PART I

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THE TOWER OF OBLIVION

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS

ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

The Tower of Oblivion

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

AUTHOR OF

"A CASE IN CAMERA," ETC.

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1921

_All rights reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1921,

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

Set up and printed. Published November, 1921.

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U. S. A.

To

NIGEL PLAYFAIR

and the Ladies and Gentlemen of

"THE BEGGAR'S OPERA COMPANY"

(Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, June 5th, 1920)

who were so constantly his

"pleasure and soft repose"

while the following pages were

writing, this book is dedicated

by

their friend and well-wisher

THE AUTHOR

Kensington 1921

Contents

England

Page

THE SIDE-SLIP 1

THE STERN CHASE 57

THE STRAPHANGER 91

THE DOUBLE CROSS 129

THE PIVOT 181

FRANCE

THE LONG SPLICE 207

THE EVEN KEEL 261

THE CUT-OUT 327

THE DESERT ISLAND 371

THE HOME STRETCH 407

ENGLAND

PART I

THE SIDESTEP

THE TOWER OF OBLIVION

I

I think it is Edgar Allan Poe who says that while a plain thing may on

occasion be told with a certain amount of elaboration of style, one that

is unusual in its very nature is best related in the simplest terms

possible. I shall adopt the second of these methods in telling this

story of my friend, Derwent Rose. And I will begin straight away with

that afternoon of the spring of last year when, with my own eyes, I

first saw, or fancied I saw, the beginning of the change in him.

The Lyonnesse Club meets in an electric-lighted basement-suite a little

way off the Strand, and as I descended the stairs I saw him in the

narrow passage. He was standing almost immediately under an incandescent

lamp that projected on its curved petiole from the wall. The light shone

brilliantly on his hair, where hardly a hint of grey or trace of

thinness yet showed, and his handsome brow and straight nose were in

full illumination and the rest of his face in sharp shadow. He wore a

dark blue suit with an exquisitely pinned soft white silk collar, to

which, as I watched, his fingers moved once; and he was examining with

deep attention a print that hung on the buff-washed wall.

I spoke behind him. "Hello, Derry! One doesn't often see your face

here."

Quietly as I spoke, he started. Ordinarily he had very straight and

steady grey-blue eyes, alert and receptive, but for some seconds they

looked from me to the print and from the print to me, irresolutely and

with equally divided attention. One would almost have thought that he

had heard his name called from a great distance. Then his eyes settled

finally on the print, and he repeated my last words over his shoulder.

"My face? Here?... No."

"What's the picture? Anything special?"

Still without moving his eyes from it he replied, "The picture? You

ought to know more about it than I--it's your Club, not mine----"

And he continued his absorbed scrutiny.

Now I had passed that picture scores of times before and had never found

it worth a glance. It was a common collotype reproduction of a stodgy

night-effect, a full moon in a black-leaded sky with reflections in

water to match--price perhaps five shillings. Then suddenly, looking

over his shoulder, I realised where his interest in it lay. He was not

looking at the picture at all. In the polished glass, that made an

excellent mirror in that concentrated light, I had seen his eyes

earnestly fixed on his own eyes, his cheeks, his hair, his chin....

Well, Derwent Rose had better reason than most men for looking at

himself in a picture-glass if he chose. Indeed it had already struck me

that that afternoon he looked even more than ordinarily fresh and

handsome. Let me, before we go any further, describe his personal

appearance to you.

He had, as I knew, passed his forty-fifth birthday in the preceding

January; but he would have been taken anywhere for at least ten

years younger. You will believe this when I tell you that at the

age of thirty-nine, that is to say in the year 1914, he had walked

into a recruiting-office, had given his age as twenty-eight,

received the compliments of the R.A.M.C. major who had examined him,

had joined an infantry battalion as a private, risen to the rank of

company-sergeant-major, and had hardly looked a day older when he had

come out again, with a herring-bone of chevrons on his cuff and a

captain's stars on his shoulder--not so much as scratched. He was just

over six feet high, with the shoulders of a paviour and the heart and

lung capacity of a diver. Had you not been told that he wrote novels

you would have thought that he ran a ranch. His frame was a perfectly

balanced combination of springiness and dead-lift power of muscle; and

to see those grey-blue eyes that looked into yours out of unwrinkled

lids was to wonder what secret he possessed that the cares and rubs and

disillusions of life should so have passed him by.

Yet he had had his share of these, and more. His looks might be smooth,

but wrinkles enough lay behind his writing. From those boyish eyes that

reminded you of a handler of boats or a breaker of horses there still

peeped out from time to time the qualities of his earlier, uneasy

books--the gay and mortal and inhuman irony of _The Vicarage of Bray_,

the vehement, unchecked passion of _An Ape in Hell_. If to the ordinary

bookstall-gazer these works were unknown--well, that was part of the

task that Derwent Rose had set himself. It is part of the task any

writer sets himself who refuses all standards but his own, and works on

the assumption that he is going to live for ever. Only his last

published book, _The Hands of Esau_, showed a fundamental urbanity, a

mellower restraint, and perhaps these were the securer the more hardly

they had been come by. I for one expected that his next book would rise

like a star above the vapours where we others let off our little

six-shilling crackers ... but his body seemed a mere flouting of the

years.

And here he stood under the corolla of an incandescent lamp, looking at

himself for wrinkles!

Then in the glass he caught my eye, and flushed a little to have been

caught attitudinising. He gave a covert glance round to see whether

anybody else had observed him. A few yards away, in the doorway, Madge

Aird was smilingly receiving the Club's guests, but for the moment Madge

was looking the other way. Then he spoke in a muffled voice.

"Well? Notice anything? How do I look? How do I strike you? No, I don't

want a compliment. I'm asking you a question. How do I look? I've a

special reason for wanting to know."

I laughed a little, not without envy.

"How do you look!" I said. "Another ten years will be time enough for

you to begin to worry about your looks, Derry. I know your age, of

course, but for all practical purposes you may consider yourself

thirty-five, my young friend."

Sadly, sadly now I remember the eagerness of his turn.

"How much?" he demanded.

"I said thirty-five or thereabouts, you Darling of the Gods. I'm fifty,

but you make me look sixty, and when you're a hundred your picture will

be in the papers with the O.M. round your neck. You'll probably have

picked up the Nobel Prize too, and a few other trifles on the way.

You've got a physique to match your brain, lucky fellow that you are,

and nothing but accident can stop you. Don't go out and get run over,

that's all. Well, are you coming in?"

But he hung back. And yet it was largely his own fault if in such places

as this Club he felt like a fish out of water. It might even have been

called a perverse and not very amiable vanity in him, and I had hoped he

had got over this shyness, arrogance, or both. We have to live in a

world, even if we are as gifted mentally and physically as was Derwent

Rose. But it was no good pressing him. I remembered him of old.

"Then if you're not coming in?" I ventured to hint; and again his hand

went to the soft collar.

"What have I come for, you mean? I want you to find out for me if

there's a Mrs Bassett here."

"I don't think I know her."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett. Ask somebody, will you?"

"What's she like to look at?"

"Can't say. Haven't seen her for years."

"Wait a bit. Is it somebody called Daphne Bassett?"

"Yes, yes--Daphne," he said quickly.

"Who published what's called a 'first novel' some little time ago?"

Instantly I saw that I had said something he didn't like. The blood

stirred in his cheeks. He spoke roughly, impolitely. And even up to

this point his manner had been curt enough.

"Why do you say it like that?" he demanded. "'First' novel, with a

sneer? She wrote a novel, if that's what you mean."

Yet, though he began by glaring at me, he ended by looking uneasily

away. You too may have wondered why publishers so eagerly insist that

some novel or other is a really-and-truly 'first' one. Your bootmaker

doesn't boast that the pair of boots he sells you is his 'first' pair,

and you wouldn't eat your cook's 'first' dinner if you could help it.

You may take it from me that in the ordinary course of things Derwent

Rose would have been far more likely to applaud the novel that ended an

ignominious career than the one that began it. Yet here he was,

apparently wishing to outface me about something or other, yet at the

same time unable to look me in the eye.

"There's got to be a first before there can be a second, hasn't there?"

he growled. "Jessica had to have a First Prayer, didn't she? And is

there such a devil of a lot of difference between one novel and another

when you come to think of it--yours or mine or anybody else's?"

It was at this point that I began to watch him attentively.

"Go on, Derry," I said.

"There isn't; you know there isn't; and I'm getting sick of this

superior attitude. Why must everybody do the Big Bow Wow all the time?

Can't somebody write something just for amuse--I mean must they always

be banging the George Coverham Big Drum? As long as it doesn't make any

pretence.... Have you read it?" he demanded suddenly.

"No."

"Then you don't know anything about it."

It was here that I became conscious of what I have called the Change.

Whatever had happened to put him out, this was not the Derry Rose I had

lately seen. Surely my remark about that "first" novel had been innocent

enough; but he had replied surlily, unamiably, unfamiliarly....

"Unfamiliar?" No, that is not the word. I should rather say remotely

familiar, recollected, brought forward again out of some time that was

past. Just as in his resplendent physical appearance he seemed to be

"too" well, if such a thing can be, so in his manner he seemed to be

too ... something; I gave it up. I only knew that the author of _The

Hands of Esau_ would not have spoken thus.

"Well, will you find out for me if she's here?" he said in a softer one.

I fancy that already he was sorry he had not spoken more quietly.

"Why not come in and see for yourself?"

"Oh--you know how I hate this sort of thing."

"Not long ago you spoke of joining the Lyonnesse."

"I know. I thought I would. But I've decided it's out of my line."

"Then at least come and be introduced to Mrs Aird. She'll know whether

Mrs Bassett's here or not."

The blue-grey eyes gave mine a quick and critical glance.

"Is that the Mrs Aird who writes those bright books about young women

and their new clothes and how right their instincts are if you only give

them plenty of pocket-money and leave 'em alone?"

I smiled. Perhaps it was a little like Madge. But I noticed his sharp

distinction between the novels of one woman and the "first" novel of

another. It began to look as if behind Mrs Hugo Bassett the novelist lay

Daphne Bassett the woman.

"Well," I sighed, "I'm to ask for Mrs Hugo Bassett. What's the title of

her book?"

"_The Parthian Arrow._"

"Mrs Hugo Bassett, author of _The Parthian Arrow_. Very well----"

I approached Madge, but before I could ask my question she had drawn me

inside the doorway.

"_Who_ is he?" she whispered ardently in my ear. Her plump ringed hand

clutched my sleeve, and there was the liveliest curiosity in the dark

eyes that looked up at me from under her nodding hat with black

_pleureuse_ feathers.

"Is there a Mrs Bassett here--Daphne Bassett?"

"No. But----"

"Has she been, and is she likely to come?"

"She hasn't been, and nobody'll come now. But George----"

"I'll see you presently; just let me get rid of my message," I said; and

I returned to Rose.

A glance at my face was enough for him. He may have muttered a

"Thank-you," but I didn't hear it; he had spun on his heel and in a

moment was half-way to the cloakroom. I hope he got his own hat, for he

was out again almost instantly. I had a glimpse of his magnificent back

as he hurried along the passage, then a flying heel at the turn of the

stairs and he was gone. Turning, I saw that Madge had watched his

departure with me. She almost ran to me.

"Quickly, George--who, _who_ is your Beautiful Bear, and why have you

been keeping a superb creature like that from me?" she demanded. "I knew

he was waiting for a woman. Every skirt that came in----" at the swing

of her head the feathers tossed like an inky weeping-elm in a gale.

"But," she added, "I confess I never saw a man admire himself _quite_ so

openly before."

My friend has scored off me often enough in the past. This time I scored

off her.

"Derwent Rose always was good-looking," I remarked.

She fell a step back.

"George!--_Derwent Rose!_ You don't mean to say that _that_ was Derwent

Rose?"

"I always thought you knew everybody in London."

"_That_ was Derwent Rose!" Then she added, with inexpressible conviction

and satisfaction, "_Ah!_"

I am always a little uneasy when Madge Aird says "Ah!" in that tone. She

was Madge Ruthven before she married Alec Aird, and I have often

wondered whether in the past any of her Scottish forbears had any

traffic with France. I am not now thinking of the air with which she

always wore her clothes, from whatever it was on her head to the always

irresistible shoes on her tiny feet. I mean the workings of her mind.

There is none of our northern softness and hesitation and mystery about

these. All she thinks and says has a logical completeness and finish

that somehow always seems just a little too good to be true. Few things

in this world are so neatly right as that. But wrong though her

conclusions may be, they are always dazzlingly effective, and you have

to swallow them or reject them whole.

"_Ah!_" she murmured again, with the intensest self-approval; and I

wondered what unreliable imperfection she was meditating now. You never

know with her. She sees so many people, goes to so many places, hears so

much. Often the mere mention of a name is enough to touch off that

instantaneous fuse of her memory that leads straight into the heart of

heaven knows what family history or hidden scandal.

"And what do you mean by 'Ah'?" I asked her.

"The gorgeous creature! I never dreamed--but this makes the situation

perfectly fascinating!"

"What situation?"

"Why, of him and Daphne Bassett. But poor old George, I keep forgetting

that you're the noblest Roman of them all and don't listen to our horrid

petty little scandal. And evidently you haven't read _The Parthian

Arrow_."

"I haven't. Tell me what it's about."

"But you've read _An Ape in Hell_?"

"Of course. Tell me what the other's about."

But at that moment she was claimed. Her next words came over her

shoulder as, with a wisk of her ribboned ankles and another gale in the

shake of feathers, she was off.

"Not now--another time. I shall be in fairly early this evening if

you're staying in town. It's quite an interesting situation. And if

you'll bring your Beautiful Bear to see me some time, I'll----"

I understood her to mean that in that case she would bring Mrs Hugo

Bassett also.

II

I live out in Surrey, my car happened to be in dock, and I had my train

to think of. As I walked slowly up the short street to the Strand I

puzzled over Madge's words. Evidently she found some connection between

that "first" novel, _The Parthian Arrow_, and Rose's own book, _An Ape

in Hell_. Well, my ignorance could soon be remedied. There was a

bookshop just round the corner, and I could be the possessor of a copy

of Mrs Bassett's book in five minutes.

But suddenly, on the point of hailing a taxi, I dropped the point of my

stick again. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the feeling that there

was some invitation or appointment I had overlooked. I knew that it

could be of no great importance, and, looking back on these events

since, I have thought that it was perhaps a mere disinclination to go

down to Surrey that night that gave me pause. I may say that I am

unmarried, and have got my housekeeper fairly well trained to my ways.

So, standing on the kerb, I brought a number of papers from my pocket

and began to turn them over in search of the forgotten appointment.

I found it. It was a lecture by a Fellow of a Learned Society, and it

was to take place at the rather unusual hour of six o'clock. No doubt

this was in order that the learned speaker might get his paper over by

half-past seven, leaving his learned listeners free to dine. A taxi

slowed down in front of me.

"Society of Arts," I said to the driver.

A minute later I was on my way to see Derwent Rose for the second time

that afternoon.

I will tell you in a moment the subject of that lecture I had so

suddenly decided to attend. First, a word as to my attitude at that time

towards new discoveries and new thought in general. I was enormously,

wistfully interested in them. Instinctively, at that time, I stretched

out my hands to them. I had lived long enough in the world to realise

that such events as Trafalgar and the French Revolution were mere

events of yesterday, and the possibilities of an equally near to-morrow

haunted me. I shrank from the thought that while the dead stones of the

Law Courts and Australia House would still be there after I had gone, I

should not at least be able to make a guess at the stream of Life,

uncradled yet, that would beat and press and flow along those channels

in so little a time, the new blood of London's old unchanging veins. One

begins to think of these things when one is fifty.

So, at a minute or so to six, my taxi set me down in the Adelphi, when I

might have been a happier man had it taken me straight to Waterloo.

And now for what that lecture was all about.

My meaning will perhaps be clearer if I give an extract from a leading

article in _The Times_ of slightly later date. On a subject of this kind

I would rather use an expert's words than risk the inaccuracies that

might creep into my own.

"Human beings," the article begins, "differ not only in the

knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence

or natural ability. It has long been accepted that the former

property may continue to increase until the natural faculties

begin to abate, but that the latter has a maximum for each

individual, attained early in life.... Intelligence, as opposed

to knowledge, is fully developed before the age of schooling is

over. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which,

even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been

reached. Obviously the standard varies in different individuals;

the degree of intelligence passed through by the more fortunate

at the age of ten may be the final attainment of others, and all

intermediate stages occur.... Mr H. H. Goddard, an American

psychologist of international repute, classifies the intelligence

of his countrymen into seven grades, but believes that in

exceptional cases, amounting to four and a half per cent. of the

population, a superlative standard is reached at the age of

nineteen. On the other hand, seventy per cent. of the citizens of

the United States have to carry on their lives with the

intelligence of children of fourteen, and ten per cent. with that

of children of ten."

It was to hear these conclusions of Mr Goddard's expounded by a

fellow-savant that I had come that afternoon to the Society of Arts.

To tell the truth, a certain whimsical humour in the idea had attracted

me. When a man's books sell as well as mine do, and he is as

flatteringly thought of as I am, it is rather tickling to be told that

he is really an infant of sixteen or seventeen, telling fairy-stories to

a gigantic public nursery the average age of which is perhaps twelve.

Sir George Coverham, Knight, merely the top boy of a kindergarten of

adults!... It pleased me, and I rather hoped the lecturer would approach

his subject from that humorous angle.

The lights were being turned down as I entered the lecture chamber.

Quietly, not to make a disturbance, I tiptoed to the nearest seat. Then,

as with a preliminary hiss or two the shaft of light from the lantern

pierced the gloom, I was able dimly to distinguish that the subject of

the lecture had not attracted more than a couple of dozen people. These

barely filled the first two rows. The rest of the theatre appeared to be

empty. Of the speaker himself nothing could be seen but a glimpse of

white beard as he moved slightly at the reading-lamp.

He read from a typescript in a flat, monotonous voice, with once in a

while a halting explanatory remark that trailed, paused, and then

stopped altogether. I watched the acute angles his wand made with its

own shadow on the diagrams projected by the lantern.

Then I thought I heard an impatient movement and muttering somewhere

behind me. The speaker, after another long and painful pause, had just

said, "I hope I've made that clear, gentlemen"; and I was almost certain

that the muffled growl had taken the shape of the words "You don't know

a damned thing about it!"

Then, a few minutes later, the sound was repeated, this time accompanied

by an unmistakable groan.

"Sssh!" said somebody sharply from the front or second row.

The lecture dragged on.

But about the next and final outbreak there was no doubt whatever.

Neither was there about the sharp suffering of whoever was the cause of

it. Somebody a couple of rows behind me must be ill, I thought, and

evidently others thought so too, for the lecturer came definitely to a

stop, and my eyes, now accustomed to the gloom, saw the turning of

faces.

"Is anybody----?" a secretary or chairman called out, and I expected the

light to go up at any moment.

In the end, however, the lecture was finished without further incident.

The lights were switched on, the dingy classic painted panels on the

walls could be seen, and instantly every face, my own included, was

turned towards the back of a man who was seen to be hurriedly making his

way to the door.

I cannot tell you what happened at the Society of Arts after that. I was

already on my feet, hurrying after that back. It was the same back I had

seen, in the same haste, leaving the Lyonnesse Club less than two hours

ago.

He had got to the entrance hall before I caught him up. He accepted with

rather disturbing docility the arm I slipped into his. All the fight had

gone out of him; he might not have been the same man who had so recently

tried to outface me about first novels. I looked at his face as we stood

by the glass doors that opened on to John Street. It showed both fear

and pain.

"What's the matter, Derry? Can I be of any help?" I asked him anxiously.

He muttered, "Yes--yes--about time I called somebody in--just about

enough of it----"

"Do you want a doctor? Shall we call at a chemist's?"

He stared at me for a moment; then I vow he almost laughed.

"A doctor? No thanks. One dose a day's quite enough."

"One dose of what?"

"Words," he replied, with a jerk of his head in the direction of the

lecture chamber.

We passed out and into John Street, he accommodating his ordinary

London-to-Brighton pace to mine. He once told me that five miles an hour

was walking, six stepping out a bit, and anything over six and a half

really "going."

"Which way?" I asked at the end of the street.

"I suppose you'd better come round to my place," he replied; and we

crossed the Strand and struck north past Trafalgar Square.

He lived (I am not troubling you with the lobster we shared standing up

at a counter, during which repast we did not exchange one single

word)--he lived in Cambridge Circus, and I hope I have not given you the

impression that Derwent Rose was desperately poor. When I spoke of him

as having none too much either of money or success I meant as by

comparison with myself. Until, quite suddenly and by no means early in

life, my own reward came to me, I should have considered his quarters

luxurious--once you had got there. This you did by means of a narrow

staircase from the various landings of which branched off the offices of

variety-agents, film-brokers, furriers, jewellers and I don't know what

else. The double windows he had had fitted into his room subdued the

noises of the Circus outside, and if he cared to draw his thick brocade

curtains as well he could obtain almost dead silence. His black oak

furniture was brightly polished by some basement person or other, his

saddlebag chairs scrupulously beaten and brushed. The two or three

thousand books that completely filled two of his walls might have been

arranged by a librarian, so methodically and conveniently were they

disposed, with lettered and numbered tickets at intervals along the

edges of the shelves; and I knew that he had begun a catalogue of them.

All this portion of his room spoke of a man settling down into

meticulousness, whom disorderly habits and departures from routine begin

to irritate. In marked contrast with it was the topsy-turvy state of the

large oval table with the beaded edge. This was in an appalling state of

confusion. Newspapers had been tossed aside on to it, open books with

their faces downwards sprawled over it. Empty shells of brown paper

still kept something of the shape of the books they had contained, and

ends of packer's string with bits of sealing-wax twined among them. A

teacup lay on its side in a wet saucer, a large oval milk-can stood next

to it. And on the top of all were the snaky rubber cords of an exerciser

and a ten-pound, horsehair-stuffed medicine-ball.

I was about to hang up my hat in the neatly-curtained recess he had had

fitted up as a lobby when he exclaimed "Oh, chuck it anywhere," and set

me the example by throwing his own hat and stick on to the clutter. They

caught the medicine-ball, which rolled an inch or two, tottered, and

then fell with a soft dead thump to the floor. The next instant, as if

now that his own door was closed behind him there was no longer any need

to keep up appearances, he himself had fallen with a similar thud to the

sofa. He, this piece of physical perfection who called six miles an hour

"stepping out a bit," lay all limp and relaxed, with lids quivering

lightly over his closed eyes. He spoke with his eyes closed.

"Well, what did you think of it?" he said, breathing deeply.

I tried to keep my anxiety out of my tone.

"What did I think of the lecture?"

"Yes, the lecture if you like. That'll do to start with. No, I don't

want anything, thanks. Tell me what you thought of the lecture."

I began to say something, I hardly remember what, when, still with his

eyes closed and twitching, he interrupted me.

"All those silly charts--all those useless figures about the American

Army--that's all waste of time. Making work for work's sake. I could

have told him all that straight away."

I remembered those groans in the obscurity of the lecture-room. I spoke

quietly.

"Is that what you were going to tell him when you--interrupted a

little?"

I had to wait for his reply. When it did come I hardly heard it, so low

did he speak.

"I know what you mean; but I can only tell you that if you'd been

vivisected like that you'd have squirmed a bit too."

I couldn't help thinking he had taken that lecture in a curiously

personal sense, and I said so.

"Vivisected?" I exclaimed. "I was vivisected, as you call it, just as

much as you were--perhaps more in some ways. What on earth are you

talking about? It's a general question. It's human functions and

faculties at large he was vivisecting, not you or me. So," I concluded,

"we were all vivisected alike, and when everybody's vivisected--you

see----" I made a little gesture.

Then he opened his eyes, and there was an expression in them that

suddenly dried me up. It was an even more remarkable throw-back to a

remembered and earlier manner than that I had witnessed earlier in the

afternoon. In short, it was an expression of unconcealed contempt.

"Q.E.D.," he said. "Finis, Explicit, and the Upper Fourth next Term.

You'd have made a good schoolmaster.... I tell you that when I say 'I'

and 'myself'"--he positively glared with irascibility and impatience--"I

mean myself singly and specially, understand--the egregious and

indestructible ego--and not merely just as much or as little as anybody

else. Get that well into your head or I won't talk to you."

Had he not been so visibly suffering I shouldn't have stood the tone of

it for a moment, not even from him. And let me tell you at once the

surmise that had already flashed through my brain. I am a dependable

sort of person myself, one of the kind that nothing startlingly new is

ever likely to happen to; but I was not so sure about his kind. Brains

like his often fly off at queer tangents, and I wondered whether he had

been reading too much of this current cant about "multiple personality"

and had allowed it to run away with him. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems

to rush to that for an explanation of everything nowadays. I had already

noticed, by the way, that one of the books that sprawled cover uppermost

on his table was a book on the thyroid gland. But suddenly he seemed to

guess at my thoughts. He spoke more quietly. Indeed he seemed to be

fully aware of these outbreaks of his, and to be trying to resist them

more and more strenuously as our conversation proceeded.

"Sorry, old fellow," he said contritely. "I'm very sorry. I oughtn't to

have spoken like that. But I'm not what they call 'disintegrating'; I'm

the last man to do that. When I say 'I' I mean the 'I' I've always been.

That's just the devil of it."

"Suppose you begin at the beginning," I suggested.

"There you are!" was his swift reply. He was sitting up on the sofa now,

and was facing it, whatever "it" was, with a calmer courage. "I _can't_

begin at the beginning. All I really _know_ yet's the end, and of course

that hasn't come.... It's a damn-all of a problem. Get yourself a drink

if you want one. No, I won't have one; I--I daren't. And you might draw

the curtains. When I hear the buses and taxis it makes me want to go

out."

I drew his curtains for him, but did not take the drink. He sat on the

sofa leaning a little forward, his great hands clasped between his knees

and working slightly and powerfully, as if he cracked walnuts in the

palms of them. The grey-blue eyes avoided mine. I have seen that same

avoiding glance in the eyes of a man who had something perfectly true to

tell, but so utterly improbable that he was self-convicted of lying even

in speaking of it.

"About what you were saying this afternoon in that Club place--my age,"

he began in a constrained voice. "You--you meant it, I suppose?"

"That you'd live to be a hundred and be world-famous? Yes, I meant it in

a way. I didn't mean you to take me too literally, of course."

"And you thought"--he hesitated for a moment and shivered slightly--"it

was something to be congratulated about?"

"Well--isn't it? Professionally you've staked out a magnificent course

for yourself in which time means practically everything, and so, if you

live long enough, as you look like doing----"

Yet I cannot tell you what premonition of calamity seemed already to

flow like an induced current from him to me. Ordinarily I am not

specially sensitised to receive impressions of this kind. I am just a

man who had had the luck to think as most other people think and to be

able to express their thoughts for them. The greater therefore must have

been that current's projecting force. Certainly the greater was my shock

when it did come.

"I shan't live to be a hundred," he said in a low voice.

I cannot remember what I said, or whether I said anything at all. All

that I do remember is his own next words, the swift and agonising

collapse of the whole man as he said them, and the feeling of my own

nape and spine.

"No, not a hundred. You're counting the wrong way. You got my age quite

right this afternoon. I'm thirty-five. And I shall live till I'm

sixteen."

III

Among the things that have contributed to the wordly success of Sir

George Coverham, Knight, has been that author's rigid exclusion from his

books of everything that does not commend itself to the average common

sense of his fellow-beings. The most he seeks in his modest writings--I

speak of him in the third person because, as Derry's head dropped over

his knees, it seemed impossible that this Sir George Coverham and I

could be one and the same person--the most he seeks is a line somewhere

between ordinary experience and the most, rather than the least,

attractive presentation of it. In a word, his books are polite,

debonair, and deliberately planned so as not to shock anybody.

Therefore in some ways he may be quite the wrong person to be writing

this story of Derwent Rose. For example: he had known Rose for some

fifteen years, and, not to mince matters, there had been many highly

impolite things in Rose's life during that time. More than once it had

seemed a very good thing indeed that he had had to work hard for his

money. The great mental concentration necessary for the writing of some

of his books must have kept him out of a good deal of mischief.

So I (I am allowing myself the man and Sir George Coverham the novelist

gradually to reunite, as they gradually reunited that evening)--I, his

friend, had already done what we all do when we are completely bowled

over. I had instinctively sought refuge from his lunatic announcement in

trifles--any trifle that lay nearest to hand. Suddenly I found myself

wondering why he was afraid to take a drink, and why I had had to draw

his curtains lest the sound of the buses and taxis should call him out

into the streets.

But presently he had recovered a little. He was even able to look at me

with the faint shadow of a smile.

"Well, that's the lot," he said. "I've given you the whole thing in a

nutshell. You heard that lecture and you know me. You can fill in the

rest for yourself."

Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was not yet half-past nine. I got on

to my feet.

"You'd better get your hat and come down to Haslemere with me," I said.

"We can catch the ten-ten. You're all on edge about something and you

want a change. Leave word here that you'll be back in a week, and come

along."

But he did not move, except to shake his head.

"I expected you'd say that. It's what anybody would say. It simply means

that you haven't taken it in yet. No, since we've started we'll go

on--unless you'd rather not. I warn you there's a good deal to be said

for not going on."

"Why not talk about it down at Haslemere?"

Once more there was the hint of irascibility.

"Do you want to hear or don't you?"

Slowly I sat down again, and he resumed his former attitude of cracking

nuts with his palms for nutcrackers.

"There's not an atom of doubt about what I'm going to tell you," he

began. "Not an atom. Unless I'm mistaken you saw for yourself this

afternoon--though of course you didn't know what you were seeing. You

simply thought I looked younger, didn't you?"

I waited in silence.

"And I fancy my manner got a bit on your nerves--does a bit now for that

matter?"

This also I let pass without remark.

"Well, let's start from that point. You said I looked thirty-five. Well,

it's just that that's getting on your nerves--the less amiable side of

my character when I was thirty-five, and--and--well, when you go you

might take that bottle of whisky with you and make me sign the pledge or

something. I'm trying--I'm honestly trying--to hang on, you see."

I sighed. "I wish you could make it a bit plainer," I said.

"I'm making it as plain as I can. Is _this_ plain--that something's

happened to me, I don't know what, and _I'm getting younger instead of

older?_"

"Derry----" I began, half rising; but he held up one heroically-moulded

hand.

"Let me finish. And if I happen to go to sleep suddenly you just walk

straight out, do you hear? Walk right out and shut the door. You're to

promise that. There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go

through.... So there it is. Instead of getting older like everybody else

I'm simply getting younger. I'm perfectly sober--I haven't had a drink

for five days--and I tell you I shall go on till I'm thirty, and then

twenty-five, and then twenty, and then, at sixteen or thereabouts--that

fellow wasn't very sound on his ages to-night--I shall die. _Now_ have

you got it?"

Even about human nature there are some things that you have to accept as

it were mathematically. I am no mathematician, but I do know (for

example) that the common phrase "mathematically certain" is a misnomer.

The whole essence of mathematics lies, not in its certainties, but in

its assumptions, its power to embrace any concept whatever and pin it

down in the form of a symbol. Once you have adopted the symbol you don't

trouble about what lies behind it. You merely proceed to reason on it.

It can only have been in some such way that I accepted Derwent Rose's

mad statement and was willing to see what superstructure he was prepared

to raise upon it. I was even able to speak in an almost calm and

ordinary voice.

"Tell me how you know all this," I said.

He was logical and prompt.

"By my knowledge of myself, and also by my memory. I know what I was at

thirty-five, and I know what I did; well, I simply know that I'm that

man again, and that I shall go on and re-do more or less what he's

already done. At some point in my life I must have got turned round, and

now I'm living it backwards again. And put multiple personality quite

out of your head. That's the whole point. I'm not anybody else, and I

shan't be anybody else. At this moment I'm Derwent Rose, as he always

was and always will be, but simply back at the mental and physical stage

when he wrote _An Ape in Hell_."

To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to

remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I

breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool

fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal

idea that had sent that cold shiver up my spine was capable of an

ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion

that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient

loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we

choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been

abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the

place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment.

Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less.

You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an

ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always

did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome

depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or

hell is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying

altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again

he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently

and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I

admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning

anyway--the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the

flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you

call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid

after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the

writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints

induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process,

didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear

Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But--you'd hardly call _this_

spiritual, would you?"

I think I mentioned that he wore a soft white collar, pinned and tied

with exquisite neatness. A moment later he wore it no longer. Without

troubling about pin, studs or buttons, with a swift movement he had

ripped the collar, tie and half the shirt-band from his neck, and

showed, of an angry and recent purply-red, vivid on his magnificent

throat, two curved marks like these brackets--().

Now I am not more squeamish than most men. I am far from having lived

the whole of my life in cotton-wool. But it needed no course in medical

jurisprudence to tell me what those marks were--the marks of teeth, and

of a woman's teeth. I was deeply wounded. Rose's amusements in this sort

were no affair of mine, and I strongly resented this humiliation both of

himself and of me.

But his hand gripped my arm like a vice. Suddenly I saw a quite new pair

in his grey-blue eyes. It was a swift fear lest, instead of helping him,

I should turn against him.

"Good God, man!" he cried in a high voice. "Don't think _that_! Don't

think I'm such a cur as to--oh, my God, _that_ isn't the point! I'm not

bragging about my conquests!... The point is that _these marks are ten

years old and they weren't there last night_!"

I tried to free myself from his grip, but he wouldn't let me go. He ran

agitatedly on, repeating himself over and over again.

"There isn't much imagination about _that_, is there? _That_ isn't

fancy, is it? _That_ doesn't happen to any man any day, does it? A man

would be likely to remember _that_, wouldn't he? He wouldn't forget it,

if it was only for the shame of it! Is _that_ just ordinary memory? And

how would you feel when everything was healed over and forgotten, and

you'd settled decently down, and hoped everything was forgiven you--and

then you were to be dragged back over the ploughshares like that! I tell

you you've got to see it all crowding back on you again, before you

realise that forgetting's the greatest happiness in life!... I tell you

on my word of honour that that happened ten years ago, when I was

thirty-five before, and that it wasn't there last night! _Now_ tell me

I'm drunk or dreaming!"

Stupefied I stared at him. The issue was plain. Either he was telling

the truth, or he was not. Either those marks were as recent as they

looked or as old as he said. He was to be believed or disbelieved. There

was no middle way.

And my heart sank like a stone in my breast as suddenly I found myself

believing him. He saw that I did, and fumblingly sought to fasten the

collar again. But he had torn both buttonhole and band, and could only

cover up those shameful marks by turning up the collar of his dark blue

jacket. He sat with his collar turned up for the rest of our talk.

Presently I felt a little more master of myself. I had moved over to the

sofa and was sitting by his side. He, this youthful Hercules of

forty-five, who wrote books and made you think of boats and horses, was

weeping softly. He was weeping for misery and hate of what, apparently,

he must go through again. Stupidly my eyes rested on the carefully

lettered and numbered shelves of books, and then on the slovenly litter

of the table. The electric light gave the merest flicker--they were

doing something at the power-station--and then burned quietly on. It

shone on the black oak furniture and the saddlebag chairs, on our two

hats on the table, on the neatly curtained recess where the hats should

have been. It was impossible not to see that in its contrast of

orderliness and disorder the very room showed two sharp and distinct

phases. Almost with voices the inanimate things seemed to cry it aloud.

