IV

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, before, as he had

himself observed, I liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my

new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not

only failed to find his general intention--I found myself missing the

subordinate intentions I had formerly found. 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 confess--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 incident of the time however was that I told George Corvick

all about the matter 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, unmistakably 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 appended. “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 related, no matter in what expansion, the history of

my little secret, and I shall never speak of the business 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 spoiled a part of my fun. 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 had not lost my power to

minister to his mirth. He laughed out at the 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 he was not 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 daresay 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 shifting 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 destiny was a thing too perfect in its

way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending upon 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 secret for enjoyment. I wondered as I walked away

where he had got _his_ tip.

V

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 they

would enjoy their fun too much to wish to share it with the crowd. They

appeared to have caught instinctively Vereker’s peculiar notion of

fun. 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 called it letters, he called it life--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 calling together one Sunday in August at 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 her with

the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I admitted that I felt I had

given thought enough to this exposure: hadn’t I even made up my mind

that it was hollow, wouldn’t stand the test? The importance they

attached to it was irritating--it rather envenomed my dissent.

That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that

I felt humiliated at seeing other persons derive a daily joy from an

experiment which 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 deep in. I doubt whether they would have got so wound up

if they had not been in love: poor Vereker’s secret gave them endless

occasion to put 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 immediately have

accepted it. The case there was altogether different--we had nothing

but the word of Mr. Snooks. I rejoined that I was stupefied to see him

attach such importance even to the word of Mr. Vereker. He inquired

thereupon whether I treated Mr. Vereker’s word as a lie. I wasn’t

perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound, to go as 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 personal confusion--for my 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

daresay it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss Erme’s

mamma. 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 upon his moves. He would take up a

chessman and hold it poised a while over one of the little squares,

and then he 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 sport and

as to the honour--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 an

hesitation: “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 had a suspicion that they had 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 not

encountered him again. I think at bottom I was 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 saw her with Vereker

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

liked the man still better than I had liked the books.