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The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions · English · Gutenberg #34703 · 801,548 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Tower of Oblivion

Author: Oliver Onions


        
Release date: December 19, 2010 [eBook #34703]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOWER OF OBLIVION ***




Produced by David Clarke, Pat McCoy and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)









      THE TOWER OF OBLIVION



      THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO . DALLAS
      ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO


      MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
     LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
            MELBOURNE

    THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
             TORONTO




      The Tower of Oblivion

              BY

         OLIVER ONIONS


          AUTHOR OF
     "A CASE IN CAMERA," ETC.

          New York
     THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
            1921

     _All rights reserved_


  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA


      COPYRIGHT, 1921,
            BY
       OLIVER ONIONS


  Set up and printed. Published November, 1921.


        Press of
  J. J. Little & Ives Company
      New York, U. S. A.




    To

    NIGEL PLAYFAIR
    and the Ladies and Gentlemen of
    "THE BEGGAR'S OPERA COMPANY"
    (Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, June 5th, 1920)

    who were so constantly his
    "pleasure and soft repose"
    while the following pages were
    writing, this book is dedicated

    by

    their friend and well-wisher

    THE AUTHOR

    Kensington 1921




Contents


England
                                  Page
  THE SIDE-SLIP                     1
  THE STERN CHASE                  57
  THE STRAPHANGER                  91
  THE DOUBLE CROSS                129
  THE PIVOT                       181

FRANCE

  THE LONG SPLICE                 207
  THE EVEN KEEL                   261
  THE CUT-OUT                     327
  THE DESERT ISLAND               371
  THE HOME STRETCH                407




ENGLAND




PART I

THE SIDESTEP




THE TOWER OF OBLIVION


I

I think it is Edgar Allan Poe who says that while a plain thing may on
occasion be told with a certain amount of elaboration of style, one that
is unusual in its very nature is best related in the simplest terms
possible. I shall adopt the second of these methods in telling this
story of my friend, Derwent Rose. And I will begin straight away with
that afternoon of the spring of last year when, with my own eyes, I
first saw, or fancied I saw, the beginning of the change in him.

The Lyonnesse Club meets in an electric-lighted basement-suite a little
way off the Strand, and as I descended the stairs I saw him in the
narrow passage. He was standing almost immediately under an incandescent
lamp that projected on its curved petiole from the wall. The light shone
brilliantly on his hair, where hardly a hint of grey or trace of
thinness yet showed, and his handsome brow and straight nose were in
full illumination and the rest of his face in sharp shadow. He wore a
dark blue suit with an exquisitely pinned soft white silk collar, to
which, as I watched, his fingers moved once; and he was examining with
deep attention a print that hung on the buff-washed wall.

I spoke behind him. "Hello, Derry! One doesn't often see your face
here."

Quietly as I spoke, he started. Ordinarily he had very straight and
steady grey-blue eyes, alert and receptive, but for some seconds they
looked from me to the print and from the print to me, irresolutely and
with equally divided attention. One would almost have thought that he
had heard his name called from a great distance. Then his eyes settled
finally on the print, and he repeated my last words over his shoulder.

"My face? Here?... No."

"What's the picture? Anything special?"

Still without moving his eyes from it he replied, "The picture? You
ought to know more about it than I--it's your Club, not mine----"

And he continued his absorbed scrutiny.

Now I had passed that picture scores of times before and had never found
it worth a glance. It was a common collotype reproduction of a stodgy
night-effect, a full moon in a black-leaded sky with reflections in
water to match--price perhaps five shillings. Then suddenly, looking
over his shoulder, I realised where his interest in it lay. He was not
looking at the picture at all. In the polished glass, that made an
excellent mirror in that concentrated light, I had seen his eyes
earnestly fixed on his own eyes, his cheeks, his hair, his chin....

Well, Derwent Rose had better reason than most men for looking at
himself in a picture-glass if he chose. Indeed it had already struck me
that that afternoon he looked even more than ordinarily fresh and
handsome. Let me, before we go any further, describe his personal
appearance to you.

He had, as I knew, passed his forty-fifth birthday in the preceding
January; but he would have been taken anywhere for at least ten
years younger. You will believe this when I tell you that at the
age of thirty-nine, that is to say in the year 1914, he had walked
into a recruiting-office, had given his age as twenty-eight,
received the compliments of the R.A.M.C. major who had examined him,
had joined an infantry battalion as a private, risen to the rank of
company-sergeant-major, and had hardly looked a day older when he had
come out again, with a herring-bone of chevrons on his cuff and a
captain's stars on his shoulder--not so much as scratched. He was just
over six feet high, with the shoulders of a paviour and the heart and
lung capacity of a diver. Had you not been told that he wrote novels
you would have thought that he ran a ranch. His frame was a perfectly
balanced combination of springiness and dead-lift power of muscle; and
to see those grey-blue eyes that looked into yours out of unwrinkled
lids was to wonder what secret he possessed that the cares and rubs and
disillusions of life should so have passed him by.

Yet he had had his share of these, and more. His looks might be smooth,
but wrinkles enough lay behind his writing. From those boyish eyes that
reminded you of a handler of boats or a breaker of horses there still
peeped out from time to time the qualities of his earlier, uneasy
books--the gay and mortal and inhuman irony of _The Vicarage of Bray_,
the vehement, unchecked passion of _An Ape in Hell_. If to the ordinary
bookstall-gazer these works were unknown--well, that was part of the
task that Derwent Rose had set himself. It is part of the task any
writer sets himself who refuses all standards but his own, and works on
the assumption that he is going to live for ever. Only his last
published book, _The Hands of Esau_, showed a fundamental urbanity, a
mellower restraint, and perhaps these were the securer the more hardly
they had been come by. I for one expected that his next book would rise
like a star above the vapours where we others let off our little
six-shilling crackers ... but his body seemed a mere flouting of the
years.

And here he stood under the corolla of an incandescent lamp, looking at
himself for wrinkles!

Then in the glass he caught my eye, and flushed a little to have been
caught attitudinising. He gave a covert glance round to see whether
anybody else had observed him. A few yards away, in the doorway, Madge
Aird was smilingly receiving the Club's guests, but for the moment Madge
was looking the other way. Then he spoke in a muffled voice.

"Well? Notice anything? How do I look? How do I strike you? No, I don't
want a compliment. I'm asking you a question. How do I look? I've a
special reason for wanting to know."

I laughed a little, not without envy.

"How do you look!" I said. "Another ten years will be time enough for
you to begin to worry about your looks, Derry. I know your age, of
course, but for all practical purposes you may consider yourself
thirty-five, my young friend."

Sadly, sadly now I remember the eagerness of his turn.

"How much?" he demanded.

"I said thirty-five or thereabouts, you Darling of the Gods. I'm fifty,
but you make me look sixty, and when you're a hundred your picture will
be in the papers with the O.M. round your neck. You'll probably have
picked up the Nobel Prize too, and a few other trifles on the way.
You've got a physique to match your brain, lucky fellow that you are,
and nothing but accident can stop you. Don't go out and get run over,
that's all. Well, are you coming in?"

But he hung back. And yet it was largely his own fault if in such places
as this Club he felt like a fish out of water. It might even have been
called a perverse and not very amiable vanity in him, and I had hoped he
had got over this shyness, arrogance, or both. We have to live in a
world, even if we are as gifted mentally and physically as was Derwent
Rose. But it was no good pressing him. I remembered him of old.

"Then if you're not coming in?" I ventured to hint; and again his hand
went to the soft collar.

"What have I come for, you mean? I want you to find out for me if
there's a Mrs Bassett here."

"I don't think I know her."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett. Ask somebody, will you?"

"What's she like to look at?"

"Can't say. Haven't seen her for years."

"Wait a bit. Is it somebody called Daphne Bassett?"

"Yes, yes--Daphne," he said quickly.

"Who published what's called a 'first novel' some little time ago?"

Instantly I saw that I had said something he didn't like. The blood
stirred in his cheeks. He spoke roughly, impolitely. And even up to
this point his manner had been curt enough.

"Why do you say it like that?" he demanded. "'First' novel, with a
sneer? She wrote a novel, if that's what you mean."

Yet, though he began by glaring at me, he ended by looking uneasily
away. You too may have wondered why publishers so eagerly insist that
some novel or other is a really-and-truly 'first' one. Your bootmaker
doesn't boast that the pair of boots he sells you is his 'first' pair,
and you wouldn't eat your cook's 'first' dinner if you could help it.
You may take it from me that in the ordinary course of things Derwent
Rose would have been far more likely to applaud the novel that ended an
ignominious career than the one that began it. Yet here he was,
apparently wishing to outface me about something or other, yet at the
same time unable to look me in the eye.

"There's got to be a first before there can be a second, hasn't there?"
he growled. "Jessica had to have a First Prayer, didn't she? And is
there such a devil of a lot of difference between one novel and another
when you come to think of it--yours or mine or anybody else's?"

It was at this point that I began to watch him attentively.

"Go on, Derry," I said.