The man who had catalogued those bays of books had been the author of

_The Hands of Esau_. He who now threw everything down on to that

disgraceful table was he who had written _An Ape in Hell_.

He still wept quietly. I put my hand on his knee.

"All right, Derry," I said. "Try to pull yourself together. You say you

can't begin at the beginning. Very well, begin anywhere you like. I dare

say something can be done. It may turn out to be--oh, shellshock or

something."

But already my heart told me that it would turn out to be nothing of the

kind.

IV

I am not going to direct your attention specially to the more fantastic

part of what Derwent Rose told me in his rooms that night. I have found

no issue in that direction. Neither am I going into the metaphysics of

the thing; I know no more about that than he ever knew himself. But if

you care to read, in reverse, the progress of a man out of the sad

shadows of middle-age back into the light and beauty and belief that

once were his--always the same man, undeviating from the lines laid down

by his own nature, re-approaching each phase as he had formerly

approached it, but in times and circumstances so complex and altered

that nothing in the pilgrimage was constant but himself--if, I say, you

care to read that extraordinary intertwining of what he had done and

what he re-did, and are content with this, and will not pull me up every

time the mystery of the deeper cause confounds us both, then I am

content too and we can go ahead.

It had been going on (he told me) for six months past; but at the outset

I ought to warn you that he had two scales of time. Here I wish that we

were all mathematicians, and that I could write and you could read his

wondrous history in symbolised concepts. However, we will do the best we

can with words.

Broadly speaking, he went backwards, not at a uniform rate, but in a

series of irregular and unequal slips. That is to say, that though in

six months or so of actual time he had retrograded the ten years between

forty-five and thirty-five, it did not follow that he had gone back five

years in three months or two and a half in any given six weeks. I went

carefully into this point with him. I asked him, if the ratio was not a

steady twenty to one (or a hundred and twenty months of experienced time

as against six by the clock) what he estimated it at for shorter periods

of either. But to this he could give no clear answer. Being unable to

fix the precise turning-point, and hardly knowing when the indications

in himself had begun (since at first he had put the whole thing aside as

an absurdity), he had no datum. He had only become fully awake to the

phenomenon when it had not been possible to disregard it any longer.

"Well, as we've got to assume something let's assume that," I said.

"When was it that you first had no doubt at all?"

This he did more or less remember. I give his account in his own words.

"It was about two months ago," he said. "I'd no book on hand. I don't

mind admitting that I'd never felt so stale and empty and sick of

everything I'd ever done. In fact I'd got to the point you noticed this

afternoon."

"What point was that? Don't let's take anything for granted."

"When you rubbed me up about that first novel. I'd got to the point of

hardly seeing any difference worth mentioning between the worst stuff

and the best, Shakespeare included. Do you mind if I go into that rather

in detail?"

"Do."

"Here, I thought, is this creature man, this fellow called George

Coverham or Derwent Rose, brought naked into a world that marvellously

doesn't care a rap about him--but that he's got to contrive to make some

sort of an interpretation of, because it's where he's got to live. He

hasn't got too long to live there either--a strictly limited time--so

that there's just him and this wonderful uncaring universe for it. This

and nothing else is what happens every time a human being's brought into

the world. All this procreation and child-bearing are just for that--so

that somebody can make head or tail of the world.... Well, what do they

do to him? By and by they send him to school. That's the first step

towards taking him away from this universe he's trying to make something

of and telling him instead what some other naked being before him

thought about it all. That's all right as far as it goes. Just once in a

while, I suppose, two heads may be better than one. But"--he paused for

emphasis--"when a third begins to repeat what a second has already

repeated, and a fourth a third, and so on, by and by the universe begins

to drop right away into the background. The process goes on--it has gone

on--till not one in ten million dreams there's a universe at all. You

know what I mean--all talk about talk about talk about it. So, if you've

any sense of proportion at all, where does the difference between one

book and another come in?"

"Well--that's the state of mind you were in," I observed. Goodness knows

I wasn't trying to shut him up. If it did him good to talk I would

gladly have listened to him all night. As for sharing these Olympian

views of his, however, I have never had either the strength or the

audacity. It is because of my own indefatigability in talking about talk

about talk that they made me a Knight.

"I was only trying to explain how I felt," he answered apologetically.

"Let's start again. It was two months ago within a few days, and I know

it was a Monday morning, because Mrs Hyems doesn't come up on Sundays,

and she brought a parcel that had been overlooked from Saturday night.

It was half-past eight, and I was in there shaving"--he nodded in the

direction of his bedroom. "She wanted to call my attention to the parcel

because it was registered."

"Is this just to fix the date, or has the parcel anything to do with

it?"

"Both. I'm coming to the parcel in a minute. Well, as I was saying, I

was just about fed up with things in general. Books in particular. Nice

state of mind for an author with his living to earn to begin the week

in! I remember stopping shaving to have a good hard look at myself. I

remember saying to myself in the glass, 'You're young, you're a perfect

miracle of youth; you've got quite a good brain as brains go; and yet

instead of getting out of doors and living every minute of one of God's

good days you'll sit down there, and make scratches on bits of paper

that have got to be just like the scratches everybody else makes or you

won't sell 'em; isn't there something wrong somewhere?' I asked myself

that in the glass. And mind you, I was feeling extraordinarily fit

physically. That's important. I'd felt like that for days past. Who

wants to work when he feels like that?"

I sighed a little. Even I, with my modicum of health, have occasionally

felt too fit to work.

"So I finished dressing and came in here to breakfast, and I was

half-way through breakfast when that book caught my eye."

"What book?"

"The parcel I spoke of. It was a book. As a matter of fact it was Mrs

Bassett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_."

I glanced at him. "Registered?"

"Yes. You mean one doesn't usually register a common or garden novel

unless you want there to be no mistake about the person getting it?"

"Go on."

"So I opened it there and then and began to read it. I read it at a

single sitting. Then I tore it in two. Wait a bit, I'll show you. Pass

me a book, any one. They're all the same."

I passed him a book from the untidy table, an ordinary two-inch-thick

octavo volume in a cloth binding. Now read carefully. He didn't even

change his position on the sofa. Using his knees only as a support, with

his hands he tore the back into halves. Let me say it again. I don't

mean he tore it lengthwise along the stitching. He didn't separate the

pages into dozens or scores, nor bend or break it. He just tore it

across as I might have torn a postcard. I can still see the creeping and

fanning of the leaves under the dreadful pressure of his hands, the soft

whity-grey fur of paper as the gap widened relentlessly before my eyes,

hear the slightly harsher sound of the rending cloth and the little

"zip" at the end.

Then he tossed the two halves on to the table again.

"I used to do a bit of that sort of thing years ago," he remarked,

without even a quickening of his breath. "Half-crowns and packs of

cards, you know. But I'd had to drop it. Your muscles have changed by

the time you're forty-five. I'd tried to tear a pack of cards not long

before, but I could only make a mess of them and had to give it up."

I found not a word to say. As much as the feat itself the terrifying

ease with which he had done it made me gape.

"Yes, my strength came on me like Samson's that morning," he continued.

"I was scared of it myself. I didn't know what was happening, you see.

I'm simply trying to tell you the first time I knew there was no mistake

about it."

I found my voice.

"But why did you tear the book? I--I hope you weren't looking for the

author this afternoon to tear her too!" I laughed nervously.

He turned earnest eyes on me.

"I swear I never meant her, George--in that accursed _Ape_ book of mine,

I mean. Of course she must have thought I did, and--and--well, to be

perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure she didn't start me on the idea.

You've got to start somewhere. But I went over it a dozen times

afterwards. _Am_ I the man to take it out of a woman in print?" he

appealed piteously.

He was not, and I tried to reassure him; but he broke in anew.

"Why, I'd forgotten all about her before I'd written a couple of

chapters! You're a novelist; you understand. If only she'd.... But I

suppose I left something in--some damnable wounding oversight--but I

can't find it even yet"--he glared round the room as if in search of a

copy of his own book to submit to cross-examination all over again.

And then abruptly he seemed to put the book aside. His manner changed.

He lifted himself from the cushions and spoke in a strained voice.

"Look here, George," he said hurriedly, jumping from point to point,

"let's be getting on. I may be having to turn you out soon; this may be

no place for you. Where had we got to? Where I tore that book. You were

asking me when I first felt sure of all this. Well, it wasn't just the

book, it was what happened inside me as well. Something gave way. I was

afraid. I'm afraid now. You've known me a long time, George; known

scandalous things about me, I'm afraid. But a man can live a pretty

queer sort of life and yet manage to keep something safe from harm all

the time. It's that that I'm hanging on to now. You see, I've never had

any habits or customs. I've never been the millionth man--the fellow who

repeats what they've all said before him. Every morning of my life I've

tried to look at the universe as if I'd never seen it before--as if it

had never been seen by anybody before. Dashed risky way of living....

But I managed to keep something clean inside me ... thank God ... need

it ... badly ... no time to go into all that now...."

He muttered unintelligibly. He was not actually looking at his watch,

and yet he gave the impression of having his eye on the passage of time.

Suddenly he went on with a new spurt.

"Don't interrupt, please. I may have made a miscalculation. You see,

when I drop off to sleep.... About that book. I started it at breakfast,

sent Mrs Hyems away, and never moved from my chair till I'd finished it

in the afternoon. Then, when I ripped it in two, I seemed to rip

something in myself with it. I can't describe it any other way.

Something in me seemed to open and take me right back. Before breakfast

that morning I was what they call 'settling down in life.' I'd written

_Esau_ since the _Ape_, and had lots of things planned. I'd even got a

bit old-maidish about all this"--he indicated his tidy walls.

"Then--piff! All that stage of my development seemed to go like smoke.

No, no pain; no physical feeling of any kind except that sudden rush of

bodily strength. I just tore myself in two as I'd torn the book, and I

ran to my glass--the glass I'd shaved in only a few hours ago."

"And you saw----?" the words broke breathlessly from me.

Slowly he shook his head. "Nothing--that time. _I hadn't been to sleep,

you see. A sleep's got to come in between._ That's why you mustn't be

here if I go to sleep.... No, it was the next morning I saw it."

Faintly I asked him what it was he had seen the next morning.

But before he could reply there had come a sudden wicked glitter into

his grey-blue eyes. His hand had once more gone to his upturned coat

collar. And he chuckled--chuckled.

"Not _this_, if that's what you mean," he said with a jerk of his head.

"That was my last adventure; the one I'm telling you about now was two

before that." Then his chuckle dying away again, "You notice your face

when you shave, don't you?--the texture of your skin and so on? Well,

that was what I saw: just a few years younger, a few years softer, a few

years smoother. The corners of your eyebrows here; you know how the brow

gets thin at the sides and those sprouts of long hair begin to come?

Well, they'd gone. And I was scared at my strength coming back like

that.... I say, get me a drink, will you? No, no, blast it--not that

stuff--plain water."

I got him the water. He gulped it down. His fingertips were still

feeling his eyebrows. Then with another spurt:

"What's the time now? Never mind--but I keep a diary now, you see. Have

to. Memory isn't to be trusted in a matter of this kind. And speaking of

memory, it'll be hell's delight if that goes. You see, this isn't 1920

for me; it's 1910, and I shan't have written _The Hands of Esau_ for

another three years yet. Or you can call it both 1920 and 1910 if you

like. Bit mixing, isn't it? It's demoniac. I call it----" he called it

something rather too violent for me to set down, and I have omitted one

or two other strong expressions that had begun to creep into his speech.

"And just one other thing before I shove you out," he positively raced

on. "I said I should die at sixteen. If it comes to the worst I hope to

God I shall; none of your scarlet second childhoods for me! But how the

Erebus and Terror do I know when sixteen will come?... I say, where are

you sleeping to-night? Perhaps you'd better---- Have some whisky. If

only we had that damned datum point! Do have some whisky. Have the----

lot. Are those curtains drawn? Take my key and lock me in and give it to

Mrs Hyems downstairs. Where's that diary of mine?"

Then all in a moment he was on his feet. Without ceremony he had thrust

my hat into my hands. Comparatively gently, seeing what his strength

was, he was hustling me towards the door.

"Sorry, old man"--the words came thickly--"thanks awfully--I expect I

shall be all right--don't bother about me.... But I shall have to move

sooner or later--looks so dashed queer one man coming in and another

going out--too comic if they arrested me on a charge of making away with

myself.... See you soon--yourself out--quick, if you don't mind--go,

go!"

The next moment I was out on his landing. He had almost carried me out.

I heard the locking of his door, but after that, though I listened,

nothing.

V

Presently it occurred to me that there was nothing to be gained by

waiting. It did not seem to be an occasion for calling for help, and if

there was something he did not wish me to see it was hardly a friend's

part to stand there listening for it. Slowly I descended past the closed

offices of the cinema and variety agents and let myself out into the

street. Involuntarily my eyes went up to his window, but no light showed

there, and I remembered that I had drawn his curtains myself. Among a

knot of people who waited for omnibuses I stood on the kerb, lost in

thought.

It was after eleven o'clock, and Haslemere was now out of the question.

I could have got a bed at my Club, but I vaguely felt that there might

be something rather more to the purpose to do than that. For some

minutes I couldn't for the life of me think what it was. Four o'clock of

that afternoon seemed an age ago.... Then I remembered. Madge Aird might

at least be able to throw a little light on the Daphne Bassett aspect of

the affair. She had said she would be at home that evening, and I can

always have a bed at the Airds' for the asking.

I mounted a bus, descended at my Club, telephoned to Alec Aird, seized a

bag I kept ready packed in town, and by half-past eleven was on my way

to Empress Gate.

Alec himself opened the door to me. He was in his dinner-jacket, but had

thrust his feet into a comfortable pair of bedroom slippers and was

smoking his everlasting bulldog briar pipe. There were neither hats nor

coats on the hall table, and he had the air of having the house to

himself.

"Thought it would be you," he said. "Lost your train? Give me your

bag--I'm scared to death of asking a servant to do anything after dinner

these days. Come up."

"Isn't Madge in? She said she was going to be at home."

"Oh, Madge calls it being at home if she's in by midnight. She's only at

the Nobles. I don't think she's going on anywhere. Listen"--the click of

a key had sounded in the hall--"there she is, I expect."

It was Madge. She followed us up into the drawing-room a moment later,

gave me a glance that was half surprised and half amused, and proceeded

to unscarf herself. Alec was relighting his pipe with the long

twisted-paper poker. There was a question in the eye he cocked at her.

Alec is fond of home, and lives a good deal of his social life

vicariously, sending Madge to represent him and relying on her account

of the proceedings when she gets back. This is frequently lively.

"Oh, nobody much," she chattered. "The Tank Beverleys and the Hobsons,

and Connie Fairham and her escapade, and Jock Diver with Mrs Hatchett.

Washout of an evening; makes home seem quite nice, especially with

George here. Do give me a decent peg; they'd nothing but filthy cup."

Then, as Alec busied himself at a tray, she shot another amused glance

at me. "Brought the Beautiful Bear, George?"

"I've just left him. I want to talk to you."

"Alec," she said promptly, "go to bed. George and I want to talk."

"Dashed if I do without a tune," Alec grumbled. "Play something."

Madge crossed to the music-stool, set her whisky-and-soda on the sliding

rest, and began to play.

I waited in an extreme of impatience. The bus-ride to the Club, getting

my bag, coming on to Empress Gate, greeting Alec--I suppose these things

had occupied me just sufficiently to put away for half an hour the

weight that had been placed upon me; but now, as I frowned at Alec

Aird's tiles and cut steel fender, that weight began to reimpose itself.

Anxiously I wondered what might be happening at that very moment in that

other room with the drawn curtains, the orderly shelves and the

disreputable table.

A man who grew younger instead of older! A man who already was ten years

younger than he had been a few months ago! He had been quite right in

saying, when I had tried to take him down to Haslemere, that that only

meant that I had not yet taken it in. I was as far from being able to

take it in as ever. More and more it forced itself on me as menacing,

inimical, wild. What sane man could believe it? And yet, if it was not

to be believed, why could I not shake it off? Why did it lurk, as it

were, in the half-lighted corners of Madge's drawing-room, allowing me

all the time I wished in which to demonstrate it to be nonsense, and

then, when I had left not one aspect of it uncriticised and undenied,

reunite and face me again exactly as before?

It happened, he said, while he slept; and he had strictly enjoined on me

that if I saw him falling asleep I was to walk straight out of the

place. "There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through."

That meant that during his sleep those tufts of his eyebrows disappeared

and that terrifying strength descended on him again. But what happened

_before_ then? Was the actual and physical change simultaneous with the

inner and mental one, or was it merely a confirmation that came

afterwards? _Had_ he changed in every respect but form and feature even

as I had talked to him? It frightened me to think that he had; but the

more I thought of it the more it looked like it.

For there had taken place a struggle within him that had but increased

in intensity as the minutes had passed. I remembered the gravity with

which he had pondered my suggestion that for the stuff of his novels he

had been too directly to heaven, too straight to hell. I don't pretend

to know any more about heaven and hell than anybody else, but I have the

ordinary man's conception of the difference between good and evil,

better and worse, and these principles, it seemed to me, had contended

in him. And he had striven to throw the weight of his personal will into

the worthier scale. There were things he did not wish to re-do, episodes

he did not wish to re-live. He had even wept that he must be dislodged

from that rock of his life to which his forty-five years had brought

him.... But what had followed? Suddenly a wicked chuckle. Violent

expressions had crept into his speech. A glitter had awakened in his

eyes, as if, since the thing must be gone through with, devilry and

defiance were a more manly part than weeping. "Well, if there's no help

for it, let's be thorough one way or the other," I could have imagined

him grimly saying....

And if this was so, what did it mean but that he _had_ actually grown

younger before my very eyes? I was merely shown, invisibly and a little

in advance, what the whole world would realise when his sleep had

smoothed out a few more wrinkles, given a newer gloss to his hair and an

added brightness to his eyes....

And in that case why had I come to see Madge Aird? What could Madge do?

What could anybody do? If the thing was true it was inescapable. He

_must_ go back. Not one single stage could be avoided. Beyond these

episodes which he dreaded lay others that perhaps he need not dread, and

others beyond those, and others beyond those ... until he attained

sixteen....

I continued to muse and Madge to play.

At last Alec got contentedly up. He straightened the creases from his

dinner-jacket.

"Thanks, old girl," he said. "Well, I'm going to turn in, and you two

can sit up and yarn about your royalties if you like. You look after

him, Madge, and see he doesn't get hold of _The Times_ before I do in

the morning. Night, George. You know where everything is----"

And, refilling his pipe as he went, he was off. Madge drew up a small

table between us, untied the ribbons of her cothurnes, rubbed the

creases from her ankles, and worked her toes inside their sheath of

silk.

"Well?" she said; and then with a little rapturous gush, "I can't get

the creature's beauty out of my head! That skin--that hair--and those

wonderful books! It isn't fair. It's too many gifts for one person. He

ought to be nationalised or something--turned over to the public like a

park."

"I want you to tell me who Mrs Bassett is," I said.

She bargained. "It's a swap, mind. If I tell you about her you tell me

about him."

"Tell me about her first."

"Well"--she settled herself comfortably--"I'm sorry to see you come down

to my own scandalmongering level. Do you want to put her into

_Nonentities I Have Known_? If so, I'll Who's-Who her for you. Here

goes. Bassett, Daphne, _nee_ Daphne Wade. O.D. (only daughter, George)

of Horatio Wade, rector of somewhere in Sussex, I forget where, but

Julia Oliphant will tell you. He, the rector, M. (married) 1, Daphne's

mother, and was M.B. (married by) 2, the child's governess. He died in

the year of his Lord I forget exactly when, leaving Daphne a little

money, otherwise I can hardly see Bassett marrying her. But Hugo pulled

it off all right. My broker knows him. He's in the Oil Crush now, but he

was playing margins on a capital of twenty pounds when Daphne (excuse my

vulgarity) caught the last bus home."

"She's a friend of Miss Oliphant's, is she?"

"She was. She and Julia and Rose were children together. But I'm not

sure Julia speaks to her since _The Parthian Arrow_. She meant it for

him all right, whether he meant his for her or not. Life's full of quiet

humour, isn't it?"

I will abridge a little of my friend's liveliness. Indeed as she caught

as it were out of the air something of my own mood, she dropped much of

it herself. This was the substance of what she told me:

Derwent Rose had written a book called _An Ape in Hell_. I don't know,

Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real

origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic

of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as

much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "_A woman who

dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell_." Had I

written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the

earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his

way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations

to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten

and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over.

Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that

already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness

of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot

delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty

and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could

have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine.

Yet one person had done so--a friend of his childhood, the author of

_The Parthian Arrow_.

"One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one

thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only

appeared quite lately."

"That's so," she admitted.

"But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event."

"Well--she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book

immediately his appeared, in 1910."

"How do you know that?"

"Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her

characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up

to date."

So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but

seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well.

"Well--go on," I said.

But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see

where the _Ape_ must have hurt her!"

"As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book----"

"But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness

that she felt it."

"_What!_" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like

Derwent Rose would----"

"Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine.

She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to.

They were boy and girl together. Now suppose _I'd_ had an affair with

somebody in _my_ young days, and had married somebody else, and then

he'd gone and--rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a

_Parthian Arrow_ even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear

that another woman did."

"But--ten years!"

"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a

baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book.

But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth--well,

thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things

get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's

forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years."

"But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they

were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so."

"Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?"

"Just what you'd expect him to say, of course--that he's awfully sick

he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain."

She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed

and threw her whole castle down to the ground.

"Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's

hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly

shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so

fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said

this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you

to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him."

But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was

beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening

at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a

shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her

anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed

only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not

exist, but as experience they did. For him the _Arrow_ and the _Ape_

were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated

them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by

return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly

beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns:

He was thirty-five when he wrote She was thirty-one when she read

his _Ape_. it and began her rejoinder.

He was forty-five when he read She was forty-one at the time

the _Arrow_. that he read it.

But he was thirty-five again. She was still forty-one.

He was going on getting younger. She would get no younger.

He was convinced he would die at She----

sixteen.

But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of

the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.

After all (I thought testily) Rose might consider himself a confoundedly

lucky fellow. What, after all, was he grumbling at? Because he was going

to have his precious, precious youth all over again? His health and

vigour and strength all over again, so that he could tear a book in two

as I might have torn a piece of paper? His clear skin and glossy hair

and the keen sight of his eyes once more? He was luckier than poor Madge

and myself! And what, if that American was right, was he risking?

Nothing that I could see, unless he should go beyond that age of the

maximum of his faculties, which he was persuaded he would not do. And in

addition to the approaching brilliance of his youth it was not

impossible that he would keep the whole of his accumulated experience as

well. Not for him that old and bitter cry that has so often been wrung

from the rest of us: "Oh for my life over again, knowing what I know

now!" So far, at any rate, he was having his life again, knowing all he

knew at the turning-point. And the fellow was grumbling!

"Now tell me about him," said Madge.

But she could not suppress a yawn as she said it. I knew that she, like

myself, was longing to slip out of her clothes and to get into bed.

"Another time," I said, wearily rising. "Which room are you putting me

in?"

As she rose I did not notice what it was that she caught up from a

side-table and put under her wrap. She preceded me upstairs. The room

into which she showed me was one I had occupied before, and only a minor

change or two had since been made. One of these caught my eye. It was a

leather-framed photograph of Miss Oliphant that stood with the

reading-lamp on the bedside table.

"Well, good night," Madge yawned. "They'll bring you tea up. Don't read

too long--bad for the eyes and the electric-light bill----"

Then it was that I noticed the book she had quietly slipped on to the

table. It was Mrs Bassett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_.

VI

Part of the fuss my numerous friends made about my Knighthood was this

desire of theirs that my portrait should be painted and hung up in the

Lyonnesse Club. Whether in fact I shall ever look down from those

buff-washed walls I am at present unable to say. That rests with Miss

Julia Oliphant. I myself merely have the feeling that if she doesn't

paint me I hardly wish to be painted.

Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee

and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following

day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to

Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.

"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you

sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."

"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and

see her this afternoon."

"You say you don't know her well?"

"I've met her once."

We entered the station. I took my friend's ticket. I saw her to the gate

of her lift, and the attendant paused, his hand on the iron lattice.

"Well," she said, "I think you'll find that won't matter. Let me know

how you go on. Good-bye--and you can tell the Bear from me that no

decent person believes a word of it."

And with a wave of her hand across the grille she sank with the lift

into the ground.

I walked to my Club, lunched alone, and then, in a corner of the

smoking-room, busied myself with my rather scanty recollections of the

lady I was going to see that afternoon. Though I had only actually met

her upon one occasion, we had a sort of hearsay acquaintance in

addition. She and Derwent Rose had been children together, and one does

not begin quite at the beginning with the friends of one's friends.

Moreover, there are these people whom one may actually meet only at wide

intervals, but over whom absence does not seem to have its ordinary

power. Nothing seems to ice over, you come together again at the point

where you left off. Perhaps because you draw your nourishment from the

same elements, you are able to take the gaps for granted.

Nevertheless, of my own single personal meeting with Miss Oliphant I

could remember little but her eyes. I had been presented to her across a

small dinner-table, with rosy-shaded electric candles, that had turned

those great eyes pansy-black in the pinky gloom. I had guessed that in

the daylight they were of the deep brown kind that, alas, so frequently

means glasses for reading and distressing headaches; but what had struck

me at the time had been their quiet readiness and familiarity, as if

they said to me, "He's told me about you; I wonder what he's said to

you about me!"

And now those same eyes, photographed in a leather frame, had watched me

during the whole of the previous night. They had watched me as I had

read that awful book. Darkly watchful and expectant, they had seen my

first amazed incredulity, then my successive waves of anger. "But go

on," they had seemed ever to urge me; "there's much more to come!"

And under the bedside lamp they had been still watching me when the maid

had brought in tea and had flung the curtains aside, admitting the

bright sunshine.

Then, when the book had dropped from my hand to the floor, they had

said, "Don't you think it would be rather a good thing if you were to

come to see me?"

I am not going to advertise that hateful book of Mrs Bassett's. If I

could have torn it in two as Rose had torn it I should have done so. She

had hardly changed his name--for what was "Kendal Thorne" but Derwent

Rose? So I will merely say that to old memories she had added new and

malicious inventions, and had produced a ridiculous grotesque of a vain

and peevish childhood, an impossibly blatant youth, and a culmination

born of her own distorted imagination. It was for her, and not for

himself, that he had blushed. For her sake he would have torn up every

single copy of it if by that means it could never have been. He could

have scolded her, shaken her, smacked her, ashamed, angry and helpless

as one is before an ill-conditioned child who nevertheless has claims on

one. That there could ever have been any passage between them her book

put entirely out of the question. And so much for _The Parthian Arrow_.

At half-past three that afternoon I was at the Boltons, ringing Miss

Oliphant's bell. A tiny maid admitted me, and I was shown into a sort of

alcove with a good deal of tapestry and bric-a-brac and brass about, the

sort of things the artists of half a generation ago affected for the

sake of their "colour." Nor was the studio into which I was presently

shown much different from a hundred other studios I had seen. These

glass-roofed, indigo-blinded, north-lighted wells, I may say, always

depress me, and had I to live in one of them I should instantly have a

side-window cut, so that I might at least have a glimpse once in a while

of somebody who passed in the outer world.

But somehow the place suited Miss Oliphant. Perhaps it was the north

light. Artists choose the north light because it varies little, and

there was something about her that didn't vary very much either. She

came through a portiere-hung door, and as she stood there for a moment,

not surprised (for I had telephoned that I was coming), but with that

familiarity and expectancy once more in her dark eyes, I was able to

check this cool and composed impression of her with my former one of

over-lustrous eyes in the pinky gloom of the shaded lamps of the

dinner-table.

Her hair, like her eyes, was dark; but she had a habit rather than a

style of dressing it. It was piled in a high mass over her white brow,

quite neatly, but rather as if to have it out of the way and done with

than as making the most of its rich glossy treasure. A dateless, but by

no means inappropriate tea-gown of filmy grey with a gold thread

somewhere in it showed her long harmonious lines of limb and allowed her

breasts to be guessed at; and the ripeness of her shoulders set off her

long and almost too slender neck. She had cool and beautiful hands,

sleeved to the wrist; but the daylight added to her years. At our former

meeting I should have said she was thirty-five. Now I saw that she could

hardly be less than forty.

She took my hand for a moment, smiled, but without speaking, and began

to busy herself at a Benares tray. She reinserted the plug of an

electric kettle, which immediately broke into a purr. She listened for a

moment with her ear at the kettle, and then suddenly filled the teapot.

She spoke, once more smiling, through the little cloudlet of steam.

"Do sit down," she said, indicating a "property" curule chair. "Well,

how's Derry? Have you seen him lately?"

I made a note of the name she too called him by, and said, Yes, I had

seen him yesterday. "I'm sorry to say he seemed worried," I added.

"Oh? What's worrying him?" she asked, withdrawing the plug from the wall

and popping a cosy over the pot. It was a French cosy, a dainty little

porcelain Marie Antoinette, with a sac and a padded and filigreed

petticoat, and I remember thinking that if Miss Oliphant ever went to

fancy-dress dances the costume of her cosy would have suited her very

well.

"Have you read that horrible woman's horrible book?" I asked her

point-blank.

"_The Parthian Arrow?_ Yes, I've read it," she said equably.

"Well, I should say that's one of the things that's worrying him," I

replied. "I've just read it, and the taste of it's in my mouth still."

She considered the teapot. "We'll give it two minutes and then take the

bag out," she remarked. Then, "Oh yes, I've read it. I don't think she

need have written it either. But it is written, and there's an end of

it. As for Derry, anybody who knows him knows that his whole life's been

one marvellous mistake after another. He dodges it somehow in his books,

but he knows nothing whatever about women in real life. Never did.

Sugar?"

This was hardly what Madge Aird had led me to expect. I had gathered

from her that Miss Oliphant and Mrs Bassett had more or less fallen out

about that book; in fact Madge had definitely said, "I'm not sure that

they speak now." But here was Miss Oliphant, Rose's friend, not only

quite inadequately angry on the one hand, but on the other talking about

Rose's ignorance of women almost as if he had been as much to blame as

Mrs Bassett herself.... Moreover, when a woman tells a man that another

man knows nothing about women, the man who is spoken to invariably tries

the words on himself to see whether he too is included in the

disparagement. My understanding of Miss Oliphant, such as it was,

suddenly failed me. I looked at her again to see whether, and if so

where, I had made a mistake.

She was doing a perfectly innocent little thing, one that at any other

time I might have found charming. Her long fingers were slyly lifting

the tops of sandwich after sandwich in search of the kind she wanted. A

child does the same thing with sweets--and sometimes goes beyond mere

peeping. But the infantility of the gesture jarred on me, and jarred no

less when, her eyes meeting mine, she laughed, pouted, and said: "Well,

after all, I cut them." I did not smile. Her coolness and unconcern when

a friend was savagely attacked disappointed me. As for the portrait that

was to have been the excuse for my call on her, I was glad now that it

hadn't been mentioned. I now doubted whether I should mention it. I had

supposed her to be a woman--not merely a female painter who gave a male

sitter tea in her studio.

"I don't understand you," I said, a little curtly I'm afraid. "You speak

as if that book was a mere point of view to which she's entitled."

Again she smiled at me, as if she liked me very much.

"Well, she has her point of view. It's evident that you don't know Mrs

Bassett."

"Her book's told me all about her that I ever want to know."

"So," she laughed, "you're just showing how cross you can be?"

At that moment there came a ring at the bell. She was on her feet

instantly, as if to forestall the little maid. With less tact than ever,

I thought, her fingertips touched my shoulder lightly as she passed by

me. It was only then that I noticed that the Benares tray held a third

cup and saucer.

The next moment she had shown Mrs Bassett herself in.

I am going to show Mrs Bassett in and out of this story again with all

possible speed. Only once have I set eyes on the lady since, and that

was in a moment when I was far too occupied with other matters to give

her more than a glance. She came in, a fluff of cendre hair, surmounted

by a hat made of a thousand brilliant tiny blue feathers. This was

intended to enhance the pallid blue of her eyes; as a matter of fact it

completely extinguished it. She was a Christmas-tree of silver stole and

silver muff, toy dog, and a pale blue padded and embroidered object that

I presently discovered to be the dog's quilt. I was presented to her,

bowed, and--suddenly found myself alone with her. Miss Oliphant had

picked up the teapot and was nowhere to be seen.

And this was the kind of arch ripple that proceeded from the author of

_The Parthian Arrow_:

"Oh, how d'you do, Sir George? Really a red-letter day. Sir George

Coverham and Julia Oliphant together. Quite a galaxy--or is galaxy wrong

and does it take more than two to make one, like the Milky Way?--_Oh,

Puppetty, my stole!_--You mustn't mind if I ask you thousands of

questions--I always do when I meet distinguished people--peep behind the

scenes, eh?--_Puppetty, I shall slap you!_"--a tap on the beast's

boot-button of a nose. "_So_ handsome, Julia is, don't you think? Not in

a picture-postcard sort of way, perhaps, but such character (don't you

call it?) and such a lovely figure! I know if I were a man I should fall

head over ears in love with her! Do you mind, Sir George?"

She meant, not did I mind falling in love with Miss Oliphant, but did I

mind taking the dog's cradle and quilt from her arms. I did so, made my

bow as Miss Oliphant appeared again, and moved quickly towards the

alcove where I had left my hat.

But it was Miss Oliphant herself who stopped me, and stopped me not so

much by her quietly-spoken words--"I want you to stay"--as by the sudden

command in her eyes. This was quite unmistakable. For the first time

since I had entered her studio I saw the woman I had expected to see.

That look was too imperious altogether to disobey. I sat down again.

I swear that Mrs Bassett wore that silver stole twenty different ways in

as many minutes. The air about her was ceaselessly in motion. If

Puppetty was in his quilted cradle she had him out; if he was out she

put him back again and tucked him in. She kissed and scolded the

wretched beast, and discussed Miss Oliphant's pictures and my own books.

Only her own book she never once mentioned. And I sat, saying as little

as possible, looking from one to the other of the two women.

Then, out of the very excess of the contrast between them, light began

to dawn on me. All at once I found myself saying to myself, "This can't

be what it appears to be. There's something behind it all. Look at them

sitting there, and believe if you can that the one who's pouring out tea

couldn't, for sheer womanliness, eat the other alive! Look at her! She's

a whole packed-full history behind her, and one that's by no means at an

end yet. It radiates from every particle of her. Of course Miss Oliphant

cares just as much as you do when her friend's attacked. She's a

different way of showing it, that's all. See if she isn't putting that

other one through her paces now, and for your benefit. She's not keeping

you here without a reason. Sit still and watch."

I repeat that I said this to myself.

And from that moment I knew I was on the right track.

At last Mrs Bassett rose to go. I assure you that I was on my feet

almost before she was, for I knew that my talk with Miss Oliphant was

not now to be resumed--it was to begin. The author of _The Parthian

Arrow_ was piled up with quilts, cradles and Puppetty again, and I need

say no more about the thickness of her skin than that she gave me her

telephone number and asked me to go and see her. I bowed, and Julia

Oliphant towered over her as she showed her out.

