"Oh well," said his friend, "what does it matter?"
"I do speak," he continued. "I can't sometimes not."
"Then how do you get on?"
Gedge looked at him more abjectly, to his own sense, than ever at any
one--even at Isabel when she frightened him. "I don't get on. I speak," he
said--"since I've spoken to _you_."
"Oh _we_ shan't hurt you!" the young man reassuringly laughed.
The twilight meanwhile had sensibly thickened, the end of the visit was
indicated. They turned together out of the upper room and came down the
narrow stair. The words just exchanged might have been felt as producing an
awkwardness which the young woman gracefully felt the impulse to dissipate.
"You must rather wonder why we've come." And it was the first note for
Gedge of a further awkwardness--as if he had definitely heard it make the
husband's hand, in a full pocket, begin to fumble.
It was even a little awkwardly that the husband still held off. "Oh we like
it as it is. There's always _something_." With which they had approached
the door of egress.
"What is there, please?" asked Morris Gedge, not yet opening the door,
since he would fain have kept the pair on, and conscious only for a moment
after he had spoken that his question was just having for the young man too
dreadfully wrong a sound. This personage wondered yet feared, and had
evidently for some minutes been putting himself a question; so that, with
his preoccupation, the caretaker's words had represented to him inevitably:
"What is there, please, for _me_?" Gedge already knew with it moreover
that he wasn't stopping him in time. He had uttered that challenge to show
he himself wasn't afraid, and he must have had in consequence, he was
subsequently to reflect, a lamentable air of waiting.
The visitor's hand came out. "I hope I may take the liberty----?" What
afterwards happened our friend scarcely knew, for it fell into a slight
confusion, the confusion of a queer gleam of gold--a sovereign fairly
thrust at him; of a quick, almost violent motion on his own part, which, to
make the matter worse, might well have sent the money roiling on the floor;
and then of marked blushes all round and a sensible embarrassment;
producing indeed in turn rather oddly and ever so quickly an increase of
communion. It was as if the young man had offered him money to make up to
him for having, as it were, led him on, and then, perceiving the mistake,
but liking him the better for his refusal, had wanted to obliterate this
aggravation of his original wrong. He had done so, presently, while Gedge
got the door open, by saying the best thing, he could, and by saying it
frankly and gaily. "Luckily it doesn't at all affect the _work_!"
The small town-street, quiet and empty in the summer eventide, stretched to
right and left, with a gabled and timbered house or two, and fairly seemed
to have cleared itself to congruity with the historic void over which our
friends, lingering an instant to converse, looked at each other. The young
wife, rather, looked about a moment at all there wasn't to be seen, and
then, before Gedge had found a reply to her husband's remark, uttered,
evidently in the interest of conciliation, a little question of her own
that she tried to make earnest. "It's our unfortunate ignorance, you mean,
that doesn't?"
"Unfortunate or fortunate. I like it so," said the husband. "'The play's
the thing.' Let the author alone."
Gedge, with his key on his forefinger, leaned against the door-post, took
in the stupid little street and was sorry to see them go--they seemed so to
abandon him. "That's just what They won't do--nor let _me_ do. It's all I
want--to let the author alone. Practically"--he felt himself getting the
last of his chance--"there is no author; that is for us to deal with. There
are all the immortal people--_in_ the work; but there's nobody else."
"Yes," said the young man--"that's what it comes to. There should really,
to clear the matter up, be no such Person."
"As you say," Gedge returned, "it's what it comes to. There _is_ no such
Person."
The evening air listened, in the warm thick midland stillness, while the
wife's little cry rang out. "But _wasn't_ there----?"
"There was somebody," said Gedge against the door-post. "But They've killed
Him. And, dead as He is, They keep it up, They do it over again, They kill
Him every day."
He was aware of saying this so grimly--more than he wished--that his
companions exchanged a glance and even perhaps looked as if they felt him
extravagant. That was really the way Isabel had warned him all the others
would be looking if he should talk to Them as he talked to _her_. He liked,
however, for that matter, to hear how he should sound when pronounced
incapable through deterioration of the brain. "Then if there's no author,
if there's nothing to be said but that there isn't anybody," the young
woman smilingly asked, "why in the world should there be a house?"
"There shouldn't," said Morris Gedge.
Decidedly, yes, he affected the young man. "Oh, I don't say, mind you, that
you should pull it down!"
"Then where would you _go_?" their companion sweetly inquired.
"That's what my wife asks," Gedge returned.
"Then keep it up, keep it up!" And the husband held out his hand.
"That's what my wife says," Gedge went on as he shook it.
The young woman, charming creature, emulated the other visitor; she offered
their remarkable friend her handshake. "Then mind your wife."