn't grasped it. Nobody grasps it till they've got to live it. You see, it's all a question of time. Now look at it carefully.... I'm not fixed. I'm a constantly moving quantity. For that reason I can't take an ordinary job like anybody else. Oh, I could get one all right. It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to walk into one of these Sandow places, Ince's or Jones's or any of 'em, and say, 'Just pass me a few of those two hundred pound weights,' and scare 'em alive with what I could do. In fact that's the whole situation—Ishouldscare 'em alive. You can't show pupils one man one day and perhaps a different one altogether the next; it isn't decent. Here's a nut for you to crack, George: I'm dead, a ghost. But my appearance is one of the most conspicuous things you ever saw. A man like me can't hide himself. The King or the Prince of Wales might walk down Piccadilly unrecognised, but not an athletic phenomenon like me. So as well as being the loneliest, I'm also one of the most public men living."
"So you propose to make money out of athletics?"
"Steady; let's take it as it comes. I've thought it all out, and I don't see a single flaw in it. Here's the problem: I want a large sum of money, I want to make it honestly, and if possible instantaneously, that is to say while I'm still stationary. Now how am I to do it?"
"You can't do it."
"Well, I say I can."
"How?"
You wouldn't guess in a hundred years what it was he proposed to do.
He intended to fight Carpentier.
"All in the fraction of a second, George," he said, appealing for my approval. "Knock-out punch for one of these mammoth purses, fix yourself up for life, and then disappear. It's absolutely sound reasoning."
"It's the craziest thing I ever heard."
"Why?" he asked, his eyes innocently on mine. "It's perfectly feasible."
"How would you get the match? Do you suppose any promoter would look at you? Would any champion? Would his manager let him? Remember that championship's a business. Champions make money as long as they're champions and no longer. They take no risks. And part of their business is to sidestep dangerous matches."
But he had an answer to that that evidently seemed to him conclusive. His eyes sparkled.
"Exactly! That's the very reason I picked Carpentier. Carpentier, man, Georges Carpentier!Heisn't a sidestepper! He's the most thoroughgoing sportsman alive! Look at the way he gave that Yorkshire lad his match! Sidestep, that Frenchman? Look here. You know I speak French like a native. Well, I shouldn't in the least mind going straight up to him and putting the whole proposition before him."
"That you were out after his championship and incidentally his living?"
"Yes, and I jolly well know what he'd do."
"So do I. He'd turn you over to Descamps and the negotiations would last a couple of years. That isn't instantaneous."
"He'd do nothing of the sort.Thatgreat fellow?... Kiss me. He'd kiss me on both cheeks, shout 'C'est ça!' and tell Descamps to fix it up straight away. Of course I wouldn't hurt him."
I stared. "Couldyou put Carpentier out?"
He laughed. A laugh was his reply.
"But suppose—an accident can always happen—suppose he putyouout?"
This time I had not even a laugh for a reply.
He was fast asleep.
Asleep, dead off, and in that moment of time! The instant before his eyes had kindled at the thought of what a lark it would be to take on that peerless Frenchman and put him out; now, between a question and an answer, those eyes were closed and he slept profoundly.
With immense profundity. I bent over him and spoke his name in his ear. I shook him by the shoulder. He was unconscious of either action. His colour was blooming, his breathing deep and easy; else his sleep seemed to have the immensity of death itself. Under the glaring incandescent mantle he was theatrical in his beauty, superb in the relaxation of his strength. I could not take my eyes off him. It was almost frightening to see that complete annihilation of so much physical and mental power.
To write that book—and to fight Carpentier! He had worked it coolly and impudently out. The analytical faculties he would have brought to the one task he had merely applied to the other, and he had arrived at the perfectly logical answer that the way to make the maximum of money as nearly instantaneously as possible was to knock out Carpentier.
I could only gaze spellbound at him as he slept.
What to do now?
I was aware that this question had been waiting for an answer ever since we had left that picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue. I had now found him, or he me; but what next? Let him go again? But apparently he did not want to go; he clung to me pathetically, as to the single companion he had in the world. Take him away somewhere? But he had refused to come, had urged that monstrous book. Was I to stay here with him, to stay all night, to stay till Trenchard's return? That was, to say the least, inconvenient.Should I put him to bed? Somehow I hesitated to disturb that vast unconsciousness. Poor fellow, he richly earned all the rest he got.
I went into the bedroom, brought out Trenchard's quilt, and spread it over him. I moved his head gently to the padded portion of the wicker chair. I made him as comfortable as I could. Then once more I stood irresolute.
It was now after one o'clock, and that powerful sleep had cut us clean off in the middle of things. I had much, much more to ask him. I wanted to know his intentions about his rooms in Cambridge Circus, whether he thought of returning there, whether he wanted his furniture stored or sold. If to myself and Trenchard and possibly a few others he was still known as Derwent Rose, I wanted to know what his name was to the rest of mankind. Merely as a means of communication with people he did not wish to meet face to face, I wanted to know whether his handwriting had changed, whether he used a typewriter, what his signature was like.