"There isn't; you know there isn't; and I'm getting sick of this
superior attitude. Why must everybody do the Big Bow Wow all the time?
Can't somebody write something just for amuse--I mean must they always
be banging the George Coverham Big Drum? As long as it doesn't make any
pretence.... Have you read it?" he demanded suddenly.

"No."

"Then you don't know anything about it."

It was here that I became conscious of what I have called the Change.
Whatever had happened to put him out, this was not the Derry Rose I had
lately seen. Surely my remark about that "first" novel had been innocent
enough; but he had replied surlily, unamiably, unfamiliarly....
"Unfamiliar?" No, that is not the word. I should rather say remotely
familiar, recollected, brought forward again out of some time that was
past. Just as in his resplendent physical appearance he seemed to be
"too" well, if such a thing can be, so in his manner he seemed to be
too ... something; I gave it up. I only knew that the author of _The
Hands of Esau_ would not have spoken thus.

"Well, will you find out for me if she's here?" he said in a softer one.

I fancy that already he was sorry he had not spoken more quietly.

"Why not come in and see for yourself?"

"Oh--you know how I hate this sort of thing."

"Not long ago you spoke of joining the Lyonnesse."

"I know. I thought I would. But I've decided it's out of my line."

"Then at least come and be introduced to Mrs Aird. She'll know whether
Mrs Bassett's here or not."

The blue-grey eyes gave mine a quick and critical glance.

"Is that the Mrs Aird who writes those bright books about young women
and their new clothes and how right their instincts are if you only give
them plenty of pocket-money and leave 'em alone?"

I smiled. Perhaps it was a little like Madge. But I noticed his sharp
distinction between the novels of one woman and the "first" novel of
another. It began to look as if behind Mrs Hugo Bassett the novelist lay
Daphne Bassett the woman.

"Well," I sighed, "I'm to ask for Mrs Hugo Bassett. What's the title of
her book?"

"_The Parthian Arrow._"

"Mrs Hugo Bassett, author of _The Parthian Arrow_. Very well----"

I approached Madge, but before I could ask my question she had drawn me
inside the doorway.

"_Who_ is he?" she whispered ardently in my ear. Her plump ringed hand
clutched my sleeve, and there was the liveliest curiosity in the dark
eyes that looked up at me from under her nodding hat with black
_pleureuse_ feathers.

"Is there a Mrs Bassett here--Daphne Bassett?"

"No. But----"

"Has she been, and is she likely to come?"

"She hasn't been, and nobody'll come now. But George----"

"I'll see you presently; just let me get rid of my message," I said; and
I returned to Rose.

A glance at my face was enough for him. He may have muttered a
"Thank-you," but I didn't hear it; he had spun on his heel and in a
moment was half-way to the cloakroom. I hope he got his own hat, for he
was out again almost instantly. I had a glimpse of his magnificent back
as he hurried along the passage, then a flying heel at the turn of the
stairs and he was gone. Turning, I saw that Madge had watched his
departure with me. She almost ran to me.

"Quickly, George--who, _who_ is your Beautiful Bear, and why have you
been keeping a superb creature like that from me?" she demanded. "I knew
he was waiting for a woman. Every skirt that came in----" at the swing
of her head the feathers tossed like an inky weeping-elm in a gale.
"But," she added, "I confess I never saw a man admire himself _quite_ so
openly before."

My friend has scored off me often enough in the past. This time I scored
off her.

"Derwent Rose always was good-looking," I remarked.

She fell a step back.

"George!--_Derwent Rose!_ You don't mean to say that _that_ was Derwent
Rose?"

"I always thought you knew everybody in London."

"_That_ was Derwent Rose!" Then she added, with inexpressible conviction
and satisfaction, "_Ah!_"

I am always a little uneasy when Madge Aird says "Ah!" in that tone. She
was Madge Ruthven before she married Alec Aird, and I have often
wondered whether in the past any of her Scottish forbears had any
traffic with France. I am not now thinking of the air with which she
always wore her clothes, from whatever it was on her head to the always
irresistible shoes on her tiny feet. I mean the workings of her mind.
There is none of our northern softness and hesitation and mystery about
these. All she thinks and says has a logical completeness and finish
that somehow always seems just a little too good to be true. Few things
in this world are so neatly right as that. But wrong though her
conclusions may be, they are always dazzlingly effective, and you have
to swallow them or reject them whole.

"_Ah!_" she murmured again, with the intensest self-approval; and I
wondered what unreliable imperfection she was meditating now. You never
know with her. She sees so many people, goes to so many places, hears so
much. Often the mere mention of a name is enough to touch off that
instantaneous fuse of her memory that leads straight into the heart of
heaven knows what family history or hidden scandal.

"And what do you mean by 'Ah'?" I asked her.

"The gorgeous creature! I never dreamed--but this makes the situation
perfectly fascinating!"

"What situation?"

"Why, of him and Daphne Bassett. But poor old George, I keep forgetting
that you're the noblest Roman of them all and don't listen to our horrid
petty little scandal. And evidently you haven't read _The Parthian
Arrow_."

"I haven't. Tell me what it's about."

"But you've read _An Ape in Hell_?"

"Of course. Tell me what the other's about."

But at that moment she was claimed. Her next words came over her
shoulder as, with a wisk of her ribboned ankles and another gale in the
shake of feathers, she was off.

"Not now--another time. I shall be in fairly early this evening if
you're staying in town. It's quite an interesting situation. And if
you'll bring your Beautiful Bear to see me some time, I'll----"

I understood her to mean that in that case she would bring Mrs Hugo
Bassett also.


II

I live out in Surrey, my car happened to be in dock, and I had my train
to think of. As I walked slowly up the short street to the Strand I
puzzled over Madge's words. Evidently she found some connection between
that "first" novel, _The Parthian Arrow_, and Rose's own book, _An Ape
in Hell_. Well, my ignorance could soon be remedied. There was a
bookshop just round the corner, and I could be the possessor of a copy
of Mrs Bassett's book in five minutes.

But suddenly, on the point of hailing a taxi, I dropped the point of my
stick again. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the feeling that there
was some invitation or appointment I had overlooked. I knew that it
could be of no great importance, and, looking back on these events
since, I have thought that it was perhaps a mere disinclination to go
down to Surrey that night that gave me pause. I may say that I am
unmarried, and have got my housekeeper fairly well trained to my ways.

So, standing on the kerb, I brought a number of papers from my pocket
and began to turn them over in search of the forgotten appointment.

I found it. It was a lecture by a Fellow of a Learned Society, and it
was to take place at the rather unusual hour of six o'clock. No doubt
this was in order that the learned speaker might get his paper over by
half-past seven, leaving his learned listeners free to dine. A taxi
slowed down in front of me.

"Society of Arts," I said to the driver.

A minute later I was on my way to see Derwent Rose for the second time
that afternoon.

I will tell you in a moment the subject of that lecture I had so
suddenly decided to attend. First, a word as to my attitude at that time
towards new discoveries and new thought in general. I was enormously,
wistfully interested in them. Instinctively, at that time, I stretched
out my hands to them. I had lived long enough in the world to realise
that such events as Trafalgar and the French Revolution were mere
events of yesterday, and the possibilities of an equally near to-morrow
haunted me. I shrank from the thought that while the dead stones of the
Law Courts and Australia House would still be there after I had gone, I
should not at least be able to make a guess at the stream of Life,
uncradled yet, that would beat and press and flow along those channels
in so little a time, the new blood of London's old unchanging veins. One
begins to think of these things when one is fifty.

So, at a minute or so to six, my taxi set me down in the Adelphi, when I
might have been a happier man had it taken me straight to Waterloo.

And now for what that lecture was all about.

My meaning will perhaps be clearer if I give an extract from a leading
article in _The Times_ of slightly later date. On a subject of this kind
I would rather use an expert's words than risk the inaccuracies that
might creep into my own.

     "Human beings," the article begins, "differ not only in the
     knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence
     or natural ability. It has long been accepted that the former
     property may continue to increase until the natural faculties
     begin to abate, but that the latter has a maximum for each
     individual, attained early in life.... Intelligence, as opposed
     to knowledge, is fully developed before the age of schooling is
     over. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which,
     even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been
     reached. Obviously the standard varies in different individuals;
     the degree of intelligence passed through by the more fortunate
     at the age of ten may be the final attainment of others, and all
     intermediate stages occur.... Mr H. H. Goddard, an American
     psychologist of international repute, classifies the intelligence
     of his countrymen into seven grades, but believes that in
     exceptional cases, amounting to four and a half per cent. of the
     population, a superlative standard is reached at the age of
     nineteen. On the other hand, seventy per cent. of the citizens of
     the United States have to carry on their lives with the
     intelligence of children of fourteen, and ten per cent. with that
     of children of ten."

It was to hear these conclusions of Mr Goddard's expounded by a
fellow-savant that I had come that afternoon to the Society of Arts.

