"A way to what?"
"To find out--to find out!" She spoke gaily and excitedly, but suddenly
checked herself. "We're talking nonsense," she said.
"We're mixing things up, but I'm struck with your idea. Get Lady
Mellifont to let you."
"Oh, _she_ has looked!" Mrs. Adney murmured, with the oddest dramatic
expression. Then, after a movement of her beautiful uplifted hand, as if
to brush away a fantastic vision, she exclaimed imperiously: "Bring me
the scene--bring me the scene!"
"I go for it," I answered; "but don't tell me I can't write a play."
She left me, but my errand was arrested by the approach of a lady who
had produced a birthday-book--we had been threatened with it for several
evenings--and who did me the honour to solicit my autograph. She had
been asking the others, and she couldn't decently leave me out. I could
usually remember my name, but it always took me some time to recall my
date, and even when I had done so I was never very sure. I hesitated
between two days and I remarked to my petitioner that I would sign on
both if it would give her any satisfaction. She said that surely I had
been born only once; and I replied of course that on the day I made her
acquaintance I had been born again. I mention the feeble joke only to
show that, with the obligatory inspection of the other autographs, we
gave some minutes to this transaction. The lady departed with her book,
and then I became aware that the company had dispersed. I was alone in
the little salon that had been appropriated to our use. My first
impression was one of disappointment: if Vawdrey had gone to bed I
didn't wish to disturb him. While I hesitated, however. I recognised
that Vawdrey had not gone to bed. A window was open, and the sound of
voices outside came in to me: Blanche was on the terrace with her
dramatist, and they were talking about the stars. I went to the window
for a glimpse--the Alpine night was splendid. My friends had stepped out
together; the actress had picked up a cloak; she looked as I had seen
her look in the wing of the theatre. They were silent awhile, and I
heard the roar of a neighbouring torrent. I turned back into the room,
and its quiet lamplight gave me an idea. Our companions had
dispersed--it was late for a pastoral country--and we three should have
the place to ourselves. Clare Vawdrey had written his scene--it was
magnificent; and his reading it to us there, at such an hour, would be
an episode intensely memorable. I would bring down his manuscript and
meet the two with it as they came in.
I quitted the salon for this purpose; I had been in Vawdrey's room and
knew it was on the second floor, the last in a long corridor. A minute
later my hand was on the knob of his door, which I naturally pushed open
without knocking. It was equally natural that in the absence of its
occupant the room should be dark; the more so as, the end of the
corridor being at that hour unlighted, the obscurity was not immediately
diminished by the opening of the door. I was only aware at first that I
had made no mistake and that, the window-curtains not being drawn, I was
confronted with a couple of vague starlighted apertures. Their aid,
however, was not sufficient to enable me to find what I had come for,
and my hand, in my pocket, was already on the little box of matches that
I always carried for cigarettes. Suddenly I withdrew it with a start,
uttering an ejaculation, an apology. I had entered the wrong room; a
glance prolonged for three seconds showed me a figure seated at a table
near one of the windows--a figure I had at first taken for a
travelling-rug thrown over a chair. I retreated, with a sense of
intrusion; but as I did so I became aware, more rapidly than it takes me
to express it, in the first place that this was Vawdrey's room and in
the second that, most singularly, Vawdrey himself sat before me.
Checking myself on the threshold I had a momentary feeling of
bewilderment, but before I knew it I had exclaimed: "Hullo! is that you,
Vawdrey?"
He neither turned nor answered me, but my question received an immediate
and practical reply in the opening of a door on the other side of the
passage. A servant, with a candle, had come out of the opposite room,
and in this flitting illumination I definitely recognised the man whom,
an instant before, I had to the best of my belief left below in
conversation with Mrs. Adney. His back was half turned to me, and he
bent over the table in the attitude of writing, but I was conscious that
I was in no sort of error about his identity. "I beg your pardon--I
thought you were downstairs," I said; and as the personage gave no sign
of hearing me I added: "If you're busy I won't disturb you." I backed
out, closing the door--I had been in the place, I suppose, less than a
minute. I had a sense of mystification, which however deepened
infinitely the next instant. I stood there with my hand still on the
knob of the door, overtaken by the oddest impression of my life. Vawdrey
was at his table, writing, and it was a very natural place for him to
be; but why was he writing in the dark and why hadn't he answered me? I
waited a few seconds for the sound of some movement, to see if he
wouldn't rouse himself from his abstraction--a fit conceivable in a
great writer--and call out: "Oh, my dear fellow, is it you?" But I heard
only the stillness, I felt only the starlighted dusk of the room, with
the unexpected presence it enclosed. I turned away, slowly retracing my
steps, and came confusedly downstairs. The lamp was still burning in the
salon, but the room was empty. I passed round to the door of the hotel
and stepped out. Empty too was the terrace. Blanche Adney and the
gentleman with her had apparently come in. I hung about five minutes;
then I went to bed.