And above all I wanted to know what steps I must now take with regard to Julia Oliphant.
Of course I intended to tell her everything, and to tell him that I had done so. The worst I should risk would be his momentary anger that I had betrayed him. He had wished to spare her a meeting with himself, but he had not known that she was unsparable. More than that, she was indissuadable. I should not be able to keep her from him. And, if he clung so touchingly to me, found me so "magnificently steady," what comfort would he not find in that unvarying constancy of hers? He might break out on me for the moment, but he would bless me for it by and by.
I sat down in the other chair. I was very tired. I dozed.
In perhaps a quarter of an hour I opened my eyes again. He had not moved. It was a mild night, the deep chair was not uncomfortable, and I dozed again and again woke. Still he slept. I muttered a "Good night, poor old chap." I was too drowsy even to get up and turn down the incandescent light.
This time I slept as soundly as he.
Afterwards he blamed himself that he had not sent me away; but that sleep had dropped on him like a falling beam. All his sleep, he explained, was like that. Immeasurable chasms of time seemed to have passed away between his closing his eyes and his opening them again.
So this is what came next:
A light creaking of his chair brought me suddenly wide awake and sitting up. A peep of grey daylight showed in the upper portion of the window-frame, but the incandescent mantle still glared yellowly above his head. He had moved, but without waking. He turned his head and slumbered on.
But the turn of his head had brought his face into the light....
He only shaved once a day, in the morning; and on the following morning he shaved again. But it was his whole beard that he thus shaved off daily, thirty days' growth in a night. He had had no set intention of growing that beard that I had seen in the hansom. A few days before coming to Trenchard's place he had woke up one morning, stroked his face, and found it there.
There he slept—in his golden beard.
"Most certainly he shall write his book," Julia declared.
"Not if I can prevent it," I replied.
"We'll see about that. You don't think he'll give us the slip again?"
"I don't think so—I mean he doesn't seem to want to at present."
"And he was all right when you left him? Is he comfortable there? Had he a good breakfast? Was his bed made? Does anybody go in and clear up for him? Had he any flowers?"
"He's quite all right there. He wants to see me as muchas he can. He'd ask me to stay with him, but he's determined to get ahead with that book."
I did not tell her of any other reason why he might wish to be alone when he woke up in the morning. I assumed that a man's shaving operations could have no interest for her. But this is what had taken place:
On seeing his first signs of stirring I had slipped quietly into his bedroom. There, lying on his bed, I had pretended to be asleep. I had heard his tiptoe approach, the slight creaking of the door as he had peeped in, his stealthy crossing to the dressing-table, where his razors were. Then he had stolen out again, and I had heard a kettle filled and other preparations. A quarter of an hour later he had (as he supposed) woke me. He stood there by the bedside with a cup of tea in his hand. His chin was smooth. I wondered about that other morning when, passing his hand over his face, he had first found the beard there. And I wondered what his companion, if he had had one, had thought of it.
"But he shall write his book, poor darling," Julia repeated.
This was at half-past ten in the morning, in her studio, whither I had walked straight from Derry's loft over the mews.
"He ought to be locked up for life if he does," I answered.
But she was very obstinate. Derry (she said) should do whatever he had a mind to do. More than that (and a crafty light stole into her dark eyes as she said it), she intended to help him.
"To write his book? And what do you know about writing books?"
"I didn't say to write his book. You say he's—what d'you call it?—sharpening his tools, getting himself fit. Well, I can help him to do that."
"How?"
"I'll leave the door open so you can hear."
She ran out of the studio to the little cabinet where her telephone was. I heard the following, her side of the conversation that ensued.
"Is that 9199? Miss Oliphant would like to speak to Mrs Aird, please.... Is that you, Madge? Yes, this is my dinner-call.... Oh, like a top, and I know your phone's by your bed. Madge, my dear, I want to know who that learned person was I was talking to last night: yes, the bibliomaniac person.... Who?" Then, with a jump of her voice, "What, he's staying with you? He's in the housenow? Do send for him immediately.... Of course not, you goose, but you have an extension, haven't you?..."
And then this:
"Oh, good morning! Miss Oliphant speaking.... Ah, you've forgotten!... Most frightfully excited about our conversation last night. Will you tell me again the title of that book and whether I can see it in the British Museum? Wait a minute, I want to write it down...."
Then, carefully and as it were a letter at a time:
"Manuel—du—Répertoire—Bibliographique—Universel....Yes, I've got that....Paris, 44, Rue de Rennes....Now the other book, please....Decimal Classification and Relative Index....Yes....Melvil Dewey....Is that enough to identify them?"
Then a rapid perfunctory gush, a "Thank yousomuch," the receiver clapped on again, and re-enter Julia, her face ashine with triumph.
"Well, did you hear all that?" she said. "You can take me along to the British Museum as soon as you like. You'll have to get me into the reading-room, because I haven't a ticket. Then if I were you I should trot away off to Haslemere."