Seldom in my life have I held a door open for a woman with greater

pleasure.

The outer door closed, and Miss Oliphant reappeared and crossed slowly

to the settee. I now knew beyond all doubt that I was right. She seemed

suddenly exhausted. She passed her hand wearily over those too-lustrous

eyes. Listlessly she told me to smoke if I wanted to. Then she

continued to sit in silence.

At last she roused a little. She turned her eyes on me.

"Well--now you've seen the author of _The Parthian Arrow_."

I made no remark.

"And," she continued, "you did exactly as I expected--exactly what a man

would do."

"What was that?"

"You'd one look, and then you turned away."

"One look was enough."

"Oh, you all think you've got rid of a thing when you've turned your

backs on it. That's the way men quarrel. 'Oh, So-and-So's a bounder;

blackball him and have done with it.' And so long as he isn't in your

Club he doesn't exist for you."

I pondered, my eyes on her old-fashioned studio-trappings. "Well, say

that's a man's way of defending his friend. What's a woman's?"

Our eyes met once more, and I knew a very great deal about Miss Julia

Oliphant by the time she had uttered her next six words.

"A woman has her to tea," she replied.

Then, as if something within her would no longer be pent up, she broke

into rapid speech.

"Oh, _I_ know you men! You're all too, too kind! Forgive me if I say I

think you like the feeling. It pleases you, and you don't stop to think

that it puts all the more on us. You make your magnificent gesture, but

we have to go round picking up after you. Do you think I'd let that

woman out of my sight?... But I'm sorry I had to trick you a little."

"To trick me?"

"Yes, when you first came in. I saw you were puzzled and--disappointed

in me. You see, when a person's coming to tea and may be here any moment

you have to keep some sort of hand on yourself. It isn't the time to

indulge your real feelings. So I took no chances. I'm sorry if I threw

you off the track.... Well, you've seen her, and you've read her book.

Tell me where you think the toy dog comes in."

She was speaking vehemently enough now. She did not give me time to

reply.

"I'll tell you. You and Derry--all the decent men--a toy dog fetches you

every time. You're all so, _so_ kind! You see tragedies and empty

cradles and all the rest of it straight away. And perhaps once in a

while you're right. But you can take it from me you're wrong this time.

I've known her all my life, and I don't believe she ever for a single

moment wanted a child. She'd never have put up with the bother of one.

So Derry's worrying all about nothing. All that sticks in her throat is

that she imagines she's been pilloried as not being able to have one.

Her vanity was hurt, not her motherhood at all. Now that she's got rid

of that bookful of bile I think she's a perfectly happy woman. Her days

are just one succession of shopping and matinees and calls and

manicuring and Turkish baths and getting rid of Bassett's money. It was

just the same during the war--flag-days and driving convalescents about,

and bits of canteen-work and committees by the score.... Oh, Derry

needn't worry his head; tragedy's quite out of the picture! Let's have

the truth. No weeping Niobe--just scents and powders and Puppetty and an

imaginary grievance--that's her."

I think it is my own sex that is the merciful one, at any rate to woman.

Man has made radiant veils for her, has shut his eyes to this or that

stark aspect of her, because the world has to go on by his efforts and

he cannot afford to begin his scheme of things all over again every time

he sees the red light of the prime in a woman's eyes. Julia Oliphant had

spoken cruelly, ruthlessly, without decency; and I now knew why. No

woman cares that a wrong is done in the abstract. Her bitterness and

hate ever mean that someone dear to her has been subjected to indignity

and pain. And suddenly I rose from my seat, crossed to the settee, and,

sitting down by Julia Oliphant's side, did a thing I am not in the

habit of doing upon a short acquaintance. I took both her hands into

mine.

With as little hesitation as I had taken them her fingers closed on

mine. And I fancied the quick strong pressure answered the question I

was going to ask her before ever my lips spoke it. It had all been there

months before--all prepared and promised in that first steady intimate

look across the rosy-shaded candles of that dinner-table. I spoke quite

quietly.

"Isn't there something I'd better know--and hadn't you better tell me

now?" I said.

Again that firm cool pressure of the fingers. The tired eyes looked

gratefully into mine.

"I always knew you'd be like that if only----"

"Then tell me. Because when you've done I've something to tell you."

God knows what fires were instantly ablaze in the depths of the eyes.

"About him?" broke instantly from her lips.

"You tell me first."

The fires died down, and the voice dropped again.

"Tell you? I don't mind telling you.... Of course; all my life; ever

since we were children together. Not that he ever gave me a thought. But

that made no difference."

And having said it she had said all. I saw the beginning of the fires

again. She went straight on. "Now what were you going to tell me?"

Remember it was not yet eighteen hours since Derwent Rose had thrust me

out of his door, torn between an angel and a devil within himself. But

what are eighteen hours to a man who has two scales of time? To him they

might represent years of experience. He had clung desperately to his

better man, but--who knew?--already he might be less accessible to the

angelic. If I was not already too late, to catch him while he was of

that same mind and will was the important thing. If this woman who had

just told me with such touching simplicity that she had loved him all

her life was indeed his good angel, it seemed to me that here was her

work waiting for her. I saw her as none the less loving that she could

vehemently hate for the protection of her love. That she would fly to

him the moment her mind grasped his story I had not an instant's doubt.

Nor did I stop to consider that I might be betraying something he did

not wish known. It was no time for subtleties. Remembering his anguish,

I did not think he would refuse any help that was to be had. Here by my

side was his cure if cure there was to be found.

Still with her hands in mine, I took my plunge.

The first time she interrupted me was very much where I had interrupted

him. She wanted to know, apart from mere imaginary changes that might

have been due to variable health, what visible proofs there were of all

this. I wished to spare her those two ( )'s on Rose's neck, but she

smiled ever so faintly.

"Yes, you're all nice dears. But I know perfectly well the kind of thing

it might be. So don't let that trouble you. It's important, you know."

So I told her. She merely nodded. "He never did know anything about

women," she said. "Go on."

Her next interruption came when I spoke of his tearing the book, though

this was more of a confirmation than a true interruption.

"He was a perfectly glorious athlete," she remarked calmly, "but he

always hated pot-hunting, and later of course his books interfered with

his training a good deal. I remember once ... but never mind. I wonder

if we shall have all that over again?"

"Then you've managed to swallow the monstrous thing so far?" I said in

wonder.

"I told you his life had been one marvellous mistake after another. Go

on," she replied.

But as I proceeded her calm became less and less assured. I was

purposely omitting from my account such elements as might tend to

agitate her, but she seemed to divine this, and perhaps she thought I

suppressed more than I did. Suddenly she broke out:

"Never mind all that about ratios. I don't know anything about ratios.

The point is, when does he expect the next--attack?"

"I hardly know--I rather think----" I began, now quite violently holding

her hands, which she had tried to withdraw. She had also attempted to

rise.

"Soon? A month? A week? To-morrow?" she demanded.

"He's not sure himself, but I'm rather afraid----"

She allowed me to say no more. She plucked her hands from mine

and ran out of the studio. I heard the single faint "ting" of a

telephone-receiver being lifted from its fork, and a moment later, "Is

that the taxi-rank? The Boltons--Miss Oliphant--as quick as you can."

Three minutes later she reappeared. She had thrown a wrap over her

tea-gown, and was hurriedly tying a scarf under her chin.

"Isn't that taxi here yet? How long should it take from here to

Cambridge Circus?"

"Twenty or twenty-five minutes."

"You'd better come with me. You can tell me the rest on the way.... What

a time he is taking! Wouldn't it be quicker to pick one up outside?

Listen--no, that's only letters. Perhaps the man's waiting and hasn't

rung--let's wait at the street entrance--here's your hat----"

She opened the inner door, kicked aside the letters on the floor, and

sped along the corridor. The taxi glided up as we reached the entrance.

The next minute we were on our way.

The streets were full and our progress was slow. People were hurrying to

their homeward tubes, running along in knots of a dozen or a score at

the tails of the slowing-down omnibuses.

"Surely there ought to be a quicker way than along Oxford Street at this

hour!" she exclaimed petulantly. Then she threw herself back in the

corner. Apparently she had forgotten all about the rest of my story. One

idea and one only possessed her--haste, haste. I am perfectly sure that

had she been in the driver's seat not an uplifted blue and white cuff in

London would have stopped her.

And her restlessness communicated itself to me. I too felt that in

talking to Madge Aird the previous evening, in reading that wretched

book all night, in not having told Miss Oliphant straight away what I

had to say, I had lost precious time. Some step ought to have been taken

quicker--immediately----

"Damn!" I said as another extended arm stopped us; and Julia Oliphant

sank back, biting her lip.

Then an endless wait at the corner of Charing Cross Road....

But even that taxi-drive had to come to an end.

"It's just near here, isn't it?" she asked, her hand on the door; and I

sprang out. It would be quicker to walk the last few yards. These few

yards, however, nearly cost Miss Oliphant her life, for I only just

succeeded in dragging her out of the way of a newsboy's bicycle that

darted like a minnow from behind a heavy dray. We stood at Rose's door.

I pressed the button of his bell, which was the third of a little

vertical row of four; but even as I did so I noticed something unusual

about its appearance. The little brass slip that bore his name had gone.

I was unable to say whether it had been there on the previous evening,

as he himself had admitted me, but gone it was now, and from certain

indications it seemed not to have been unscrewed, but wrenched off. My

heart sank, but I was careful to conceal from Miss Oliphant the

foreboding I felt.

"He may be out," I muttered. "I'll ring for the housekeeper."

To fetch Mrs Hyems up from her basement took more time, but at last she

appeared, and a look of mingled perplexity and relief came into the eyes

that met mine.

"Mr Rose?" I said.

"Aren't you the gentleman as came last night, sir?" she said. "Didn't he

go out with you? I heard you come down; about eleven o'clock it would

be; and he didn't seem to be not a minute after you----"

"Hasn't he been back since?"

"I can't make it out, sir. He hasn't been to bed, and there was a note

for me on his table this morning. Paid all up he has, but not a word

about his milk nor his washing nor his letters nor when he's coming

back. And he left his door open, which that isn't his way. Perhaps you'd

like to come up, sir?"

We followed her up the stairs. His door still stood wide open, and as

far as I could see his room was exactly as I had left it last night. The

medicine-ball still lay where it had rolled on the floor, the cushions

of the sofa still bore the imprint of his body. I turned to the

caretaker.

"You say he's paid you, Mrs Hyems?"

"To the end of the week, sir, except for his washing and ceterer."

"And he's left no address?"

"No more than I tell you, sir."

"Then," I said briskly, "I should just tidy his room and close his door.

He'll probably be back to-night. If he isn't let me know. Here's my

address."

But as I said it I seemed to see again those marks where his name-plate

had been. Derry always carried, suspended in his trousers-pocket by a

little swivelled thong, one of those fearsome-looking compendium knives

that consist of half a dozen tools in one. The plate had not been

unscrewed; what he had done had been to thrust one of these blades

behind it and to rip it bodily from its bed. I pictured it all only too

clearly. Myself carefully watched out of the way--a cheque hurriedly

written--a gulp of whisky perhaps and the call of the streets--a dash

downstairs with his door left open behind him--a minute's feverish work

over the plate.... He had left his books, his papers, his furniture, his

medicine-ball. But his name he had taken away, and I did not think that

those rooms in Cambridge Circus would see Derwent Rose's face any more.

PART II

THE STERN CHASE

I

_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 120 _bis_, 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 120

_bis_, 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 into retirement 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 his _dossier_ in 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 born in 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.

II

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 the year 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

found that 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 of _An Ape in Hell_, but him of _The

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 it _might_ have 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.

III

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 120 _bis_, 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

again the 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. "_I_ should

say so! Where've _you_ been 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 was precisely 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 hansoms are 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.

"A _hansom_, man--damn it, a _hansom_! 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 a subtler 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 of _The Hands of Esau_ and _The Vicarage of

Bray_ to do with all this? True, he had been in it, 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 was _not_ dead. 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.

_Had_ he 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, "This friend 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: "So _that's_ the 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 moved to 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.

IV

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 I had 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. I _am_ the

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 _or_ The Derwent Rose who might have

had said, when I had replied, "Whisky? Well, it has

offered him the whisky, interesting effects sometimes.

"No, no--blast it, Somebody once called it a short

no--water!" 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 _or_ The Derwent Rose who might have

had torn off his collar, growled, "Well, what is there

but who had also cried, extraordinary about that?

"Good God, man, I'm Perhaps it isn't anything to

not bragging of my make a song about, but don't

conquests--don't think pretend you've never heard of

I'm not ashamed!" such a thing before. It happens

every night, you know."

The Derwent Rose who had _or_ The Derwent Rose who might

sat in a hansom with a have said, "Men are men and

white satin slipper as women are women. This is also

openly and innocently as Piccadilly Circus. Look round.

I might have sat to Can't _you_ find anything

Julia Oliphant for my better to do than to hunt for

portrait. a man who is--not at home to

anybody this evening?"

The Derwent Rose who _or_ The Derwent Rose who cared

loved beauty and hated nothing for the name of

ugliness. 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 a _Salle des Pas Perdus_ is 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's beard; 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 a _pied-a-terre_ in 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'm_ supposed to sit and listen respectfully when _you_

talk, but _you_ never listen to what _I've_ got 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, that _he's_ still looking for _her_?"

"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 you don'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. _As_ you say. Fearfully pleased and excited

really. Quite a romance. And of course she'd have given anything _not_

to 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 they _do_

so 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 stop _me_ outside 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, about thirty-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.

"_Then_ he's all right," she said in a low and moved voice. "He was

writing the _Vicarage_ then. 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--and he 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 it _from 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...."

V

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 his _Vicarage_ in

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 the _Vicarage_ was

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 book or

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 terrible _Vicarage_ stuff. 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 shall _never_ forgive 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. It _was_ rather like an aureole when

she was a child. And her eyes _were_ blue. 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's_ what 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 sometimes _remember_ what 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 and nothing 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 was _not_ thirty-three at all.

He had _not_ yet 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 for Derwent 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.

PART III

THE STRAPHANGER

I

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 I remembered, 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,

"_When_ do 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, and cook their breakfasts with

methylated spirits. This fellow was called Trenchard. Got all messed up

at the Brick Stacks, La Bassee 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 Bassee, 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 us not 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 it _is_

so enormous after all! There might be quite a simple idea underlying it,

I mean. What's more enormous than human nature? Yet every 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 on _Vicarage_ lines,

I suppose, but oh--immensely bigger! Freedom, scope! The _Vicarage_ was

well enough in its way, but fussy and niggly and scratchy. I can do this

largely, grandly--I _know_ so 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. I _want_ to 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 more than 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 come _here_." 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 of the 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 I _did_ write 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? I _must_ have sixteen at one end, I _must_ have

forty-five at the other, and I _must_ if possible have thirty-three in

the middle, because if I don't write this as I wrote _The 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 I _can't_ let 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 upper landing 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.

II

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 two half-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

written _An Ape in Hell_. At the very least he was now the man who had

written _The Vicarage of Bray_, and not impossibly he was an earlier man

still. And here I had better say a word or two about the _Vicarage_, 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 three descriptions; 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 the _Vicarage_ only 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 of another 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 a But the dazzling endeavour might

work for which no man had ever elude him at any moment.

been equipped as he was equipped.

He would make that python-meal But he might be thirty again

of material and produce a before he digested it.

super-_Vicarage_.

He was still hanging on, his But he was hanging on as a

enthusiasm at its keenest, straphanger hangs on--totteringly,

his experience at its richest. insecurely.

Once he had got going he would But not until he got going.

take a week off with me, a day

with Julia Oliphant.

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 musingly on. "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--_how_ long 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 she

_might_ have 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 a _name_ to 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 what _would_ completely 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 I _can_ know now--the only

one--the only one 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.

III

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--I _should_ scare '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! _He_ isn'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. _That_ great fellow?... Kiss me. He'd kiss

me on both cheeks, shout '_C'est ca!_' and tell Descamps to fix it up

straight away. Of course I wouldn't hurt him."

I stared. "_Could_ you put Carpentier out?"

He laughed. A laugh was his reply.

"But suppose--an accident can always happen--suppose he put _you_ out?"

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.

IV

"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 much as 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 house _now_? 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--Repertoire--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 you _so_ much," 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 is _always_ rewarded,

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 Derry _shall_

write 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, I _love_ myself for being so good! He drooled

along, and I said 'How thrilling' and things like that, thinking of

something else all the time, and now _this_ gorgeous 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 his _Vicarage_. 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 the _Vicarage_ blasphemous? He's simply

going to do the _Vicarage_ again, 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 would _not_ have

him second to Homer--she would _not_ have 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 enormously more 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 former _Vicarage_ period

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."

"Well, you didn't die of the shock, so why should I? Come and get me my

ticket."

We passed through the glazed doors and along the Roman Gallery. I rang

at the closed door where the temporary tickets are obtained. There was

no difficulty, and slowly we walked past the double row of Caesars and

Emperors again. I had taken her arm. Somehow I suddenly felt as though I

were about to lose her, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for an even

longer one. I spoke in a low voice.

"Do you think it will be--safe? Just to walk in on him, I mean. Wouldn't

it be better to prepare him first?"

"No, no--that's the one thing I _am_ sure of."

"Are you sure you can trust yourself?"

"I don't know. If I can't there's an end of everything, so I must."

"What about our going together?"

"No, nor that either." She flushed a little as she said it.

I think, though I am not sure, that there was jealousy in that flush. In

that unspeakable solitude of his Derry had so far only a single

friend--myself. She was prepared, if she could, to steal my share of

him, to have him all to herself.

"But I've got to see him to-day; I promised it," I said.

"Then off you go now, while I'm here. But you're not to say a word about

my coming. Then if I were you I should get off to Haslemere."

She meant I had better get out of the way altogether. I sighed....

"Well, come and get your books."

We sought the reading-room, and I put her into a seat and passed to the

catalogue counter. I took her slips to her for signature, dropped them

into the basket, and then returned to her. It was early, and few readers

had yet arrived. We were in the "N" bay, which we had to ourselves. I

saw her look up at the million books, dingy and misty in the pale light

of the high rotunda. I saw her dark eyes travel along the frieze of

names in tarnished gold--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning. In the past I have

spent a good deal of time in the reading-room; now it is a place I get

out of as quickly as I can. It crushes me, annihilates my spirit with

the weight of the vanity of vanities. Of the makers, as well as of the

making of books, there is no end. They are born, they lisp, they spell,

they write; and then they die. The eager heart, the busy brain, are a

few tarnished letters on a frieze, a strip of paper gummed into the

casualty-list of a catalogue. We think, write, and to-morrow we die.

Only one man was not going to think, write, and die to-morrow. He was

going to be different from all men who had gone before him. Because of

something that had happened to him, he was going to blazon his name, not

in that circular cemetery of dead books, but across the whole width of

the heavens outside.

And this tired woman trifling with the tips of her long fingers against

the book-rest as she waited for her books was going to be his

accomplice. She was going, by means of something called love, to keep

him at that acme of his powers where innocence and wisdom met and in the

past he had thrown her a friendly word from time to time. She was going,

single-handed, to arrest that backward drift of his life. Whatever had

caused it should be thwarted in her. He should _not_ be thirty. He

_should_ remain, if she could compass it, thirty-three for as long as he

wanted--for the rest of his life and hers.

I wondered the dome did not fall on her.

Presently she turned her head and smiled in my eyes.

"Well, don't you wait, George. Thanks so much. Good-bye."

I left her sitting there, in that vast and brown-hued well, still

waiting for her books.

PART IV

THE DOUBLE CROSS

I

A conspicuous feature about my small house in Surrey is its lake--eighty

yards by forty of clear dark water among the oak and willows, spring-fed

and with trout in it. This lake lies immediately in front of the house,

where other houses have their lawns. It needs a good deal of attention,

for springtime sheddings that are charming on grass are messy on water,

and nothing but wind can sweep the glossy surface. But its infinite

variety of mood lights up the whole place like a smiling eye, and I am

very attached to it.

Not more than a quarter of an hour's bicycle-ride away is a preparatory

school for boys up to the age of fourteen.

Need I say that I have had to put up a diving-platform at one end of the

lake?

There are, of course, certain rules: bicycles to be left at the

potting-shed, diving from the punt not allowed, not more than four

bathers at one time, etc., etc. But within these limits the pond is as

much theirs as mine, and seldom a summer afternoon passes without a

bathing-party.

I had done Julia's bidding and had come back home again. It had been on

a Wednesday morning that I had left her waiting for her books in the

reading-room of the British Museum. It was now Friday, and I had not

heard a word either of her or Derry.

I had tried not to think of them. Finding that impossible, I had

wandered restlessly up and down, no good to myself or to anybody else.

On Thursday, and again on Friday, I had almost returned to London. I

could not shake off that picture of her, sitting alone in that dreary

rotunda of accumulated human knowledge. Had she started that

crack-brained index, he his terrifying book? Had she gone to him? What

had she said? What had he replied? I could neither guess nor forget

about it. As if he had infected me with something of his own calamity,

my mind too was in two places at the same time--among the Surrey oaks

and sweet-chestnut, and in that loft where he had lived over the South

Kensington mews.

My study is an upper room at the front of the house, with French windows

that open on to a wide verandah. I often drag out a table and work

outside. But work that morning was impossible. I was too unsettled even

to answer letters. So I walked out on to the verandah and leaned on the

ramblered rail. The oaks across the lake were turning from gold to

green, and the two big willows by the diving-stage were a ruffle of

silver-grey. Under the clear surface the trout were basking shadows. I

wished the afternoon were here. It would at least bring the boys to

bathe.

Suddenly I heard my housekeeper's step on the verandah behind me. She

always walks straight through the study if she gets no answer to her

knock.

"Miss Oliphant," she announced.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

"Miss Oliphant! Where?"

"In the drawing-room, sir."

In five seconds I was through the study and half-way downstairs. The

drawing-room is a cool, low-ceilinged apartment at the farther end of

the house. It has windows on two of its sides, those to the north green

with brushing leaves and a ferny bank, the others glazed doors that that

morning stood wide open. As I entered I heard mingled laughter.

They both stood there.

They were silhouetted against the sunny opening, laughing like a couple

of children. Perhaps the joke was that Julia only had been announced. I

stood watching them for a moment; then I advanced.

"Good morning," I said.

Julia gave a swift turn. The next moment she had pushed Derry forward.

"You explain--I wash my hands of it," she laughed.

She wore thick shoes and a walking-costume, and on her head was a little

felt hat with a pheasant's feather. He had on an old tweed jacket and

grey flannel bags. He held out his hand.

"Hope we're not dragging you from your work, George," he laughed. "Do

you good anyway. I felt like a day off, so I dug out Julia. 'Down tools,

Julia,' I said; 'no work to-day. Where shall we go? Shall we give George

Coverham a surprise?' So here we are, to lunch, please. By Jove, there's

a kingfisher!"

He sprang out on to the terrace to see where the electric-blue flash had

whistled off to.

Swiftly I glanced at Julia. In her eyes was the old deep shining. But

Derry called over his shoulder:

"That was a young one, wasn't it? Is there a nest? How many hatched out?

Do they go for the fish?"

He seemed splendidly fit, perfectly happy. He seemed so happy that

suddenly I wondered what I had been making myself so miserable about. A

weight seemed to lift all at once from my mind. Too much London had

oppressed me, I supposed. Cambridge Circus is not the place for a

country-living man to stay too long in. It bred too many fancies. Much

better for the Circus-dweller to come into the country.

"It went over by that bank," Derry was saying, still peering after the

kingfisher; and I stepped out.

"Yes. The nest's right in the bank. Six of them hatched. You'll see

another in a minute."

But at that moment his eyes fell on the punt. Quickly he turned to

Julia.

"Years since I've had a punt-pole in my hand!" he exclaimed. "Is it in

working order, George? Come along----"

"You go, Julia," I said; and I returned into the house to see about

lunch.

What had happened? Had he really brought her out for the day on his own

account, as formerly he had used to do? Or was she allowing him to

think that he had? Was he repeating himself even textually, in those

words "Down tools, Julia, no work to-day"? I must know. It was essential

that I should know. Yet already something in his manner told me that I

should not learn it from him. He was here not to talk about himself, but

to enjoy, keenly and vividly, every moment of his day. Whatever my own

megrims had been, he showed none. Not he, but Julia, would have to

explain matters.

Suddenly I took a resolution. I pushed at a baize door.

"Mrs Moxon!" I called.

My housekeeper appeared.

"Would it be upsetting your arrangements if I asked my visitors to stay

for the week-end?" I asked.

She considered a moment; then she thought it could be managed. But she

seemed puzzled.

"It _is_ Mr Rose, isn't it?" she said.

Derry, I may say, had been to my house twice or thrice before.

"Of course."

"I thought it was, sir, but they told me only to say Miss Oliphant."

"Oh, that was their little surprise for me," I replied. "Very well, Mrs

Moxon. Lunch, and I'll ask them to stay for the week-end. My sister left

a few things, didn't she?"

"That'll be all right, sir. I'll see to Miss Oliphant."

I came out of the house again and sought the lake. They were out in the

middle of it, lying down in the punt together with their heads over the

side. They were watching the trout. I was on the point of hailing them

when I refrained. Something dramatic in their juxtaposition pulled me up

short.

Their heads were together, their laughter came across the water. She

_was_ having her summer again. But what would it cost her? Her

unchanging adoration--and his affectionate indifference! He had never

cared, he never would care. To-morrow he would have forgotten all about

it. But she would have still another day's memories to add to those

others when he had jumped five-barred gates with his pipe in his mouth

and his stick in his hand--memories of my punt and pond and the greening

oaks and the silvery willows.... Yet she was laughing as carelessly as

he. They were playing a game. A willow-leaf had floated like a fairy

shallop towards them, and he was blowing it her way, she blowing it back

again.

Then a dragonfly caught their attention, and they forgot the

willow-leaf, as instantly as children forget.

* * * * *

At lunch I sat with my back to the open windows, they where they could

look out. Apparently he had completely forgotten that night, only three

days ago, when he had told me that I was the only one of his old

acquaintances to whom he dared reveal himself. He called her Julia, she

him Derry, and to both of them I was George. We laughed, joked, said

anything that came into our heads; but beneath it all I was in an

extreme of curiosity. _How_ had they come together? _What_ had happened

that there was now a second person in the world to whom he could

pronounce his name?

Half-way through lunch I made my proposal that they should remain for a

couple of days. His brow suddenly clouded. I watched him carefully, and

I knew that Julia was watching him as carefully as I.

"Awfully good of you, George," he said in a suddenly altered voice, "but

I really don't think I can spare the time. I only downed tools for one

day, you know. I really must get back."

"But to-morrow's Saturday. I promise to let you go on Sunday evening if

you really must."

"I'm so fearfully busy, you see," he said uneasily.

Under the table I felt Julia's foot touch mine. She spoke.

"Fancy Derry talking like a minor novelist about being busy!" she

laughed. "Why, you always used to say that if it was as hard work as all

that something was wrong and ought to be seen to!"

His brow instantly cleared again. "That's so," he said. "Did I say that?

I'd forgotten. Busyness is all bunk, of course; made for duffers. A

thing either does itself or it doesn't.... Right, George, I'll stop if

Julia will. I hope you won't mind if I go to bed rather early though. I

really have been hard at it, and I need a lot of sleep."

"This air'll make you sleep," I assured him. I did not add that if he

wished to go to bed early lest he should sink into abysmal sleep in the

middle of a sentence he should have his wish. Razors and a spirit-lamp

were going to be put into his room. A little teapot and caddy would also

be placed there. I intended to tell Mrs Moxon that he was faddy about

his early-morning tea. He might then use his hot water for any purpose

he wished.

We took coffee outside, and then went for a stroll round my few acres.

In the kitchen-garden he had a new idea. Over a hedge at one end of it,

well out of the way, was a rather unsightly dump of old household

rubbish--tins, burst buckets, old zinc baths, broken utensils of every

kind. A few spadefuls of earth are thrown over these from time to time,

and a handful of nasturtium-seeds once in a while helps to mitigate the

eyesore.

"You want an incinerator, George," he announced. "Here's all your stuff

ready. Hammer this old junk out flat, get the blacksmith to cut a few

rods, a cartload of stones and a few barrowloads of clay, and there you

are. Lots of fine ash for your beds too, though I shouldn't think this

soil needed much. Got a pencil? I'll show you----"

He made rough sketches of the incinerator on the back of an envelope.

We strolled back to the pond and the punt again, and he threw off his

coat, turned up his sleeves, and poled us up and down. He glowed with

vitality and power. Both for strength and delicacy of touch he did

whatever he liked with the punt. One beautifully-finished little feat he

performed. A blossom of water-starwort floated on the pond some fifteen

yards away. Julia's hand was trailing lazily in the water.

"Keep your hand just as it is," he ordered her.

She had only to close her fingers on the blossom. With one perfect

stroke, one complicated thrust of the pole, that included I knew not

what components of opposite forces reconciled to one end, the flower

sped swiftly to her hand and rested there. There was no jar, only a

thrilling as of a sound-board as the punt fetched up still. He laughed

with pleasure at his skill.

Then at that moment I heard the sound of boys' voices. The bathing-party

had arrived. I turned to Julia.

"They come every afternoon. Would you like to go up to the house, or

will you stay here in the punt under the trees?"

"Oh, in the punt, please," she said; and Derry turned quickly.

"Bathing? Did you say boys were going to bathe? I say, that's rather an

idea! Got a spare costume, George?"

Across the lake a stripling figure stood on the diving-stage with a

towel about his shoulders. It was Du Pre Major. He dropped the towel,

stood poised, and then came the sound of a plunge. Derry's eyes shone.

In a moment he had put the punt in under the trees.

"That's done it," he laughed. "Can I ask your housekeeper for a towel?"

"You know my room. You'll find everything you want there."

"Right. I've nearly forgotten how to swim----"

He stepped from the punt and ran lightly round the pond.

Julia's wet fingers still held the flower. Her head hung a little down,

so that the light from the water was thrown softly up on to her face.

Her eyes, but her eyes only, moved as the sound of another plunge was

heard; but it was only the other Du Pre and Southby. I did not speak.

There would be time enough for talking after Derry had gone to

bed--early.

Then over by the house a gleam of white appeared. It was Derry with a

robe of towelling over his shoulders. He did not take the path to the

diving-board; instead, he dropped the towel on a grass border, looked

aloft for a moment, and then took a straight run at one of the willows.

It was a "cricket-bat" willow, and it overhung the diving-board at an

angle out of the vertical. How he managed the leap I do not know, but in

a moment he was up the tree like a squirrel, poised in the fork,

laughing down at the surprised boys on the stage below.

"Stand clear," he called.

His path through the air was a swallow's. There was a soft plunge, a

hissing effervescence as of black soda-water, and he shot to the surface

again like a javelin, a dozen yards away.

"Oh, ripping plunge, sir!" one of the boys called rapturously. "Jimmy!

Did you see it? Did you see that?"

"Come in--let's make a dog-fight of it!" Derry cried.

And one after another they tumbled in and splashed towards him.

I have been told that that Friday's four are still the envied of the

whole school. He was very wonderful with them. The dog-fight over he set

to work to coach them. They had never seen the stroke that consists of

turning the left leg from the knee downwards into a screw-propeller, so

that the swimmer travels forward, not in a series of impulses, but at a

uniform rate of progress. He showed them in the water, and then hoisted

himself to the diving-platform and showed them there. The stage became a

comical waggling of nubile white legs.

"No, no," his voice came to us, "from the knee--think of a screw--and

about a six-inch stroke with your left hand--it's worth learning--makes

swimming as easy as walking----"

"Show us a racing-stroke, sir----"

"Shut up, Jimmy. Is this right? It does catch your knee, though----"

"Do that dive again, sir----"

Then, when Derry judged they had had enough of it, he ordered them out.

He himself did a final dash of the whole eighty yards and back again,

while the water boiled behind him. Then he sought his wrap and

disappeared into the house.

"He's 'some' swimmer, isn't he?" said Julia softly. She had neither

spoken nor moved.

He was.

But even I could see that he knew nothing of women.

The bit of water-starwort was still in her hand. Suddenly with a little

laugh she tossed it over the side.

"Oughtn't he to have some tea?" she said....

I do not wish to labour the details of that afternoon. I may say that

already I had a very distinct and curious impression of them, namely,

that they _were_ details, isolated and without continuity; but I will

come to that presently. We sat rather a long time over tea, and Derry

talked. The only subject he seemed to avoid was that of his work.

Otherwise he was alert, keen, dead "on the spot." On athletics he was

extraordinarily illuminating. Granted that as an engine his body was

pretty near perfection; it was on the "fundamental brainwork" of the

subject that he laid the greatest stress. The modesty of the

demonstrations which he made on the verandah before our eyes was

altogether charming; he was as simple and earnest with us as he had been

with the boys. For such-and-such a performance (he showed) your balance

_must_ be thus and thus; for swiftness, a certain speed of movement

_must_ be the perfectly-synchronised sum-total of half a dozen different

speeds. I am no very remarkable athlete myself; I have always supposed

that I lacked some special gift; but Derry spoke almost as if, by the

mere taking of thought, he could add a cubit to his leap or plunge. He

took his sport and his writing in very much the same way. You "just

helped nature all you could."

Then he was back on the subject of the incinerator again.

Shortly after that it was an oak that ought to be lightened on one side

unless I wanted to have a hole torn in the bank of my pond.

Then, dinner over, he began to fidget. This was at a little after eight

o'clock. At twenty past he rose abruptly.

"It's that bathe I suppose," he yawned. "If you don't mind I think I'll

turn in. You said I might, you know----"

"I'll show you up," I said.

"Don't trouble," he replied, Julia's hand in his.

But I wanted to make sure that the tea-caddy was where I had told Mrs

Moxon to put it.

II

On the night when he had half scared me out of my wits with that

horrible demonstration with the electric torch on the edge of the bamboo

table, he had been careful to explain that he was putting the question

in its most elementary form. There were (he had said) other factors, and

more important ones. One of these had already occurred to me. Stated as

simply as possible, it was this:

As he had held the torch that night, with that notch that "had got to be

thirty-three" in the middle of the illuminated edge, about six inches on

either side of the notch had come within the lamp's beam. "Keep your eye

on that edge and never mind the other dimensions," he had said, and he

had proceeded to manipulate the lamp.

_But how had he determined the distance at which the lamp must be held

from the table's edge?_

You see the enormous importance of this. The lighted portion of the edge

was the extent of his memory, faculty or whatever one may call it. But

what about that memory's _quality_ as distinct from its extent? Suppose,

instead of holding the torch a foot away, he had held it three inches

away only? The nearer the shorter--but the brighter; the farther away

the longer--but the dimmer. Our childish recollections are intense, but

of small things; as we grow older we remember more, but more vaguely....

I find that I shall have to make use of the parallel columns again.

Indeed I begin to suspect that I shall have to do so throughout. Was

this then the position?

BY APPROACHING THE LAMP BY WITHDRAWING THE LAMP

He might re-live a given age The intensity would diminish

again with great intensity. but the scope of memory

would enlarge.