To tell the truth, a certain whimsical humour in the idea had attracted
me. When a man's books sell as well as mine do, and he is as
flatteringly thought of as I am, it is rather tickling to be told that
he is really an infant of sixteen or seventeen, telling fairy-stories to
a gigantic public nursery the average age of which is perhaps twelve.
Sir George Coverham, Knight, merely the top boy of a kindergarten of
adults!... It pleased me, and I rather hoped the lecturer would approach
his subject from that humorous angle.

The lights were being turned down as I entered the lecture chamber.
Quietly, not to make a disturbance, I tiptoed to the nearest seat. Then,
as with a preliminary hiss or two the shaft of light from the lantern
pierced the gloom, I was able dimly to distinguish that the subject of
the lecture had not attracted more than a couple of dozen people. These
barely filled the first two rows. The rest of the theatre appeared to be
empty. Of the speaker himself nothing could be seen but a glimpse of
white beard as he moved slightly at the reading-lamp.

He read from a typescript in a flat, monotonous voice, with once in a
while a halting explanatory remark that trailed, paused, and then
stopped altogether. I watched the acute angles his wand made with its
own shadow on the diagrams projected by the lantern.

Then I thought I heard an impatient movement and muttering somewhere
behind me. The speaker, after another long and painful pause, had just
said, "I hope I've made that clear, gentlemen"; and I was almost certain
that the muffled growl had taken the shape of the words "You don't know
a damned thing about it!"

Then, a few minutes later, the sound was repeated, this time accompanied
by an unmistakable groan.

"Sssh!" said somebody sharply from the front or second row.

The lecture dragged on.

But about the next and final outbreak there was no doubt whatever.
Neither was there about the sharp suffering of whoever was the cause of
it. Somebody a couple of rows behind me must be ill, I thought, and
evidently others thought so too, for the lecturer came definitely to a
stop, and my eyes, now accustomed to the gloom, saw the turning of
faces.

"Is anybody----?" a secretary or chairman called out, and I expected the
light to go up at any moment.

In the end, however, the lecture was finished without further incident.
The lights were switched on, the dingy classic painted panels on the
walls could be seen, and instantly every face, my own included, was
turned towards the back of a man who was seen to be hurriedly making his
way to the door.

I cannot tell you what happened at the Society of Arts after that. I was
already on my feet, hurrying after that back. It was the same back I had
seen, in the same haste, leaving the Lyonnesse Club less than two hours
ago.

He had got to the entrance hall before I caught him up. He accepted with
rather disturbing docility the arm I slipped into his. All the fight had
gone out of him; he might not have been the same man who had so recently
tried to outface me about first novels. I looked at his face as we stood
by the glass doors that opened on to John Street. It showed both fear
and pain.

"What's the matter, Derry? Can I be of any help?" I asked him anxiously.

He muttered, "Yes--yes--about time I called somebody in--just about
enough of it----"

"Do you want a doctor? Shall we call at a chemist's?"

He stared at me for a moment; then I vow he almost laughed.

"A doctor? No thanks. One dose a day's quite enough."

"One dose of what?"

"Words," he replied, with a jerk of his head in the direction of the
lecture chamber.

We passed out and into John Street, he accommodating his ordinary
London-to-Brighton pace to mine. He once told me that five miles an hour
was walking, six stepping out a bit, and anything over six and a half
really "going."

"Which way?" I asked at the end of the street.

"I suppose you'd better come round to my place," he replied; and we
crossed the Strand and struck north past Trafalgar Square.

He lived (I am not troubling you with the lobster we shared standing up
at a counter, during which repast we did not exchange one single
word)--he lived in Cambridge Circus, and I hope I have not given you the
impression that Derwent Rose was desperately poor. When I spoke of him
as having none too much either of money or success I meant as by
comparison with myself. Until, quite suddenly and by no means early in
life, my own reward came to me, I should have considered his quarters
luxurious--once you had got there. This you did by means of a narrow
staircase from the various landings of which branched off the offices of
variety-agents, film-brokers, furriers, jewellers and I don't know what
else. The double windows he had had fitted into his room subdued the
noises of the Circus outside, and if he cared to draw his thick brocade
curtains as well he could obtain almost dead silence. His black oak
furniture was brightly polished by some basement person or other, his
saddlebag chairs scrupulously beaten and brushed. The two or three
thousand books that completely filled two of his walls might have been
arranged by a librarian, so methodically and conveniently were they
disposed, with lettered and numbered tickets at intervals along the
edges of the shelves; and I knew that he had begun a catalogue of them.
All this portion of his room spoke of a man settling down into
meticulousness, whom disorderly habits and departures from routine begin
to irritate. In marked contrast with it was the topsy-turvy state of the
large oval table with the beaded edge. This was in an appalling state of
confusion. Newspapers had been tossed aside on to it, open books with
their faces downwards sprawled over it. Empty shells of brown paper
still kept something of the shape of the books they had contained, and
ends of packer's string with bits of sealing-wax twined among them. A
teacup lay on its side in a wet saucer, a large oval milk-can stood next
to it. And on the top of all were the snaky rubber cords of an exerciser
and a ten-pound, horsehair-stuffed medicine-ball.

I was about to hang up my hat in the neatly-curtained recess he had had
fitted up as a lobby when he exclaimed "Oh, chuck it anywhere," and set
me the example by throwing his own hat and stick on to the clutter. They
caught the medicine-ball, which rolled an inch or two, tottered, and
then fell with a soft dead thump to the floor. The next instant, as if
now that his own door was closed behind him there was no longer any need
to keep up appearances, he himself had fallen with a similar thud to the
sofa. He, this piece of physical perfection who called six miles an hour
"stepping out a bit," lay all limp and relaxed, with lids quivering
lightly over his closed eyes. He spoke with his eyes closed.

"Well, what did you think of it?" he said, breathing deeply.

I tried to keep my anxiety out of my tone.

"What did I think of the lecture?"

"Yes, the lecture if you like. That'll do to start with. No, I don't
want anything, thanks. Tell me what you thought of the lecture."

I began to say something, I hardly remember what, when, still with his
eyes closed and twitching, he interrupted me.

"All those silly charts--all those useless figures about the American
Army--that's all waste of time. Making work for work's sake. I could
have told him all that straight away."

I remembered those groans in the obscurity of the lecture-room. I spoke
quietly.

"Is that what you were going to tell him when you--interrupted a
little?"

I had to wait for his reply. When it did come I hardly heard it, so low
did he speak.

"I know what you mean; but I can only tell you that if you'd been
vivisected like that you'd have squirmed a bit too."

I couldn't help thinking he had taken that lecture in a curiously
personal sense, and I said so.

"Vivisected?" I exclaimed. "I was vivisected, as you call it, just as
much as you were--perhaps more in some ways. What on earth are you
talking about? It's a general question. It's human functions and
faculties at large he was vivisecting, not you or me. So," I concluded,
"we were all vivisected alike, and when everybody's vivisected--you
see----" I made a little gesture.

Then he opened his eyes, and there was an expression in them that
suddenly dried me up. It was an even more remarkable throw-back to a
remembered and earlier manner than that I had witnessed earlier in the
afternoon. In short, it was an expression of unconcealed contempt.

"Q.E.D.," he said. "Finis, Explicit, and the Upper Fourth next Term.
You'd have made a good schoolmaster.... I tell you that when I say 'I'
and 'myself'"--he positively glared with irascibility and impatience--"I
mean myself singly and specially, understand--the egregious and
indestructible ego--and not merely just as much or as little as anybody
else. Get that well into your head or I won't talk to you."

Had he not been so visibly suffering I shouldn't have stood the tone of
it for a moment, not even from him. And let me tell you at once the
surmise that had already flashed through my brain. I am a dependable
sort of person myself, one of the kind that nothing startlingly new is
ever likely to happen to; but I was not so sure about his kind. Brains
like his often fly off at queer tangents, and I wondered whether he had
been reading too much of this current cant about "multiple personality"
and had allowed it to run away with him. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems
to rush to that for an explanation of everything nowadays. I had already
noticed, by the way, that one of the books that sprawled cover uppermost
on his table was a book on the thyroid gland. But suddenly he seemed to
guess at my thoughts. He spoke more quietly. Indeed he seemed to be
fully aware of these outbreaks of his, and to be trying to resist them
more and more strenuously as our conversation proceeded.

"Sorry, old fellow," he said contritely. "I'm very sorry. I oughtn't to
have spoken like that. But I'm not what they call 'disintegrating'; I'm
the last man to do that. When I say 'I' I mean the 'I' I've always been.
That's just the devil of it."

"Suppose you begin at the beginning," I suggested.

"There you are!" was his swift reply. He was sitting up on the sofa now,
and was facing it, whatever "it" was, with a calmer courage. "I _can't_
begin at the beginning. All I really _know_ yet's the end, and of course
that hasn't come.... It's a damn-all of a problem. Get yourself a drink
if you want one. No, I won't have one; I--I daren't. And you might draw
the curtains. When I hear the buses and taxis it makes me want to go
out."

I drew his curtains for him, but did not take the drink. He sat on the
sofa leaning a little forward, his great hands clasped between his knees
and working slightly and powerfully, as if he cracked walnuts in the
palms of them. The grey-blue eyes avoided mine. I have seen that same
avoiding glance in the eyes of a man who had something perfectly true to
tell, but so utterly improbable that he was self-convicted of lying even
in speaking of it.

