WHEN I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he made me
feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an insult. He had
instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen’s ardent response was in itself a
pledge of discretion. The question would now absorb them and would offer
them a pastime too precious to be shared with the crowd. They appeared
to have caught instinctively at Vereker’s high idea of enjoyment. Their
intellectual pride, however, was not such as to make them indifferent to
any further light I might throw on the affair they had in hand. They
were indeed of the “artistic temperament,” and I was freshly struck with
my colleague’s power to excite himself over a question of art. He’d call
it letters, he’d call it life, but it was all one thing. In what he said
I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally for Gwendolen, to whom,
as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently better to allow her a little
leisure, he made a point of introducing me. I remember our going
together one Sunday in August to a huddled house in Chelsea, and my
renewed envy of Corvick’s possession of a friend who had some light to
mingle with his own. He could say things to her that I could never say
to him. She had indeed no sense of humour and, with her pretty way of
holding her head on one side, was one of those persons whom you want, as
the phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian by themselves.
She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had remarkably
little English for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me that I had
chilled her by my apparent indisposition to oblige them with the detail
of what Vereker had said to me. I allowed that I felt I had given
thought enough to that indication: hadn’t I even made up my mind that it
was vain and would lead nowhere? The importance they attached to it was
irritating and quite envenomed my doubts.
That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that I
felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an experiment
that had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold while, by the
evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase for which I myself
had sounded the horn. They did as I had done, only more deliberately and
sociably—they went over their author from the beginning. There was no
hurry, Corvick said the future was before them and the fascination could
only grow; they would take him page by page, as they would take one of
the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way
in. They would scarce have got so wound up, I think, if they hadn’t been
in love: poor Vereker’s inner meaning gave them endless occasion to put
and to keep their young heads together. None the less it represented the
kind of problem for which Corvick had a special aptitude, drew out the
particular pointed patience of which, had he lived, he would have given
more striking and, it is to be hoped, more fruitful examples. He at
least was, in Vereker’s words, a little demon of subtlety. We had begun
by disputing, but I soon saw that without my stirring a finger his
infatuation would have its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents
as I had done—he would clap his hands over new lights and see them blown
out by the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told him, but
the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character
of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had Shakespeare’s own
word for his being cryptic he would at once have accepted it. The case
there was altogether different—we had nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks.
I returned that I was stupefied to see him attach such importance even to
the word of Mr. Vereker. He wanted thereupon to know if I treated Mr.
Vereker’s word as a lie. I wasn’t perhaps prepared, in my unhappy
rebound, to go so far as that, but I insisted that till the contrary was
proved I should view it as too fond an imagination. I didn’t, I confess,
say—I didn’t at that time quite know—all I felt. Deep down, as Miss Erme
would have said, I was uneasy, I was expectant. At the core of my
disconcerted state—for my wonted curiosity lived in its ashes—was the
sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at last probably come out
somewhere. He made, in defence of his credulity, a great point of the
fact that from of old, in his study of this genius, he had caught whiffs
and hints of he didn’t know what, faint wandering notes of a hidden
music. That was just the rarity, that was the charm: it fitted so
perfectly into what I reported.
If I returned on several occasions to the little house in Chelsea I dare
say it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss Erme’s ailing
parent. The hours spent there by Corvick were present to my fancy as
those of a chessplayer bent with a silent scowl, all the lamplit winter,
over his board and his moves. As my imagination filled it out the
picture held me fast. On the other side of the table was a ghostlier
form, the faint figure of an antagonist good-humouredly but a little
wearily secure—an antagonist who leaned back in his chair with his hands
in his pockets and a smile on his fine clear face. Close to Corvick,
behind him, was a girl who had begun to strike me as pale and wasted and
even, on more familiar view, as rather handsome, and who rested on his
shoulder and hung on his moves. He would take up a chessman and hold it
poised a while over one of the little squares, and then would put it back
in its place with a long sigh of disappointment. The young lady, at
this, would slightly but uneasily shift her position and look across,
very hard, very long, very strangely, at their dim participant. I had
asked them at an early stage of the business if it mightn’t contribute to
their success to have some closer communication with him. The special
circumstances would surely be held to have given me a right to introduce
them. Corvick immediately replied that he had no wish to approach the
altar before he had prepared the sacrifice. He quite agreed with our
friend both as to the delight and as to the honour of the chase—he would
bring down the animal with his own rifle. When I asked him if Miss Erme
were as keen a shot he said after thinking: “No, I’m ashamed to say she
wants to set a trap. She’d give anything to see him; she says she
requires another tip. She’s really quite morbid about it. But she must
play fair—she _shan’t_ see him!” he emphatically added. I wondered if
they hadn’t even quarrelled a little on the subject—a suspicion not
corrected by the way he more than once exclaimed to me: “She’s quite
incredibly literary, you know—quite fantastically!” I remember his
saying of her that she felt in italics and thought in capitals. “Oh when
I’ve run him to earth,” he also said, “then, you know, I shall knock at
his door. Rather—I beg you to believe. I’ll have it from his own lips:
‘Right you are, my boy; you’ve done it this time!’ He shall crown me
victor—with the critical laurel.”
Meanwhile he really avoided the chances London life might have given him
of meeting the distinguished novelist; a danger, however, that
disappeared with Vereker’s leaving England for an indefinite absence, as
the newspapers announced—going to the south for motives connected with
the health of his wife, which had long kept her in retirement. A
year—more than a year—had elapsed since the incident at Bridges, but I
had had no further sight of him. I think I was at bottom rather
ashamed—I hated to remind him that, though I had irremediably missed his
point, a reputation for acuteness was rapidly overtaking me. This
scruple led me a dance; kept me out of Lady Jane’s house, made me even
decline, when in spite of my bad manners she was a second time so good as
to make me a sign, an invitation to her beautiful seat. I once became
aware of her under Vereker’s escort at a concert, and was sure I was seen
by them, but I slipped out without being caught. I felt, as on that
occasion I splashed along in the rain, that I couldn’t have done anything
else; and yet I remember saying to myself that it was hard, was even
cruel. Not only had I lost the books, but I had lost the man himself:
they and their author had been alike spoiled for me. I knew too which
was the loss I most regretted. I had taken to the man still more than I
had ever taken to the books.