Emotion or passion might become He might become comparative,

predominant characteristics, critical, philosophic,

at the expense of but at the cost of intensity

intellectual comparisons. of emotional experience.

He certainly would not succeed He might be in danger of

in any task that demanded including so much that he

width of outlook first of all. would become diffuse and

pointless.

He might concentrate so brilliantly The speculative man might get

as to perform a momentary and the upper hand of the practical

sensational feat--say to one and he would fail in a

knockout Carpentier. supreme momentary effort--in

other words, Carpentier

would knock him out.

A summer's day in the country It would be merely a matter

might be almost unbearably of fresh air and exercise, to

beautiful to him. be set off against the working

hours lost and the cost

of two railway tickets.

I am anxious not to go beyond my brief. I knew that for the purpose of

his book he was attempting to manipulate himself, but what his success

had so far been I did not know. Nevertheless all the possibilities had

to be considered, and the more I thought of this one the more it

impressed me. For practical purposes, these differences of

memory-intensity might turn out to be the pivot on which all else

turned.

For suppose that he had no choice but to go back and reopen the closed

book of his life, and that nothing that Julia or I could do would stop

him. Whether in that case was the better: to live as it were day by day

and hour and hour, with joy and grief experienced at their highest

pitch, or to continue to possess to the full this unique and double

knowledge, of a past that had been a future and of a future that was

once more a past?

To put it in another form, since he must do this Widdershins Walk, was

it better for him to know he was doing it, or to do it knowing as little

as possible about it?

Or, in its simplest form of all, would he be happier with or without a

memory of any kind?

* * * * *

I said good night to him at the door of his room and closed it behind

me. I had not taken more than a couple of steps when I heard him softly

lock it. I went down to Julia in the drawing-room.

Even on a warm summer's evening, when the windows stand wide open, I

like a wood fire. Outside the heavens were a beauteous pink glow, with

one amber star. The trout were rising for their evening meal, and a

sedge-warbler sang short sweet phrases. From time to time a moorhen

scuttered along the surface of the pond, and the smell of

night-flowering tobacco floated into the quiet room. But Julia had no

wish to go out. Into a pair of my sister's slippers she had thrust her

worsted-clad feet, and she was toasting her toes and smiling into the

fire.

"Is that window too much for you?" I asked.

"No."

"Then put this shawl over your shoulders. You'll have hot milk to go to

bed with."

"Thank you, George."

"And now," I said, drawing up my chair opposite to her, "tell me what's

happened since Wednesday."

She mused. "Happened to him?"

"I want to know _all_ that you did. Did you go to him?"

"No. He turned up at the Boltons this morning and dragged me out,

exactly as he said."

"But----"

"Oh, I'd sent him a note."

"Ah! I wondered.... What did you say?"

"It was only a couple of lines. I forget what the exact words were. I

merely said that I shouldn't be in the least afraid of anything, and

that anyway I hadn't a dog to set at him. Just that. Nothing else. I

wrote it in the Museum after you'd gone."

"And that fetched him round?"

"Yes."

"Well, what did he say?"

She hesitated. "That's just it, George. He hasn't even referred to it."

"What, not in any way?"

"Not in any way."

"He just came into the Boltons as if nothing had happened, and he's

talked all day as if nothing had happened?"

"That's exactly it."

"He's not mentioned his book?"

"Only what you heard at lunch."

"He is writing it?"

"One would gather so. You know as much about it as I do."

I gazed into the fire. A louder splash came from the pond--one of the

three-pound rainbows. Julia resumed of her own accord.

"You see, when you left me in the Museum I really didn't know what to

do. After what you'd told me I didn't want to risk upsetting him by

simply walking in to his place unannounced. So I wrote that note, and

he'd get it last night. And he was round early this morning. But he

hasn't even mentioned the note. I suppose he got it, but things aren't

in the least like what you told me. You told me he was passionately

grateful at finding you. Well, that doesn't at all describe his manner

to me. He's jolly, keen, full of enjoyment and zest at everything that

comes along--and that's all. He _must_ have understood my note; that's

why I put in that bit about the dog; if he didn't understand he'd have

to ask what _that_ meant. But not one single word. What do you suppose

has happened?"

A little disingenuously I asked her what she meant by "happened."

"To him of course. I've told you all _I_ did. It must have been rather

heartrending between you two; so why this perfect composure now that

there are three of us?"

I didn't know. I was a little afraid to guess. But again I pondered that

distance of the torch from the table's edge.... Julia was still gazing

into the fire, her long hands between her knees, so that her

walking-skirt shaped them. Then suddenly she looked from the fire to me.

"How many things has he talked about to-day, since he's been here?" she

asked abruptly.

I moved uneasily. "Oh--how many things does one talk about in a day?

Hundreds," I replied.

"But--at such a _pitch_!" She threw the word at me with almost

accusatory energy. "Top-note all the time--birds' nests, punts,

athletics, incinerators, those boys bathing----"

Less and less at my ease, I could only urge that a holiday was a

holiday, and that Derry might as well have stayed at home as bring his

cares with him.

"You think it's just that?" she demanded, looking me full in the face.

"I should say so."

"Hm!"

But in spite of that rather critical "Hm!" she seemed reassured.

Suddenly she gave a soft chuckle.

"He was rather wonderful with those boys," she said.

"They're nice boys."

"What a games-master he'd make!" Then, with a sly and guilty look in her

eyes, "What shall we do to-morrow, George? Oh, it's ripping luck, being

here unexpectedly like this!"

"What would you like to do? There's the car if you want to go anywhere!"

"N--o," she said reflectively, as if running over in her mind a dozen

delectable plans. "I think just potter about here. Rushing about in

cars ... no, it's perfectly adorable here. I don't want to set foot out

of your grounds. George, you are a duck!" She hugged herself.

Whether he was living from moment to moment or not, there was no doubt

about her. She basked shamelessly. I am not making her out to be

anything she was not. She was a ready, practical creature, by no means

above what is called feminine littleness, not very young, but with her

own beauty. It was, too, her beauty's hour. Sitting there between the

firelight and the fairness of the evening outside, long-throated,

cool-browed, with the glow of the wood-flames richly in her eyes, her

body seemed an ivory lamp that guarded its light with sacred and jealous

care. And that flame was to all intents and purposes stolen. She now

intended, calculated, planned, contrived. Up to that moment I had

supposed her to be waiting (as it were) in that remembered Sussex

village, waiting at the centre of whatever mystery had happened to him,

waiting for him to come back to her. But now I knew that she was doing

nothing so passive. She was _not_ waiting. She was prepared to bring

events about. To the little that he had spared her on his forward

journey she was prepared to help herself immeasurably as he returned.

Like a footpad she watched his drawing-near. Sitting there by my fire,

with that day's memories still glowing about her, she was contriving

further ones for the morrow....

And suddenly the whole scope of her daring flashed upon me. At

twenty-eight she had failed to get him. Now, at forty, she would not

scruple to make use of whatever arts she had since acquired.

_She would, if she could, marry Derwent Rose._

I cannot tell you my stupefaction at my own discovery. It was wellnigh

with awe that I looked at her. For in that case her adventure was hardly

less tremendous than his own. That is what I meant when I said that he

began to constrain us and to draw us into the wheel of his own destiny.

To marry a man of diminishing age! To marry a man who had lately been

forty-five, was now at some unknown point in the neighbourhood of the

thirties, and would presently miraculously re-attain adolescence! What

unheard-of marriage was this?

As if she enumerated something to herself, one slender finger-tip was on

another. "First I shall go with him to the blacksmith's about those

rods," she said softly.

I avoided her gaze. "I don't know," I said, "that I want an incinerator

built."

"But Derry wants to build it," she answered, as if that settled the

question.

"He may have forgotten all about it to-morrow."

Swiftly she turned on me. "What do you mean by that?"

"The plain meaning of the words--he may have forgotten."

"Do you mean something about his memory?"

"Which memory? He's two of them--so far."

"Tch!... You just this moment said that he was deliberately putting

things away from him because this was a holiday. Did you say that just

to keep me quiet? Don't you believe it yourself?"

"I neither believe nor disbelieve. I simply don't know."

"Oh, you're tiresome!... In plain English, then: are you suggesting that

when he came to me this morning, the only reason he didn't mention my

note was that he had forgotten all about it in the night?"

I shrugged my shoulders. It all happened in the night. That was why he

went to bed early. That was why I had given him a spirit-kettle for

tea--or shaving. Something might have happened during the night of which

she spoke. Something might be happening in my house at that very moment.

"_Do_ you mean his memory's cracking up?" she demanded.

"I think we could find out."

"How?"

"By getting him to talk about his book. To write that book he must draw

on both his memories, experiences, or whatever you like to call it.

That's his whole equipment for it--two conscious experiences, with

himself balanced in the middle making the most of both. We might find

out that way."

"Oh, there's a shorter way than that," she said.

"What?"

"To ask him."

I shrugged my shoulders again. "Yes...."

And then I took her entirely off her guard. Outside the pink had turned

to peach, and the amber star had become a diamond. Suddenly, as they do,

the trout had ceased to rise, and a single short squawk came from the

moorhens' nest. I rose and stood before her.

"Julia," I said without warning, "_would_ you marry him?"

She might not have heard. I thought she was never going to reply. She

drew the shawl a little more closely about her shoulders, and I crossed

the room and closed the windows. Then I returned to my place in front of

her.

At last she spoke.

"I suppose you may ask that," she said. "The answer is--Yes."

"You've considered it?"

"Yes."

"Everything it would mean?"

"Yes."

"And you think you've--the right?"

She stared at me. "The right?"

"Yes, the right. Look at it this way. There's no doubt at all about one

thing; he isn't the same man to-day, or at any rate he isn't in the same

mood, that he was two days ago. He may be just deliberately putting his

work aside for a day, or--he may be the other thing. He may be going on

with his book on Monday morning--or he may be quite past it already. It

makes a good deal of difference to you which of these two men he is."

"It makes no difference."

"Oh yes it does. In the one case you'd be simply his secretary, and

things would be more or less as they were before. But for the other he

wouldn't want a secretary. That mad book would be all over and done

with. You saw him as he was to-day: one quick brilliant impression after

another. That man might write a few vivid short stories, but never that

appalling book.... Look here, Julia, I didn't want to tell you, because

the whole idea gives me a shudder; but this is the way he explained it

himself."

And without any more ado I told her of his demonstration with the

electric torch and of my own additions thereto.

She was not afraid of much, that woman. I had almost written that she

took it perfectly calmly, but that was just what she did not do. But it

was no fear of immensity and the blackness of Infinity that she showed.

Rather she seemed to see an opportunity to be snatched at. That face

that I have likened to the ivory of a lamp betrayed the soft radiance

that she tried to, but could not hide.

"Yes, that gives it," she breathed.

"So you see what I mean by 'having the right.' You'd be there, the

nearest, the brightest, vivider than everything else.... _Have_ you the

right?"

She laughed softly. "You mean I'm a baby-snatcher?" she said.

I did not reply.

For that was about the size of it. Did he remain in that mood, there she

would be in the punt with him, or holding iron rods for him as he set

out the plan of the incinerator, or hunting with him for the

kingfishers' nest, or watching him as he bathed with to-morrow's batch

of boys. He would blow little boats of willow-leaves to her, bring

water-blossoms gliding into her hand. To-morrow evening they would watch

that amber star together, stroll along my winding paths as the

glow-worms came out. That was to be her theft--to press herself home in

the glamorous irresistible moment, let what would afterwards befall. My

modest little estate was to be her antechamber to paradise, and

unwittingly I had set open the gates of it for her myself.

And she was laughing at me for it--openly laughing at me.

"Well--the portrait for the Lyonnesse Club's getting along very nicely,

George," she laughed.

"Dear, dear Julia----" I began.

"That earnest expression's rather good. What a pity I didn't bring my

painting-tools--we might have got a good day's work done to-morrow."

"My dear----"

Then, suddenly, "How long have you actually known Derry, George?" she

demanded.

"About fifteen years."

"Not longer? Then you don't know what's coming next?"

I don't like to be smiled at as she was smiling. I jumped up.

"Yes I do," I said with a flush. "What's coming next is that you're not

going to do this. You're going to promise me not to. Be his secretary,

his nurse, his housekeeper, anything else you like, but you're not to do

this. It it's nothing else it's----"

"Taking a mean advantage, you mean?" she supplied the words for me. "But

he never did know anything about women. Why shouldn't he learn, poor

dear?"

"Julia, you _can't_ have thought! A man without an age! A man, except

for you and me, without even a name a week together! A man who says of

himself that he's to all intents and purposes a ghost haunting anybody

who happens to know anything about him!... Anyway you shan't."

"Shan't I, George?" she asked with a long deep look into my eyes.

"That you shall not."

She too rose and stood before me, one elbow on the mantelpiece. She drew

up the walking-skirt an inch or two and pushed at a log with her foot.

"Of course it isn't as if you and I could ever quarrel, George," she

said. "There, I'm burning your sister's slipper. I say we can't quarrel,

because we're ever so far beyond that. Therefore we can talk quite

plainly about anything on earth, or under it, or above it. So now tell

me why I mustn't marry Derry."

I thought of the man upstairs, of the spirit-kettle on his table, of

why he must be alone when he woke in the morning.

"There are physical reasons, if there weren't any others."

"Of course. He'll get younger. He'll be sixteen. Well, I can be his

mother then. But I shall have _been_ his wife."

"For how long?"

She lifted her beautiful shoulders. "What does that matter? I said his

wife. Does any bride on her wedding-day ask herself how long it's for?

There have been widows who've never even taken breakfast with their

husbands."

"But they married men like other men."

"Pooh! Tell that to any woman in love! They're all Derrys as long as it

lasts, and he's Derry as long as it lasts."

"But his memory?"

"We don't know that anything's the matter with it. Really you're very

hard to please, George. First you complain that he's got too much memory

and he's writing what you call a wicked book with it. Now you seem

afraid he hasn't enough to get married with. If he's happier without a

memory at all, what's the odds?"

"But yourself?"

"Oh, I can look after myself--now! And anyway you needn't worry about

_my_ memory!"

Yet that was what I was worrying about. How gorgeously she had enriched

her memories that very day I had seen for myself. Openly she exulted in

her treasures. But what was to be the end of it all? By marriage did she

mean one last wild lovely memory more and after that--nothing? If so,

was ever degree so inconceivably prohibited? A dark-haired child in the

wrong seat in a village church--a few odd hours in the country that it

might have been a mercy to spare her--that day in my own house and

grounds--to-morrow with whatever it might bring--perhaps another day or

two unless he overtook another milestone before then ... and then the

relative and inevitable sequence: his bride, his elder sister, his

mother, aunt, elderly adviser and friend, and so on to the close. This

was the prospect she was deliberately embracing. Here she espied her

joy....

And should there be a child?...

She had sat down again. That appearance of a quarrel between two people

who could never quarrel was at an end. I lifted the logs, arranged her

shawl again, and then also sat down. Mrs Moxon brought in a tray, with

hot milk and biscuits for her and whisky for myself. She set a small

table between us. Julia's slender fingers played as it were a tune as

she moved the too-hot glass from one position to another. Mrs Moxon gave

a final glance round, wished us good night, and went out again. I mixed

myself a peg, and then turned to Julia.

"I think you were going to tell me, when I interrupted you, what

happened before I knew Derry," I said.

Little pistol-like cracks began to break from the green-oak logs I had

moved. A thin pouring of amethyst streamed up the chimney-back, and the

heart of the fire was intense pink and salmon. The glow from the ceiling

made semi-transparent the rich shadows of the farther recesses of the

room. It was true that as against my fifteen years she had known him for

more than thirty. My own personal knowledge of his history was now on

the point of failing. Only to her could I look for an anticipation of

what might next be expected.

"Yes," she said musingly. "Anyway I'm prepared for it."

"What was it?"

"You don't know?"

"Only in a general way that at some time or other he must have travelled

a good deal."

She nodded. "That's it. His Wanderjahre. He walked mostly--Italy,

Germany, France, racketed about all over the place. Broke hearts

wherever he went too I expect. It was then that he picked up his

wonderful French."

"Then do you think that that phase is--falling due again?"

She shook her head slowly. How could she tell? "I only had occasional

letters from him at that time. Usually to smuggle him out some tobacco

or see about a letter of credit or something. I had one from Siena, and

one from Trieste, and another from Nimes.... But," she added briskly,

"if I married him of course I should go with him. That would solve

everything."

"Would it!"

"I mean if his appearance changed much. You say yourself he can't stop

in one place for long. He can't even take an ordinary job. And you seem

to think that's a reason why I shouldn't marry him. But to my mind it's

the very reason why I should. He shan't be left to tramp the world all

alone, poor boy. I'm quite a good walker."

But for the shawl round her shoulders, the glass of hot milk and my

sister's slippers, she seemed ready to start immediately.

"Julia, are you well off?" I suddenly asked her.

She smiled. "The sooner I'm paid for that portrait of you the better,

George," she said.

"Because," I continued, "his royalties won't keep his boots soled, and

as for that mad idea of fighting Carpentier----"

She made an indifferent gesture within the shawl and sipped her milk.

"And now," I pursued her, "I want you to notice how you've changed your

mind this last half-hour or so. As you sit there now you haven't the

least intention of becoming his secretary. In fact you're calmly

planning how you can murder that book of his."

"How do you know that, George?"

"You are. Remember the flash-lamp. _He_ wants to light up his time-scale

from sixteen to forty or thereabouts. _You_ want it like a

burning-glass, all concentrated in one brilliant spot--yourself. In

other words you're planning a mental assault on him."

She laughed delightedly. "Before committing a physical one? George, you

shock me! I hope you're not going to lock me into my room!"

"Further than that. You don't intend to lose a moment of time, because

those Wanderjahre may be drawing very near."

Her mouth was prim. "It's a difficult position, George."

"Do you intend to ask him outright to marry you?"

"It's a very difficult position," she repeated demurely. "Suppose he

accepted me one day and forgot all about it the next. I should have to

propose to him daily, shouldn't I?"

"I don't think you need joke about it."

Her daring eyes positively fondled my face. She showed all her teeth in

a wide smile.

"Why not?" she asked. "What else is there to do? You wouldn't have me

take it seriously, would you? How can it be taken seriously?"

And she added, stretching her long hands to the fire, "Why, it would be

the least serious marriage there ever was!"

III

By breakfast-time the next morning I had taken a resolve. I had slept

little for thinking of it. I intended, if I could, to make Derry talk

about his book.

For while I abhorred the very idea of that book, there was one thing I

abhorred more. This was the thought of the collapse of his memory. If

anything happened to that the situation was horribly simple. A man who,

from having had two memories, passes to not having one at all,

is--gently but without any further pother--locked up. And had that been

the end of it I don't think I should have had the heart to write Derry's

tale.

He came down, shaven, radiant, hungry. I had heard his plunge into the

lake three quarters of an hour before. Julia too was fresh as the dew,

and ate heartily. So, over coffee and kidneys and bacon, with such

offhandedness as I could assume, I asked him point-blank how his book

was getting on.

A wave of thankfulness passed over me at his very first words.

"I say, George," he protested, "this is a holiday, you know. Must we

talk shop? By sheer strength of will I've put it all on one side for a

couple of days, and here you are trying to shove my nose back on to the

grindstone again! Bit of a nigger-driver you are.... Well, just for the

length of one pipe; after that shop's taboo for the rest of the day.

What is it you want to know about it?"

"Oh, just how it's shaping."

He told me. His account of it as far as it had gone, his projection of

the continuing portion, were perfectly lucid, reasoned, logical. He

brought all his faculties to bear, was completely master of himself. His

memory was as clear in both directions as it had been. I tested this by

means of one or two questions that otherwise are of no importance here.

All was well. My most dreaded fear was removed. Indeed it was I who, at

the end of our pipe, had to change the subject.

One awkward, rather shamefaced explanation, however, he did make. This

was both to Julia and to myself.

"I ought to say one thing while I'm about it," he said in a halting and

embarrassed voice. "I got your note, Julia. I know what you mean. How

you tumbled to it I don't know, and I needn't say it's an unspeakable

comfort having the two of you. I'm not going to look a gift-horse like

that in the mouth, so if you don't mind we won't talk about it. I

suppose George told you, though?"

"Yes."

"Then that's all right. Of course he won't tell anybody else. If he'd

asked me first I might have kicked a bit, but it's turned out all right,

so that's all we need worry about.... Now what are we going to do

to-day? Those trout at all muddy, George? Give me a mayfly and let's

have a try at one of 'em----"

I got him a rod and warned him against the telephone-wire that has to

cross one end of the pond. I left him and Julia mounting the cast on the

verandah.

I went up to my study. I went there from a motive not unlike gratitude

to God. An embodied ghost Derry might be to the rest of the world, but

our little private triumvirate had still a normal basis. He understood

the whole situation, and so to us was no ghost. Nor was even the

prospect of his Wanderjahre now quite so intimidating. The terror would

have been to think of him as an _ignis fatuus_, unconscious of himself,

flitting hither and thither over the face of the Continent at large.

_Cogito, ergo sum._ The distance of the lamp from the table's edge was

apparently not an irrevocably fixed factor. "By sheer strength of will"

he had been able to vary it. He _could_ enjoy intensely and reason

infallibly, if not at one and the same time, at any rate by turns. He

_was_ still capable of work and of play, and at the maximum of either.

How, then, did she stand with her wild scheme of marrying him?

I sat down at my table and worked it out thus:

While he was in his working But while he was at play his

mood he was inaccessible to accessibility was a raised

her. power.

As his secretary she could not But as his playmate she met

hope for more than a repetition him on his return journey--he

of her former experience. as he had been, but she

far more _rusee_ and resolved.

His work occupied by far the Therefore his work stood in

greater portion of his time. her way.

Therefore his work must be But I had encouraged him to

discouraged. speak of it.

I had done her a disservice. But they were at play at this

moment, setting up a fishing-rod

on the verandah.

His Wanderjahre would presently She knew this, and would

be upon him again. lose no time.

I think that states it fairly.

And she had the whole day and the whole of to-morrow before her.

I began to wonder whether I had done wisely in asking them to stay after

all.

But perhaps I was troubling myself unnecessarily about this

moonshine-marriage after all. What about him? He at least would see the

monstrous anomaly and would never allow it. He at any rate knew that if

there was one place on earth where no woman must come it was into his

room between evening and dawn. Things far too terrifying and precise

happened during those hours. He knew this, and five minutes between him

and myself would settle Julia's business once for all.

But again I saw in a flash where I was wrong. Five minutes between him

and myself? It couldn't be done. Why? For the simple reason that, in

order to talk to me at all on such a matter, he would have to be in his

aware and "working" mood--the very mood in which he had always been

inaccessible to her. My answer would be a stare from those steady

grey-blue eyes. "Marry Julia!" he would exclaim. "My dear chap, what on

earth are you talking about? If I'd ever dreamed of marrying Julia

shouldn't I have done it years ago? It's the very last thing in the

world I ever thought of!" That would be his reply to me. I should be

warning him against a contingency he had never for a moment entertained.

And yet--for even that was not the end of it--it was perfectly possible

that with that word "Preposterous!" still on his lips he might go

straight to her, hand her into the punt, once more alter his focus of

intelligence, and be under her spell again before they were half-way

across the pond....

Suddenly I heard his call below: "Quick, Julia, the net--I've got him

on!" I stepped out on to the balcony to watch. It was one of the

three-pounders, making a good fight for it. But he had little chance

against my green-heart in Derry's hand. Three minutes settled it. There

he lay on the bank, with Derry and Julia bending over him. I think she

thought him a lucky fish to have been caught by Derry. I descended and

joined them.

"Going to try for another?" I asked him. But already he was taking down

the rod.

"No, we thought of doing a bit of crosscut sawing for a change."

"Not the incinerator?" I hinted with a glance at Julia.

"Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the incinerator," he exclaimed. "Which

shall we do, Julia? Walk on to the blacksmith's or do the sawing? The

sawing I think; it'll take some time to cut the rods, and we can send a

lad with the sizes and fetch them after lunch. Do the boys come to bathe

on Saturdays, George?"

"They do," I said with another glance at her.

I saw the little mutinous dip of the corners of her mouth.

I am not going to take you in detail through the whole of that day. For

half the afternoon they disappeared; they had gone for a walk in the

neighbouring woods; but they were back in time for the bathing-parade.

Again Derry swam, with the boys, while I lay with Julia in the punt.

We occupied opposite ends of it, and hardly spoke. The commotion made by

the swimmers was almost spent by the time it reached our end of the

pond, and we moved almost imperceptibly under the oaks, with now a soft

touch on the bank, then a little way out, and then the glide to the bank

again. A sort of amicable hostility seemed to have settled between us.

It seemed to be understood that she would do what she would do, and I

should prevent it if I could. I could see the soles of her walking-shoes

and her worsted-clad ankles as I lay, and I mused on the contrasts in

her. She was ready to be off with him anywhere, anyhow; but the evening

before she had been glad of a glass of hot milk and a fire to warm her

hands at. She might, as she said, be a good walker, but she had drawn my

sister's shawl closely enough about her shoulders to keep out the night

air. She was a young forty, yet somehow hardly young enough to traipse

houseless after him wherever his whim might lead him. She was not

altogether irresponsible, and yet she contemplated "the least serious

marriage there ever was."

The punt rocked as she suddenly sat half up. "Are you asleep, George?"

"No."

"I nearly was. I can't imagine why you ever come to London when you've a

place like this to bask in. How do you manage to get any work done?"

"I can't say I am doing a great deal at present."

"Now that's the first inhospitable thing you've said. Which is your

study--the end room there?" She glanced up at the balcony.

"Yes."

"Don't you ever sleep out?"

"No. My room's at the back, and it's two wide-open windows."

"I love the ramblers up the pillars! May I have some to take back?"

"_Mais naturellement._"

"Ah, but you can't stay that like Derry, George----"

"I can't do anything like Derry. On the whole I'm not sure that I want

to."

"You don't believe that sometimes one single hour may be worth all the

rest of life put together?"

"I suppose I'm the other kind of man."

"Ah well!" She stretched herself luxuriously. "I used to think as you

do. But I've learned a lot since then. An awful lot."

"'Awful's' perhaps the word."

"But lovely. Anyway who cares? What does it matter? What does anything

matter? (Oh, look at his dive!) Nothing matters, George--nothing. I dare

you to say it does."

"It might be difficult to run the world on those lines."

"Oh, I don't know. It's in a pretty ghastly muddle as it is. Do you

know, I've made a discovery about that, George."

"Really?"

"It's this: That we make the mistake of regarding the world as full of

rational people, with perhaps a few particularly stupid ones here and

there. Now if you'll only regard it as full of perfect zenies, with just

once in a while a reasonable being among them, that would explain

everything."

"You'd better go to sleep again, Julia."

"But it is so. I see it, oh so clearly! And you don't worry about

anything then--what anybody thinks or says or does or anything. You just

take the funny old peepshow as it is. That's the way to live."

"On an endless walking-tour?"

"Why not, if you're in jolly places all the time?"

"Siena? Nimes? Trieste?"

"Literal George!... But really, nothing matters. Everything except the

present moment is meant to be forgotten. It's the only one you live in.

In the past you're dead and in the future you aren't born yet--except

him.... George----"

"Hm?"

"Girls nowadays _do_ have an awfully easy time!... You've only got to

look at their clothes. We dressed down to our toes and up to our ears,

and that meant we had to take a good deal of trouble about things. We

had to make a little go a long way, so to speak--talk, and smile, and be

amusing, and think what we said. If we didn't we were soon left out in

the cold. But girls nowadays simply powder their shoulder blades and

dress to their knees more or less, and that's all. Lots of 'em never

open their mouths except to eat. They don't _do_ anything; they get

there by _un_doing something.... But how boring for you, George. What

does it matter as long as you do get there?"

"I hope you'll think twice before you commit a very great folly," I

said.

She laughed. "No, no. I've finished thinking. It was one of my mother's

maxims: 'Take care of your health and don't ever give way to serious

thinking.' Don't you think it's rather good?"

"I agree as far as your health's concerned."

"Oh, the other too. She was a wise woman. I've only lately begun to

realise how wise.... Ah, they're going in. Come along."

She stood up in the punt to see whether Derry appeared on the balcony on

his way to dress.

At teatime I had a caller, a gentle old friend and neighbour of mine,

Mrs Truscott. I saw her old-fashioned victoria standing in the drive as

we reached the terrace. Derry was charming to the old lady; Julia--also

charming, but with some subtle difference that I cannot explain. After

tea Derry and Julia strolled off to see whether the rods had come from

the blacksmith's yet, but they stopped to examine the victoria on the

way. Mrs Truscott turned to me.

"What an exceedingly handsome man! But surely she's a good deal older

than he?"

"Why do you couple them like that?" I asked.

"Aren't they engaged?"

"No."

She smiled. "Not yet?"

"Nor likely to be," I risked.

She shook her head, so that her grey curls trembled about her cheeks.

"Ah, you bachelors, Sir George! All sorts of things happen under your

noses that you don't see!"

"I don't think anything's happening here. They've simply been friends

since they were boy and girl together."

"That's a handicap, I admit," she replied. "Perhaps the worst a woman

has to put up with. But occasionally things happen in spite of it."

"I really think you're mistaken this time, Mrs Truscott."

"Well, well, well, well.... And are you writing us another of your

charming books?"

It passed at that, but it left me with an uneasy feeling. These old

ladies are so very acute.

Nothing remarkable happened at dinner, except a curious little covert

duel between Julia and myself when I once more tried to draw out Derry

to talk about his book. I am afraid that she won and I failed.

Good-temperedly but flatly he refused to discuss it; he wanted to look

at my Hogarths instead. So I drew the large folio-stand up in front of

the drawing-room fire, arranged the lights and we turned over the

prints. He seemed very much less drowsy; indeed it was half-past nine

before he spoke of going to bed; and as in the country that is not an

unreasonably early hour, and since moreover Julia had sat up late the

night before, I was not surprised when she also said that she would

retire early. He went first, but she was not long after him. I was

therefore left either to sit over my fire alone, or to follow them,

which ever I liked best.

I went my nightly round, of window-fastenings and so forth; for although

Mrs Moxon has always been round before me, it is my house, and there

would be small satisfaction in scolding her were anything to happen. As

a matter of fact I had that night to reopen the side door, for it had

occurred to me that the driver of Mrs Truscott's victoria, who was

almost as old as herself, had the bad habit of leaving the drive-gate

open. Accordingly I walked up the drive, saw that the gate was properly

fastened, and then stood for a moment enjoying the cool air.

It was a full and late-rising moon, and only the faintest hint of yellow

yet lighted the trunks of the plantation behind the house. The overflow

from the lake, which I never heard in the daytime, sounded loudly. The

evening star had set; the others were exceedingly tiny, pale and remote;

in another hour or so they would be almost extinguished in the moon's

effulgence. A glow-worm burned stilly, lighting up the whole leaf as a

ship's sidelight lights up its painted box. Through a gleam from the

house a bat flickered. I stood for several minutes; then I turned, went

in, locked up, and ascended to my bedroom.

This room, I should explain, is at the back of the house and does not

overlook the pond. This is in some ways a drawback, but it has its

advantages. By foregoing the amenity of sleeping in one of the rooms

with the pleasantest view I was able to have a practically

self-contained suite all to myself--study in front, and dressing-room,

bathroom and bedroom all communicating. My books alone run into all

three rooms, and are thus kept together; and the rest of the upper floor

is left for my guests and servants. Derry's room was the one next to my

study. Julia's, like my own, was at the back. I had put her there partly

because of the second bathroom, and partly because Mrs Moxon would be

within call had she need of anything.

All was quiet as I entered the room. I switched on my bedside light,

undressed, and got into bed. But I was not very sleepy, so I got out

again, reached down a book at random, punched my pillow into position

and began to read.

I was not very lucky in my book, however, and my attention wandered.

From wondering what was wrong with my author I passed away from him

altogether, and presently found myself spinning, as it were, fantasias

on life in human terms. And as I continued to do this these fantasias

began to accrete more and more about the figure of Derwent Rose.

What a history had unfolded since that afternoon when I had found him in

the Lyonnesse Club, gazing at his image in the glass of a framed print

on the wall! Hitherto I had contemplated that unfolding only a portion

at a time. I had typified him as it were in terms of his books, had seen

the man who had written _The Hands of Esau_ give way to him who had

written _An Ape in Hell_, and this one in turn to the author of _The

Vicarage of Bray_. I had taken him phase by phase; I was not yet sure of

a single unit of the repeating-pattern of his backward life. But these

books were not merely his three principal books. They were his only

books of any importance. All prior to the _Vicarage_ had been

experimental, fragmentary, partial--as indeed all he had ever done was

fragmentary and partial by the side of the huge and desperate work he

now contemplated. Therefore we were at the end of measurement by books.

The rest was in Julia Oliphant's possession. She was now his sole

authentic companion, and soon she would have shouldered even me

completely out of his life, and would go forward--backward--with him

alone.

My thoughts passed to her. What a history for her too since that

afternoon when I had taken her hands in mine, had asked her a question,

and had had her matter-of-fact reply, "Of course; all my life; but it

never made any difference to him." Now it was to make a difference to

him. Though he presently eluded her never so swiftly down the slippery

years, she had come to the conclusion that it was worth it. And, for a

few weeks, a few hours yet, I had to admit that they were not

ill-matched. Mrs Truscott had thought that she was older than he, but

had none the less assumed them to be lovers. He, of course, had sunk

into a vast of sleep an hour ago, but I wondered whether she was at that

moment lying awake, scheming, contriving, making sure....

Then, tired of thought, I switched off my lamp and closed my eyes.

The rather secluded situation of my house has its reaction on the

quality of my sleep. I don't mean that I don't ordinarily sleep

perfectly soundly and naturally, but the routine of locking up for the

night sets, as it were, a timepiece in my head. The running of the lake,

the night-sounds of animals and birds, the creaking of a bough, the

motion of a window-blind in the wind--these are every-night sounds to

which I have grown accustomed; but any unusual sound will bring me wide

awake in a moment. Robbery in the neighbourhood is not entirely unknown.

I had slept for perhaps a couple of hours when I was thus brought

suddenly awake.

The moon was high over the plantation; it slanted whitely across my

window-sash, cut into relief the folds of the casement curtains. Outside

the night creatures would be at play or about their nocturnal

employments. But it was no owl nor rabbit that I had heard. It had been

the light crackling of something under a foot. I sat up, still,

listening.

I heard nothing further, and after a minute noiselessly uncovered myself

and slipped out of bed. All the doors of my little suite stood open, so

that I had no handle to turn as I tiptoed from my bedroom into the

dressing-room. Thence I could look through the study to the balcony

beyond. The night was palely brilliant; my eyes could penetrate into the

detailed depths of the oaks across the pond; I could see the pebbles on

the path, the shadow of a chimney-stack over the bathing-stage. The

balcony itself, however, was a blackness. On that side of the house a

marauder could easily hide.

I went back to the dressing-room, took down a dark-coloured gown, put it

on, and returned through the study. If anybody was lurking about I

wished to be inconspicuous. I reached my writing-table and was about to

step outside when again I heard the sound. It came, not from below, but

from the balcony itself.