"About what you were saying this afternoon in that Club place--my age,"
he began in a constrained voice. "You--you meant it, I suppose?"

"That you'd live to be a hundred and be world-famous? Yes, I meant it in
a way. I didn't mean you to take me too literally, of course."

"And you thought"--he hesitated for a moment and shivered slightly--"it
was something to be congratulated about?"

"Well--isn't it? Professionally you've staked out a magnificent course
for yourself in which time means practically everything, and so, if you
live long enough, as you look like doing----"

Yet I cannot tell you what premonition of calamity seemed already to
flow like an induced current from him to me. Ordinarily I am not
specially sensitised to receive impressions of this kind. I am just a
man who had had the luck to think as most other people think and to be
able to express their thoughts for them. The greater therefore must have
been that current's projecting force. Certainly the greater was my shock
when it did come.

"I shan't live to be a hundred," he said in a low voice.

I cannot remember what I said, or whether I said anything at all. All
that I do remember is his own next words, the swift and agonising
collapse of the whole man as he said them, and the feeling of my own
nape and spine.

"No, not a hundred. You're counting the wrong way. You got my age quite
right this afternoon. I'm thirty-five. And I shall live till I'm
sixteen."


III

Among the things that have contributed to the wordly success of Sir
George Coverham, Knight, has been that author's rigid exclusion from his
books of everything that does not commend itself to the average common
sense of his fellow-beings. The most he seeks in his modest writings--I
speak of him in the third person because, as Derry's head dropped over
his knees, it seemed impossible that this Sir George Coverham and I
could be one and the same person--the most he seeks is a line somewhere
between ordinary experience and the most, rather than the least,
attractive presentation of it. In a word, his books are polite,
debonair, and deliberately planned so as not to shock anybody.

Therefore in some ways he may be quite the wrong person to be writing
this story of Derwent Rose. For example: he had known Rose for some
fifteen years, and, not to mince matters, there had been many highly
impolite things in Rose's life during that time. More than once it had
seemed a very good thing indeed that he had had to work hard for his
money. The great mental concentration necessary for the writing of some
of his books must have kept him out of a good deal of mischief.

So I (I am allowing myself the man and Sir George Coverham the novelist
gradually to reunite, as they gradually reunited that evening)--I, his
friend, had already done what we all do when we are completely bowled
over. I had instinctively sought refuge from his lunatic announcement in
trifles--any trifle that lay nearest to hand. Suddenly I found myself
wondering why he was afraid to take a drink, and why I had had to draw
his curtains lest the sound of the buses and taxis should call him out
into the streets.

But presently he had recovered a little. He was even able to look at me
with the faint shadow of a smile.

"Well, that's the lot," he said. "I've given you the whole thing in a
nutshell. You heard that lecture and you know me. You can fill in the
rest for yourself."

Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was not yet half-past nine. I got on
to my feet.

"You'd better get your hat and come down to Haslemere with me," I said.
"We can catch the ten-ten. You're all on edge about something and you
want a change. Leave word here that you'll be back in a week, and come
along."

But he did not move, except to shake his head.

"I expected you'd say that. It's what anybody would say. It simply means
that you haven't taken it in yet. No, since we've started we'll go
on--unless you'd rather not. I warn you there's a good deal to be said
for not going on."

"Why not talk about it down at Haslemere?"

Once more there was the hint of irascibility.

"Do you want to hear or don't you?"

Slowly I sat down again, and he resumed his former attitude of cracking
nuts with his palms for nutcrackers.

"There's not an atom of doubt about what I'm going to tell you," he
began. "Not an atom. Unless I'm mistaken you saw for yourself this
afternoon--though of course you didn't know what you were seeing. You
simply thought I looked younger, didn't you?"

I waited in silence.

"And I fancy my manner got a bit on your nerves--does a bit now for that
matter?"

This also I let pass without remark.

"Well, let's start from that point. You said I looked thirty-five. Well,
it's just that that's getting on your nerves--the less amiable side of
my character when I was thirty-five, and--and--well, when you go you
might take that bottle of whisky with you and make me sign the pledge or
something. I'm trying--I'm honestly trying--to hang on, you see."

I sighed. "I wish you could make it a bit plainer," I said.

"I'm making it as plain as I can. Is _this_ plain--that something's
happened to me, I don't know what, and _I'm getting younger instead of
older?_"

"Derry----" I began, half rising; but he held up one heroically-moulded
hand.

"Let me finish. And if I happen to go to sleep suddenly you just walk
straight out, do you hear? Walk right out and shut the door. You're to
promise that. There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go
through.... So there it is. Instead of getting older like everybody else
I'm simply getting younger. I'm perfectly sober--I haven't had a drink
for five days--and I tell you I shall go on till I'm thirty, and then
twenty-five, and then twenty, and then, at sixteen or thereabouts--that
fellow wasn't very sound on his ages to-night--I shall die. _Now_ have
you got it?"

Even about human nature there are some things that you have to accept as
it were mathematically. I am no mathematician, but I do know (for
example) that the common phrase "mathematically certain" is a misnomer.
The whole essence of mathematics lies, not in its certainties, but in
its assumptions, its power to embrace any concept whatever and pin it
down in the form of a symbol. Once you have adopted the symbol you don't
trouble about what lies behind it. You merely proceed to reason on it.

It can only have been in some such way that I accepted Derwent Rose's
mad statement and was willing to see what superstructure he was prepared
to raise upon it. I was even able to speak in an almost calm and
ordinary voice.

"Tell me how you know all this," I said.

He was logical and prompt.

"By my knowledge of myself, and also by my memory. I know what I was at
thirty-five, and I know what I did; well, I simply know that I'm that
man again, and that I shall go on and re-do more or less what he's
already done. At some point in my life I must have got turned round, and
now I'm living it backwards again. And put multiple personality quite
out of your head. That's the whole point. I'm not anybody else, and I
shan't be anybody else. At this moment I'm Derwent Rose, as he always
was and always will be, but simply back at the mental and physical stage
when he wrote _An Ape in Hell_."

To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to
remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I
breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool
fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal
idea that had sent that cold shiver up my spine was capable of an
ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion
that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient
loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we
choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been
abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the
place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment.
Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less.
You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an
ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always
did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome
depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or
hell is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying
altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again
he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently
and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I
admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning
anyway--the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the
flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you
call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid
after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the
writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints
induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process,
didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear
Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But--you'd hardly call _this_
spiritual, would you?"

I think I mentioned that he wore a soft white collar, pinned and tied
with exquisite neatness. A moment later he wore it no longer. Without
troubling about pin, studs or buttons, with a swift movement he had
ripped the collar, tie and half the shirt-band from his neck, and
showed, of an angry and recent purply-red, vivid on his magnificent
throat, two curved marks like these brackets--().

Now I am not more squeamish than most men. I am far from having lived
the whole of my life in cotton-wool. But it needed no course in medical
jurisprudence to tell me what those marks were--the marks of teeth, and
of a woman's teeth. I was deeply wounded. Rose's amusements in this sort
were no affair of mine, and I strongly resented this humiliation both of
himself and of me.

But his hand gripped my arm like a vice. Suddenly I saw a quite new pair
in his grey-blue eyes. It was a swift fear lest, instead of helping him,
I should turn against him.

"Good God, man!" he cried in a high voice. "Don't think _that_! Don't
think I'm such a cur as to--oh, my God, _that_ isn't the point! I'm not
bragging about my conquests!... The point is that _these marks are ten
years old and they weren't there last night_!"

I tried to free myself from his grip, but he wouldn't let me go. He ran
agitatedly on, repeating himself over and over again.

"There isn't much imagination about _that_, is there? _That_ isn't
fancy, is it? _That_ doesn't happen to any man any day, does it? A man
would be likely to remember _that_, wouldn't he? He wouldn't forget it,
if it was only for the shame of it! Is _that_ just ordinary memory? And
how would you feel when everything was healed over and forgotten, and
you'd settled decently down, and hoped everything was forgiven you--and
then you were to be dragged back over the ploughshares like that! I tell
you you've got to see it all crowding back on you again, before you
realise that forgetting's the greatest happiness in life!... I tell you
on my word of honour that that happened ten years ago, when I was
thirty-five before, and that it wasn't there last night! _Now_ tell me
I'm drunk or dreaming!"

Stupefied I stared at him. The issue was plain. Either he was telling
the truth, or he was not. Either those marks were as recent as they
looked or as old as he said. He was to be believed or disbelieved. There
was no middle way.

And my heart sank like a stone in my breast as suddenly I found myself
believing him. He saw that I did, and fumblingly sought to fasten the
collar again. But he had torn both buttonhole and band, and could only
cover up those shameful marks by turning up the collar of his dark blue
jacket. He sat with his collar turned up for the rest of our talk.

