Six months after Vereker had left England George Corvick, who made his
living by his pen, contracted for a piece of work which imposed on him
an absence of some length and a journey of some difficulty, and his
undertaking of which was much of a surprise to me. His brother-in-law
had become editor of a great provincial paper, and the great provincial
paper, in a fine flight of fancy, had conceived the idea of sending a
“special commissioner” to India. Special commissioners had begun, in
the “metropolitan press,” to be the fashion, and the journal in question
felt that it had passed too long for a mere country cousin. Corvick had
no hand, I knew, for the big brush of the correspondent, but that was
his brother-in-law’s affair, and the fact that a particular task was not
in his line was apt to be with himself exactly a reason for accepting
it. He was prepared to out-Herod the metropolitan press; he took solemn
precautions against priggishness, he exquisitely outraged taste. Nobody
ever knew it--the taste was all his own. In addition to his expenses he
was to be conveniently paid, and I found myself able to help him,
for the usual fat book, to a plausible arrangement with the usual fat
publisher. I naturally inferred that his obvious desire to make a little
money was not unconnected with the prospect of a union with Gwendolen
Erme. I was aware that her mother’s opposition was largely addressed to
his want of means and of lucrative abilities, but it so happened that,
on my saying the last time I saw him something that bore on the question
of his separation from our young lady, he exclaimed with an emphasis
that startled me: “Ah, I’m not a bit engaged to her, you know!”
“Not overtly,” I answered, “because her mother doesn’t like you. But
I’ve always taken for granted a private understanding.”
“Well, there _was_ one. But there isn’t now.” That was all he said,
except something about Mrs. Erme’s having got on her feet again in the
most extraordinary way--a remark from which I gathered he wished me to
think he meant that private understandings were of little use when the
doctor didn’t share them. What I took the liberty of really thinking
was that the girl might in some way have estranged him. Well, if he had
taken the turn of jealousy for instance it could scarcely be jealousy
of me. In that case (besides the absurdity of it) he wouldn’t have gone
away to leave us together. For some time before his departure we had
indulged in no allusion to the buried treasure, and from his silence,
of which mine was the consequence, I had drawn a sharp conclusion. His
courage had dropped, his ardour had gone the way of mine--this inference
at least he left me to enjoy. More than that he couldn’t do; he couldn’t
face the triumph with which I might have greeted an explicit admission.
He needn’t have been afraid, poor dear, for I had by this time lost all
need to triumph. In fact I considered that I showed magnanimity in not
reproaching him with his collapse, for the sense of his having thrown up
the game made me feel more than ever how much I at last depended on him.
If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any
use if _he_ wasn’t. It wasn’t a bit true that I had ceased to care for
knowledge; little by little my curiosity had not only begun to ache
again, but had become the familiar torment of my consciousness. There
are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly
more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don’t know after
all why I should in this connection so much as mention them. For the
few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is
concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and
courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake
on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the
revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim
gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white
face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had
met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick’s absence that she
made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived
for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed upon her, and in her
presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of “Deep Down” again: it was
a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a
wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still more
remarkably pulled her.
Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I
repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to me
was: “He has got it, he has got it!”
She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean the
great thing. “Vereker’s idea?”
“His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay.”
She had the missive open there; it was emphatic, but it was brief.
“Eureka. Immense.” That was all--he had saved the money of the
signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. “He doesn’t say
what it is.”
“How could he--in a telegram? He’ll write it.”
“But how does he know?”
“Know it’s the real thing? Oh, I’m sure when you see it you do know.
_Vera incessu patuit dea!_”
“It’s you, Miss Erme, who are a dear for bringing me such news!”--I went
all lengths in my high spirits. “But fancy finding our goddess in the
temple of Vishnu! How strange of George to have been able to go into
the thing again in the midst of such different and such powerful
solicitations!”
“He hasn’t gone into it, I know; it’s the thing itself, let severely
alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress
out of the jungle. He didn’t take a book with him--on purpose; indeed
he wouldn’t have needed to--he knows every page, as I do, by heart.
They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn’t
thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right
combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That’s the way he knew
it would come and the real reason--you didn’t in the least understand,
but I suppose I may tell you now--why he went and why I consented to
his going. We knew the change would do it, the difference of thought, of
scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had perfectly,
we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in his mind, and in
the _secousse_ of a new and intense experience they just struck light.”
She positively struck light herself--she was literally, facially
luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she
continued: “He’ll come right home--this will bring him.”
“To see Vereker, you mean?”
“To see Vereker--and to see _me_. Think what he’ll have to tell me!”