The first stages of our grievous task were accomplished. We had buried
Adrian in Highgate Cemetery with the yellow fog around us. His mother
had been put into a train that would carry her to the quiet country
cottage wherein she longed to be alone with her sorrow. Doria still lay
in the Valley of the Shadow unconscious, perhaps fortunately, of the
stealthy footsteps and muffled sounds that strike a note of agony
through a house of death. And it was many days before she awoke to
knowledge and despair. Barbara stayed with her.
We had found Adrian's will, leaving everything to Doria and appointing
Jaffery and myself joint executors and trustees for his wife and the
child that was to come, among his private papers in the Louis XV cabinet
in the drawing-room. We had consulted his bankers and put matters in a
solicitor's hands with a view to probate. Everything was in order. We
found his own personal bills and receipts filed, his old letters tied up
in bundles and labelled, his contracts, his publisher's returns, his
lease, his various certificates neatly docketed. It was the private desk
of a careful business man, rather than that of our old unmethodical
Adrian. There are few things more painful than to pry into the
intimacies of those we have loved; and Jaffery and I had to pry alone,
because Doria, who might have saved our obligatory search from
impertinence, lay, herself, on the Borderland.
All that we required for the simple settlement of his affairs had been
found in the cabinet. On the list of assets for probate we had placed
the manuscript of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The
Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing
that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered
the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it
locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his
unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women,
who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion,
hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed,
professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an
inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and
household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living,
the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand
it over to the publisher.
So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered
the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the
blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating
yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the
morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The
stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the
electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its
scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went
to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in
the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three
different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter
the quill had scrawled "God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass
ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an
eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to
hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its
heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed
from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.
"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed
look. "We'll have our work cut out."
"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as
you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."
Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited three loose, ragged
piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets
unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite
manuscript; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes,
fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible
memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.
"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah
steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude
drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking
over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.
"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his
beard.
"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great
relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were
turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained
Adrian's whimsy.
"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh
at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an
incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish
away, and we'll look at the second shelf."
The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were
more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a
couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent
scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen
stories.
"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery,
standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous
wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had
pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting
in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.
"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."
We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.
"It will take weeks to fix it up."
"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."
In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or
four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a
dozen headed "Chapter I."
"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.
I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I
examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a
coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.
"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"
He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in
brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.
"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.
"Thank God!" said I.
He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet
with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a
white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written
inscription:
"The Diamond Gate. A Novel--by Thomas Castleton."
"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two
we both stood stock-still.
The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily
flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's--Tom Castleton, the one genius
of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.
There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too
familiar--as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom
Castleton from Adrian.
Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.
There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond
Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian
had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man,
but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.
We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands
and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we
ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are
times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We
found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The
apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we
examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into
an awful certainty.
The great epoch-making novel did not exist.
It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no
possibility of existing.
"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in his
great, hoarse bass.
"God knows," said I.
But even as I spoke, I knew.
I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned
Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to
shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I
was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and
hugged me kindly.
"Go and get warm," said he.
"But this?" I pointed to the litter.
"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."
He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I
crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet
and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that
morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just
as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose
some story in mitigation of the tragedy.
Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down
on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the
shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse
and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the
yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of
turning on the lights.
"What have you done?" I asked.
"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll bring a
portmanteau and take it away."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"Leave that to me," said he.
What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was very
glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with the
reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as
he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself
like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he was a professional
demigod. He reassured me further.
"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."
"All right," said I.
And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he
broke the silence.
"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in God's
name?"
And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the cold grip
of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was none too
consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks,
which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in
terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his
offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he
had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture.
Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not. Least of
all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the revelation of
his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in
perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian. With all his faults,
his poses, his superficialities, his secrecies, his egotisms, I never
dreamed of him as aught but a loyal and honourable gentleman. When I
think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul.
What does one man know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was
right: "We mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable
faith in Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast
with conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
them part of our very selves.
Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place
made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral
sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the
manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his hands. Undoubtedly he was to
arrange for its publication. Castleton's appointment to the
professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I well remember,
necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he
sailed. Why did not Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the
manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a
question of despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were
not parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From
that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years,
in his easy way, he struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for
Doria, he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent
to Wittekind, the publisher of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till
later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript?
That was what Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with
morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence--that is the
only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
explain the sustained act of folly.
And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
himself to do heretofore, he had done.
As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
capacity.
When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
the condemned cell.
As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a
novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
like, but the essential quality of the artist.
And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
wondrous book. The pity of it!
How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No
wonder he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills for
whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for
the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate God was
merciful at last. He killed him.
Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire--the ship-logs that Adrian
loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and what-not, gave green and
crimson and lavender flames.
"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he said. "A
war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of
hell. But this sample I haven't struck before and it's the worst of the
lot. My God! and only the day before yesterday I took him to be
married."
"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked hairs
out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy of China,
which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you had no idea of
time or space."
He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.
"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the child
stillborn--"
I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me;
that of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his
eyes: "They'll both be born together."
I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I said. "Both
stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter, the more
shudderingly awful it is."
Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.
"And she at the point of death--to complete the tragedy," he said below
his breath.
Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.
"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried with a
startling quaver in his deep voice.
"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the best
thing you can wish for her?"
"Why not?"
"Isn't it obvious? She recovers--she will, most probably, recover;
Jephson said so this morning--she comes back to life to find what? The
shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's
better that she should die now."
Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his
eyes blazed.
"What do you mean--shattering of idols?"
"She is bound to learn the truth."
He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp,
so that I winced with pain.
"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim
suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told
her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of
passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched
fists,--the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and
ceiling of the fog-darkened room--I shrank into my chair, for he seemed
not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same
deep, shaken voice.
"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand."
His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."
"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."
"You swear you've seen it?"
"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.
He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair,
and walked for a little about the room.
"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself. It's a
matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you understand clearly
what I mean?"
"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself
to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it can't last
forever."
Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the steel of
his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's enemy.
"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
something out of nothing."
"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've seen it,
and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it
matter to you what becomes of it?"
"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole
matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and
trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you?"
"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
choose. But you've seen the outside of it."
He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled a
memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy.
Then he turned on me.
"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul
of what you have seen this day?"
I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for? But
you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must know."
He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile:
"You and Barbara are one," said he.
Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from
his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheet of the
blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God: A Novel: By
Adrian Boldero."
"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the fire.