Presently I felt a little more master of myself. I had moved over to the
sofa and was sitting by his side. He, this youthful Hercules of
forty-five, who wrote books and made you think of boats and horses, was
weeping softly. He was weeping for misery and hate of what, apparently,
he must go through again. Stupidly my eyes rested on the carefully
lettered and numbered shelves of books, and then on the slovenly litter
of the table. The electric light gave the merest flicker--they were
doing something at the power-station--and then burned quietly on. It
shone on the black oak furniture and the saddlebag chairs, on our two
hats on the table, on the neatly curtained recess where the hats should
have been. It was impossible not to see that in its contrast of
orderliness and disorder the very room showed two sharp and distinct
phases. Almost with voices the inanimate things seemed to cry it aloud.
The man who had catalogued those bays of books had been the author of
_The Hands of Esau_. He who now threw everything down on to that
disgraceful table was he who had written _An Ape in Hell_.

He still wept quietly. I put my hand on his knee.

"All right, Derry," I said. "Try to pull yourself together. You say you
can't begin at the beginning. Very well, begin anywhere you like. I dare
say something can be done. It may turn out to be--oh, shellshock or
something."

But already my heart told me that it would turn out to be nothing of the
kind.


IV

I am not going to direct your attention specially to the more fantastic
part of what Derwent Rose told me in his rooms that night. I have found
no issue in that direction. Neither am I going into the metaphysics of
the thing; I know no more about that than he ever knew himself. But if
you care to read, in reverse, the progress of a man out of the sad
shadows of middle-age back into the light and beauty and belief that
once were his--always the same man, undeviating from the lines laid down
by his own nature, re-approaching each phase as he had formerly
approached it, but in times and circumstances so complex and altered
that nothing in the pilgrimage was constant but himself--if, I say, you
care to read that extraordinary intertwining of what he had done and
what he re-did, and are content with this, and will not pull me up every
time the mystery of the deeper cause confounds us both, then I am
content too and we can go ahead.

It had been going on (he told me) for six months past; but at the outset
I ought to warn you that he had two scales of time. Here I wish that we
were all mathematicians, and that I could write and you could read his
wondrous history in symbolised concepts. However, we will do the best we
can with words.

Broadly speaking, he went backwards, not at a uniform rate, but in a
series of irregular and unequal slips. That is to say, that though in
six months or so of actual time he had retrograded the ten years between
forty-five and thirty-five, it did not follow that he had gone back five
years in three months or two and a half in any given six weeks. I went
carefully into this point with him. I asked him, if the ratio was not a
steady twenty to one (or a hundred and twenty months of experienced time
as against six by the clock) what he estimated it at for shorter periods
of either. But to this he could give no clear answer. Being unable to
fix the precise turning-point, and hardly knowing when the indications
in himself had begun (since at first he had put the whole thing aside as
an absurdity), he had no datum. He had only become fully awake to the
phenomenon when it had not been possible to disregard it any longer.

"Well, as we've got to assume something let's assume that," I said.
"When was it that you first had no doubt at all?"

This he did more or less remember. I give his account in his own words.

"It was about two months ago," he said. "I'd no book on hand. I don't
mind admitting that I'd never felt so stale and empty and sick of
everything I'd ever done. In fact I'd got to the point you noticed this
afternoon."

"What point was that? Don't let's take anything for granted."

"When you rubbed me up about that first novel. I'd got to the point of
hardly seeing any difference worth mentioning between the worst stuff
and the best, Shakespeare included. Do you mind if I go into that rather
in detail?"

"Do."

"Here, I thought, is this creature man, this fellow called George
Coverham or Derwent Rose, brought naked into a world that marvellously
doesn't care a rap about him--but that he's got to contrive to make some
sort of an interpretation of, because it's where he's got to live. He
hasn't got too long to live there either--a strictly limited time--so
that there's just him and this wonderful uncaring universe for it. This
and nothing else is what happens every time a human being's brought into
the world. All this procreation and child-bearing are just for that--so
that somebody can make head or tail of the world.... Well, what do they
do to him? By and by they send him to school. That's the first step
towards taking him away from this universe he's trying to make something
of and telling him instead what some other naked being before him
thought about it all. That's all right as far as it goes. Just once in a
while, I suppose, two heads may be better than one. But"--he paused for
emphasis--"when a third begins to repeat what a second has already
repeated, and a fourth a third, and so on, by and by the universe begins
to drop right away into the background. The process goes on--it has gone
on--till not one in ten million dreams there's a universe at all. You
know what I mean--all talk about talk about talk about it. So, if you've
any sense of proportion at all, where does the difference between one
book and another come in?"

"Well--that's the state of mind you were in," I observed. Goodness knows
I wasn't trying to shut him up. If it did him good to talk I would
gladly have listened to him all night. As for sharing these Olympian
views of his, however, I have never had either the strength or the
audacity. It is because of my own indefatigability in talking about talk
about talk that they made me a Knight.

"I was only trying to explain how I felt," he answered apologetically.
"Let's start again. It was two months ago within a few days, and I know
it was a Monday morning, because Mrs Hyems doesn't come up on Sundays,
and she brought a parcel that had been overlooked from Saturday night.
It was half-past eight, and I was in there shaving"--he nodded in the
direction of his bedroom. "She wanted to call my attention to the parcel
because it was registered."

"Is this just to fix the date, or has the parcel anything to do with
it?"

"Both. I'm coming to the parcel in a minute. Well, as I was saying, I
was just about fed up with things in general. Books in particular. Nice
state of mind for an author with his living to earn to begin the week
in! I remember stopping shaving to have a good hard look at myself. I
remember saying to myself in the glass, 'You're young, you're a perfect
miracle of youth; you've got quite a good brain as brains go; and yet
instead of getting out of doors and living every minute of one of God's
good days you'll sit down there, and make scratches on bits of paper
that have got to be just like the scratches everybody else makes or you
won't sell 'em; isn't there something wrong somewhere?' I asked myself
that in the glass. And mind you, I was feeling extraordinarily fit
physically. That's important. I'd felt like that for days past. Who
wants to work when he feels like that?"

I sighed a little. Even I, with my modicum of health, have occasionally
felt too fit to work.

"So I finished dressing and came in here to breakfast, and I was
half-way through breakfast when that book caught my eye."

"What book?"

"The parcel I spoke of. It was a book. As a matter of fact it was Mrs
Bassett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_."

I glanced at him. "Registered?"

"Yes. You mean one doesn't usually register a common or garden novel
unless you want there to be no mistake about the person getting it?"

"Go on."

"So I opened it there and then and began to read it. I read it at a
single sitting. Then I tore it in two. Wait a bit, I'll show you. Pass
me a book, any one. They're all the same."

I passed him a book from the untidy table, an ordinary two-inch-thick
octavo volume in a cloth binding. Now read carefully. He didn't even
change his position on the sofa. Using his knees only as a support, with
his hands he tore the back into halves. Let me say it again. I don't
mean he tore it lengthwise along the stitching. He didn't separate the
pages into dozens or scores, nor bend or break it. He just tore it
across as I might have torn a postcard. I can still see the creeping and
fanning of the leaves under the dreadful pressure of his hands, the soft
whity-grey fur of paper as the gap widened relentlessly before my eyes,
hear the slightly harsher sound of the rending cloth and the little
"zip" at the end.

Then he tossed the two halves on to the table again.

"I used to do a bit of that sort of thing years ago," he remarked,
without even a quickening of his breath. "Half-crowns and packs of
cards, you know. But I'd had to drop it. Your muscles have changed by
the time you're forty-five. I'd tried to tear a pack of cards not long
before, but I could only make a mess of them and had to give it up."

I found not a word to say. As much as the feat itself the terrifying
ease with which he had done it made me gape.

"Yes, my strength came on me like Samson's that morning," he continued.
"I was scared of it myself. I didn't know what was happening, you see.
I'm simply trying to tell you the first time I knew there was no mistake
about it."

I found my voice.

"But why did you tear the book? I--I hope you weren't looking for the
author this afternoon to tear her too!" I laughed nervously.

He turned earnest eyes on me.

"I swear I never meant her, George--in that accursed _Ape_ book of mine,
I mean. Of course she must have thought I did, and--and--well, to be
perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure she didn't start me on the idea.
You've got to start somewhere. But I went over it a dozen times
afterwards. _Am_ I the man to take it out of a woman in print?" he
appealed piteously.

He was not, and I tried to reassure him; but he broke in anew.

"Why, I'd forgotten all about her before I'd written a couple of
chapters! You're a novelist; you understand. If only she'd.... But I
suppose I left something in--some damnable wounding oversight--but I
can't find it even yet"--he glared round the room as if in search of a
copy of his own book to submit to cross-examination all over again.

And then abruptly he seemed to put the book aside. His manner changed.
He lifted himself from the cushions and spoke in a strained voice.

