RETURNING to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out each in
its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a maddening month,
in the course of which several things took place. One of these, the
last, I may as well immediately mention, was that I acted on Vereker’s
advice: I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I could really make nothing
of the business; it proved a dead loss. After all I had always, as he
had himself noted, liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my
new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only
failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the
subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn’t even
remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my
search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the
more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to
follow up the author’s hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to
make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I _had_ no
knowledge—nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it—they
only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my
confusion—perversely, I allow—by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of
me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a
monstrous pose.
The great point of it all is, however, that I told George Corvick what
had befallen me and that my information had an immense effect upon him.
He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had Mrs. Erme, and there
was as yet, I could see, no question of his nuptials. He was immensely
stirred up by the anecdote I had brought from Bridges; it fell in so
completely with the sense he had had from the first that there was more
in Vereker than met the eye. When I remarked that the eye seemed what
the printed page had been expressly invented to meet he immediately
accused me of being spiteful because I had been foiled. Our commerce had
always that pleasant latitude. The thing Vereker had mentioned to me was
exactly the thing he, Corvick, had wanted me to speak of in my review.
On my suggesting at last that with the assistance I had now given him he
would doubtless be prepared to speak of it himself he admitted freely
that before doing this there was more he must understand. What he would
have said, had he reviewed the new book, was that there was evidently in
the writer’s inmost art something to _be_ understood. I hadn’t so much
as hinted at that: no wonder the writer hadn’t been flattered! I asked
Corvick what he really considered he meant by his own supersubtlety, and,
unmistakeably kindled, he replied: “It isn’t for the vulgar—it isn’t for
the vulgar!” He had hold of the tail of something; he would pull hard,
pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker’s strange confidence and,
pronouncing me the luckiest of mortals, mentioned half a dozen questions
he wished to goodness I had had the gumption to put. Yet on the other
hand he didn’t want to be told too much—it would spoil the fun of seeing
what would come. The failure of _my_ fun was at the moment of our
meeting not complete, but I saw it ahead, and Corvick saw that I saw it.
I, on my side, saw likewise that one of the first things he would do
would be to rush off with my story to Gwendolen.
On the very day after my talk with him I was surprised by the receipt of
a note from Hugh Vereker, to whom our encounter at Bridges had been
recalled, as he mentioned, by his falling, in a magazine, on some article
to which my signature was attached. “I read it with great pleasure,” he
wrote, “and remembered under its influence our lively conversation by
your bedroom fire. The consequence of this has been that I begin to
measure the temerity of my having saddled you with a knowledge that you
may find something of a burden. Now that the fit’s over I can’t imagine
how I came to be moved so much beyond my wont. I had never before
mentioned, no matter in what state of expansion, the fact of my little
secret, and I shall never speak of that mystery again. I was
accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever entered into
my game to be, that I find this game—I mean the pleasure of playing
it—suffers considerably. In short, if you can understand it, I’ve rather
spoiled my sport. I really don’t want to give anybody what I believe you
clever young men call the tip. That’s of course a selfish solicitude,
and I name it to you for what it may be worth to you. If you’re disposed
to humour me don’t repeat my revelation. Think me demented—it’s your
right; but don’t tell anybody why.”
The sequel to this communication was that as early on the morrow as I
dared I drove straight to Mr. Vereker’s door. He occupied in those years
one of the honest old houses in Kensington Square. He received me
immediately, and as soon as I came in I saw I hadn’t lost my power to
minister to his mirth. He laughed out at sight of my face, which
doubtless expressed my perturbation. I had been indiscreet—my
compunction was great. “I _have_ told somebody,” I panted, “and I’m sure
that person will by this time have told somebody else! It’s a woman,
into the bargain.”
“The person you’ve told?”
“No, the other person. I’m quite sure he must have told her.”
“For all the good it will do her—or do _me_! A woman will never find
out.”
“No, but she’ll talk all over the place: she’ll do just what you don’t
want.”
Vereker thought a moment, but wasn’t so disconcerted as I had feared: he
felt that if the harm was done it only served him right. “It doesn’t
matter—don’t worry.”
“I’ll do my best, I promise you, that your talk with me shall go no
further.”
“Very good; do what you can.”
“In the meantime,” I pursued, “George Corvick’s possession of the tip
may, on his part, really lead to something.”
“That will be a brave day.”
I told him about Corvick’s cleverness, his admiration, the intensity of
his interest in my anecdote; and without making too much of the
divergence of our respective estimates mentioned that my friend was
already of opinion that he saw much further into a certain affair than
most people. He was quite as fired as I had been at Bridges. He was
moreover in love with the young lady: perhaps the two together would
puzzle something out.
Vereker seemed struck with this. “Do you mean they’re to be married?”
“I dare say that’s what it will come to.”
“That may help them,” he conceded, “but we must give them time!”
I spoke of my own renewed assault and confessed my difficulties;
whereupon he repeated his former advice: “Give it up, give it up!” He
evidently didn’t think me intellectually equipped for the adventure. I
stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured, but I couldn’t help
pronouncing him a man of unstable moods. He had been free with me in a
mood, he had repented in a mood, and now in a mood he had turned
indifferent. This general levity helped me to believe that, so far as
the subject of the tip went, there wasn’t much in it. I contrived
however to make him answer a few more questions about it, though he did
so with visible impatience. For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were
all so blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in
the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He
highly approved of this image when I used it, and he used another
himself. “It’s the very string,” he said, “that my pearls are strung
on!” The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn’t want to
give us a grain of succour—our density was a thing too perfect in its way
to touch. He had formed the habit of depending on it, and if the spell
was to break it must break by some force of its own. He comes back to me
from that last occasion—for I was never to speak to him again—as a man
with some safe preserve for sport. I wondered as I walked away where he
had got _his_ tip.