I slept badly, for I was agitated. On looking back at these queer
occurrences (you will see presently that they were queer), I perhaps
suppose myself more agitated than I was; for great anomalies are never
so great at first as after we have reflected upon them. It takes us some
time to exhaust explanations. I was vaguely nervous--I had been sharply
startled; but there was nothing I could not clear up by asking Blanche
Adney, the first thing in the morning, who had been with her on the
terrace. Oddly enough, however, when the morning dawned--it dawned
admirably--I felt less desire to satisfy myself on this point than to
escape, to brush away the shadow of my stupefaction. I saw the day would
be splendid, and the fancy took me to spend it, as I had spent happy
days of youth, in a lonely mountain ramble. I dressed early, partook of
conventional coffee, put a big roll into one pocket and a small flask
into the other, and, with a stout stick in my hand, went forth into the
high places. My story is not closely concerned with the charming hours I
passed there--hours of the kind that make intense memories. If I roamed
away half of them on the shoulders of the hills, I lay on the sloping
grass for the other half and, with my cap pulled over my eyes (save a
peep for immensities of view), listened, in the bright stillness, to the
mountain bee and felt most things sink and dwindle. Clare Vawdrey grew
small, Blanche Adney grew dim, Lord Mellifont grew old, and before the
day was over I forgot that I had ever been puzzled. When in the late
afternoon I made my way down to the inn there was nothing I wanted so
much to find out as whether dinner would not soon be ready. To-night I
dressed, in a manner, and by the time I was presentable they were all at
table.
In their company again my little problem came back to me, so that I was
curious to see if Vawdrey wouldn't look at me the least bit queerly. But
he didn't look at me at all; which gave me a chance both to be patient
and to wonder why I should hesitate to ask him my question across the
table. I did hesitate, and with the consciousness of doing so came back
a little of the agitation I had left behind me, or below me, during the
day. I wasn't ashamed of my scruple, however: it was only a fine
discretion. What I vaguely felt was that a public inquiry wouldn't have
been fair. Lord Mellifont was there, of course, to mitigate with his
perfect manner all consequences; but I think it was present to me that
with these particular elements his lordship would not be at home. The
moment we got up, therefore, I approached Mrs. Adney, asking her
whether, as the evening was lovely, she wouldn't take a turn with me
outside.
"You've walked a hundred miles; had you not better be quiet?" she
replied.
"I'd walk a hundred miles more to get you to tell me something."
She looked at me an instant, with a little of the queerness that I had
sought, but had not found, in Clare Vawdrey's eyes. "Do you mean what
became of Lord Mellifont?"
"Of Lord Mellifont?" With my new speculation I had lost that thread.
"Where's your memory, foolish man? We talked of it last evening."
"Ah, yes!" I cried, recalling; "we shall have lots to discuss." I drew
her out to the terrace, and before we had gone three steps I said to
her: "Who was with you here last night?"
"Last night?" she repeated, as wide of the mark as I had been.
"At ten o'clock--just after our company broke up. You came out here with
a gentleman; you talked about the stars."
She stared a moment; then she gave her laugh. "Are you jealous of dear
Vawdrey?"
"Then it was he?"
"Certainly it was."
"And how long did he stay?"
"You have it badly. He stayed about a quarter of an hour--perhaps rather
more. We walked some distance; he talked about his play. There you have
it all; that is the only witchcraft I have used."
"And what did Vawdrey do afterwards?"
"I haven't the least idea. I left him and went to bed."
"At what time did you go to bed?"
"At what time did _you_? I happen to remember that I parted from Mr.
Vawdrey at ten twenty-five," said Mrs. Adney. "I came back into the
salon to pick up a book, and I noticed the clock."
"In other words you and Vawdrey distinctly lingered here from about five
minutes past ten till the hour you mention?"
"I don't know how distinct we were, but we were very jolly. _Où
voulez-vous en venir_?" Blanche Adney asked.
"Simply to this, dear lady: that at the time your companion was occupied
in the manner you describe, he was also engaged in literary composition
in his own room."
She stopped short at this, and her eyes had an expression in the
darkness. She wanted to know if I challenged her veracity; and I replied
that, on the contrary, I backed it up--it made the case so interesting.
She returned that this would only be if she should back up mine; which,
however, I had no difficulty in persuading her to do, after I had
related to her circumstantially the incident of my quest of the
manuscript--the manuscript which, at the time, for a reason I could now
understand, appeared to have passed so completely out of her own head.
"His talk made me forget it--I forgot I sent you for it. He made up for
his fiasco in the salon: he declaimed me the scene," said my companion.
She had dropped on a bench to listen to me and, as we sat there, had
briefly cross-examined me. Then she broke out into fresh laughter. "Oh,
the eccentricities of genius!"
"They seem greater even than I supposed."
"Oh, the mysteries of greatness!"
"You ought to know all about them, but they take me by surprise."
"Are you absolutely certain it was Mr. Vawdrey?" my companion asked.
"If it wasn't he, who in the world was it? That a strange gentleman,
looking exactly like him, should be sitting in his room at that hour of
the night and writing at his table _in the dark_," I insisted, "would be
practically as wonderful as my own contention."
"Yes, why in the dark?" mused Mrs. Adney.
"Cats can see in the dark," I said.