My study doors are so arranged that I can either hook them half back, at

an angle of forty-five, or entirely so, flush against the walls. That

night they stood at their fullest width, so that, if anybody was on the

verandah, I had not to risk discovering myself as it were obliquely. I

advanced to the hinged edge and peered cautiously forth.

Derry was not asleep. He was moving irresolutely, now a few steps this

way, now a few steps that, at the farther end of the balcony, and the

noise I had heard had been the cracking of a fir-cone or fragment of

bark under his feet. His hair was tumbled, he had put on his old tweed

jacket, but the pyjama-suit I had lent him was small for him, and his

bare ankles showed above his heelless slippers. There was no light in

his room, and I suddenly remembered that that evening he had not shown

his usual anxiety to be off early upstairs.

After those immensities of sleep, was he now suffering from insomnia?

I was about to step out to him when something within me, I really can't

tell you what, drew me swiftly back again. The room past Derry's,

opposite which he now stood, was unoccupied, and its windows were closed

except for the little doors in the upper panes. But somebody was undoing

a fastening. I had seen the turn of Derry's head towards me, and had

withdrawn my own head only just in time. The sound of unfastening

continued.

I think already I knew what I was going to see. By crossing the corridor

Julia could enter that unoccupied room, pass through it, and gain the

balcony. Indeed (I struggled to persuade myself) were she sleepless and

in need of air there was no reason why she shouldn't. But I knew that I

mocked myself. I knew that not sleeplessness had brought her out.

Almost, I thought, they must hear the thumping of my heart. I wondered

whether I dared look again.

I dared not--yet I had to----

She had cast over her the Burberry she had brought out for the single

day. She left the bedroom door open behind her and stood with her pale

hand on the edge of it, not advancing. Slowly his head lifted. His eyes

met hers. I think I could have stepped bodily out and he would not have

seen me for the look he gave her. It was hard, fixed, tranced. Still she

did not move. All her life she had waited for him; it was proper now

that he should come to her.

Very slowly he lifted his hands----

Already I had turned away.

For I had heard the little flutter of her garments, the rush and catch

of her breath----

Grim King of the Ghosts!

She was in his arms.

IV

The next morning I did not hear his plunge into the lake. This was not

because I was not back in my own house in time.

For I had not remained in it. I had dressed, had crept softly

downstairs, and had let myself out, easing the catch of the side-door

behind me. I had walked to Hindhead, and from the edge of the Punch Bowl

had seen the night end and the day begin. I had watched the cloudlets

kindle like plumes of the wings of cherubim, ineffable, indifferent,

anguishing in that the eye and heart ached and fainted for more than

they could endure, gazed and yet saw not because of their own

overbrimming. I had turned away, weary of the heavenly thing, yet had

returned with tears for more of it. I had cast myself down with my face

hidden in the wet earth. I had tried not to think or feel. Had it been

possible I would have been, not a few miles, but a few worlds away. And

in sober fact I am not sure that I was not worlds away. In the thing

that had happened time, distance, had no meaning. Nothing so mystic in

its very nature can be merely _a little_ in error; once it is not right,

it is wrong with an unimaginable totality. Ordinary measurement is

annihilated; in the very instant of identity the last conceivable

differences are wrapped up together as in the vital element of a seed. I

am sorry I cannot make this plainer. You either see what had happened or

you don't. It beat and bludgeoned my spirit as I lay there, sometimes

quivering, sometimes still, while the sun had risen over the Devil's

Punch Bowl.

On my return to the house Mrs Moxon met me. She is an efficient

creature, but a little given to impressionistic fancies, and there was

perplexity in her face as I entered by the way I had left--the side

door.

"The gentleman and lady don't seem to be having any breakfast, sir," she

said.

"Why not?"

"I'm sure I can't tell you, sir. Mr--Mr Rose asked where you were, and

then said perhaps I'd better keep breakfast back."

"Where are Mr Rose and Miss Oliphant now?"

"They went off that way, sir." She nodded in the direction of the

kitchen-garden.

"Then I'll see about it. Have breakfast ready in ten minutes, please."

The kitchen-garden is not very large, but it is a straggling sort of

place, being, in fact, the oddments of ground left over when the

tennis-court was made. I looked for my guests among the dewy canes, but

did not see them; they were not behind the sweet-pea hedge that made my

lungs open of themselves to receive its fragrance. But they had been

there, for I saw that the roller on the court had been moved. Its barrel

was wet all round with dew, and the patch of grass where it had stood

during the night was dry.

Then, just as I was on the point of calling their names, they appeared

from behind the tall artichoke brake.

I spoke first, ignoring what Mrs Moxon had told me.

"Good morning," I called. "Breakfast is just ready. I'm sorry to have

kept you waiting. Come along."

It was Derry who answered, advancing across the court towards me.

"Ah, there you are. I've been looking for you. I wanted to thank you and

say good-bye. I'm afraid I've got to be pushing along."

I acted my part as well as I could. "Pushing along! What are you talking

about? What train are you going by? This is Sunday. Come along in to

breakfast."

"Oh, I'd a cup of tea and a biscuit in my room, thanks," he said

hesitatingly. "I know it's springing it on you rather suddenly, George,

but I really must be getting along."

"What's all this about? Your book?" I demanded.

"Yes, the book. Yes, the book, George."

"But I tell you it's Sunday. There the twelve-forty-six and the

four-fifty. You've missed the eight-fifty-five."

"I thought of walking," he said.

"All the way to London? That would take you two days. So it isn't your

book after all."

"Oh, I meant part of the way," he evaded, fidgeting. "Guildford or

Weybridge or somewhere."

"And is Julia going to walk to Guildford or Weybridge too? Don't be

absurd. Come along to breakfast."

Reluctantly he turned his face towards the house.

I say I acted as well as I could; but it was acting. I had to act

because I was afraid to face the reality. His haste to be off seemed to

make that reality a twofold possibility. In the highly peculiar

circumstances it was not for me, his host, to inquire whether he

scrupled to breakfast or sit down in my house; but it was for me,

technically still his friend, to wonder why he had tried to put me off

with some tale about wanting to get on with his book and, in his

eagerness to be gone, proposed to walk to London. It might have been

decency and delicacy. On the other hand, he now experienced everything

with the greatest intensity, and this sudden and imperious urge to walk

might have been the first faint thrilling of that communicating nerve

that, traced back, led to his Wanderjahre.

At Julia I had not yet dared to look.

I made him eat whether he wished it or not; oh, I was not above using my

advantage. For he was entirely unaware that the cracking of a fir-cone

under his foot had brought me out of my bed and to the door of my study.

It was because he supposed me to have been soundly asleep all night that

I was able to compel him to swallow his punctiliousness at the same time

that he swallowed his trout, coffee and marmalade. If either or all of

them stuck in his throat there was no remedy for that.... At least so at

first I thought. But as breakfast proceeded, I began to be strangely

aware of my complete helplessness. Much as I might wish it, I could not

wash my hands of him. Once more, the choice was not mine, but his.

For what could I do with him? Nothing--nothing at all. I was bound hand

and foot. You cannot turn a two-memoried man out of your house as you

can another. You don't get rid of him if you do. He has his

own--ubiquity. There is only one of him, and you never know where he

isn't. It was not now a question of whether he should marry Julia

Oliphant, but whether he was to be suffered to vanish, to be swallowed

up in the world of men, a drop in the human ocean that did not merge but

still remained a drop, a grain on humanity's shore yet numbered too, an

anomaly, a contradiction in nature, a ghost in the flesh, a man among

ghosts. For if he was a ghost to us we must be ghosts to him. And ghost

does not bring ghost to book for reasons of the flesh. No, he was still

Derry, on whom this enormous destiny had alighted. He was not to be

judged.

Nevertheless he must settle his soul's affairs and eat his breakfast

like anybody else.

We got through that meal somehow. Julia talked to Derry, and I suppose I

also was included, but I have no memory of what it was all about. One

vivid little incident, however, I do remember. I learned why the heavy

roller on the tennis court had been moved. She had asked Derry whether

he could lift it, and for answer he had picked it up and held it above

his head, as once he had held her sewing-machine. So she had gloried in

him.... But of the rest of the conversation I remember nothing.

Breakfast over, I excused myself and left them at the table together. It

had occurred to me that I was still as I had returned from the Devil's

Punch Bowl, and that I had neither shaved nor bathed.

But on my way to my room Mrs Moxon again met me. She was replacing

flowers, and she carried a pail of withered ones in her hand.

"I beg pardon, sir, but may I ask if you got up in the night?" she

asked.

"Yes," I answered. "Why?"

"Only that I fancied I heard somebody moving about," she said.

"Yes. I went into Mr Rose's room. Then I went out for a walk. I'm not

sleeping very well, Mrs Moxon. To-night I shall take a draught."

She knows my tone. I hope she was satisfied. I passed on to my

dressing-room.

Three quarters of an hour later I came down again. I found Julia at one

of the drawing-room windows, alone and gazing out over the pond. She

started at the sound of my voice behind her.

"Where's Derry?" I had asked.

"Over there by the punt," she replied.

I had not noticed him as he had stooped behind the little shelter to

untie it.

"Is he leaving to-day?"

"I don't know."

"Are you trying to keep him?"

She had turned her back on me again and was once more looking out of the

window. "Of course I'm trying to keep him--so far as I may in somebody

else's house."

"Oh.... Why 'of course?'"

"Of course it's of course. Do you think I'm going to take my eyes off

him for a single moment? You heard what he said before breakfast."

"About walking to London as the quickest way of getting back to that

book of his?"

She did not answer. Derry had moved, and her eyes had instantly moved

with him.

"Why is he putting out by himself? Why aren't you with him?" I asked.

"Oh--as long as I know where he is----"

"Didn't he ask you to join him?"

"No."

"The first time for two days?"

No reply.

"I wonder why he didn't ask you?"

"I wonder," she repeated.

"Have you no idea?"

With that she suddenly confronted me. She stood with her hands on either

side of the window-frame, dark against the morning light. She looked

straight into my eyes.

"Isn't this rather a catechism, George?" she said. "Your tone too. I

want you to tell me something. It's this; Are these _really_ the

questions you're wanting to ask me?"

She said it with the proudest calm; but whatever it was that existed

between us made me for some moments longer as calm as herself.

"I do want to know those things. Otherwise I shouldn't have asked you."

"Oh, I'm afraid I said it badly. That's not what I meant. I mean are

those the _only_ questions you want to ask me?"

The moment she said it I was much less certain that they were not. Her

next words plunged me still deeper into doubt. She spoke as it were

direct from the heart of some uttermost complexity.

"What _is_ the relation between you and me, George?" she demanded.

I considered, my eyes downcast. I felt hers steadily on my face all the

time. I spoke in a low voice.

"I'm beginning to know less than ever."

"You'd hardly call it ordinary, would you--conventional and so on?"

"That's quite the last word I should use."

"It's not ordinary because of an extraordinary element that's at the

very root of it. You know what that is; it's"--her eyes went towards the

punt--"it's all him. He's got us all on the run. Give him his head and

he could have the whole world on the run. There's no reason about it; as

many people as knew about him would simply be bewitched. So I've taken

it for granted that we don't quite come under everyday rules. We have to

break and make rules as we go along.... About those questions. They

really _are_ all that you want to know--just what he'll do next and so

on?" she challenged me.

I think I should have broken in on the spot with a "Yes--I want to know

_nothing_ else--nothing at all!" But she gave me no time. Her eyes

called my own downcast ones peremptorily up from the floor.

"Because," she said, with the utmost distinctness in the shaping of each

syllable, "I notice that since breakfast you've shaved, George. You've

also changed your clothes. One does not usually change one's clothes

immediately after breakfast. I suppose Mrs Moxon is brushing the others.

They needed brushing. They had bits of dried grass and heather on

them.... George--George dear--thank you----"

I spoke in little more than a whisper. "For--going out?"

"Oh no. For only thinking of it--for only thinking of it. But you would

think of it; I always knew you'd be like that.... Now ask me anything

you like. _Any_thing you like. Only don't ask Derry. It made"--for an

instant only there was the slightest tremor in her voice--"it made no

difference to him."

What, as she had said, was our relation? Had he "got us going"? Had he

subdued all our standards to his own standardlessness? Had he withdrawn

some linchpin of ordinary conduct from the wheel on which the whole

world revolves? I didn't know. I don't know now. The more I think of it

the less I know. I only know what I did. Her affairs were her affairs,

and I have ado enough to look after my own. I took one of her cool hands

in mine, bowed as low over it as if she had been a queen, and kissed it.

Her other hand rested lightly for a moment on my head as I did so.

"And now," she resumed in her ordinary tones, "about him."

He was sitting alone in the punt, some forty yards away, gazing straight

before him. He had ceased to paddle, the water had ceased to drip from

his resting blade. It accentuated his isolation that for two whole days

he had hardly left her side. Restlessness and impatience plainly

possessed him. He was straining to be off. It would not have surprised

me to see him suddenly thrust the paddle in, swirl across the lake, tie

up the punt, walk straight up to me, hold out his hand, and say,

"George, old man, it's no good--I've got to go this moment." I turned to

Julia.

"If he leaves shall you go with him?" I asked.

"Leaves here? This house? To-day?"

"I didn't mean that."

"You mean if he buckles on his knapsack again?"

"If that's the next stage."

"I'm afraid to think."

"Then you _do_ think he might just--go off?"

She sighed a little. "I suppose it has to be faced."

"And in that case would you go with him?"

She started nervously. He had put in the paddle. But he only gave a

couple of strokes, and withdrew it again. Her voice was low.

"I would, of course. To the end of the world. But that's the whole

point. He never wanted me. He doesn't want me now. He won't want me

then."

I saw--only too plainly. Naturally he would not want her. It was the

very essence of his wandering that he should be unhampered and alone.

That which she now had she had; but it seemed to me that it was all she

would ever have. She had thrown, and--won? Lost? Which? That was for her

to say. Had she remained content as she was she might have kept him on

the original terms in perpetuity; but it looked as if in precipitating

the event she had encompassed her own defeat. Her eyes were now on him

as if they would never see him again.

"Shall we go across to him?" I said.

She shook her head. "Don't worry him. There's no stopping it. He's bound

to go. There, I didn't want to say it, but it's better to face it. He's

fighting with the Wanderlust now. And if he goes it isn't the end. There

are stages beyond that, and there's no stopping them either. He'll come

back in the end."

"Then you'll let him go?"

"He shall do whatever he wishes. It mayn't be for long."

"How many Wanderjahre had he?"

"Two--three--I don't quite remember. But that may not mean more than a

week or a fortnight really."

"And--he'll come back?"

"He'll come back, or we can go to him. Probably he won't be able to get

very far. Anyway nothing on earth can stop it, so there's no more to be

said."

I looked at her fixedly, earnestly. "But there is more to be said. What

about yourself?" I said quietly.

For a moment her eyes left that man in the punt who fidgeted to feel the

stick in his hand again, the pack on his back and the hard road under

his feet. They smiled dimly into mine.

"Oh, I'm a painter. There'll be that portrait of yours to start

presently, George."

And back went the eyes to the motionless figure in the punt.

V

Derry stayed to lunch without further pressing. He had made his book his

excuse; that brushed aside, he had no choice but to stay or give his

reason for not staying. So, as a man who is starting on a walking-tour

of indefinite duration can hardly boggle at an hour or two sooner or

later in the starting, and as, moreover, having brought Julia, he must

in ordinary politeness take her back again, he stayed.

But lunch was nearly as extraordinary as breakfast had been. Once more

he tried to urge his book, and again failed. And I remembered how

formerly, in Cambridge Circus, his very thought and essence had been

modified in my presence, awaiting only sleep to put the visible and

physical seal upon it. It needed only half an eye to see that he no

longer had the least interest in that book. The more he urged it, the

more plainly it became a thing of the past. Vivaciously, yet as if

repeating them from memory, he said things he had said twice and thrice

before; echoes, mere echoes.... And then suddenly he ceased to talk

about his book. He wanted a change, he said; wanted to get away

somewhere; and this rang instantly true. I fancied he even became a

little cunning. "Do you know, George, I've never in my life been in

Ireland?" he said. "Only an hour or two away, and I've never been! Lord,

how we do sit still in one place! I feel positively ashamed. We settle

down--get sitzfleich--heavens, I do want a change!" ... And somehow I

knew that he was dragging in Ireland as a red-herring. He had no

intention of going there. That was purely for our benefit. He not only

wanted to go away alone, but he did not wish to have his whereabouts

known. Only a few hours before he had made much of Julia and myself, as

his only rest and comfort in that wavering ebb of his life; now he no

longer did not need, but very definitely did not want companionship. And

he threw dust in our eyes. Yes, just a little cunning. I made a note of

it.

I have said that the afternoon train to town was at four-forty. There

was not another till seven-eighteen, reaching Waterloo at

eight-forty-one. There was little doubt which of the two he would

choose. As we all three took a stroll backwards and forwards after lunch

he turned to Julia.

"Will the four-forty suit you all right?" he asked.

She only nodded.

"Right. And I say: would you mind if when we got to town I put you on

your bus at Waterloo and left you? There's a little job I must do."

"Very well, Derry," she said.

"And now, George, if you could spare me just a moment----," this time he

turned to me.

Julia walked rather quickly away.

The "little job" of which he had spoken was this:

He wanted me--quite at my own convenience, of course, and whenever I

next happened to be in town--to arrange for the sale of his things at

Cambridge Circus. To attend to this himself might be to ask for trouble.

So I was to sell everything for what it would fetch and remit the money

to him.

"Where?" I asked him. ("Ireland?" I thought.)

"I shall have to let you know that later," he replied. "I want to sell

the lot and pay all up there; chairs and curtains are no good to a man

like me. I don't suppose I shall ever want 'em again. I shall have to

settle up with Trenchard too, and money's as well in your pocket as

anywhere else."

"Will you have some now to be going on with?"

"No, that's quite all right. I have all I want for the present, if you

wouldn't mind doing this other for me. Thanks, old fellow."

"Is it to Cambridge Circus that you're going to-night when you leave

Julia?" I asked.

"Yes. There are one or two small things I want, and also a few things I

think I'd better destroy."

"Couldn't you," I said slowly and quite deliberately, "have taken her

home and seen about your things to-morrow?"

I felt the beginning of his perturbation. "It's so dashed awkward,

George," he stammered. "I don't want to go in the daytime."

"Couldn't you go to-morrow night and still take her home?"

Again he muttered, his eyes on the ground. "Why waste a day?"

"If, as you say, you want a change--supposing you were to go off

somewhere for a bit--wouldn't you like somebody with you?"

"No, George," he answered curtly.

"You are going away?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"Immediately?"

"Yes."

"Where to?"

"I don't know yet."

"Would you let me come with you?"

"No."

"Would you, if it were possible, take Julia?"

"No."

"Might both of us come with you together?"

"No." And, raising his voice, "No, I tell you, no!" he said.

We had stopped by a rather shabby-looking thicket of rugosa roses near

the diving-stage. The pink-flowered hedge hid us from the house. I spoke

quietly, not to give my own agitation too much head.

"Derry," I said, "you remember what you showed me with that flashlight

that night in your rooms?"

With marked reluctance he answered, "Yes I do."

"I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking a lot about it. Of

course it makes a considerable difference how far away you hold the

lamp."

"A hell of a difference," he muttered.

"Do you always hold it at the same distance?"

His whole mind seemed to wriggle. "I haven't, if you must know. But why

drag all this up again? I offered to tell you before but you wouldn't

listen."

"I hadn't the reason then that I have now. Do you--move it about

deliberately?"

"I have to some extent. I told you that. I did by an effort of will when

I came here for a day's rest."

"A day's rest?... You're not going back to that book. You know that

better than I do. That book's all past and done with. Something's

happened since."

I saw him turn pale. "What do you mean?" he asked almost inaudibly.

"You came here on Friday midday. I've watched you carefully ever since.

Let's--well, let's stick to terms of the flash-lamp. Except for a

quarter of an hour or so at breakfast yesterday morning, when you talked

about your book, you've had that lamp steadily rather close to the edge

of the table. Isn't that so?"

"I tell you a holiday's a holiday," he said faintly.

"Let me go on. I want to know how close that lamp has been. The closer

you hold it the more ecstatically you experience, you know. Very well.

Now has there been a moment since yesterday when ... _you've held it as

close as you could get it_?"

I was in time to catch him as he swayed. He clutched at my shoulder.

"George----"

"Steady--but tell me----"

"George--I've been trying to remember----"

"What! Good God! You don't remem--_so close that you don't remember_?"

"I honestly--but no, that isn't true--I seem to remember something--let

me think, let me think.... What time did I go to bed last night?"

"Later than usual. Not till half-past nine."

"What was I doing? Tell me what I was doing. I was looking at pictures

or something, wasn't I?"

"You were looking at the Hogarth prints."

"Yes, yes, that's right.... I didn't fall asleep, did I?"

"No, you didn't."

He muttered thickly. Outrageous, extravagant, beyond reason as it was,

his sincerity could not be doubted. "It made no difference to him,"

Julia had said; but that her words should be taken _au pied de la

lettre_ like that!... He continued to mutter.

"I do remember something--I do remember--at least I did this morning--I

thought I did--but it went. Why didn't I come into breakfast? _Why_ was

I going away without any breakfast? _Why_ wouldn't I have breakfast,

George? I'm sure there was a reason, but I can't for the life of me

remember." Then he began to talk rapidly. "That lamp--very close, you

say--touching--something all instantaneous and burning--one intense

brilliant spot--no before or after--all isolated by itself--but I'll

swear I didn't fake the lamp that time! By all that's sacred I swear it,

George! Something happened in the night that had nothing to do with me

at all! It all happens in the night. Why"--he flung out his arms in a

perfectly amazing appeal--"if I'd moved the light at all it would have

been farther away! I _wanted_ to do that book! I thought about nothing

else from the moment I went upstairs! I ached to be at it--wished this

wasted week-end was over--I saw it all again perfectly clearly,

beautifully clearly! I'd got out of bed. And then ... everything went

out. It was exactly as if somebody'd taken that torch out of my hand,

somebody with a stronger will than mine, and concentrated it--in the

very moment when I saw that book practically written--one bright blazing

bull's-eye----"

There was a little bench about four yards away. I think I needed its

support more than he. Together we reached it and sat down. He turned the

beautiful grey-blue eyes on me.

"George," he said more quietly, "something happened. I know it did."

I made no reply.

"Something happened. Something's been done to me. Somebody's been taking

a hand in my life. At breakfast-time I almost knew what it was. Do _you_

know what it was?"

There was only one possible answer to this. I made it, in a broken

voice.

"No, old man, I don't."

"Except of course that I've slipped back again."

"Except that, I suppose."

He passed his hand wearily over his brow, and, much as I hated that

insolent vainglorious book of his, the gesture with which he wiped it

away went strangely to my heart.

"Then what's that make the year now? 1903 or 4 I suppose; all blind

guessing though; how can you tell your age to a year or two simply by

how you feel?... But that would be about it. I was in the Adriatic in

1903; Venice, and across to Genoa and Marseilles. I'd been in Marseilles

a few years before and thought I'd like another look at it. Gay place.

There was a little cafe on the Vieux Port with a little stage where a

woman used to dance. Andalusian; very dark-eyed; pretty sort of wild

animal. She had a little sloping mirror at the top of the stage so she

could see who was in front when she was behind. Wicked show; I wasn't

having any; knives come out too easily there. But of course she'd gone

when I went again in 1904."

I made one more appeal. "Derry, can't you stay here a little longer?"

But it had now resumed its possession of him. He was almost cheerful

again.

"Sorry, George. It's good of you to ask me, but it's quite impossible.

Glad Julia was able to take a run down with me; she's a rattling good

sort. I feel rather beastly about shaking her at Waterloo, but I really

must get up to Cambridge Circus to-night. And if you'll see about

selling those things, George--any time will do--I've got nearly a

hundred pounds, so there's really no hurry--I'll let you know where to

send the money to----"

* * * * *

I drove them to the station. As the car turned out of the drive Julia's

eyes took a last look at my balconied house. His spirits were now high;

he was on the eve of a holiday. They got into an empty third-class

carriage.

"Well, thanks most awfully, George," he said.

We waved hands.

Both their heads were framed in the window as the train glided out of

the station.

That night I once more roamed restlessly from room to room of my house.

The place seemed extraordinarily and insistently empty, and I could not

have told you whether I was glad or sorry for it. For this thing was

getting altogether too much for me. Remember that I am merely a

commercially successful English novelist, not a person accustomed to the

contemplation of the mysteries of life and death in terms of electric

torches and bamboo tables. Also a man of my years does not spend a night

at the Devil's Punch Bowl without knowing something about it afterwards.

In this connection, going into my dressing-room, I found that after all

my suit of clothes had not been brushed. I summoned Mrs Moxon and told

her to take them away. She stiffened a little, and some part of her

clothing creaked.

"It's made a good deal of extra work for the week-end," she reminded me.

"I'm sorry for that, but you were consulted beforehand," I said.

"It was more than I reckoned for," she announced with dignity.

A little of this was enough.

"Very well, Mrs Moxon. Take the clothes away, please, and let me have

them to-morrow. By the way, I shall be going up to town by the midday

train."

"In that case, sir," she said, "if you're seeing Mr Rose perhaps you'd

give him this. I suppose it's his. I found it in his room."

She put into my hand a small book covered with shiny black cloth. I

opened it to see what it was.

A single glance told me. It was Derwent Rose's diary.

PART V

THE PIVOT

I

"George, you haven't brought your Beautiful Bear round to see me yet,"

said Madge Aird. And I jumped a little as she added, "By the way, does

he happen to have a brother?"

"No. At least I never heard of one. Why?"

"I wondered. I've seen somebody most remarkably like him, only younger.

In this neighbourhood too. I thought Nature made him and then lost the

recipe, or whatever the saying is."

I assumed a lightness I hardly felt. "Did you 'fall for' this other

paragon as you did for Mr Rose?"

She laughed. "Oh, I don't know. I dare say beauty of that sort would be

ill to live with. Better a dinner of herbs all to yourself than a

stalled ox every woman you knew would be running after. Or words to that

effect. So you and Alec needn't be too downhearted. But really he was

most astonishingly like. Where does Mr Rose live?"

"Mr Rose is at present abroad."

"Oh, I don't mean that it was he! I couldn't make a mistake like

that--I'd far too good a look at him the other time, the dazzling

creature! But you might find out if the family's seriously addicted to

monogamy, unless he turns out to have a brother after all. Well, when

are you coming to see us? Better hurry, as we're off very soon."

"Where are you going?"

"Dinard. The three of us. Johnnie's taken a villa. Have you settled what

you're going to do yet?"

"Not yet."

"Then why not come over to us for a few weeks? When you get tired of me,

Jennie's getting most take-about-able. She's seventeen. And--George----"

"Yes?"

"When a woman tells you she's got a daughter of seventeen there are

quite a number of pretty things to be said----"

We continued to talk and walk aimlessly side by side. I had met her in

Queen's Gate, and I intended to retrace my steps to Queen's Gate the

moment I had got rid of her. She chattered on.

"And by the way, has Hastings mentioned Mr Rose to you lately?"

"No. Why?" I said. Hastings is my literary agent, the man beside whose

labours on my behalf my own seem puny.

"Because I've got a feeling that this creature of all the talents really

is coming off this time," she went on. "Hastings has found a publisher

who's going to see that Derwent Rose is 'It' or die in the attempt. So

if you want to do the Bear a good turn send him to Hastings. When is he

coming back?"

"I don't quite know."

"Well, there's no immediate hurry. Everybody'll be away in another week

or two. But it _would_ be rather joysome to see Derwent Rose at last

where he really belongs! Well, think about Dinard. Any time you like.

'Bye----"

And with a wave of her hand she was off.

Even when you think you are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of a thing

it can sometimes come freshly over you; and merely in the professional

part of me I had felt an oddly special little pang at Madge's last

words. Here, apparently, was a publisher who believed in Derwent Rose

and was prepared to back his belief with money; and--it was too late!

Derwent Rose, wanderer, would never write another book. A few

travel-sketches, perhaps, a few pen-pictures by the way, a few

evening-paper articles; but another book--no. I wished that publisher no

ill, but I did wish that he had recognised Derry's struggles,

endeavours, faithfulness, strength, a little sooner than a day after the

fair. Poor Derry would not have even the cynical consolation that while

his real books had been neglected money would be heaped on him for his

bad ones. He no longer had a book left in him. A pugilist's manager

would be of more use to him than a publisher now.

I passed up Queen's Gate and turned into the mews where I had arranged

to meet Trenchard.

I had made my appointment with him because I had a question of special

importance to ask him. I wanted to know whether Trenchard had seen him

immediately before his departure, and, if he had, _how old he now

looked_.

For the farther he travelled the more crucial this question became. From

forty-five to thirty-five he might still pass as Derwent Rose, but he

could hardly do so from, say, forty-five to twenty. I had not a moment's

doubt that it had indeed been he whom Madge had seen and had failed to

recognise--nay, had unhesitatingly assumed to be another man. Also my

housekeeper's suspicions that all was not as it should have been had

also been thoroughly awakened. "It is Mr Rose, isn't it?" she had asked

me with a puzzled look on the Friday midday; but by Sunday morning Julia

and he had become "the lady and gentleman" who had had to be fetched in

to breakfast. Old Mrs Truscott again had unhesitatingly set him down as

years younger than Julia. If Trenchard had seen him before his departure

he had probably been the last of us to do so. Trenchard, in short, was

to tell me what Derry's diary had completely failed to tell me.

For that little shiny-backed pocket book had merely brought things to a

more hideously complicated pass even than before. I shall return to this

diary in a moment; for the present let it suffice that, like the

publisher's offer, it seemed to me to have turned up just a few hours

too late. I had hoped for a survey wide enough, simplified enough, to

help me to his rate of progress. I had so far found nothing of the

slightest use whatever. I was without the faintest idea of his present

age. He might have been thirty, twenty-five, twenty, younger. He might

even be sixteen, at which age he had said he would die.

Trenchard I found to be a black-haired, pleasant-voiced, very much

alive fellow of a little under thirty. His rank, I believe, had been

that of major, and even the atrocious crippling he had received at La

Bassee did not destroy his look of perfect efficiency. He was just able

to start up a car, and cars were his livelihood and he lived in them. I

introduced myself, and he hobbled cheerfully about among his cups and

bread-and-butter and methylated spirits.

"So," I concluded my introduction of myself, "as I'm settling up a few

matters for him I wanted to know how you stood."

"Oh, everything's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned," he

laughed, filling the teapot. "Place left like a new pin, Bradburys in an

envelope, and a quite unnecessary letter of thanks for what he calls my

kindness. I was only too glad to have somebody in the place."

"Do you know what day he left?"

"Let me see. To-day's the ninth. He left on Monday, the fifth."

(Note: he had cleared out of Trenchard's place the day after I had seen

him and Julia off at Haslemere Station.)

"He didn't say where he was going?"

He gave me a quick glance. "I say, this _is_ all right, isn't it?" Then,

laughing as I smiled, "Sorry, but one has to be careful, you know. No,

he didn't say. Here's his note if you care to read it. I don't even know

what to do with letters if any come for him."

Already I guessed that it would be useless to put my question; but I

asked it none the less.

"You didn't _see_ him before he left, then?"

"No. He simply left that note. It's dated the evening of the fourth, and

it says he's off to-morrow.... By the way, what _am_ I to do about

letters?"

There wouldn't be any letters. Of that I was sure. But I gave him my

address, wound up a pleasant chat rather quickly, and took my leave.

And now for that diary that, instead of helping me, had proved the

greatest stumbling-block of all.

I had had not a moment's scruple in reading every word of it, in trying

to disentangle every diagram and equation it contained. Any question of

ordinary decorum had long since passed out of the relation that existed

between him, Julia, and myself. And let me repeat once more that a man

who has questioned the universe until he has asked one question too many

involves in his own fatality all who have to endure the contact of him.

His state is apocalyptic, his existence merely spatial, without zenith

of virtue or nadir of disgrace. If my roof had not been abused, neither

did I violate his diary. I merely read it without a qualm.

Its oddity began with its very first page. Ordinarily on the first page

of a diary you look for the owner's name and address. Here was no

address; on the other hand there was a string of names. There were, to

be exact, eight of them, with space for more, the whole written in his

small fine hand and disposed in a neat vertical column. This block of

names might have been from the everyday-book of any working novelist,

part of whose task it is to label his puppets appropriately. I had no

reason to suppose that hitherto Derwent Rose had ever gone under any

name but his own. It had certainly occurred to me that he might sooner

or later have to do so. This appeared to be a preparation for such a

contingency. His own name of Derwent Rose, by the way, did not appear.

Opposite the names a diagram had been pasted into the book. It was on

squared paper, such as draughtsmen use, of so many squares to the inch;

and these squares had been numbered horizontally along the top with the

years from 1891 to 1920, that is to say from his own age of sixteen on.

Lower down the page, and still horizontally, red and black lines of

various lengths were set in echelon. These were sprinkled over with

numbers, which I discovered to refer to the pages that followed. Certain

arrows pointed in opposite directions. Over these were written, in one

direction, the words "'A' memory," in the other the words "'B' memory."

This completed the horizontal arrangement.

The vertical set-out appeared to have given him much more trouble. It

did not appear to have been completed. A heavy black line ruled up

through the year 1905 was lettered "true middle," but that appeared to

be the only stable term of its kind. The rest was a mere rain of

pencil-lines, momentary false middles that apparently he had tried to

seize in passing. I knew by this time how unseizable they were. Not one

of them lay on the right side of the true middle line. All overstepped

it and travelled in a gradual procession towards the left of the

diagram.

On other pages I found other diagrams. These were merely enlarged

details of the foregoing, with days of the month instead of years.

One wild chart was an attempt to combine the whole in a single

comprehensive statement. But this had completely beaten him. A

serpentine whip-lash of pencil had been flung so viciously across it

that one almost heard the crack.

The rest of the book consisted of text.

I was of course prepared at any moment to receive a telegram or letter

asking for the book's instant return. If it really contained the key to

his speed of retrogression it was probably the most important thing he

had in the world. Therefore, lest he should claim it before I had

finished with it, it stayed in my breast pocket when it was not actually

in my hand.

And so I had three days' madness over the hateful thing. Twenty times I

nearly tore it in two as he had once torn a six-shilling novel. Then at

the end of the three days I put it down, leaned back exhausted in my

chair, and asked myself what it was that I was really in search of.

I wonder whether the answer will startle you as much as it startled me.

True, it came pat enough. There was nothing whatever new about it. It

was merely what it had been all along, and I ought to have been familiar

with it by this time.... I merely wanted to know his age. Just that and

nothing more.

Yet of all the shocks that a man can receive, the shock of the expected

and waited-for is sometimes the most profound. You know it is coming; it

is therefore pure, fundamental shock, unalleviated by the lighter

element we call surprise. When something you have lived with every day,

taken for granted, thought you knew all about, have become familiar with

to the point of boredom, suddenly so recalls attention to itself that

all your habitual notions about it drop clean away, leaving you face to

face with a strange thing--a line of verse, an object in your house, a

tune, a picture, a wife--when this happens, then you may know that

something has been wrong all along, is still wrong, and that if you

would set it right you must go back to the very beginning again.