"Look here, George," he said hurriedly, jumping from point to point,
"let's be getting on. I may be having to turn you out soon; this may be
no place for you. Where had we got to? Where I tore that book. You were
asking me when I first felt sure of all this. Well, it wasn't just the
book, it was what happened inside me as well. Something gave way. I was
afraid. I'm afraid now. You've known me a long time, George; known
scandalous things about me, I'm afraid. But a man can live a pretty
queer sort of life and yet manage to keep something safe from harm all
the time. It's that that I'm hanging on to now. You see, I've never had
any habits or customs. I've never been the millionth man--the fellow who
repeats what they've all said before him. Every morning of my life I've
tried to look at the universe as if I'd never seen it before--as if it
had never been seen by anybody before. Dashed risky way of living....
But I managed to keep something clean inside me ... thank God ... need
it ... badly ... no time to go into all that now...."

He muttered unintelligibly. He was not actually looking at his watch,
and yet he gave the impression of having his eye on the passage of time.
Suddenly he went on with a new spurt.

"Don't interrupt, please. I may have made a miscalculation. You see,
when I drop off to sleep.... About that book. I started it at breakfast,
sent Mrs Hyems away, and never moved from my chair till I'd finished it
in the afternoon. Then, when I ripped it in two, I seemed to rip
something in myself with it. I can't describe it any other way.
Something in me seemed to open and take me right back. Before breakfast
that morning I was what they call 'settling down in life.' I'd written
_Esau_ since the _Ape_, and had lots of things planned. I'd even got a
bit old-maidish about all this"--he indicated his tidy walls.
"Then--piff! All that stage of my development seemed to go like smoke.
No, no pain; no physical feeling of any kind except that sudden rush of
bodily strength. I just tore myself in two as I'd torn the book, and I
ran to my glass--the glass I'd shaved in only a few hours ago."

"And you saw----?" the words broke breathlessly from me.

Slowly he shook his head. "Nothing--that time. _I hadn't been to sleep,
you see. A sleep's got to come in between._ That's why you mustn't be
here if I go to sleep.... No, it was the next morning I saw it."

Faintly I asked him what it was he had seen the next morning.

But before he could reply there had come a sudden wicked glitter into
his grey-blue eyes. His hand had once more gone to his upturned coat
collar. And he chuckled--chuckled.

"Not _this_, if that's what you mean," he said with a jerk of his head.
"That was my last adventure; the one I'm telling you about now was two
before that." Then his chuckle dying away again, "You notice your face
when you shave, don't you?--the texture of your skin and so on? Well,
that was what I saw: just a few years younger, a few years softer, a few
years smoother. The corners of your eyebrows here; you know how the brow
gets thin at the sides and those sprouts of long hair begin to come?
Well, they'd gone. And I was scared at my strength coming back like
that.... I say, get me a drink, will you? No, no, blast it--not that
stuff--plain water."

I got him the water. He gulped it down. His fingertips were still
feeling his eyebrows. Then with another spurt:

"What's the time now? Never mind--but I keep a diary now, you see. Have
to. Memory isn't to be trusted in a matter of this kind. And speaking of
memory, it'll be hell's delight if that goes. You see, this isn't 1920
for me; it's 1910, and I shan't have written _The Hands of Esau_ for
another three years yet. Or you can call it both 1920 and 1910 if you
like. Bit mixing, isn't it? It's demoniac. I call it----" he called it
something rather too violent for me to set down, and I have omitted one
or two other strong expressions that had begun to creep into his speech.
"And just one other thing before I shove you out," he positively raced
on. "I said I should die at sixteen. If it comes to the worst I hope to
God I shall; none of your scarlet second childhoods for me! But how the
Erebus and Terror do I know when sixteen will come?... I say, where are
you sleeping to-night? Perhaps you'd better---- Have some whisky. If
only we had that damned datum point! Do have some whisky. Have the----
lot. Are those curtains drawn? Take my key and lock me in and give it to
Mrs Hyems downstairs. Where's that diary of mine?"

Then all in a moment he was on his feet. Without ceremony he had thrust
my hat into my hands. Comparatively gently, seeing what his strength
was, he was hustling me towards the door.

"Sorry, old man"--the words came thickly--"thanks awfully--I expect I
shall be all right--don't bother about me.... But I shall have to move
sooner or later--looks so dashed queer one man coming in and another
going out--too comic if they arrested me on a charge of making away with
myself.... See you soon--yourself out--quick, if you don't mind--go,
go!"

The next moment I was out on his landing. He had almost carried me out.
I heard the locking of his door, but after that, though I listened,
nothing.


V

Presently it occurred to me that there was nothing to be gained by
waiting. It did not seem to be an occasion for calling for help, and if
there was something he did not wish me to see it was hardly a friend's
part to stand there listening for it. Slowly I descended past the closed
offices of the cinema and variety agents and let myself out into the
street. Involuntarily my eyes went up to his window, but no light showed
there, and I remembered that I had drawn his curtains myself. Among a
knot of people who waited for omnibuses I stood on the kerb, lost in
thought.

It was after eleven o'clock, and Haslemere was now out of the question.
I could have got a bed at my Club, but I vaguely felt that there might
be something rather more to the purpose to do than that. For some
minutes I couldn't for the life of me think what it was. Four o'clock of
that afternoon seemed an age ago.... Then I remembered. Madge Aird might
at least be able to throw a little light on the Daphne Bassett aspect of
the affair. She had said she would be at home that evening, and I can
always have a bed at the Airds' for the asking.

I mounted a bus, descended at my Club, telephoned to Alec Aird, seized a
bag I kept ready packed in town, and by half-past eleven was on my way
to Empress Gate.

Alec himself opened the door to me. He was in his dinner-jacket, but had
thrust his feet into a comfortable pair of bedroom slippers and was
smoking his everlasting bulldog briar pipe. There were neither hats nor
coats on the hall table, and he had the air of having the house to
himself.

"Thought it would be you," he said. "Lost your train? Give me your
bag--I'm scared to death of asking a servant to do anything after dinner
these days. Come up."

"Isn't Madge in? She said she was going to be at home."

"Oh, Madge calls it being at home if she's in by midnight. She's only at
the Nobles. I don't think she's going on anywhere. Listen"--the click of
a key had sounded in the hall--"there she is, I expect."

It was Madge. She followed us up into the drawing-room a moment later,
gave me a glance that was half surprised and half amused, and proceeded
to unscarf herself. Alec was relighting his pipe with the long
twisted-paper poker. There was a question in the eye he cocked at her.
Alec is fond of home, and lives a good deal of his social life
vicariously, sending Madge to represent him and relying on her account
of the proceedings when she gets back. This is frequently lively.

"Oh, nobody much," she chattered. "The Tank Beverleys and the Hobsons,
and Connie Fairham and her escapade, and Jock Diver with Mrs Hatchett.
Washout of an evening; makes home seem quite nice, especially with
George here. Do give me a decent peg; they'd nothing but filthy cup."
Then, as Alec busied himself at a tray, she shot another amused glance
at me. "Brought the Beautiful Bear, George?"

"I've just left him. I want to talk to you."

"Alec," she said promptly, "go to bed. George and I want to talk."

"Dashed if I do without a tune," Alec grumbled. "Play something."

Madge crossed to the music-stool, set her whisky-and-soda on the sliding
rest, and began to play.

I waited in an extreme of impatience. The bus-ride to the Club, getting
my bag, coming on to Empress Gate, greeting Alec--I suppose these things
had occupied me just sufficiently to put away for half an hour the
weight that had been placed upon me; but now, as I frowned at Alec
Aird's tiles and cut steel fender, that weight began to reimpose itself.
Anxiously I wondered what might be happening at that very moment in that
other room with the drawn curtains, the orderly shelves and the
disreputable table.

A man who grew younger instead of older! A man who already was ten years
younger than he had been a few months ago! He had been quite right in
saying, when I had tried to take him down to Haslemere, that that only
meant that I had not yet taken it in. I was as far from being able to
take it in as ever. More and more it forced itself on me as menacing,
inimical, wild. What sane man could believe it? And yet, if it was not
to be believed, why could I not shake it off? Why did it lurk, as it
were, in the half-lighted corners of Madge's drawing-room, allowing me
all the time I wished in which to demonstrate it to be nonsense, and
then, when I had left not one aspect of it uncriticised and undenied,
reunite and face me again exactly as before?

It happened, he said, while he slept; and he had strictly enjoined on me
that if I saw him falling asleep I was to walk straight out of the
place. "There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through."
That meant that during his sleep those tufts of his eyebrows disappeared
and that terrifying strength descended on him again. But what happened
_before_ then? Was the actual and physical change simultaneous with the
inner and mental one, or was it merely a confirmation that came
afterwards? _Had_ he changed in every respect but form and feature even
as I had talked to him? It frightened me to think that he had; but the
more I thought of it the more it looked like it.

For there had taken place a struggle within him that had but increased
in intensity as the minutes had passed. I remembered the gravity with
which he had pondered my suggestion that for the stuff of his novels he
had been too directly to heaven, too straight to hell. I don't pretend
to know any more about heaven and hell than anybody else, but I have the
ordinary man's conception of the difference between good and evil,
better and worse, and these principles, it seemed to me, had contended
in him. And he had striven to throw the weight of his personal will into
the worthier scale. There were things he did not wish to re-do, episodes
he did not wish to re-live. He had even wept that he must be dislodged
from that rock of his life to which his forty-five years had brought
him.... But what had followed? Suddenly a wicked chuckle. Violent
expressions had crept into his speech. A glitter had awakened in his
eyes, as if, since the thing must be gone through with, devilry and
defiance were a more manly part than weeping. "Well, if there's no help
for it, let's be thorough one way or the other," I could have imagined
him grimly saying....