"Who's that you were talking to?"
"A most fearful bore I met at the Airds' at dinner last night. At least I thought he was a bore then. Now he's a duck and an angel and I could kiss him all over his bald old head. Goodness isalwaysrewarded, George, but not often the next morning like this." She clapped her hands.
"You're less comprehensible than ever I knew you, which is saying a good deal."
"Dear old George! When you're bald I'll kiss you too. And Derryshallwrite his book."
"And fight Carpentier?"
"Poodledoodle!"
And she flitted out again, unfastening her painting-blouse at the back as she went.
I knew enough of Miss Oliphant by this time to treat her apparent irresponsibilities with respect. I had never heard of either of the books of which she had spoken over the telephone, but I risked a guess at their nature—Bibliographique Universel—Decimal Classification—evidently the subject was indexing, and she had met somebody at dinner the night before who had led her into these arid fields. Naturally she had been bored. But now she was in a rapture of plotting and machination. She intended to assist and encourage Derry in that inordinate plan of his. She came in again, dressed for walking, humming a blithe tune.
"Dear, dear Providence! There was I ready to snap Madge's head off for seizing quite a nice man herself and giving me old Drybones, but now I'm going to send her some flowers. See the idea, George?"
"What are these books?"
"The very latest thing in the way of indexing. It lasted nearly the whole of dinner. Oh, Ilovemyself for being so good! He drooled along, and I said 'How thrilling' and things like that, thinking of something else all the time, and nowthisgorgeous piece of luck!"
"A Universal Index?"
"Yes, of the whole of human knowledge. It's all done with decimals—or do they call them semicolons? Dots anyway. You can turn up anything from the solar system to a packet of pins at a moment's notice. If Derry doesn't know about it he'll dance with joy.... But come along. I must see those books. Let's go by bus. You can get me a reader's ticket, can't you?"
She pushed me out in front of her and closed the door with a reckless bang. All the way to the bus she talked as delightedly as if it had been her birthday.
"So I shall mug up those decimals and things and then go and be his secretary. I know more or less how he wrote hisVicarage. He used to stride up and down my room, thinking aloud about it. And this will be the same, only enormous! He says he wants to make it as Moses made his Decalogue? He shall, bless his heart. Why shouldn't he? I don't see your stuffy old objections, George."
"One of them is that Moses didn't 'make' the Decalogue. He went up into Sinai for it."
"Well, leave Moses out then. Any other reason?"
"I've told you. If it isn't exactly blasphemous, it's getting on that way."
"Why?" she said with heat. "Was theVicarageblasphemous? He's simply going to do theVicarageagain, but on a huger scale. If he can write a gigantic book why should you say to him 'No, you mustn't write that—write a littler one instead'? He's perfectly entitled to write the biggest book he can. He's just as much entitled to it as you or any other writer. You only call it those names because it's bigger than yours."
She glowed with jealousy for his fame. He was her demi-god, and she would have had all the world bow down before him. She wouldnothave him second to Homer—she wouldnothave him second to Shakespeare. At least so it struck me, and I could only shake my head again and again and repeat that in my opinion it was not a legitimate ambition.
We had mounted to the top of a motor-bus, where we occupied a back seat. For some minutes she did not speak. Then, as she still continued silent, I looked at her face. At the same moment her face turned to mine.
What worlds away from the truth I was that clear look told me. His fame? She didn't care twopence for his fame, except that it might amuse him. His book? She didn't care whether he wrote his book or whether he didn't. To her, fame and books were the vanities with which men so incomprehensibly amuse themselves when they might be thinking of something that mattered. It was enormouslymore than that that her eyes told me on the top of that east-bound bus that morning.
For if he wished to remain thirty-three, she too as intensely wished and willed it. He should write any book he wanted, do anything on earth he liked, so long as that loft in a South Kensington mews became an upper room in Cremorne Road all over again. She would flutter about, pretending to be indexing the whole mass of human knowledge for him, clipping and pasting and filing within sound of his voice; but what she would really be doing would be to cut Patum Peperium sandwiches for him, to see that he fed himself properly, opened his windows, made his bed, had his washing and mending properly done. That formerVicarageperiod had been the summer of her life; she would now thrust herself in the way of it once more. That she might do so with some sort of countenance she was on her way to read those thorny books in the British Museum. The latest thing in indexing was the bait with which she set the trap of her adoration. She would humour, encourage, wheedle, praise. But she too would have her summer twice.
We did not speak again until we descended in Tottenham Court Road and walked along Great Russell Street. Then as we approached the Museum railings she turned abruptly to me. She wanted her final confirmation of the facts.
"You've told me all that he said about me?"
"Yes." (This was untrue. I had suppressed one thing. I had not told her that he had sometimes stayed away from Cremorne Road because she bought things for him she could not afford.)
"And he's no idea at all that I know anything whatever about it?"
"None whatever."
"Tell me again about his having sometimes thought of me lately."
I did so. "For all I know he might even have come to see you but for the fear of giving you that shock."