So there I stood, an unhappy, over-confident little scholar, whom the

inexorable tutor silently points back to his task.

Humbly I returned to the book that, if it told me anything at all, must

at least tell me this.

And now I must ask you to bear your portion of that little shiny-backed

book too; for on a point of this importance I cannot allow you to accept

my own conclusions on trust. You must know how I arrived at them. Where

Derwent Rose was at that moment, what manner of man he was, what he was

doing, how long he might continue to do it, whether he was alive at

all--these things depended on no off-handed survey of his case, but on

the dry figures, dates and details that I had hitherto neglected.

Fortunately we had a roughly-sufficient starting-point. This was the

date of June 8th, 1920, the day when I had met him at the Lyonnesse

Club. It was not, it must be confessed, his true zero. The true zero was

now indiscoverable. But I myself, in good faith and knowing nothing of

all this, had judged him to be thirty-five that afternoon; he himself

had confirmed my judgment, subsequent changes had sufficiently borne it

out, and the diary now re-affirmed it.

So much for June 8th, when, if he had had an age at all, it had

presumably been thirty-five. Thereafter he had disappeared for exactly

three weeks, and on June 29th, a Tuesday, he had spoken to me in the

picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue.

On the following day, Wednesday, June 30th, I had returned to Haslemere,

having left Julia waiting for her books in the reading-room of the

British Museum.

Then, two days later still, on Friday, July 2nd, they had unexpectedly

turned up together at my house.

Now a definite note in the diary, written as a matter of fact in my own

house (for he kept it instantly up to date), told me that on that day,

July 2nd, he had "felt twenty-nine." True, he had later admitted the

vagueness of these mere "feelings" as an index to age, but there it was

for what it was worth, and it agreed with the impression I had myself

formed, based on his vivid and ecstatic and momentary moods. Except when

I had compelled him to speak of his book, Saturday had been the

counterpart of Friday. That is to say, that during the whole of Friday

and Saturday he had remained twenty-nine.

Therefore (and omitting the loss of the years forty-five to thirty-five,

now untraceable), during the twenty-five days from June 8th to July 3rd

he had dropped a total of six years.

So far so good; but that was not quite what I wanted to know. What I was

trying to ascertain was a far more important thing--the shortest

_actual_ time in which he had lost the great length of _apparent_ time.

It would make the greatest practical difference in the world whether

this figure were a high or a low one.

And now groan, as I groaned, when you look at the four days between June

29th and July 3rd--those four days in which, in order that he might be

at the very top of his power for the writing of his book, he had

vehemently _denied_ his age, had juggled with it, wrestled with it,

refused it, ignored it, vowed that a false middle was or should be a

true one, and had hung as it were to a strap while the whole momentum of

his being had tried to sway him in another direction.

The entry for those four days was a mere question-mark with an open

choice. It read:

"Thirty-three--thirty?"

And yet on the fifth day he had been twenty-nine!

Now let us take the queried figures separately and subtract.

If on the fourth day he had been the lower figure--thirty--then he had

only dropped a year in a night.

But if on the fourth day he had been thirty-three, then he had dropped

four whole years in the same time.

Either was possible, and yet in the one case the ratio was, appallingly,

four times as great as in the other.

And now that I was getting to the root of the matter I wished to take

nothing for granted. His equations were high above my head, but I

reviewed the position in terms of my own. This is how I set it out:

I HAD ALREADY KNOWN THE DIARY NOW TOLD ME

That by June 8th he had That his "straphanging"

slipped back from forty-five age three weeks later

to thirty-five. (on June 29th) was

"thirty-three--thirty."

That on Wednesday, June 30th, In a pathetic little jotting of

Julia had been scheming to the same date, that he feared

make herself his secretary. he would never write his

book, that he was "getting

too young for it," but that he

intended to attempt it at all

costs.

That on the following Friday That he now doubted whether

and Saturday, at my house, what he had at first thought

he had been vivid, momentary, to be will-power had really

intense. been that at all; in fact, that

the real effort of will would

have been, not to put his

work out of his head for a

couple of days, _but to

remember it_.

At this point I began to grow excited. It seemed to me that at last I

began to see light. I had taken him step by step from the starting-point

of June 8th to the evening of Saturday, July 3rd, and the reason I had

not gone beyond that date was that the diary itself stopped there. Its

last entry was the one I have just given--that he feared he had been

mistaken in supposing that will-power had had anything whatever to do

with that stolen week-end's holiday.

Oh, had there but been one, one single entry dated Sunday, July 4th!

For if it was possible for him to shuffle off four years in what I may

call an ordinary night, what was _im_possible after an experience as

stupefying as had been his on the night of Saturday-Sunday?

And yet in appearance it had not altered him. I had spent practically

the whole of Sunday with him, and there had been nothing to indicate

that he was not still twenty-nine. His manner, it is true, had been

alternately jumpy and morose, but that might have been the mere vague

pull of his Wanderjahre. Therefore it looked as if that mad onslaught of

Julia's on his stability had passed him over after all.

_Ah, but wait a moment!..._ I sat up at my desk, vociferating the words

aloud. Were we at such a dead end after all? Perhaps not....

And first of all I remembered that question I had asked him about the

flash-lamp as he had stood behind the screen of rugosa roses on the

Sunday afternoon. "Has there been a moment since yesterday when that

lamp has been held as close as it could be held?" Again I saw his sudden

pallor. Again I felt his clutch on my shoulder, again heard his faint

"George--I've been trying to remember ... the lamp ... very close ...

touching ... one intense brilliant spot ... but I swear I never moved

it ... it was as if somebody took the torch out of my hand ... somebody

meddled in my life...."

And he had made me go through his Saturday evening's programme

again--his inspection of the Hogarths, his unusual wakefulness, the hour

at which he had gone upstairs.

Only for a few moments on the Sunday morning had he seemed dimly to

surmise that something of the last importance might have happened to him

during the hours of darkness. He had then forgotten all about it.

Nevertheless, would not his next rejuvenation date, not the moment of

the fact itself, _but from that of the beginning of his realisation of

it_?

No--no--I was not quite right even yet. Even _that_ moment of wild fear,

so quickly gone again, was not the moment I sought. Even after _that_ he

might to all appearances have remained twenty-nine for some hours

longer.

For his change happened while he slept, and I had not reckoned with that

sleep that must come in between.

His next sleep had been, not in my house, but in Trenchard's loft.

_Monday morning, July 5th_, had been his new starting-point, and that

day he had disappeared.

You have now all the material dates that I had. You know that in

comparatively uneventful, unexciting circumstances he could go back four

years in a night. And I have told you of the headlong role Julia

Oliphant had taken upon herself.

How old, then, was Derwent Rose when he woke up in Trenchard's rooms on

the morning of Monday, July 5th, 1920?

Twenty-five?

Twenty?

Or sixteen and already dead?

II

I now turn to that portion of the diary that seemed to confirm my

impression that he had gone to France.

Both his memories, "A" and "B," appeared so far to be functioning

normally. In order to ascertain this he had applied a number of

ingenious tests to himself. But it immediately struck me that while all

his "A" (or Age) notes were written in English, all those in the "B" (or

Boyhood) direction were in French.

And not only was the language French. The illustrations and incidents

were French in character also. Thus, he wrote in English: "Have been

trying to see how much of _Esau_ I can remember without looking at the

book"; but of something that had once happened in Marseilles I read: "Je

tache de me debrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." There might have been

purpose in this alternation of the two languages, but I was more

inclined to think that he had done it purely instinctively. When a man

speaks a language as Derwent Rose spoke French he finds a pleasure in

the mere exercise of his attainment. France had always attracted him, he

had not unlimited money at his disposal, and mere considerations of

ordinary time (an intensely special thing to him) might preclude his

getting more than a few hours' journey away. Anyway, with one thing and

another, I had chanced it, and guessed that somewhere on the north coast

of France would find him.

"And you're going over there to stay with the Airds," Julia mused. "Then

there's just a possibility----"

"Oh, the whole coast will be swarming with English by the end of the

month."

"Still----"

"Do you want me to let you know if I come across him?"

"Oh, I don't know. I leave it to you. Do just as you think. When are you

going?"

"On the thirtieth."

"What about his money?"

"Oh, he needn't worry about that."

"George"--she looked at me accusingly--"I believe you've bought those

things of his yourself."

"Bought's hardly the word," I laughed. "Anyway, why shouldn't I?"

"And you're going to finance him."

"Well, the man's got to eat. And Carpentier _might_ knock him out."

She looked away down the crowded tea-room and made no reply.

She herself had chosen the Piccadilly, and I looked at her again as she

sat there, tucked away in a far corner of the room, with merry parties

at the neighbouring tables and De Groot playing the "_Relicario_." She

was differently and quite brilliantly dressed. As far as externals could

assist her, she appeared to have resolved to go back step by step and

hand in hand with Derwent Rose. Her furs were thrown back, showing the

V-shaped opening of her brown _charmeuse_, perfectly plain except for a

tiny bronze beading at the edge and a lump of amber on a fine gold

chain. Her arms were dropped over the sides of her chair, making from

throat and dropped shoulders to the tips of her fingers one mantle-like

flowing line. Her dark hair was arranged after a different fashion, and

on it was a little brown brocade toque with owl's ears sticking out.

About her younger women chattered and laughed, but among them she seemed

to be--I hardly know how to express it--above rather than out of the

picture, architecture to their building, a contralto melody underrunning

their treble and fragmentary tunes, a white marble against which their

fountains glittered and rainbowed and splashed. No shawls, worsted

stockings and hot milk here! If Derry must be young, she too would be as

young as clothes could make her. And I could not deny her success.

Not a word had I said to her about my discovery of his diary. I did not

see what help it would be to do so. It could only open up the rather

dreadful question, whether, in suddenly thrusting into the

infinitely-delicate mechanism of his progression no less potent a factor

than herself, she had not brought irreparable ruin upon him. More and

more I had begun to fear that this might be so. I have already said how

little I was concerned with the mere right or wrong of her theft, gift,

or whatever else she liked to call it. That was swept aside in the

singularity of the whole catastrophe. But for him I was deeply anxious.

I could not shake off the impression that this time he must have

"dropped" very heavily indeed. I thought I knew now why he had not

telegraphed for that diary. It was of little further use to him. He had

begun it with that torch at the cool and wide and "philosophic" range;

he had continued it at the "emotional" focus of keen and rapid

sensation; but at that point the diary had stopped. There was no entry

since Julia Oliphant, seeing her Eden twice and no angel with a flaming

sword guarding this unsuspected postern of it, had set all a-flux in one

blinding spot of irrevocable contact. Could the torch, after that

climax, ever be withdrawn again? Was he at this moment burning out the

residue of his youth at its whitest heat of combustion? Was he, since

that last sleep in Trenchard's place, rushing through the months and

years so swiftly as to gasp for very breath?

And if so, what were those experiences that swept down on him in one

wild blurr of things long since finished with, unrepeatable in their

original form, and yet inevitably to be repeated in that form or in

another?

To all this Julia was still the key. One or two trivia in his diary

apart, she was the only key. She it was who had received those letters

of his from Nimes, Arles, Trieste, and who farther back still had known

his childhood, its happiness, aspirations, beliefs, dreams. Whatever

soil he trod at this moment he must still be the boy she had known in a

Sussex village. French stained-glass instead of English might hold his

rapt eyes, the organ of a High Mass evoke raptures in his Anglican

heart, but he was still the same.

And, before that stage was reached, the wild and reckless English years

might even now be re-enacting themselves somewhere in the Pas de Calais,

Ille-et-Vilaine or the Cote du Nord.

And she who had given that extra spin to the already whizzing wheel of

his fate sat there in the Piccadilly, her head a little back, her lips a

little parted, her dark eyes sensitised to all the glitter of the room,

the fingers of one down-hung hand moving in time to Raquel's song.

Suddenly I broke in on her mood.

"Julia. As a practical matter. How do you suppose he got to France? It

isn't easy for a man without papers of any kind, you know."

"Oh, he'd get there if he wanted to," she answered, the fingers still

beating time.

"Easy enough to talk, but we may as well look at the practical side of

it. _He'll_ have to."

"If you mean his money, that's very nice of you, George, but I thought

that was all arranged? Or do you mean that as he used to write to me

before he may do so again? If that's it you can hand his money over to

me."

"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking----"

But she interrupted me vivaciously. "Oh, look at that woman in the cloak

just getting up! That's _ra_ther a wrap, isn't it? And I wonder whether

I could wear those shoes!... Now that's what I call having the best of

both worlds, George. She's all the advantages of that flapper with the

nice fair-haired boy there--the one smoking a cigarette and showing her

garters--as well as being a woman. But perhaps she isn't your type. Men

do run to types, don't they?... George, you're not listening. I asked

you whether men ran to types."

"If you mean do I, you've had most of my time lately."

"Don't be silly. I mean women men are in love with. Or are you all ready

to toy with anything that comes along?"

"I thought that you said the end of that man was that he knew nothing

about women."

"Oh, what's the use of telling me what I used to say!" She tossed the

little cap with the owl's ears. "At any rate I don't talk the same folly

twice. Life's too short. Do you like my hat?"

"Very charming."

"Not absurd on me? Nor the way I've done my hair for it? I'm not

mutton-dressed-as-lamb? And you haven't seen my shoes----"

Round the leg of her chair she pushed a suede sheath slender as one of

the willow-leaves on my pond.

"I do hold my own? Among all these smooth hairs and pretty complexions?

I haven't got a touch of powder on; do you think I should? Don't natter;

honestly; should I be all right if I met Derry?"

I looked at her without smiling. "Which Derry?" I asked.

"Oh, any Derry! Derry at his maddest, his wildest! Tell me, George: if

I'd had just one grain of sense before instead of being a sloppy

art-student he only remembered once in six months, all flat heels and

hair in her eyes, thinking that by cutting sandwiches ... don't you

think, George? Mightn't it have made a _wee_ bit of difference? And

won't it still when----"

"When what?"

"Oh--any moment! Who knows?"

I tried to break the current of her infatuated fancies. "Julia, don't

you think----" But her eyes laughed me down.

"Think, George!... But this _is_ thinking! You've no idea of the amount

of brainwork there is in it! Oh, I'm not talking about rubbishy books

and pictures now! Why, this is all the thinking I've ever done!"

"I was going to ask you whether you thought that things with him

were--going quicker than they ought to, let us say."

"Not if they bring him back to me."

"But you let him go away."

"Oh, on his Wanderjahre. I dare say that's all over by now."

"Then you do think he may have--speeded up?"

"It wouldn't surprise me."

"Why wouldn't it?"

"Nothing would surprise me."

"But this particular thing?"

She shook with soft laughter. "Oh, George, some nice steady-going

woman--like I used to be--ought to adopt you.... Why, you stupid, as if

I wasn't _willing_ him to speed up, as you call it, with every particle

that's in me, if only I can manage to be somewhere at hand when he gets

there!"

I gave her a quick look. "Do you mean that you're going to slip over to

France after all?" I demanded.

"No. Wasn't thinking of it. As far as I know at present I shall just

stay here. But," she said meaningly, "if I were going anywhere it

wouldn't be France."

"Where would it be?"

"Belgium."

"Belgium's about the last place anybody with his war-experience would go

to for a holiday."

"What, Antwerp in August?"

"I don't see. Sorry."

"Aren't they holding the Olympic games there?"

"_Ah!..._ So you think they might draw him?"

"I didn't say so. I don't know as a matter of fact that I should go to

Antwerp either. But you once asked me whether I thought I could bring

him by just sitting still and loving him. Well"--a victorious smile--"I

almost believe I could--now. But I shouldn't cut him sandwiches--now. I

shouldn't be just somebody he remembered when he was at a loose

end--now. I'd have him keen, George-old-Thing. He'd think anything I

gave him a devil of a favour. Look at that wise young minx with the

garters there; I'd have him to heel as she has her boy. Look, she's

having a cocktail. Order me a cocktail, please."

"Which? Martini? Manhattan? Bronx?"

"I dunno. Never tasted one in my life. But I'm not too proud to learn.

And--Geordie"--she shot a sidelong glance at me--"I've half a mind to

begin practising on you!"

"Well--if that will keep you from practising on anybody else----"

"You think you'd be safe, George?"

"Wretchedly safe."

All at once the hectic manner seemed to fall from her. A little incision

appeared for a moment between her brows. She pressed it away again with

her fingers.

"I suppose so," she said quietly. "You can't say ours isn't an

extraordinary relation. It's safe to say there's nothing like it in this

room."

Nor anywhere else, I thought; and I was glad to think so. I am an

average, more or less straight-living man, with a bias towards virtue

rather than the other way; but almost any relation, it seemed to me, was

to be preferred to this unnatural inhibition that had so singularly

little to do with virtue. Allow me, as a man who possibly has been

nearer to these things than you have, to give you a little advice.

Avoid, by all means in your power, contact with a man who has put over

the reversing-gear of his life as Derwent Rose had done. He will land

you in his own net. Unless you are more magnificently steady than I,

even when it comes to your relations with an admirable woman you will

find yourself interfered with at every step you take. Even the evil that

you would you do not, and the good that you would not, that you do.

But it was a question of her rather than of me. I was only at the fringe

of the moral commotion Derwent Rose had made on this planet. She was

deliberately advancing on its very storm-centre. And in the very nature

of things she was doomed to frustration. It seemed to me that she had

already frustrated herself. For suppose she should succeed in her aim,

and should pull off--well, whatever Rose had hinted at when he had

spoken of Andalusian dancers and tilted mirrors in Marseilles sailors'

kens. What then? That had not been Derwent Rose! "Je tache de me

debrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." Where was her success, seeing that it

had been the greatest of his dreads that he must re-live that dingy

phase before finding the lovelier Derwent Rose who dwelt away on the

other side?

Therefore, do what she would, her lot was as predestined as his own. Her

successive roles awaited her also--sister, aunt, elderly friend. But the

way to Eden--ah, _that_ she would terribly contrive! He, sick with a

twice-lived anxiety, might turn away from his fence; but she approached

it from the other side. Dust and ashes to him were all enticement to

her. Once already she had put herself in his way; but what was once?...

Ah, these inappeasable human hearts of ours! We cry "Give me but this,

Lord, and I ask no more." But, having it, we must have more. "Nay, Lord,

so quickly gone?" ... She recked not that presently his sins would be

all un-sinned again, while her own would be upheaped an hundredfold. Her

lot was his. Jointly they advanced on a common fate. When all was over

she would put off those crafty garments again. But until then he was to

be tripped--at his maddest, at his wildest.

"Julia," I said with a failing voice, "for his sake can't you let it

rest?"

She turned quickly. "What do you mean--for his sake?"

"For pity of him--perhaps even for his life."

She broke out, softly, but with a concentration of energy that I can

hardly express.

"For pity of him! And why of him? What about me? Why do you try to

separate us? We never were separated really. All that ever separated us

was my own ignorance and conceit and not having the right hair! I'll bob

it--I'll peroxide it--I'll do anything--but I'm not going to stop now!"

I tried to quieten her, but she went passionately on.

"Pity of _him_! Why, it's for pity of him that I'm doing it! Why should

he for ever give, give, give, and get nothing in return? He never did

get anything--nothing out of his books, nothing out of his life, only

this one magnificent thing that's happened! He's flung pearls away, all

the splendid pearls of himself, flung them to the grunters as they did

in the Bible, and all they wanted was common greasy farthings! Farthings

would have done, and he showered pearls on 'em! And not one single thing

did he ever get back! Oh, it makes me boil!... But I've picked up a

wrinkle or two since then, George! Nobody ever told me anything about

life, nothing that was true. They told me that if I opened my mouth and

shut my eyes and never forgot that I'd been nicely brought up all sorts

of lovely things would come of themselves. Nobody ever told me I should

have to get up and get and fight for my own hand. I was to speak when I

was spoken to, and what did it matter how I did my hair or what sort of

shoes I wore as long as men understood I was a nice girl and not to be

taken liberties with? They took their liberties somewhere else we

weren't supposed to know anything about. The un-nice girls got the

insults--and the pearls. We just went on being respected, and sometimes,

if we'd been very nice indeed, one of us would get a greasy farthing

after all the pearls were gone. They called that marriage, and said it

was the crown of a woman's life. That's what we were taught, George.

That's what every woman of my age was taught. And look at Peggy there

getting away with it as fast as she can!"

I touched her sleeve, but she refused to be stopped.

"And it was all my own fault for believing them. I ought to have thought

it out for myself, like Peggy. It was my job, and I didn't do it. I

painted idiotic canvases instead. It wasn't Derry's job. It isn't any

man's job. I'd been throwing sheep's-eyes at him all my life; why didn't

I say to myself, 'Look here, Julia my girl, this doesn't appear to be

working somehow. Cutting sandwiches and letting him pose for you and

mooning about him afterwards isn't doing the trick. You know

he's--obtainable--because you know other women do it. What's the matter

with _you_?'--I ought to have asked myself that, and I didn't. I let

myself drift into being a 'good sort' to him. Stupidest thing a woman

can do. I expect he'd have thought it a sort of sacrilege to kiss me.

Sacrilege!----"

She checked contemptuously at the word, but went straight on.

"And now this has happened, just to him and me, and if it never happened

before, all the more gorgeous luck! He _shall_ have something back for

his life. He shall know what love is before he dies. You can go to

anybody you like for your portrait, George; Peggy and I are out for

blood. What's the good of having luck if you don't believe in it? If

being nice didn't work let's have a shot at the other thing. (Ah, so

_that's_ a cocktail!) So that's that, George. Something's bound to

happen. He'll be writing to me or something; I'm not worrying in the

least.... But I mustn't let my neck get all pink like this just with

thinking of him." She fetched out a little mirror and a puff. "Nice

girls used to do that, and it was called maiden modesty, and I'm damned

if it paid. I'm perfectly willing to learn, either from Peggy with her

garters or anybody else.... Ah, she's getting up! I must see her close

to----"

She was on her feet. I heard her murmur, "I'm taller than she is

anyway----"

"Sit down till I've got the waiter," I said.

But she continued to stand. She was looking after the girl she had

called Peggy--erect, ready, perilously instructed, a beautiful danger.

Her life had been one unvarying, starry lamp of love; now, for the

beguiling of the Derry of those onrushing years of the heat of his

blood, a hundred false fires were being prepared. And I could only

remain silent at the wonder of it, that all was one, and that the false

was no less true than the true.

III

It still wanted a week to the thirtieth, but I had various matters to

set in order, and the time passed quickly. I saw Julia once more before

I left. She still nonchalantly left it to me, should I come across

Derry, to let her know or not, as I thought best. She herself was not

going very far--merely into Buckingham to stay with friends. She gave me

dates and addresses, and then her manner seemed to me to show some

hesitation.

"If he should write to me for money suddenly," she said. "You see, you

won't be at hand."

"Oh, that's all arranged. He wouldn't wait till he was actually starving

before he wrote, and Mrs Moxon is readdressing all letters immediately."

"But suppose he wrote to me. I've no money."

"Then you can wire me. I'll arrange for a sight-draft."

Her hands smoothed down the body of a frock I had not seen before--a

sooty shower of black chiffon over I know not what intricately-simple

and expensive-looking swathing below.

"I believe you're afraid to trust me with his money," she smiled,

preening herself.

This conversation, I ought to say, took place in her studio. Suddenly I

looked up.

"Julia," I demanded, "where's that tallboy gone?"

"The tallboy? Oh, it's somewhere about the place."

"On your back?"

"Not all of it. Some of it's on my feet. Don't you like them?"

She showed them. I turned away.

"Then," I said, "if _he's_ selling furniture to pay for a holiday, and

_you're_ selling it to buy frocks, I certainly shan't trust you with a

penny. If he writes to you you'd better wire me."

"Poor Julia!" she laughed. "When she was sensible she could do nothing

right, and now that she's quite mad she's as wrong as ever. Well, a

short life and a gay one. Good-bye, George, and a happy holiday----"

So the evening of the thirtieth found me on the St Malo boat, hoping it

wasn't going to rain--for I had looked down below and preferred the

deck. Smoothly we glided down Southampton Water. The boat was packed,

and I was unable to dine till ten o'clock. Then I came up on deck again

and set about making myself comfortable for the night.

It did rain, but I was well tucked away in the shelter of a deck-house,

and was little the worse for it. A fresh south-west wind blew, and I

watched the phantom-grey water that hissed and rustled hoarsely past our

sides. The throbbing of the engines began to beat softly and incessantly

in my head, and half dozing, I found myself wondering what Derry had

done about his passport. "Throb-throb," churned the engines ... perhaps

he had forged himself a seaman's and fireman's ticket, signed on as a

deckhand or stoker, and had given the L.S.W. Railway Company the slip

the moment he had got across. Dreamily, muffled up in my wrappings, I

tried to picture it. He would be careful. He would be careful about his

beard, for example. He would let it grow a day or so before; perhaps he

would now continue to wear a beard. Unless.... And he would sleep the

day before and stoke through the night. A stoker for a night, dressed in

a boiler-suit or stripped to the waist, as he had stripped when he had

held Julia Oliphant's sewing-machine aloft. And grime in his golden

beard. Or else the author of _The Vicarage of Bray_ bending the warp on

to the drum of the steam-winch or putting the luggage in the slings in

the hold. Oh, as she had said, he would get across somehow if he wanted

to.....

And once across he would have very little trouble. He would mingle with

the porters and camionneurs, carrying his gear in his hand. Probably he

would pretend it was somebody else's. Then--the small luggage through

first--_rien a declarer_--his perfect French--he would be along the quay

and in the vedette before they had begun to get the big stuff out of the

hold. As for his passport--oh, he would manage....

An employe picked his way through the dark huddles on the deck, took the

reading of the log, and retired again. The masthead lights made loops

and circles in the rain. I took a nip from my flask and dropped back

into my doze. Alderney Light winked, and up the Race it blew stiffly....

Yes, he would get across if he had made up his mind to. As for his

_permis de sejour_--oh, things like that were for ordinary people. What

would he do with a _permis de sejour_ who had no _permis de sejour_ in

life itself, but must doubly dodge through it, from this place to that

and from one date to the date before?... But I rather fancied he had

gone by Dover. Certain notes almost at the end of his diary seemed an

indication of that. These notes had no coherence--just odd words like

"Lord Warden," "boat," "tide," and a little time-table of figures.

Apparently he had worked it out just before that week-end he had spent

with me.... "Lord Warden"--that meant Dover--tide--time.... Again the

Company's man came to take the reading of the log. Again the throbbing

of the engines evoked the image of Derry, stripped, moving in the red

glare of the furnaces, sweating, coal-dust in his beard. But perhaps he

no longer had a beard. Perhaps Julia had made sure of that. Julia,

desperate creature, wild, disturbing creature.... Peggy in her

garters ... selling furniture to buy frocks, shoes, stockings, scent....

"Pour Troubler," "Myster_ieuse_" ... "Myster_ieuse_, Myster_ieuse_,

Myster_ieuse_," sighed the water rushing past.... And in the Piccadilly,

that long white throat, the fine angle of her jaw, among little double

chins, little buttons of chins, short necks, thrust-forward necks,

square shoulders instead of that long mantle-like line down over her

shoulders like swift water before it breaks, to the fingers that moved

softly in time to the "_Relicario_" ... the "Relicario" ... De Groot ...

De Groot, De Groot, De Groot.... Myster_ieuse_, Myster_ieuse_.... Again

the reading of the log, again the sailor's return through the dozing

huddles on the deck; the phantom-grey water rustling hoarsely past, the

masthead lights swinging aloft. I hate these short and crowded crossings

when it is hardly worth while to take off your clothes and you arrive

cramped, crumpled, unshaven, unrefreshed. I wondered how early it would

be possible to get a cup of tea. A cup of tea--a cocktail--cocktails for

tea--"So _that's_ a cocktail!"--Manhattan, Manhattan, De Groot, De

Groot, De Groot....

Another pull at my flask, and then I really did sleep.

The day was grey when I awoke. The huddles on the deck had begun to

stir. The east kindled, as I had last seen it kindle over the Devil's

Punch Bowl and Gibbet Hill. The sun flashed on the waves, on people

bestirring themselves, opening dressing-cases, making such toilets as

they could. Then I heard the welcome click of teacups and flung off my

rugs. I went below, secured a seat for breakfast, and made myself less

unpresentable. Hot breakfast, after all, goes a long way towards

obliterating the discomforts of a night on deck. As I rose from the

table I glanced through the open port. Pale on the starboard bow was the

long line of Cap Frehel, ahead was St Malo's spire.

FRANCE

PART I

THE LONG SPLICE

I

As the little vedette approached Dinard Cale--I had got quickly through

the Customs and come across with the hampers of that morning's fish--an

Alec Aird out of a Men's Summer Catalogue waved his hand to George

Coverham out of a flea-bag and called out a cheery good morning. It was

hardly yet half-past seven, so Alec must have been up betimes. He seized

the two bags I pushed ashore and gesticulated to the driver of a

nondescript sort of carosse. Then he looked me up and down and grinned.

"Ready for breakfast?"

"I'm ready for some hot water and clean clothes," I replied. "No, it

wasn't so bad."

"And is this all the stuff you've brought? I asked you to come and stay

with us, not just to drop in to lunch. Well, up you get. I don't suppose

you'll see Madge and Jennie till midday. That damned Casino; three a.m.

again last night. But it's no good talking to Madge. It always ends in

her doing just as she likes. Why, when I was Jennie's age I didn't know

there was such a thing as a roulette-table.... I say, have you brought

any English tobacco?"

I had not been in Dinard, nor indeed in France at all, since before the

war; but the long steep street where the little dark cafes were opening

seemed very friendly and familiar. We rumbled past the English Club into

the Rue Lavavasseur, and instinctively my head turned to the right. Each

short descending street gave the same remembered glimpse, of white

casino or hotel at the bottom and the bright emerald beyond. We

clattered down to the Place, and then slackened again to the ascent of

dark tree-planted avenues. "Gauche--droit, I mean--starboard a couple of

points," directed Alec, whose French bears no very great strain; and

after ten minutes or so the sound of our wheels suddenly ceased. We

were on the soft sandy drive that ended at the gate of Ker Annic.

Alec Aird hates the Casino, partly because they won't let him smoke his

pipe there, partly because he doesn't like his life strung up to

concert-pitch all the time. But Madge loves these vast vestibules of

shining mahogany and cut and bevelled glass, these palms that brush the

electric chandeliers, these broad terraces, all this bright restlessness

of hotels and shops and plage. So they had split the difference in the

villa they had rented. It stood high-perched among ilex and

Spanish-chestnut, looking out over the rocks and islands that make of

that bay a jaw full of cruel black splintered teeth. It had little

broken lawns set with hydrangeas and beds and borders of blood-red

begonias and montbretia and geraniums and marguerites, the whole tilted

up as if it would have spilled over the rough cliff-top to the rocks

below. The plage itself was hidden, but a little way out the translucent

greens began, dappled with a fairy-like refraction that brought the

purply shoals almost up to the surface. After that away northwards

spread the wide sea--serene yet curiously wistful, tender yet never gay,

dreamily lovely but unflashing, unglittering--the pensive aspect of a

sea that has its back to the sun.

"Here we are," said Alec as we pulled up in front of a chromo-lithograph

from a toybox lid, the villa of dove-grey with shutters of a chalky

greeny-white and slender ironwork everywhere--grilles of ironwork over

the glazing of the double doors, scrolled balcony railings, and iron

passementerie along the ridge of the mansard-roof. "Now look here, if

you want to go to bed say so, and we'll all be Sleeping

Beauties--confound those rotten late hours for that kid----"

I assured him that I had no wish to go to bed.

"Right. Then come along upstairs, and sing out if there's anything you

want. You'll find me somewhere about when you come down. And you might

give me that tobacco----"

And, showing me up a staircase of waxed boards into my room, he left me

to my toilet.

The pergola in which I found him three quarters of an hour later was at

the bottom of the garden. Its roof was latticed, so that over the floor,

over the garden chairs and tables, over our shoulders and hands and

white flannels, lay an intricate shepherd's-plaid of gay shadow that

crept like a net over us whenever we moved. A _bonne_ followed me with

coffee and rolls, and we sat down to talk and to watch the flat

untwinkling sea.

We, or rather Alec, talked of Boche rolling-stock on French lines (did I

tell you my friend was by way of being a consulting engineer?), of

coasting boats building at St Malo, of France's prospects of recovery

from the devastation of the war. He thought they might pick up quickly,

applauded the way they were putting their backs into it. And it may have

been my fancy or the force of former associations, but already I was

conscious of a different atmosphere. There seemed to thrill in the very

air the push of a logical, practical, unsentimental people. I had felt

it in the bustle of the porters and camionneurs on St Malo quay, in the

unyielding Breton eyes of the fishwives in the vedette, in the ten

francs that that scoundrel of a cocher had overcharged Alec. It began to

be impossible to look over that sunny emerald water and to say to

yourself, "A man with two memories is bathing in that," to sit in the

warm cage of that pergola and to remember a man who clung to false

middles and had extraordinary things happen to him in the night. Beyond

the point a couple of fishing-boats and a brown-sailed bisquine

appeared. Out toward St Cast crept an early pleasure steamer, its smoke

trailing behind it like a smudge of brown worsted. From somewhere behind

that toybox of a villa came rapid exchanges in French--the day's

provisions were arriving.

Suddenly Alec looked at his watch. "I say, what about having a look in

at the Stade? I expect there are a few of them there by now."

"Anything you like; what's on?"

"These elimination-trials for Antwerp next month," Alec replied, who was

a Fettes man and an International in his day, and is still a familiar

figure at Twickenham and Blackheath. "Haven't you seen the posters?

'Debout les Athletes'--'Sons of the Patrie'--they've been all over the

place for months. All out they are too, and some dashed good athletes

among 'em. There's one fellow I've heard of called Arnaud--haven't seen

him--in fact he's a bit of a mystery ... but look here, we've only just

time for the tram. Come along----"

The filthy little tram took us to the Stade in ten minutes. It was an

open field, with tracks and hurdles and a small white-painted Grand

Stand at one end of it, and already _les athletes_ had got down to work.

There were perhaps a dozen of them, in zephyrs and shorts and sweaters,

leaping, practising short bursts off the mark, doggedly covering the

outer track or resting in twos and threes on the grass. Several of them

wore little more clothing than a pair of shoes and a waist-sash. They

flaunted their glossy sunburnt backs, stood with arms folded over

uplifted chests, heads erect, eyes flashing, and never a smile. No

Briton would have dared to display such physical naivete. They might

have been grimly training, not for a sporting contest, but for a duel to

the death.

We watched them for an hour, and then the whooping of that horrible

little tram was heard in the distance. It hurtled up to the Halte,

fouling the air with the smoke of the dust and slate and slack that

served it for coal, and we sat with our backs to the engine and took

what care of our flannels we might.

The sluggards had descended by the time we reached the house again.

Among the harlequin shadows of the pergola Madge advanced to me with

both hands outstretched.