And if this was so, what did it mean but that he _had_ actually grown
younger before my very eyes? I was merely shown, invisibly and a little
in advance, what the whole world would realise when his sleep had
smoothed out a few more wrinkles, given a newer gloss to his hair and an
added brightness to his eyes....

And in that case why had I come to see Madge Aird? What could Madge do?
What could anybody do? If the thing was true it was inescapable. He
_must_ go back. Not one single stage could be avoided. Beyond these
episodes which he dreaded lay others that perhaps he need not dread, and
others beyond those, and others beyond those ... until he attained
sixteen....

I continued to muse and Madge to play.

At last Alec got contentedly up. He straightened the creases from his
dinner-jacket.

"Thanks, old girl," he said. "Well, I'm going to turn in, and you two
can sit up and yarn about your royalties if you like. You look after
him, Madge, and see he doesn't get hold of _The Times_ before I do in
the morning. Night, George. You know where everything is----"

And, refilling his pipe as he went, he was off. Madge drew up a small
table between us, untied the ribbons of her cothurnes, rubbed the
creases from her ankles, and worked her toes inside their sheath of
silk.

"Well?" she said; and then with a little rapturous gush, "I can't get
the creature's beauty out of my head! That skin--that hair--and those
wonderful books! It isn't fair. It's too many gifts for one person. He
ought to be nationalised or something--turned over to the public like a
park."

"I want you to tell me who Mrs Bassett is," I said.

She bargained. "It's a swap, mind. If I tell you about her you tell me
about him."

"Tell me about her first."

"Well"--she settled herself comfortably--"I'm sorry to see you come down
to my own scandalmongering level. Do you want to put her into
_Nonentities I Have Known_? If so, I'll Who's-Who her for you. Here
goes. Bassett, Daphne, _nee_ Daphne Wade. O.D. (only daughter, George)
of Horatio Wade, rector of somewhere in Sussex, I forget where, but
Julia Oliphant will tell you. He, the rector, M. (married) 1, Daphne's
mother, and was M.B. (married by) 2, the child's governess. He died in
the year of his Lord I forget exactly when, leaving Daphne a little
money, otherwise I can hardly see Bassett marrying her. But Hugo pulled
it off all right. My broker knows him. He's in the Oil Crush now, but he
was playing margins on a capital of twenty pounds when Daphne (excuse my
vulgarity) caught the last bus home."

"She's a friend of Miss Oliphant's, is she?"

"She was. She and Julia and Rose were children together. But I'm not
sure Julia speaks to her since _The Parthian Arrow_. She meant it for
him all right, whether he meant his for her or not. Life's full of quiet
humour, isn't it?"

I will abridge a little of my friend's liveliness. Indeed as she caught
as it were out of the air something of my own mood, she dropped much of
it herself. This was the substance of what she told me:

Derwent Rose had written a book called _An Ape in Hell_. I don't know,
Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real
origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic
of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as
much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "_A woman who
dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell_." Had I
written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the
earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his
way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations
to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten
and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over.
Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that
already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness
of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot
delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty
and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could
have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine.

Yet one person had done so--a friend of his childhood, the author of
_The Parthian Arrow_.

"One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one
thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only
appeared quite lately."

"That's so," she admitted.

"But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event."

"Well--she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book
immediately his appeared, in 1910."

"How do you know that?"

"Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her
characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up
to date."

So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but
seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well.

"Well--go on," I said.

But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see
where the _Ape_ must have hurt her!"

"As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book----"

"But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness
that she felt it."

"_What!_" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like
Derwent Rose would----"

"Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine.
She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to.
They were boy and girl together. Now suppose _I'd_ had an affair with
somebody in _my_ young days, and had married somebody else, and then
he'd gone and--rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a
_Parthian Arrow_ even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear
that another woman did."

"But--ten years!"

"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a
baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book.
But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth--well,
thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things
get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's
forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years."

"But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they
were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so."

"Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?"

"Just what you'd expect him to say, of course--that he's awfully sick
he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain."

She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed
and threw her whole castle down to the ground.

"Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's
hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly
shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so
fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said
this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you
to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him."

But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was
beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening
at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a
shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her
anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed
only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not
exist, but as experience they did. For him the _Arrow_ and the _Ape_
were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated
them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by
return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly
beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns:

  He was thirty-five when he wrote    She was thirty-one when she read
  his _Ape_.                          it and began her rejoinder.

  He was forty-five when he read      She was forty-one at the time
  the _Arrow_.                        that he read it.

  But he was thirty-five again.       She was still forty-one.

  He was going on getting younger.    She would get no younger.

  He was convinced he would die at    She----
  sixteen.

But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of
the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.

After all (I thought testily) Rose might consider himself a confoundedly
lucky fellow. What, after all, was he grumbling at? Because he was going
to have his precious, precious youth all over again? His health and
vigour and strength all over again, so that he could tear a book in two
as I might have torn a piece of paper? His clear skin and glossy hair
and the keen sight of his eyes once more? He was luckier than poor Madge
and myself! And what, if that American was right, was he risking?
Nothing that I could see, unless he should go beyond that age of the
maximum of his faculties, which he was persuaded he would not do. And in
addition to the approaching brilliance of his youth it was not
impossible that he would keep the whole of his accumulated experience as
well. Not for him that old and bitter cry that has so often been wrung
from the rest of us: "Oh for my life over again, knowing what I know
now!" So far, at any rate, he was having his life again, knowing all he
knew at the turning-point. And the fellow was grumbling!

"Now tell me about him," said Madge.

But she could not suppress a yawn as she said it. I knew that she, like
myself, was longing to slip out of her clothes and to get into bed.

"Another time," I said, wearily rising. "Which room are you putting me
in?"

As she rose I did not notice what it was that she caught up from a
side-table and put under her wrap. She preceded me upstairs. The room
into which she showed me was one I had occupied before, and only a minor
change or two had since been made. One of these caught my eye. It was a
leather-framed photograph of Miss Oliphant that stood with the
reading-lamp on the bedside table.

"Well, good night," Madge yawned. "They'll bring you tea up. Don't read
too long--bad for the eyes and the electric-light bill----"

Then it was that I noticed the book she had quietly slipped on to the
table. It was Mrs Bassett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_.


VI

Part of the fuss my numerous friends made about my Knighthood was this
desire of theirs that my portrait should be painted and hung up in the
Lyonnesse Club. Whether in fact I shall ever look down from those
buff-washed walls I am at present unable to say. That rests with Miss
Julia Oliphant. I myself merely have the feeling that if she doesn't
paint me I hardly wish to be painted.

Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee
and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following
day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to
Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.

"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you
sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."

"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and
see her this afternoon."

"You say you don't know her well?"

"I've met her once."

We entered the station. I took my friend's ticket. I saw her to the gate
of her lift, and the attendant paused, his hand on the iron lattice.

"Well," she said, "I think you'll find that won't matter. Let me know
how you go on. Good-bye--and you can tell the Bear from me that no
decent person believes a word of it."

And with a wave of her hand across the grille she sank with the lift
into the ground.

I walked to my Club, lunched alone, and then, in a corner of the
smoking-room, busied myself with my rather scanty recollections of the
lady I was going to see that afternoon. Though I had only actually met
her upon one occasion, we had a sort of hearsay acquaintance in
addition. She and Derwent Rose had been children together, and one does
not begin quite at the beginning with the friends of one's friends.
Moreover, there are these people whom one may actually meet only at wide
intervals, but over whom absence does not seem to have its ordinary
power. Nothing seems to ice over, you come together again at the point
where you left off. Perhaps because you draw your nourishment from the
same elements, you are able to take the gaps for granted.

Nevertheless, of my own single personal meeting with Miss Oliphant I
could remember little but her eyes. I had been presented to her across a
small dinner-table, with rosy-shaded electric candles, that had turned
those great eyes pansy-black in the pinky gloom. I had guessed that in
the daylight they were of the deep brown kind that, alas, so frequently
means glasses for reading and distressing headaches; but what had struck
me at the time had been their quiet readiness and familiarity, as if
they said to me, "He's told me about you; I wonder what he's said to
you about me!"

And now those same eyes, photographed in a leather frame, had watched me
during the whole of the previous night. They had watched me as I had
read that awful book. Darkly watchful and expectant, they had seen my
first amazed incredulity, then my successive waves of anger. "But go
on," they had seemed ever to urge me; "there's much more to come!"

And under the bedside lamp they had been still watching me when the maid
had brought in tea and had flung the curtains aside, admitting the
bright sunshine.

Then, when the book had dropped from my hand to the floor, they had
said, "Don't you think it would be rather a good thing if you were to
come to see me?"

