‘Do you feel you can find out quite a lot about the people who
wrote those inscriptions? Do they get quite real to you in the
end?’
He said:
‘No, not like that. I don’t want them real like that. It is more
to me like fitting pieces into a puzzle—thousands of tiny pieces,
and a very big puzzle—and if they do fit, if even quite a small
piece of the puzzle gets done, you know it’s right. That is one
of the satisfactory things, it can’t be just better or worse,
it must be right or wrong. Do you see what I mean at all?’
His voice changed; he asked the last question almost shyly. I
think he did not expect people quite to understand.
I thought I did, and it interested me. This was a new world to
me too; a cold intellectual world that I did not know at all;
and I was in a mood to explore.
Afterwards we went out to tea in an A.B.C. near the Museum. At
tea he was different again, more like he had been on the picnic.
He was shyer and spoke more jerkily, and I felt much more that
he admired me. The A.B.C. was crowded and rather noisy, and the
marble top of the table was smudged with coffee that had been
spilt. It seemed to me very odd to be sitting there with Walter.
I seemed to be looking on from a long way off, and wondering
how I came to be there.
After tea we got on to a bus. I said I could go home alone, but
Walter would come with me. We did not talk very much on the bus.
It was beginning to rain, and we pulled up the mackintosh cover
from the seat in front.
He said good-bye to me on the steps of Campden Hill Square, and
I thanked him for ‘a very interesting afternoon.’
He waited on the step.
‘May I come again?’ he asked. ‘May I take you out again?’
He asked it in his funny, jerky way, as though it mattered to
him very much. I could not answer him at once. I felt somehow,
irrationally, that my answer was very important.