"Monsieur! Sois le bienvenu!" Then, standing back to look at me, "What

nice flannels, George! Some of the Frenchmen here, quite nice men, go

about in the most extraordinary cheesecloth arrangements, and as for

their shoes----! Yes, I think I can be seen with you. You can take me

shopping this afternoon. I saw it in a window yesterday but hadn't time

to go in. ('It's' a hat, if you must know, Alec.) And this is Jennie,

in case she's grown so much you don't remember her."

There was a time when I used to kiss little Jennie Aird, but I should

not have dared to kiss the young woman who stood before me now.

Take-aboutable, by Jove!... Jennie had her father's colouring,

golden-red hair over a tea-rose-petal complexion lightly freckled; and

if her eyebrows were faint, that somehow merely seemed to enhance the

steady clear pebble-grey of the gaze beneath. She was six inches taller

than her mother, and whether it was the smallness of her short-featured

face that made full her beautiful throat, or whether it was the other

way round, I will not attempt to say. Nor do I remember whether her hair

was up or down that day. I have an idea that at that time it was

sometimes the one and sometimes the other. Her gesture as she offered me

her hand had the proper condescension of such a creature for a battered

old piece of goods life myself. I wondered whether I ought to call her

Miss Aird. These things come over one with rather a shock sometimes.

We lunched in a shining little salon, the exact centre of which, whether

you measured sideways, lengthwise or up-and-down, was occupied by an

enormous gilt Ganymede and Eagle lamp slung by heavy chains from the

ceiling--for the lighting was either oil or candles at Ker Annic. Then

back to the pergola for coffee. The tide had receded, and the rocks and

the stakes that marked the channels stuck up everywhere menacingly--the

Fort, Les Herbiers, Cezembre. The warm air was laden with the smell of

genets, the sky was brightly blue over our white lattice. I saw Alec

preparing to doze.

"Well, what about Dinard?" I said to Madge.

"Sure you wouldn't rather follow Alec's example? Very well, we'll drop

Jennie at the tennis-place and you and I'll go off on the prowl. I'll be

ready in five minutes. Jennie!"

She ran up to the house, and I waited for her on the sandy drive.

We walked into Dinard. The magasin that enshrined "It" was near the

Casino, and there, in an impermanent little white-screened and

gilt-chaired shop that had hardly been open a fortnight and would close

down again the moment the season was over, I had a soothing half-hour

while Alec's money took wing.

"Mais tiens, Madame"--the saleswoman's witty fingers touched, hovered,

butterflied, while the hat became half a dozen different things under

the diablerie--"pose comme ca, en effet sur l'oreille--Claire, la voile

verte--legerment--oh, m'sieu!" A delectable gesture of admiration of

everything and everybody concerned, the hat, the veil, Madge, herself,

as unabashed as the attitudinising of the sunbrowned young athletes. "On

dirait un sourire sur la tete de Madame!"

So, on a purely hypothetical rate of exchange, Madge bought three, and

we sought the teashop and Jennie.

All English-speaking Dinard meets at that teashop in the afternoon. From

four o'clock onwards it is a mob of youths in the blazers of Eton and

Charterhouse and the Old Merchant Taylors, forking gateaux from the

glass counters for themselves, their sisters, other fellows' sisters,

their sisters' friends. Their days sped in tennis, bathing, tennis, a

hurried dejeuner between the sets, tennis, watching tennis as they

waited for a partner or a court, a sudden flocking to the Le Bras for

tea, tennis, dancing, chocolates, and the programme for the tennis for

the next day. They filled the ground-floor of the shop, made a continual

coming and going on the staircase that led to the room upstairs. I

steered Madge towards the table where Jennie was already seated, and

found myself with young Rugby on my right, his shirt open at the neck,

flannels hitched up over his white-socked ankles. About me buzzed the

whirl of talk.

"He saw him at Ambleteuse, and he did it in ten in his walking-boots on

grass----"

"Rot! It's run in metres, not yards, and the record's ten and

seventh-tenths----"

"American----"

"I bet you----"

"Well, it's nearly the same, and in his boots on grass----"

"Oh, put your head in a bag! Jennie, we've got Number Four Court for

five-thirty, remember----"

"But I tell you this chap Arnaud----"

"Do let me get you one of those strawberry things, Mrs Aird----"

"My brother saw him--he just threw off his coat and waistcoat and ran as

he was----"

"Mademoiselle, trois thes, s'il vous plait----"

I spoke in Madge's ear.

"She's a very beautiful child."

"Jennie?" said proud Madge. "Rather a young queen, isn't she? But Alec's

perfectly absurd about her. Thinks young people to-day are the same as

we were. She shall have the best time I can give her."

"Any----?" I looked the question.

"No. Quite asleep. She's perfectly happy dancing and dreaming and

talking sport with these boys."

"Who are they?"

She told me. She knew half Dinard, and the printed Visitors' List gave

her the rest.

"Well, well," was all I found to say, as I looked at Jennie again.

For while woman's beauty is coeval with Time itself, you have only your

own allotted portion of it. The loveliness that comes too early or too

late is no more your affair than the dawns before your time, the sunsets

after you are gone. Madge at the midday of her life was still within my

reach at my post-meridian, but Jennie would bloom like a rosy daybreak

when my own evening star appeared. Young Rugby, young Charterhouse,

would write his vers-libre to that small head, sweet throat and the

red-gold of her hair.... But I hardly know why I write all this. I am

only trying to show how sorely I had needed a change and how grateful I

was now that it had come. I knew that I was welcome to stay with the

Airds as long as I pleased. It didn't matter if I didn't write another

book for ten years, it didn't greatly matter if I never wrote another. I

didn't want to write. That ethereal sea, that multi-coloured plage, the

genet-scented air, the feeling that all about me were people who knew

what they could not do and wasted no time in attempting to do it--ah,

they live their lives from the beginning and end them at the end in that

fair and unperplexed land of northern France.

II

Both by Alec and Madge, Jennie's education was discussed before me with

complete freedom.

"Stuff and nonsense!" Madge would roundly declare.

"Look at those two Beverley girls!"

"Very nice girls, I should have thought," Alec would growl.

"Yes, and who's ever going to marry them? Nobody as far as I can see.

That's Vi Beverley's fault. She's let them sit in one another's pockets,

and have their own silly family jargon, and think that the rest of the

world's a cinema just to amuse them, till they don't know how to talk to

a stranger without being rude. They positively freeze any young man who

goes near them, and when they do go away it's to cousins. Family

affection's all very well in its place, but you can have too much of it.

Jennie shall take people as they are. If she does miss an hour's sleep

once in a while she can stay in bed all next day if she wants."

"Better teach her baccarat and have done with it."

"Well, she needn't faint when it's mentioned. This is 1920. If ever

those Beverley girls marry it will be one another."

"If she begins to think of marrying in another four or five years----"

"She's not going to sit on the arm of your chair for five years while

you read the _Paris Daily Mail_.... Anyway, about to-night's party----"

Then, on the way to the Stade or the Club, I should have Alec's view of

the matter.

"When we were kids, if we were allowed to stop up once a year for a

pantomime ... beastly mixed sort of place like this too! Madge doesn't

know half that goes on. Why, before I'd been here three days one of the

waiters at the Grand had the infernal neck to come up to me and

whisper----"

I broke into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of a waiter whispering

alluring suggestions to Alec Aird of all people was altogether too much

for me.

"And what did you say?" I asked him.

"Say?" said Alec grimly. "When I said 'Frog' he jumped, I promise you

that!... And mark you, these French fellows look after their own women

all right--got their hands on their elbows all the time. It's only our

confounded ideas of freedom----"

"But there's no harm in to-night's party----"

"Oh, that's all right. That's at home. We can turn 'em out at ten

o'clock, and be in bed in reasonable time. It's that damned Casino I

bar----"

And so on. Early to bed and a nap after lunch certainly suited Alec. I

have seen once-fine athletes settle down like this before.

I had been at Ker Annic some days, when about the last thing I expected

had happened to me. I have just told you how little I cared whether I

ever wrote another book or not. Well, that morning I had remained in my

room after coffee and rolls to write a couple of necessary letters.

These finished, I had sat gazing out of the window at nothing in

particular, lazily content with the beauty of the morning. Then,

suddenly and without the least premeditation, I had taken a fresh sheet

of paper and had begun to make detached and random notes. These had

presently strung themselves together, and by and by a phrase had sprung

up of itself....

Whereupon, in the very moment of my despairing of ever writing again, I

had realised that my next novel was stirring within me.

Now let me tell you the part that Jennie Aird played in this.

I frankly admit that the writers of my own generation have sometimes

been a little smug and make-believe about young girlhood. We have seen a

lovely thing, and perhaps have let its mere loveliness run away with us,

to the loss of what I believe is nowadays called "contact." We have not

seen the butterfly's anatomy for the pretty bloom of its wing.

Nevertheless, I cannot see that the eager young morphologists who are

succeeding us have so very much to teach us after all. To read some of

these you would think that the whole moving mystery had been disposed of

when they had said that a young girl became conscious, shy, and had a

talk with her mother. If it must be anatomy or bloom, I think I shall go

on preferring the bloom. I have no wish to exchange the eyes in my head

for that improved apparatus that turns a woman's hand that is meant to

be stooped over into a shadowy bundle of metacarpal bones.

At the same time I do not take it for granted that youth is necessarily

the happiest season of our lives. I remember my own youth too well for

that. Emotionally, I am aware, it is all over the shop. It will giggle

in church or make a heartbreak out of nothing, indifferently and with

tragical facility. It is exploring the new-found marvels within itself

against the day when its eyes shall open to the miracle of another.

That, at any rate, and as nearly as I can express it, was the state of

Madge Aird's sleeping beauty of a daughter on the evening of the party

of which Madge and Alec had spoken.

It was a ravishing evening of late light over an opal sea. The same dusk

that turned the begonias velvety-black in their beds made luminous the

pale hydrangeas, until they resembled the glimmering whites and mauves

of the frocks that moved in and out among them. The villa was lighted up

like a paper lantern, and the moving couples inside made ceaselessly

wavering shadows across the lawn. Over the ragged bay the phares winked

in and out, and beyond the ilex and chestnut a faint luminosity

trembled--the corona of Dinard lighting up for the night.

They danced in and out between the wide hall and the salon where the

gilded Ganymede struggled with the Eagle--youngsters in their first

dinner-jackets, sylphs with their plaits swinging about their

softly-browned napes, their elders mingling among them or watching them

from the walls. Madge, in a frock that seemed to be held up singly and

solely by her presence of mind, played fox-trots. Alec was busy

"buttling" in the little recess where a scratch supper had been set out.

The air was filled with the light talk in French and English, throbbed

with the rhythm of the foxtrotting piano.

For half an hour or so I made myself agreeable to a number of ladies of

whose names I had not the faintest idea; then, with a sense of duty

done, I turned my back on the pretty scene and strolled into the garden.

On the whole I was pleased with my day. That was what I had wanted--the

solace and security of being at work again. Nothing world-shaking or

tremendous; I simply wanted to get on with the unpretentious job that

was mine, and incidentally to be tolerably well-paid for it. That, when

all was said, was the way of wisdom, the kind of thing men very properly

get knighthoods for and had their portraits hung up in Clubs. It seemed

to me that I had been through a very evil time, and that now that I was

rid of the weight of it life was worth living again. I paced the paths

of the gay artificial little garden, my thoughts on all manner of

pleasant times to come.

Near the end of the house grew an auracaria, forbidding and black. As I

moved towards it I noticed a dim white shape beneath it. I was turning

away again (for at a party like that no unaccompanied bachelor has any

title to the dimmer corners) when the figure moved towards me. It was

Jennie Aird--alone.

"Hallo, why aren't you dancing?" I asked. I had already watched her

dance four dances in succession with the same partner--young Kingston I

believe it was.

She made a quick little grimace, but did not reply.

"This is rather a nice party," I remarked.

To this she did reply. "It's a beastly party, and I hate it."

I drew certain conclusions; but "Oh?" I said. "What's the matter with

it? I thought it rather fun."

"Everything's beastly, and I wish we were back in London," she snapped.

"Anything the matter, Jennie?"

"Oh, how I do wish people wouldn't ask one what's the matter!"

"Then come for a turn and I won't."

She put her hand indifferently on my arm. She was nearly as tall as I,

and I noticed as we passed the windows that, that night at any rate, her

red-gold plait had been taken up and was closely swathed about her nape.

Of course young Kingsley or young somebody else had said something or

done something, or hadn't said or done anything, or if he had had done

it at the wrong moment or in the wrong way or had otherwise conjured up

the shade of tragedy. Therefore, as there are occasions when tact may

take the form of talking about one's self, I talked to Jennie about

myself as we skirted the garden.

"Do you know, something rather exciting happened to me this morning," I

remarked.

She showed no great interest, but asked me what it was.

"It mayn't sound much to you, but it interests me. I think I've started

a new book."

"I wish I'd something to do," was the extent of her congratulation.

"What would you like to do?"

"Oh, anything. I shouldn't care what it was. Anything's better than

this."

"Than this jolly party?"

"Yes. Or else I wish I'd been born a man. They get all the chances."

I reflected that one man, somewhere in the world, would have a very

enviable chance, but kept my thought to myself. "Been having a row with

somebody?" I asked.

"No," she answered, I have no doubt entirely untruthfully. "I'm just fed

up. I wish I could have nursed in the war or something, but I was too

young. Or I wish I could write like you. But if I told father I wanted

to earn my own living he wouldn't hear of it, and mother's one idea is

to dress me up and show me off and marry me to somebody. They don't know

how sick I am of it."

I glanced at her as we passed the lighted windows again. That soft red

sill of her lower lip was level, and just a shade short for the upper

member of her mouth's sweet portal, so that the pearls within were

negligently guarded. Temper and discontent were in her pebble-grey eyes.

She gave her head an impatient toss, as if to shake off the thought of

the boisterous young cadets and crammer's-pups within. In a day she

seemed to have outgrown them, to have lengthened her mind as she

lengthened her frocks--if young women do lengthen their frocks nowadays.

She wanted to nurse, to write, to be a student or some personage's

secretary, to say to the dingy world, "Here I am--use me and don't spare

me," in the very moment when I and such as I, disillusioned and worn,

were sighing "Enough--release me--or if that may not be, give me but

once more, once more that first dawning joy!"

"I don't want to get married," she sulked. "Ever. Mother may laugh, but

I won't. It would have been different in the war. I love all those

darling boys who were killed. But these schoolboys are all the same....

You don't want a secretary for your new book, do you?"

It may have been my imagination, but I am not sure that there did not

stir in my memory some faint echo, of a woman sitting under a murky dome

as she waited for her _Manuel de Repertoire Bibliographique Universel_.

I know these secretaries and their wiles, and if my answer had had

twenty syllables instead of one I should have meant them all.

"No," I said.

We had reached the wrought-iron gates at the beginning of the sandy

drive. Three or four cars were parked there, and apparently somebody or

other was leaving early, for a chauffeur had just switched on the

head-lights of a heavy touring-car that shook the ground with its

muttering. Judging from the power of the lights it was the car of one of

Madge's French friends, for no English car carries shafts so blinding as

those twin beams that clove the darkness. They made the windows of the

house seem a dull expiring turnip-lantern. Their blaze lighted up every

pebble, every blade of grass, defined the shadows of blade on blade. Out

of the fumy darkness insects dropped, stunned with light, and moved

feebly on the path. I drew Jennie behind the glare, and as I did so one

of the English servant maids came up to me.

"A gentleman wishes to speak to you, sir," she said.

"To me? What gentleman? Where?"

"A French gentleman, sir. A M'seer Arnaud his name is."

"Arnaud? I don't know any Arnaud. Are you sure he asked for me and not

for Mr Aird?"

"It was Sir George Coverham he asked for, sir."

"Well, where is he?"

"Here--at least he was a moment ago----"

"Arnaud?" I mused. "Do you know a M'sieur Arnaud, Jennie?"

As I turned to her I saw her in that false illumination with curious

distinctness. The soft upward glow from the path reminded one of a

photographer's manipulation of his tissue-paper screens. She stood there

semi-footlighted--smooth brows, low glint of her hair, the caught-up

upper lip that showed the pearls, her steady gaze....

Ah, her gaze! What was this, that made me for a moment unable to remove

my own eyes from her face? At what object beyond the car was she so

fixedly looking? Why had her bosom risen? Why, as if at some "Open,

Sesame!" did that betraying upper lip offer, not two, but all the pearls

within?

My eyes followed hers....

As they did so sounds of talk and laughter and farewells drew near from

the house. The departing guests were upon us.

But I had seen. If only for an instant before it retreated swiftly into

the shadows again, I had seen. Gazing at her as steadily as she had

gazed at him, the vision of a young man's face had momentarily

appeared.

Then the babble broke out about us.

"Thank you a thousand times, chere Madame----"

"Delicieuse----"

"Merci, M'sieu' Air-r-r-rd----"

"Better have the rug round you----"

"Where's Jennie? Ah, here she is----"

"A demain, a onze heures----"

"Good-bye----"

"Good-bye, Sair-r-r George----"

But I still saw that face haunting the transparent gloom. A beret cap

had surmounted it, a blouse _en grosse toile_ had clothed the shoulders

below. Monsieur Arnaud, if it was he, was dressed as an _ouvrier_ or a

sailor dresses.

And he was young, sunbrowned, grave, beautiful.

The car backed and turned. There was a grating as the clutch was slipped

in, and then the engine dropped to a steady purr. The wrought-iron gates

started out in the glare, the red tail-lights diminished. I was dimly

aware that Madge said something to me, but I remained motionless where I

stood. I came to myself to find myself alone.

Sunbrowned, grave, beautiful, young!

And he called himself Arnaud!

I have told you of that list of names with which his diary began. Arnaud

was not among them. But Arnold was. He had simply Gallicised it, and as

Arnaud he was seeking me.

Then I felt my sleeve timidly touched. His voice came from behind me, a

voice with a charming, uncertain timbre.

"George--I say, George--who was that?"

III

I will make a shameful confession. My heart had sunk like lead. I had

wanted a holiday from him. That very morning I had thought I had secured

it, had blithely planned my new and cheerful work.

And here he was, with his hand on my sleeve.

He repeated his words in a whisper. "George, who was that?"

Slowly I turned. "It _is_ you?"

"Yes."

"How did you know I was here?"

"I saw your name in the Visitors' List."

"Tell me what I can do for you."

He fell a little back. "George," he faltered, "why this tone?"

I refused to admit at once that I was ashamed. "We can't stop talking

here," I said. "Where are you staying?"

"Out at St Briac."

"Then I suppose you're walking back? The last tram went long ago."

"It's only six miles."

"Then wait here, and I'll walk part of the way with you."

They were still merrily dancing in the house, but I managed to get to my

own room unseen. I put on an ordinary jacket and cap and descended

again. He was not where I had left him. He had skirted the lauristinus

bushes, and from a safe distance was gazing into the house.

Oh, inopportune--inopportune and undesirable in the last degree!

"Ready?" I said.

Reluctantly he turned away his eyes and followed me past the cars. We

passed out of the drive and into the dark tree-planted lanes of St

Enogat.

A rutty little ruelle runs along the side of St Enogat Church and makes

a short cut to the high road. We passed the church without exchanging a

word. At last, where the street widened, I broke the silence.

"So you're Arnaud now?"

"Yes," he said in a low voice.

"The athlete people are talking about?"

He muttered that there were lots of Arnauds.

"You're a Frenchman anyway?"

"I've got to be something."

"Are you going to stay a Frenchman?"

"I don't know yet."

We continued our walk. The little white-painted Grand Stand of the Stade

glimmered over the hedge on our right when next he spoke. I saw his

glance at it.

"About those athletics, George," he said awkwardly. "I was an awful ass.

If there's anybody who oughtn't to draw attention to himself it's me.

But I did it without thinking. It was at Ambleteuse. They were running

and jumping, and I suppose my conceit got the better of me and I just

had to have a go. But I've cut all that out. It wasn't safe. I don't go

near a Stade now."

"Ambleteuse? Then you did cross Dover-Calais?"

He hesitated. "Not exactly Dover-Calais. Thereabouts."

"Thereabouts?... I suppose you worked your passage and then gave them

the slip?"

"No. I thought of that, but it was a bit too chancy."

"Then what did you do?"

"Well--strictly between ourselves, George--it's much better not talked

about--you see my difficulty--but I swam it."

I stopped dead in my stride. "_You what!_"

He spoke apologetically, as if it were something not quite creditable.

"Yes. But I don't want to give you a wrong impression. I didn't swim it

really fairly. Not like Webb and Burgess. I only swam it more or less.

For one thing, I hadn't trained, you see."

I recovered my breath. "What do you mean by swimming it more or less?"

His modesty was almost excessive. "It was like this, George. You see I

rather funked just jumping in at Dover and trusting to luck to bring me

across. It's a devil of a long swim, you know, and besides, I had to

have my clothes; couldn't land here with nothing on. So I got hold of a

fellow at the Lord Warden, a boatman who'd been with Woolf when he just

missed it. I swore him to secrecy and all that, and fixed things up with

him, and he gave me tides and times and currents and so on. I told him I

was only an amateur who didn't want to make a fuss till he'd had a

sighting-shot, and--well, it cost me a tenner. But it saved no end of

trouble. He and another chap came across with me in a little

motor-launch. I greased myself and got into a mask, and a mile out of

Dover I went overboard. Even then I didn't swim it fairly, for I was

hauled in again after about six hours for another greasing. My flesh was

quite dead half an inch in, you see. I was sick too. If we'd been really

meant to do that sort of thing we should have been given scales, like

fishes."

"Well, and then?"

"Well--that's all. I landed a little this side of Grisnez, just as if

I'd been out for an ordinary bathe. My chaps kept a sharp look-out for

the coastguard, and smuggled my clothes on to a rock; my English ones,

of course; I bought this rig in Boulogne. And in three or four days I

was pretty well all right again. But I don't think I'd have the stamina

to do it again.... I say, promise me you won't go talking about it,

George. I've got to lie absolutely low. I frightfully wanted to go to

Antwerp, but I simply daren't do it. I might be asked for my Army

Discharge Papers, or something awkward like that."

So _that_ was how he had solved the passport problem! Unable to walk the

Straits, he had simply swum them, and had saved that night's stoking

with coal-dust in his beard! And suddenly and inexplicably, I found

something of my resentment already softening within me. There was a

noble simplicity about his expedient, and even his voluminous corduroys

and shapeless vareuse did not hide the magnificence of his build. And

yet he, so magnificent, must forego that deep joy in his physical

splendour if he was to preserve his anonymity. It passed him by as the

publisher's belief in him had passed him by--as, it began to appear to

me, all else in life must pass him by. Antwerp and the Stades for

others, but for him, who would have won glorious laurels there--no. Nay,

say he was now what he looked, nineteen or twenty. His athletic prime

was already far advanced. He himself doubted whether he had the stamina

to swim the Channel again. This alone would have sufficed to win my

compassion.

We were now well clear of St Enogat. The night was moonless, but the

heavens were crowded with stars, and seaward the lights burned emerald,

diamond, ruby. Southward over the land the eye wandered over the dim

fruit trees that dotted the fields of sarrasin. A light breeze moved in

the tops of the crooked poplars, and where the tramway leaves the road

and takes as it were a dive into a wilderness of dark tamarisk and thorn

a gramophone played somewhere in an unseen cottage. Already an

intermittent paleness had begun to sweep the sky ahead: a pulse of faint

light, four seconds of darkness, the pulse again and eleven seconds of

darkness--the Giant of Cap Frehel.

At least another ten years in less than a month! I kept stealing shy

glances at him through the limpid darkness. Quite literally I felt shy

in his presence, for he was both known and unknown to me. If he was now

nineteen, I saw him now at nineteen for the first time in my life--grave

and young, brown and beautiful. His talk had a gentleness and a modesty

too. No wonder Julia Oliphant had loved him!

"Well, go on after you left Ambleteuse," I said by and by.

"Oh, then I walked, and took train once in a while, till I got to Rouen

and Caen and on here. Lovely churches all the way; I want to go to Caen

again. That took me a fortnight. Then I'd a couple of days in St Malo,

and--well, that about accounts for the time."

"And what are you doing at St Briac?"

"Sketching. Taken a great fancy to it. I've got a bike cheap, and I

either walk or ride. I stay at a rather shabby little place, but it

suits me. I've only a couple of haversacks and my painting things, so I

can be off at a moment's notice if--if anything crops up."

Charmingly and sincerely as he spoke, I was yet conscious of a reserve.

He kept, as it were, to the surface of his itinerary, dwelling only on

the outer details of his life. And, as little by little he repossessed

me, I knew that I should have to get behind this reticence. For when

and how had he lost those ten years? In Trenchard's loft, or since, or

partly both? Had he, when he had plunged into the sea a mile out of

Dover, been still twenty-nine, or his present age, or some intermediate

one? If I was to be of service to him it was necessary that I should

know all this.

"Derry," I said, using his name for the first time, "I can't walk all

the way to St Briac and back again. For one thing I'm dressed for a

party. Let's sit down."

There was a warm dry earth-wall with heath and thyme and rest-harrow and

convolvulus growing on it, and there we sat down. Opposite us opened the

marshy gap of Le Port, and every four seconds, every eleven seconds, the

aurora-like Light a dozen miles away was faintly reduplicated in the wet

mud. All was quiet save for the ceaseless rustle of the ragged poplars,

the creeping whisper of the tide.

"Now," I quietly ordered him, "I want you to tell me all the things

you've been leaving out."

At first I thought he was going to behave like an obdurate boy, whose

affairs are hugely important just because they are his. But he seemed to

think better of it. In a hesitating voice he said, "What things?"

"Well, begin with Trenchard's place on Sunday night, the 4th of July.

What happened then?"

His answer was hardly audible. "Yes, it was then."

"How much?"

"The whole lot."

"At one go you dropped from twenty-nine to--what is it now? Twenty?"

"Nineteen or twenty. I don't know. Yes."

"Then nothing's happened since then?"

"No--at least I'm not quite sure."

"Not sure?"

"No. I honestly don't know. There's been a gap somewhere, something I

ought to have come to again, but that somehow I've missed altogether. I

simply can't account for it."

"Explain, Derry."

He seemed hardly to trust his voice. "It's the queerest thing of all,

but I'll swear it on a Bible if you like. You know what it was I funked

more than anything--all those beastly rotten things going to happen all

over again.... Don't let's talk about them. They were all the time like

a nightmare to me, that I was drawing nearer and nearer to all the time.

I tell you, I'd decided to put myself out rather than wallow through all

that again.... Well, I can only tell you I've absolutely skipped it. On

my honour I have. It's the most unaccountable thing, but----" He choked

a little.

"But," I said, deeply pondering, "is it possible to skip a step--_any_

step?"

"I should have said not," he replied. "Beats me altogether. I started on

a dead straight course back, and I fancied I should have to take my

fences as I came to them. But this kink's come, and somehow I've picked

up the thread again clear on the other side of it."

I pondered more gravely still. "Wait a bit. It all happened that Sunday

night, kink and all?"

"Yes."

"That was the night you left my place with Julia Oliphant, said good-bye

to her at Waterloo, and went on to Trenchard's? Did you stick to that

programme?"

"Yes."

("And so," something seemed positively to shout within me, "much good

you've done yourself, Julia Oliphant! Much good you're still plotting!

That gap that he's skipped altogether--that's precisely where you're

setting the man-traps for him, you and your chiffons and your brown

charmeuse and your new willow-leaf shoes! You'd better forget Peggy and

her garters and get back into your nice quiet tea-gowns again!")

But aloud I resumed: "Then, if nothing's happened since that night, that

means that you're now stable--stationary?"

His reply gave me a queer shock. It was in the last word that the shock

lay. "As far as I can make out, sir."

"So you haven't got to move on from pillar to post and one lodging to

another?"

"I've been at St Briac for ten days. And that isn't all," he continued

earnestly. "I can't say for certain, and perhaps it's too soon to talk

about it. So this is touching wood. But I've got a sort of feeling that

if I'm careful and live perfectly quietly--no excitement and going to

bed early, you know--I might be able to stick just like this for a long

time. I know no more about that gap than you do, but it seems to have

cleared the air like a thunderstorm. And when I tell you that I really

intended to put myself out ... oh, how thankful...." But again he

checked himself.

And I too found myself gulping to think that I had so recently wanted to

wash my hands of him. Be rid of him? I knew now that not only should I

never be rid of him, but that never again should I want to. Charming,

innocent, beautiful and grave! I cannot tell you, for I do not know,

what mysterious spiritual thing Julia Oliphant had actually wrought upon

him. I only knew that all that he had so greatly dreaded she had taken

upon herself, and that whatever her portion thenceforward was, his was

complete absolution. "One for the Lord, the other for Azazel"; out into

the wilderness she, the scapegoat, must go; but on him the smell of that

fiercest fire of all had not so much as passed.... And I realised in

that moment that thenceforward he was my charge--yes, my son had I had

one. Must he stay in France? Then I must stay with him. Must he wander?

Then I must wander too. For the rest of his unstable life I must be his

staff and support.

"But I say, sir," he said shyly presently, "about why I dug you out

to-night. I hope you'll say no straight away if you think it's fearful

cheek, but the fact is I must have some more colours, and--well, I've

got a little money in London, but I can't get at it just for the moment.

So I really came to ask you if you could lend me five hundred francs."

This was strange. I shot a swift glance at him as he lay, a rich dark

patch of blouse and corduroys at my side.

"Where," I asked him as steadily as I could, "is your money in London?"

"I have a little there," he said awkwardly.

"How much?"

"I don't quite know, but it's certainly more than five hundred francs."

"Where did it come from?"

Through the clear dark I saw his dusky flush. "I'm sorry. I oughtn't to

have asked you. Never mind."

"Derry," I said, greatly moved, "tell me: are you remembering things

quite properly? You surely haven't forgotten that _I_ have your money?"

"Eh?" he said. The next moment he had tried to cover his quick

confusion. "Eh? Why, of course. What am I thinking of? It did slip my

memory just for the moment; stupid! I'd got it mixed up somehow with

Julia Oliphant. I was going to write to her. I remember, of course. You

sold my furniture. You did sell it, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"How much did it fetch?"

This time it was my turn to evade. "Well, as you say, more than five

hundred francs. I--I haven't totted it up yet. I came away in rather a

hurry. But there's quite a lot, and I can let you have all you want

to-morrow."

"Then that's all right," he said cheerfully.

But I found it anything but all right. On the contrary, it was

profoundly disturbing. If he could forget that he had authorised me to

sell that black oak furniture of his he could forget more vital matters.

Yet he had remembered the furniture when I had urged him.

"Tell me," I said more quietly, "as simply as you can, exactly what you

do and what you don't remember."

"I only forgot it for a moment," he stammered.

"But you did forget it. Can you explain it?"

I felt that his mind laboured, struggled; but I was hardly prepared for

what came next.

"Just let me think for a minute. I want to get to the bottom of it too.

It's a thing I've been watching most carefully, and I give you my word

I remembered everything absolutely clearly up to a couple of hours ago.

I knew all about that furniture when I came to that place for you,

because as I walked along I was trying to work out how much it ought to

amount to. In fact I wasn't coming to borrow at all, but just to ask you

for something on account. Let me think. I got there at exactly at

quarter to ten----"

His fingers were playing with the wild flowers on the earth-wall. In and

out through the whispering poplars the stars peeped. Every four seconds,

every eleven seconds, four times a minute, rose and fell the Light. I

fell to counting the intervals as I waited for his reply. Diamond,

emerald, ruby, twinkled the lights at sea....

Then suddenly he sat up and took a deep breath. I saw his radiant smile.

He faced me with the starlight in his eyes.

"George," he said, "_who was that with you in the garden_?"

IV

For some seconds the stars seemed to go out of the sky. I seemed to be,

not sitting with him on that earth-wall by Le Port gap, but to be

standing again in the drive of Ker Annic, with the glare of a

touring-car thrown up from the ground and Jennie Aird by my side. I

seemed to see again her parted lips, to hear that soft intake of her

breath. And his own face seemed to hang again like a beautiful mask

suspended in the glow.

And when I had descended from my room again I had found him lurking in

the bushes, gazing into the lighted house.

Stars in the night above us! Was that to be the next thing to happen?

Had it happened?

Evidently something had happened, and had happened during the past two

hours.

Then, as I strove to grasp the immense possibility, a deep and hapless

yearning flooded my heart. The loveliness, the loveliness of it had it

been possible! She, with the dreams still unrubbed from her opening

eyes, he a December primrose peeping up anew out of the roots of his

wrecked and fruitless years--they would have been matchlessly coupled.

Had he in truth been my son I could have desired no more for him than

this.

Yet why do I say "had it been possible"? Possible or impossible,

something, whether more beautiful or fatal I could not say, had in fact

happened. Whether to her or not, it had happened to him. How else

explain that treacherous little slip about his money? Up to then his

memory had not failed him. Reticence he had shown, a youthful

unwillingness to talk about himself, but not in order to conceal an

impaired faculty. His account of his movements during the past month had

been slight, but complete enough. One gap only--the Julia gap--he found

unaccountable, and that was no enigma to me.

But was he now on the eve of yet another transformation? Had one look of

eyes into eyes hastened him to another stage? Absolved he was; was he

now to be, not merely absolved, but confirmed in all the beauty and

liberty of that absolution? Consider it as I tried to consider it,

sitting on that thymy earth-wall while Frehel, like a ghostly clock,

threw those wavering false dawns across the night.

Julia, by her ruthless act, had But Jennie had now seen him

despoiled him of ten years as Julia had seen him more

of his life. than twenty years ago.

That act of hers constituted the But should another gap now come

gap that, try as he would, his heart would understand.

he could not account for.

In some dark and hidden way He was now beautiful, grave,

Julia had taken upon herself innocent and unafraid.

his burden of sin.

Julia, darkly machinating, was But Jennie, as spotless as he,

counting on waylaying him knew nothing of machination.

again, and yet again.

"He _shall_ know what love is; If his question to me meant

why should he get nothing anything, a wonder had happened

out of his life?" Julia had to him not two hours ago.

passionately cried.

On his former pilgrimage he But was Love the wonder now?

had not known Love.

If so, it was Julia's gift when And it was a gift to Jennie.

she had restored his innocence

to him.

But the position was inconceivable, not to be thought of. Experience

such as never man had possessed lurked behind that simulacrum of beauty

by my side. Young as he was, he was old enough to have been Jennie's

father. He was, he still remained, the man who had written _The Hands of

Esau_ and _An Ape in Hell_, the man for whom I had hunted in

questionable London haunts, who had known to the full the sin and shame

of his accumulated years. I knew, Julia knew, what contact with his

ruinous uniqueness meant. How was it possible to permit such an error in

nature as to allow him to fall in love with Jennie Aird?

Yet if he had already done so, what was there to do?

His voice sounded again softly by my side.

"You haven't told me who that was with you in the garden," he said.

"Let's finish with the other things first," I answered.

"Oh, I'm tired of talking about myself, sir."

"That's one of them. Why do you sometimes call me 'sir' and sometimes

'George'?"

He gave a start. "Have I been doing that?"

"Didn't you know?"

I couldn't catch his reply.

"When you were young I suppose you called older men 'sir'?"

"Of course."

"Do you think that at this moment you could repeat, say, half a page of

_The Hands of Esau_?" (I had my reasons for choosing that book rather

than another.)

"I think so."

"Will you try?"

"Shall you know if I'm right?"

"Near enough for the purpose, I think."

He puckered his brows and fixed his eyes on the road. He began to

recite. _The Hands of Esau_ had been written in or before 1912, and the

year was now 1920. To remember even your own book textually eight years

afterwards is something of a performance; but he was remembering, at

nineteen, the words he had written at thirty-eight--a space of nearly

twenty years. I stopped him, satisfied, but he himself immediately took

up the running.

"Of course I see what you're after, but I've done all that myself.

Honour bright, that about the furniture was the first slip of the kind

I've made. But I've made one discovery."

"What's that?"

"You're starting at the wrong end. That memory's all right. It's the

other one I've sometimes wondered about."

"Ah! The one you call your 'B' Memory! Do you mean--it sounds an odd way

of putting it, but I suppose it's all right--do you mean you don't

remember what sort of thing you'll be doing, say, next year?"

"Not very clearly, George. Sometimes that seems an absolutely unknown

adventure. And sometimes it's like that queer feeling--I expect you know

it--that you've been somewhere before, or done something before, or

heard the same thing before. It lasts for a second, and then it's gone."

"Do you think it will continue like that?"

"I've stopped thinking about it."

"That page you repeated just now. That wasn't a stock page you--keep in

rehearsal, so to speak?"

"No, that was pukka."

I considered my next question carefully. But there was no avoiding it;

it had to be put. I watched him deliberately.

"Now tell me one other thing. Do you ever remember hearing or writing

these words: '_Je tache de me debrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci?_'"

Poor, poor lad! He winced as if I had cut at him with a lash. He turned

over on the bank so that I could not see his face. He made no response

when I placed my hand on his shoulder. My heart ached for him ... but he

had to be shown that any question of love between himself and Jennie

Aird was impossible.

I shook him. "_Do_ you remember that, Derry?"

Slowly he sat up on the bank. He turned a set face on me.

"Let me say, Coverham," he said tremulously, "that I went through a

whole war without seeing as cowardly a thing as that done. I will not

forgive you."

And with barely a moment's pause he broke out:

"Oh, what am I to do, sir, what am I to do? You're older and wiser than

I am--I want help--advice----"

* * * * *

That is why I have called this portion of his history "The Long Splice."

Extremes as wide apart as those met there and interwove their strands.

Fortunate it was for me that they did, for had not that last helpless

cry been wrung from him I should have been dumb before the bitterness of

his reproach. Whether memories of sweetness and light were failing him

or not, those of bitterness and gall remained, and it was on this

quivering complexity of exposed nerves that I had laid the lash.

And yet simultaneously he was innocent, assoiled, acquitted. Only the

man he had been had groaned under the stroke; the other had turned to me

for comfort and guidance and help. And what is a remembered self that we

should weep for it? What is memory that we should writhe? No philosopher

has yet ventured to write "I remember, therefore I am." Nor does a man

remember entirely and wholly of his own will. He is his memory's lord

when he sets himself to repeat a passage from a book; but who is the

master when something leaps upon him without warning from the past,

tears open an old wound, and leaves him quivering and bleeding?...

Derry's "A" Memory now seemed to me to be beside the mark, and it was

with a sudden joy that I recognised it to be a boon that his "B" Memory

was dissolving into a golden haze. "An absolutely unknown adventure," he

had said; and what better, more merciful, more beautiful? As the Great

Pity hides other men's ends from them, so his beginning was to be hidden

from him. No remembrance of disillusion would mar for him the bloom of

his fair discoveries. What though seas were sailed before if you know it

not? Are the garden's scents less fragrant that you wonder, for a

fleeting instant, when you have smelt them before? And what of the kiss

of your mouth when that kiss is both an undoing and a re-beginning, the

end of one dream but the beginning of a lovelier still? What Julia had

done once Jennie would do again, and I had only to think of his

innocence, his beauty and his doom to know, more surely than I ever knew

anything in my life, that this would a thousandfold transcend the other.

And--supposing that it had already happened, implicit in that single

revealing look--_he had still to sleep that night_.

I forget in what words he began to plead his cause. His idea was this:

He conceived himself to be now stationary, or, if moving at all, to be

doing so hardly perceptibly. Ignorant of the connection between Julia's

attack and his putting-off of the years, he knew as little that similar

results might follow what had happened in the garden of Ker Annic that

evening. He would "hang on" by gentle and equable living, and to that

extent, and if all went well, time might presently become to him

something more nearly approaching what it was to anybody else. He even

hazarded a suggestion wild enough to make the hair stand up on your

head.

"And if I got as far as that," he mused, his eyes straight before him in

the night, "I might even--it's no madder than anything else--I might

even start living forward again; but I suppose that's too much to

expect," he sighed.

On this I simply refused to make any comment at all.

I had told him that Jennie was the daughter of my host. He was for

making plain sailing of it. His outbreak about my cowardice, by the way,

had been disregarded by both of us.

"But don't you see, Derry, you're so unimaginably different from anybody

and everybody else," I repeated for the tenth time.

"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply.

"But you don't know yet that you can."

"You don't know that I can't, sir."

I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for

it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses.

"You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and

introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to--God knows what?" I

demanded incredulously.

"You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before."

"I offered to introduce the man I then knew."

"Am I any worse now?"

"There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it

can't, and this can't."

"Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all

that?"

"I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the

other things are quite as simple as they look either."

"But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes."

"Do they fit you--or did they merely do so once?"

At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when

everything's said I _am_ me, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am.

Dash it, I _am_ on the blessed map! I'm quite a passable nineteen as

fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner

changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm--I'm--I'm in it,

George. Regularly for it. Just as deep as--oh, deep and lovely! I

didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not

just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully

not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I

promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you

manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be

quite safe--I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear--I'd promise--on

my soul I'd promise----"

I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I

have him at the Airds'--and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse

what would have been my very heart's desire for him--yet how grant it to

the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my

face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily

looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!...

I stopped before him.

"There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently.

"Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days."

It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur

of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He

stared at me blankly.

"Off! Did you say off?"

"Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me

a promise before I leave you."

"Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all

eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car.

"I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to

promise to wait in your room for me till then."

"Where is she going?"

"Will you wait in your room till I come?"

"Back to England?"

"I don't know. Will you wait for me in your room?"

"Tell me one other thing, sir," he pleaded; "just her name----"

"Her name's Jennie."

He received it as if it had been a costly gift. "Jennie, Jennie----" he

breathed softly.

"You'll wait for me?"

"Of course, sir. Thank you, George."

"Then I'll say----"

But I could not get out the words "Good night."

How did I know what the night was going to be for him?

For it happened in the night....

I left him standing by the earth-wall, with the lights still twinkling

at sea and the low glare of Frehel in the sky behind him. Four seconds,

eleven seconds, four times a minute----

"Jennie!" I heard his hushed, rapt voice as I turned away.

V

"_Le_ Por-r-rt! _Le_ Por-r-rt!"

Only an old woman with white streamers and a basket descended from the

tram, but instinctively I turned my head to look at the flowery bank on

which I had sat so few hours before. It was a sparkling morning, with an

intense blue sky, high white clouds and singing larks. The fields of

flowering sarrasin were white, cream, pink, deep russet; and far away

the grey-green boscage receded into misty blue, unbroken by walls or

fences, that contradictory communal undulation of a country where

individualism is at its most intense, holdings small, and a ditch or a

bank you could stride over fencing enough. But I was too anxious to be

able to admire. At the best it looked as if I should have to assume

complete responsibility for him and so cut my visit to the Airds

abruptly short. At the worst--but I put the worst from me.

"Allez! Roulez!"

With the sound of a tank going into action the tram clattered forward to

St Lunaire.

Up the steep street, and a swerve past the acres of tennis-courts that

had once been grass. The huge six-acre cage was already full of

players, and I thought of Jennie Aird. Then past the magasins and the

long cafe, with half-clad young Frenchmen punting a ball and walking on

their hands in the strip of meadow opposite. The Casino, the hotels, and

then a steep planted avenue that seemed to end in the air. Then a rush

and another swerve, and out on to the wide expanse of tussocky links,

grey and fawn sandhills, and turf gemmed with a myriad tiny flowers.

His hotel was within a biscuit's-toss of the terminus. It stood by the

roadside, and its front consisted of a built-out structure of glass,

within which a couple of Breton girls with tight hair, string-soled

shoes, and the physique of middle-weight boxers, were laying a dozen

small tables for _dejeuner_. A lad dressed precisely as Derry had been

dressed was delivering lifebuoys of bread, and knives clattered in

baskets, and two-foot-high stacks of coloured plates were being carried

in.

"M'sieu' Arnaud?" I inquired of one of the string-slippered Amazons.

"M'sieu' n'est pas descendu--si vour voulez monter au deuxieme,

M'sieu'."

She indicated a way through the back salon that had once been the street

frontage. Beyond yawned a cavernous kitchen, the blacker because of its

opening on to a dazzlingly green back yard. Between the two rose a

staircase, which a strapping youth was polishing with a mop on his foot.

I mounted and gained the _deuxieme_. Then, outside the closed door, I

stopped with a thumping heart.

But it was no good hesitating. I pulled myself together and knocked.

"_----trez!_" called a clear voice.

I thanked God, pushed and entered.

His head was bent over his colour-box. On a piece of paper he appeared

to be making a list of the colours to be replenished. He looked

smilingly up, and our eyes met.

Clear eyes, grave sweet mouth, undoubting smile----

And unchanged. The night had passed, and nothing perceptible had

happened. I crossed to the window. Now that all was well, I dare to

admit to myself that I had been prepared to find him--dead. If he was

right in fixing his climacteric at sixteen he might well have been dead.

But there he was, bending over his colour-box and murmuring "Cobalt--I

seem to eat cobalt--raw sienna--orange vermilion----"

Presently I spoke, still from the window.

"Well, I don't know anything about downstairs, but you've a gorgeous

view up here."

"Isn't it?" he said. "Grows on you. At first I thought it rather

scrappy, a little bit of everything, and I wish they'd put a bomb under

that silly chateau-place; but it grows on you. Inland's the country

though. Orange vermilion, pale cadmium, and a double go of cobalt----"

I looked round his room. The smell of oil-colours clung about it, but it

was exquisitely tidy and simple. Its walls were covered with a yellowish

striped paper, its ceiling beams were moulded, its herring-boned parquet

floor shone. A single mat lay by the side of his ornate wooden bedstead,

which, with the little night cupboard by it, a small table at the

window, and a single upholstered chair, was the only furniture in the

room. The door-knob was of glass, and the lace curtains had been draped

back over the open leaves of the window. From a flimsy little hat-rack

hung his two haversacks. His canvases apparently were in the cupboard

that was sunk into the wall.

"Well," he said, putting his list of colours into his pocket, "it seems

rather a rum idea bringing you right out here when I've got to go into

Dinard myself. Can I have the money, George?"

I counted it out.

"And oh, by the way--I know you won't mind--but if you'd talk French

when there's anybody about--it makes things a bit simpler----"

Here I began to be aware of the imminence of another problem. I don't

mean the talking French; I mean the whole problem of his company. He was

going into Dinard to buy colours, and I also was returning to Dinard.

The natural thing was that we should go together. I could hardly

constitute myself his guardian and not be seen about with him--bargain

with him that he only came to me or I to him like Nicodemus, by night.

He seemed to take all this cheerfully for granted.

But whither would it presently lead? Dinard was, in a word, the

world--that world in which he had no place. Everybody knew scores of

people in Dinard, and Madge Aird hundreds. Tennis, tea, the shops, the

plage--all was public, familiar, open in the last degree. Within a

couple of days, on the strength of being seen twice or thrice with me,

he would be exchanging bows and smiles and "Bonjours" with goodness

knows who.

"Well, come along," I said in a sort of daze. "But I don't know that I

feel like talking much, either in French or English. You're a devil of a

fellow for keeping your friends guessing, Monsieur Arnaud. You're still

Monsieur Arnaud, I suppose?"

"How can I change it?" he replied gravely.

Of course he couldn't change it. Arnaud he must remain until he became

too young to be Arnaud any longer.

On the returning tram I addressed myself somewhat as follows:

"George Coverham, this can't go on. You've got to make up your mind one

way or the other. If you don't he'll make it up for you. His is already

made up. He sees no reason why he shouldn't carry on. He's either right

or wrong. Well, suppose for a moment that he's right? What then?

"You know what you were prepared for when you went up those stairs of

his. You know you had to put your hand up three times before you dared

knock. Well, everything was all right; nothing had happened. If he's

really suddenly and desperately in love it ought to have happened, but

anyway it didn't. That means, in plain English, that he knows more about

himself than you do.

"And he thinks he can stay as he is. Suppose he can? Suppose even that

maddest conjecture of all is true, and that he actually may re-become

normal and live out his life like everybody else? It wouldn't be any

more wonderful than the rest. So what's the obvious thing to do? Why,

simply to take him as he is--as long as he is it. That's all he's asking

you. And he's promised to clear out at the very first hint of another

transformation. In fact he's got to. It's in the very nature of the

case.

"Look at him on the seat opposite to you there, between those two

bare-headed young women. Those two Breton girls may keep their four

handsome Breton eyes straight before them, but they're conscious of

every moment of his presence. Who wouldn't be? He's a dream of beauty.

And remember how he pleaded with you last night. Can't you hear him

still? 'Only to see her, only to talk to her: can't you manage that,

sir? Can't you, George?' Was ever gratitude more touching and absurd

than when you merely told him her name--'Jennie!' Why shouldn't he have

the love now he missed before? Julia Oliphant didn't stop to think twice

about it. Who made you Rhadamanthus, George Coverham?... Anyway, you've

got to make up your mind."

I told myself all this, and more; but I cannot say I convinced myself.

Indeed, in the face of past experience, I made the mistake of once more

thinking I had a choice in the matter. I thought that I possessed him,

and not he me. So I floundered among details, little practical details,

such as talking French to him and being seen about Dinard with him. I

recalled how already Madge Aird had asked whether he had a brother. I

seemed to see Alec's face when he was told that a Frenchman had fallen

in love with his daughter, my own as I explained that the Frenchman was

not really a Frenchman, and Alec's again as he asked me what the devil I

meant. Then there was his name--Arnaud. That again landed us straight

into a dilemma. He couldn't change it, must stop Arnaud; but as Arnaud

the athlete he had been seen at Ambleteuse. The brother of some young

Rugby or young Charterhouse at that moment in Dinard (the words seemed

to detach themselves from the noisy babble of a teashop) had seen him.

He might be recognised here; people do look twice at a casual stranger

who strolls into a Stade, chucks off his coat, and in his walking boots

does something like level time. He looked it, too, every inch of him....

And whispers might be flying round Dover too. The straits are not very

wide, and men who can swim them do not come down with every shower of

rain.... Oh, the whole thing bristled with risks. I counted a hundred of

them while the tram rolled in its cloud of filthy smoke past La

Gueriplais, La Fourberie, St Enogat, the Rue de la Gare....

"Devoiturons," he said suddenly, touching my knee.

He had taken matters into his own hands even while I had mused. I had

intended to postpone my decision by dropping off at St Enogat; now we

were at the corner of the Boulevard Feart. "Down we get!" _We!_

Apparently "we" could get to "our" colour shop without making the

circuit of the rest of the town. I will not swear that I saw a momentary

twinkle of mischief in his eyes. I was standing in the middle of the

road looking after the tram, which was already fifty yards away.

Together a middle-aged English gentleman in a neat lounge suit and a

splendid young specimen of French manhood in blouse and corduroys turned

into the Boulevard Feart.

There would still have been time to retrieve my indecision. The

Boulevard, approached from that end of the town, is not nearly so

frequented as the Rue Levavasseur and the quarter near the Casino. It

was, in fact, particularly quiet. But every step we took under the shady

limes, past the white-facaded houses and gardens vermilion with

geraniums and bluer than the sky with lobelia, brought us nearer to that

crowded busy world in which he held so singular a place. Or I could have

left him at the corner of the Rue Jacques Cartier and made my escape by

way of the Rue St Enogat. But what then? If I shook him off to-day the

question would be to face again to-morrow.... Ker Yvonne, Ker Maria, Ker

Loic ... the shuttered villas slipped past us.

Then, "Derry," I said in desperation, "I'm at my wits' end about you. I

haven't the faintest idea what I ought to do."

"It's jolly just being with you," he said, looking straight ahead.

"Yes. It's other people who're the difficulty."

I had the same answer as before. "As long as I sit tight, George?" he

said mildly.

"Even then. You said yourself that you were both the most public and the

most private man alive."

"Ah, but that was when I was slipping about all over the place.--Up

here's our shop."

"But even if you're stationary you're just as much an anomaly. Nobody

except you stops at one age."

"Well, it's a step in the right direction so to speak. At any rate it

isn't going back."

"I wish I knew how you knew that."

"I wish I could tell you, old fellow," he placidly replied.

"Look here," I said abruptly. "There's just one possible way out, but I

rather doubt whether you'd agree to it. I mean about what you wanted me

to do last night. Would you allow me to tell the whole thing to my

friends the Airds and leave the decision to them?"

Quickly, very quickly, he shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I couldn't do

that."

"But is anything else fair and right?"

"If I stop as I am?"

"In any case."

"They wouldn't believe you."

"I think Mrs Aird might believe me."

He gave a short laugh. "She can swallow a good deal if she can swallow

that!"

"She's a very observant woman. She said one thing that perhaps I ought

to tell you."

"What?" he asked with sudden curiosity.

"She saw you one day in South Kensington."

"Well?"

"She'd also had a good look at you that day at the Lyonnesse Club."

"Well?"

"She asked me whether Derwent Rose had a brother."

"Et vous avez repondu?"

"J'ai dit que non."

"C'etait la figure? La taille?"

"Le tout ensemble."

"Elle avait des conjectures? Pas possible!"

"Comme vous le dites, pas possible; mais s'ils poussent sur le Rosier

trop de boutons----"

"Il n'y-en poussera plus," he laughed; and the little knot of French

people passed us by.

He made light of my recital. I heard his quiet chuckle. Then suddenly I

realised that we were at the corner of the Rue Levavasseur, outside the

Hotel de Provence.

"Look here, haven't we passed your shop?" I said.

"Eh? Have we? By Jove, so we have. That's the charm of your

conversation, George."

"Then hadn't we better go back?"

"Of course we must; it's the only colour shop in the place. But just

step across the road now that we are here. I want some tooth-powder. And

some envelopes at the Bazaar there. Must have some--run right out

yesterday."

We crossed to a chemist's, but it appeared that he usually went to a

chemist's a little farther down the street. There he made his purchases,

and once more we came out into the street.

"Now I want some bootlaces," he said. "You see, I always load up when I

come into Dinard. Saves time, not to speak of the tram-fare."

It was approaching a brilliant midday, and from the Tennis Club, the

shops, the confectioners, and the cafes, people were beginning to press

to their various hotels and villas to lunch. In another half-hour the

street would be half empty, but now it was at its gayest with bright

blazers, gaudy costumes, sleek heads, sea-browned faces. One saw

laughing, turning heads, caught snatches of appointments--"A ce

soir"--"Don't forget, Blanche"--"Number Four at two-thirty"--"You coming

our way, Suzette?"

Suddenly my arm was seized, and M. Arnaud took a quick step forward.

"Thees ou-ay," he said laughingly, "des enveloppes----"

I was dragged into the Bazaar.

Then, but too late, I wondered what his so pressing need of envelopes

was. "Must have some--ran right out yesterday!" Who were _his_

correspondents? Of what did _his_ letter-bag consist? Letters, he! A

passport and a birth-certificate would have been more to the point; a

_permis de sejour_ and his Army Discharge Papers would have been more to

the point. And most to the point of all was that the rascal had

completely hoodwinked me.

For, standing there among hoops and grace-sticks, string shoes and cards

of bijouterie, caoutchouc bathing-caps and all the one-franc-fifty

fal-lals of the Bazaar, alone and for the moment with her back to us,

was Jennie Aird.

VI

This time if he wanted French he had it--off the ice.

"Touche--et merci, Monsieur. Bonjour."

I bowed, stepped forward, and placed myself between him and Jennie. I

touched her elbow.

"I saw you come in. Are you nearly ready? We shall be late."

I was the angrier that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry.

Jennie, giving me only the tail of her glance, turned to her choice of a

bathing-cap again--the yellow one or the green one. My back was towards

Rose, but I heard a saleswoman step up to him.

"Rien, merci--j'attends M'sieur," he said.

Jennie too heard, and turned.

There was no atmosphere of soft and factitious half-illumination now.

This was the full blaze of a perfect August midday, that flooded the

shop with sunshine and made a dazzle of Jennie's little white hat with

the cord about it, of the burnished hair beneath. The sleeves of her

white frock were cut short above the dimple of her elbow, the tiny blue

ribbon across her shoulders peeped through. She in her sunny white, he

in black vareuse and corduroys brown as a wintry coppice, again stood

looking one at the other.

And for the second time within the course of a sun I saw the world begin

anew, as it begins anew for some he, for some she, with every moment

that passes. For the beginning of the cradle is not the real beginning.

That is only the end of the darkness of forebeing that is pierced with a

woman's pang. That is still an uneasy slumber, yea, even though it

weakly smile, and by and by stumble over its syllables, and stumble over

its own uncertain feet, and walk, and spell, and use a tennis-racket. It

is incomplete, and will never be complete in itself. It is completed in

that moment when its eyes open on other eyes, and the wonder kindles

there, and the ground underfoot is forgotten, and the surrounding

sunlight is forgotten, and nothing is remembered except that those eyes

have found their other-own eyes, and, though they lose them again in

that same instant, never to see them again, will remember them in the

hour when the shadow closes over all. That, that re-begins the cycle, is

our real beginning. It was that which, in that tawdry Bazaar, turned the

golden sunlight to a nimbus about us.

Again I touched her.

"The yellow one, is it? Let me put it in my pocket."

I had secured her arm. I picked up for her the horrible fifty-centime

notes of her change. She had dropped her eyes, and her face was as

rich-coloured as her lips, her lips a pulpy quiver. I felt the touch of

Derry's hand on my sleeve, but I disregarded it. I felt bitterly towards

him.

"Come along, my dear," I said; and I pushed her past him.

Yet if, as he had said, he wished merely to see her, merely to speak

with her, he had half his wish in that moment. Her left arm was in my

right one, I between her and him. Suddenly, blush or no blush, she

lifted her head. Behind me, she looked full at him. For two, three paces

her head and shoulders continued to turn. I set my lips and looked

straight ahead.

Then her head dropped again. Her teeth caught at her upper lip. For a

moment she was a limp weight on my arm. We left the shop.

I saw his face at the window as we passed. Whether or not he stepped to

the door to watch us out of sight I do not know.

I say that it was with myself that I was chiefly angry; but I have never

found that a particularly mollifying reflection. As I have seen a man

get rid of an undesired guest by blandly pressing him to stay but

leading him gently by the arm all the time nearer to the door, so our

young man had used me. I had been piloted here, there, in whichever

direction he had wished. And as for Jennie's long backward look and turn

of the head ... well, it seemed to me that the thing might now be

regarded as done. It did not need me to murmur "Jennie, this is M.

Arnaud--Miss Aird." The back door into Alec Aird's jealously-guarded

house was set ajar, and I, the only one who could have watched it, had

failed to do so. I frowned, watching her white-clad feet moving on the

sunny pavement. I avoided looking at her face. I knew that she equally

avoided looking at mine.

Of one thing I was perfectly sure: she would not of her own accord speak

of the young man we had just left. Perhaps it was that there are some

things which, unless you out with them at once, become more and more

difficult with every moment that passes. Many a close secret was not a

secret at all in the beginning; it merely became one. Therefore she was

already showing obstinacy. She knew that I knew about that look. She had

looked openly, deliberately, as careless of my presence as if I had not

been there. And in that critical moment it was a toss-up what my

relations with my friend's seventeen-years-old daughter were to be. She

might, suddenly and swiftly, break into an emotional confession. On the

other hand she might thenceforward bear me an unspoken grudge that I

knew anything about her affairs at all.

I noticed that she carried no tennis racket. I therefore asked her, as

we crossed the emptying Place du Commerce, whether she had left it at

the Club.

"No," she said.

"Haven't you been playing this morning?"

"No."

"Too tired after the party last night?"

"No."

"I was wondering--but I suppose you've far more amusing things to do

than to come for a walk with me this afternoon."

In those few words the whole situation trembled as in a balance. If she

said Yes, much might follow; if No, then resentment would be my portion.

We continued to ascend the high-walled street, past tall garden gates

and notice-boards--"A Vendre," "Locations," "Agence Boutin." We passed

Beausejour, Primavera, Les Cyclamens....

Then for the first time she looked sideways at me.

"I should like to," she said.

I was still angry with myself and him. He was probably right in refusing

the only definite suggestion I had found to make, namely, that he should

permit me to tell my host and hostess the whole story. But if his

alternative was to lie in wait for her in the streets and shops of a

French summer resort and to hang about the open windows of the house at

night, I felt very strongly about it. He was going to be wily and

masterful, was he? He, swaying on a tightrope of time, was going to

claim the treatment of a normal man? Well, that remained to be seen. The

cold shoulder for a day or two might bring him to a more reasonable

view. Anyway, after our encounter in the Bazaar, he could hardly pretend

not to know my mind.

And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can

know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was

anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set

my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all

my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back,

back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a

lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had

taken from an article in _The Times_.

"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the

knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence

or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual,

attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as

the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of

intelligence has been reached."

Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?

A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman

like myself, on his way to luncheon at a _riant_ holiday villa with a

moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!

For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart

of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I

believe I actually passed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a

physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent

Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they

were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged

in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and

power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should

presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of

acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance--shining,

self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law?

"Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've tried to wake up as

if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his

fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was

an early sun about to rise on a creature _not_ ready-made, _not_

pre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man

given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man

liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?

A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to

luncheon!

Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of

shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.

"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the

Casino, did you?" he said.

"No. I took a walk."

"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of

course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."

"Well, she's coming for a walk with me this afternoon."

"Then for goodness' sake take her somewhere quiet. It isn't my idea of a

holiday that you have to take a rest-cure after it."

I laughed. "I'll look after her. But when I'm with Jennie I like as many

people as possible to see me with Jennie."

"Then tell her that and shake her out of herself, you old humbug. Hanged

if I'd trust her with you if you were a few years younger."

"You'll have to trust her with somebody presently."

"Plenty of time for that yet," Alec grunted. "I've got my eye on it all

right.... Well, if you're going out I'm going to have forty of the best.

Watch me fade away----"

He proceeded to "fade away," while the shadows crept over the ascending

smoke from his pipe on the table.

On this occasion, however, I was content to forego my pride in being

seen with Jennie by my side. Just a quiet cliff-path not too far away

would do. There is much to be said for a quiet cliff-path when a young

woman feels the first sweet trouble at her heart.

I left the completely faded-away Alec as I heard her step at the door of

the house. She looked me straight in the eyes, as if it would be at my

peril did I notice anything the matter with her own pebble-grey ones. We

passed out, took the steep secluded lane towards the tea-cabin above St

Enogat plage, and then descended the hewn steps to the shore. It is a

tiny plage, remarkably steep, bordered with villas that resemble their

own bathing-tents, and with a path that winds up the rocks beyond. We

did not speak as we crossed the plage and began to climb.

Along that deeply indented coast you do a lot of walking for the

distance forrader you get, and also a good deal of up-and-down round

rocky gulfs with the bottle-green water heaving lazily below. But over

the seaward walls of villa and chateau peep valerian and fig, and the

path is coral-sprinkled with pimpernel and enamelled with convolvulus

and borage and the hosts of smaller flowers. Away ahead the demi-tower

of a sea-mark rose chalk-white against the deep blue, with the airy

point of St Lunaire beyond. We approached a small field of marguerites,

so eagerly open to the afternoon sun that at a short distance they were

not white at all, but pale honey-yellow with the offering of their

golden hearts. Poppies flamed among them, and the cigales crackled like

ceaselessly-running insect machinery. From the cliff's foot came the

lazy breaking of the waves. That, I thought, was quite a pleasant place.

Even Alec would have approved of it. We sat down between the staring

marguerites and the sea.

I do not wish to speak of Jennie in a fatherly or avuncular manner. One

had better not have been born than not be simple with the heart of a

young girl. At the faintest trace of a smile it will close against you

for ever, and wonder follows wonder so quickly over it that it will be a

long time before you get your second chance. So do not tell it that it

will think differently about things to-morrow. It is you who will think

differently to-morrow if you do. I say in all sincerity that, in that

long pause between my asking Jennie to come for a walk with me and her

acceptance, I had felt a suspense as real as any I ever felt. If that

pivotal moment on which the oncoming generation turns is not to be

gravely considered, I know of no other moment that need greatly trouble

us.

So I listened to the treble of the cigales and the soft deep bass of the

sea, and the silence continued between us. She picked and nibbled

florets of clover, her eyes far away. Her gaze wandered to butterflies,

to a lizard that disappeared with a glint of bronze into a cranny, to a

ladybird that alighted on her forearm.

Then the largest tear I have ever seen brimmed, trickled and dropped.

On leaving the house she had dared me to notice anything about her eyes;

but it is another matter when a tear so engulfs a ladybird that it is a

question whether the creature's pretty wing-cases will ever be the same

again. I had to speak after that.

"Cheer up, Jennie," I said softly.

She gulped. "Why were you so horrid and cross with him!"

"This morning in the shop?"

"Yes."

"Well ... I fancied he'd played me rather a mean trick."

"He didn't!" she flashed. "I'm sure he wouldn't do anything mean!"

"Then say a trick I didn't expect from him."

"I heard him tell the woman in the shop he was waiting for you, and--and

you walked straight past him without looking at him!"

"It might have been better if you'd done the same, Jennie."

"Did he come to fetch you out last night?"

"I took him out."

"Is he the--the Monsieur Arnaud the maid meant?"

"That's the name he goes by."

"Isn't it his name?"

"I suppose it is."

"Then why do you say it like that?... I want you to tell me about him,

Uncle George, please," she ordered me.

I too wanted to do that; but I found it anything but simple. I might

have told her that he was simply a vagrant, just a fellow who wandered

about sketching, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That would have been

perfectly true. But it would have been equally untrue. That was no

picture of Derry. She had seen a far, far truer picture of him when she

had turned her head towards him in the toyshop.

"Well, of course that _is_ why I asked you to come for a walk this

afternoon, Jennie," I said slowly. "As a matter of fact M'sieur Arnaud's

had a very curious experience that I can't very well tell you about. The

result of this is that he's--a rather odd sort of person to know. In

fact he's better not known. He wanted me to introduce him to your

mother, and I told him I'd rather not do so. Anyway he's going away

soon."

"That doesn't sound like a horrid sort of person," she commented. "Is

that why he came last night--to be introduced to mother?"

"No, he came for something quite different last night."

"What?"

Here again I might have answered with a certain appearance of truth that

he had come for money, though it was his own money; but that too would

be to misrepresent him. The cigales crackled loudly. I suppose the

ladybird was all right again, for it was nowhere to be seen. I mused,

and then turned to her.

"You said yesterday that you wished you were back in England, Jennie," I

said. "How would you like to come and stay with me in Surrey for a bit?"

"No thank you, Uncle George. Thank you very much."

"It's quite jolly there in its way, and I dare say I could get somebody

quite nice to be with you."

"I should like to some day, of course," she said, "but not just now, if

you don't think it horrid of me." And she added, "I love being here."

"Since yesterday?"

She did not reply.

Of course I had not expected for a moment that she would say Yes, even

had I made up my own mind to abandon Derry to his fate, which I had not

done. Yet a thought flashed into my mind. Were I to return to England,

taking Jennie with me, Derry would still not be unlooked-after. The

moment I left, Julia Oliphant, I felt certain, would fly to his side.

And if Jennie would not come with me, what would the impossible

combination be then?... My half-formed thought became a sudden picture,

a contrast, vivid and arresting, between two women--the one who

experimented with her dress and wanted to know what a cocktail tasted

like, the other this fragrant hawthorn-bough by my side. And between the

two rose his grave and sunbrowned face....

I stared at my picture, fascinated. The three of them together!

Exquisite and horrible complication! Suppose it should ever come to

that!

Then the picture vanished, and I saw the translucent untwinkling sea.

The roofs of distant St Lunaire made a pale cluster of brightness. The

wind rippled the edges of the satiny poppies.

All at once she clutched my sleeve with both her hands and buried her

face against it. It broke, the storm that had been pent up for nearly

twenty hours. As the marguerites exposed their yearning golden hearts,

so she kept nothing back, laid bare her own heart to the sun that was

its lord.

"Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I can't bear it; it's

too--too--oh, tell me what to do, Uncle George! I know he's my darling!

I don't want to live without him! If he goes away I don't know what will

happen! It's all since yesterday--I didn't sleep a wink--I went out into

the garden when they'd all gone and stood in the same place. Then I

heard father moving about and hid.... And then this morning when you

were horrid to him--no, you weren't horrid, dear Uncle George--I know

it's all a stupid mistake--I love him! I don't care if he doesn't speak

a word of English. I want him here now! I want to be with him! Please,

please introduce him to mother. She loves French people. And he did ask

you to, so he can't be horrid. I'm sure he didn't mean to play you a

mean trick. There must be a mistake. I'm sure he can explain if you'll

let him. Dear, dear Uncle George--do, do!"

I put my hand on her hat, which was as much of her as I could see.

"Don't look at me, please--I don't want to move for just a minute."

"As long as you like, my dear."

"Oh, I'll do anything if you only will! Where is he staying? I never saw

him in Dinard before. Where is he staying? Does he live here all the

time? I could see him if you came too, couldn't I? And I don't care what

sort of clothes he wears ... do, do, Uncle George!"

Then she straightened herself, and looked full at me through her flooded

eyes. She was suddenly imperious.

"Now tell me something else, please. When you went off with him last

night. Did he say anything about me?"

Perhaps I did not lie with sufficient promptitude. "About you? No, of

course not."

She looked accusingly at me; she caught her breath.

"Oh, how _can_ you say that! I don't believe it! He did!"

"But he couldn't even see you in the dark!"

"It wasn't dark--it wasn't a _bit_ dark--it was quite light enough to

see anybody--_you_ saw him----"

"Well, he's going away, and there's an end of it."

Like a rainbow was the light that woke in her lately showering eyes. Up

went the soft lip, out peeped the pearls. Back, back from their golden

hearts lay the petals of the marguerites.

"If," she said with extreme slowness, "if he told you he was going away,

that must have been last night."

I was dumb. I saw her effort to close her inner eyes on the light that

broke on them, lest a wonder on a wonder should prove more than she

could bear.

"That was _last night_!" the triumphant words rang out.

I suppose there is no such thing as one half of a miracle without the

other----

"That was _last night_, and there hadn't _been_ a this morning then, and

he hadn't seen me when I was buying my bathing-cap, and if he said he

was going away he's changed his mind and he isn't going away at all!

Neither of us is going away! Oh-h-h!" (That "Oh" echoes in my heart

still.) "He isn't even thinking of going now! Because we both know

now--we knew in the shop--and he loves me too!"

Just to see one another--just to speak to one another--that was all they

asked of me.