I am not going to advertise that hateful book of Mrs Bassett's. If I
could have torn it in two as Rose had torn it I should have done so. She
had hardly changed his name--for what was "Kendal Thorne" but Derwent
Rose? So I will merely say that to old memories she had added new and
malicious inventions, and had produced a ridiculous grotesque of a vain
and peevish childhood, an impossibly blatant youth, and a culmination
born of her own distorted imagination. It was for her, and not for
himself, that he had blushed. For her sake he would have torn up every
single copy of it if by that means it could never have been. He could
have scolded her, shaken her, smacked her, ashamed, angry and helpless
as one is before an ill-conditioned child who nevertheless has claims on
one. That there could ever have been any passage between them her book
put entirely out of the question. And so much for _The Parthian Arrow_.

At half-past three that afternoon I was at the Boltons, ringing Miss
Oliphant's bell. A tiny maid admitted me, and I was shown into a sort of
alcove with a good deal of tapestry and bric-a-brac and brass about, the
sort of things the artists of half a generation ago affected for the
sake of their "colour." Nor was the studio into which I was presently
shown much different from a hundred other studios I had seen. These
glass-roofed, indigo-blinded, north-lighted wells, I may say, always
depress me, and had I to live in one of them I should instantly have a
side-window cut, so that I might at least have a glimpse once in a while
of somebody who passed in the outer world.

But somehow the place suited Miss Oliphant. Perhaps it was the north
light. Artists choose the north light because it varies little, and
there was something about her that didn't vary very much either. She
came through a portiere-hung door, and as she stood there for a moment,
not surprised (for I had telephoned that I was coming), but with that
familiarity and expectancy once more in her dark eyes, I was able to
check this cool and composed impression of her with my former one of
over-lustrous eyes in the pinky gloom of the shaded lamps of the
dinner-table.

Her hair, like her eyes, was dark; but she had a habit rather than a
style of dressing it. It was piled in a high mass over her white brow,
quite neatly, but rather as if to have it out of the way and done with
than as making the most of its rich glossy treasure. A dateless, but by
no means inappropriate tea-gown of filmy grey with a gold thread
somewhere in it showed her long harmonious lines of limb and allowed her
breasts to be guessed at; and the ripeness of her shoulders set off her
long and almost too slender neck. She had cool and beautiful hands,
sleeved to the wrist; but the daylight added to her years. At our former
meeting I should have said she was thirty-five. Now I saw that she could
hardly be less than forty.

She took my hand for a moment, smiled, but without speaking, and began
to busy herself at a Benares tray. She reinserted the plug of an
electric kettle, which immediately broke into a purr. She listened for a
moment with her ear at the kettle, and then suddenly filled the teapot.
She spoke, once more smiling, through the little cloudlet of steam.

"Do sit down," she said, indicating a "property" curule chair. "Well,
how's Derry? Have you seen him lately?"

I made a note of the name she too called him by, and said, Yes, I had
seen him yesterday. "I'm sorry to say he seemed worried," I added.

"Oh? What's worrying him?" she asked, withdrawing the plug from the wall
and popping a cosy over the pot. It was a French cosy, a dainty little
porcelain Marie Antoinette, with a sac and a padded and filigreed
petticoat, and I remember thinking that if Miss Oliphant ever went to
fancy-dress dances the costume of her cosy would have suited her very
well.

"Have you read that horrible woman's horrible book?" I asked her
point-blank.

"_The Parthian Arrow?_ Yes, I've read it," she said equably.

"Well, I should say that's one of the things that's worrying him," I
replied. "I've just read it, and the taste of it's in my mouth still."

She considered the teapot. "We'll give it two minutes and then take the
bag out," she remarked. Then, "Oh yes, I've read it. I don't think she
need have written it either. But it is written, and there's an end of
it. As for Derry, anybody who knows him knows that his whole life's been
one marvellous mistake after another. He dodges it somehow in his books,
but he knows nothing whatever about women in real life. Never did.
Sugar?"

This was hardly what Madge Aird had led me to expect. I had gathered
from her that Miss Oliphant and Mrs Bassett had more or less fallen out
about that book; in fact Madge had definitely said, "I'm not sure that
they speak now." But here was Miss Oliphant, Rose's friend, not only
quite inadequately angry on the one hand, but on the other talking about
Rose's ignorance of women almost as if he had been as much to blame as
Mrs Bassett herself.... Moreover, when a woman tells a man that another
man knows nothing about women, the man who is spoken to invariably tries
the words on himself to see whether he too is included in the
disparagement. My understanding of Miss Oliphant, such as it was,
suddenly failed me. I looked at her again to see whether, and if so
where, I had made a mistake.

She was doing a perfectly innocent little thing, one that at any other
time I might have found charming. Her long fingers were slyly lifting
the tops of sandwich after sandwich in search of the kind she wanted. A
child does the same thing with sweets--and sometimes goes beyond mere
peeping. But the infantility of the gesture jarred on me, and jarred no
less when, her eyes meeting mine, she laughed, pouted, and said: "Well,
after all, I cut them." I did not smile. Her coolness and unconcern when
a friend was savagely attacked disappointed me. As for the portrait that
was to have been the excuse for my call on her, I was glad now that it
hadn't been mentioned. I now doubted whether I should mention it. I had
supposed her to be a woman--not merely a female painter who gave a male
sitter tea in her studio.

"I don't understand you," I said, a little curtly I'm afraid. "You speak
as if that book was a mere point of view to which she's entitled."

Again she smiled at me, as if she liked me very much.

"Well, she has her point of view. It's evident that you don't know Mrs
Bassett."

"Her book's told me all about her that I ever want to know."

"So," she laughed, "you're just showing how cross you can be?"

At that moment there came a ring at the bell. She was on her feet
instantly, as if to forestall the little maid. With less tact than ever,
I thought, her fingertips touched my shoulder lightly as she passed by
me. It was only then that I noticed that the Benares tray held a third
cup and saucer.

The next moment she had shown Mrs Bassett herself in.

I am going to show Mrs Bassett in and out of this story again with all
possible speed. Only once have I set eyes on the lady since, and that
was in a moment when I was far too occupied with other matters to give
her more than a glance. She came in, a fluff of cendre hair, surmounted
by a hat made of a thousand brilliant tiny blue feathers. This was
intended to enhance the pallid blue of her eyes; as a matter of fact it
completely extinguished it. She was a Christmas-tree of silver stole and
silver muff, toy dog, and a pale blue padded and embroidered object that
I presently discovered to be the dog's quilt. I was presented to her,
bowed, and--suddenly found myself alone with her. Miss Oliphant had
picked up the teapot and was nowhere to be seen.

And this was the kind of arch ripple that proceeded from the author of
_The Parthian Arrow_:

"Oh, how d'you do, Sir George? Really a red-letter day. Sir George
Coverham and Julia Oliphant together. Quite a galaxy--or is galaxy wrong
and does it take more than two to make one, like the Milky Way?--_Oh,
Puppetty, my stole!_--You mustn't mind if I ask you thousands of
questions--I always do when I meet distinguished people--peep behind the
scenes, eh?--_Puppetty, I shall slap you!_"--a tap on the beast's
boot-button of a nose. "_So_ handsome, Julia is, don't you think? Not in
a picture-postcard sort of way, perhaps, but such character (don't you
call it?) and such a lovely figure! I know if I were a man I should fall
head over ears in love with her! Do you mind, Sir George?"

She meant, not did I mind falling in love with Miss Oliphant, but did I
mind taking the dog's cradle and quilt from her arms. I did so, made my
bow as Miss Oliphant appeared again, and moved quickly towards the
alcove where I had left my hat.

But it was Miss Oliphant herself who stopped me, and stopped me not so
much by her quietly-spoken words--"I want you to stay"--as by the sudden
command in her eyes. This was quite unmistakable. For the first time
since I had entered her studio I saw the woman I had expected to see.
That look was too imperious altogether to disobey. I sat down again.

I swear that Mrs Bassett wore that silver stole twenty different ways in
as many minutes. The air about her was ceaselessly in motion. If
Puppetty was in his quilted cradle she had him out; if he was out she
put him back again and tucked him in. She kissed and scolded the
wretched beast, and discussed Miss Oliphant's pictures and my own books.
Only her own book she never once mentioned. And I sat, saying as little
as possible, looking from one to the other of the two women.

Then, out of the very excess of the contrast between them, light began
to dawn on me. All at once I found myself saying to myself, "This can't
be what it appears to be. There's something behind it all. Look at them
sitting there, and believe if you can that the one who's pouring out tea
couldn't, for sheer womanliness, eat the other alive! Look at her! She's
a whole packed-full history behind her, and one that's by no means at an
end yet. It radiates from every particle of her. Of course Miss Oliphant
cares just as much as you do when her friend's attacked. She's a
different way of showing it, that's all. See if she isn't putting that
other one through her paces now, and for your benefit. She's not keeping
you here without a reason. Sit still and watch."

I repeat that I said this to myself.

And from that moment I knew I was on the right track.

At last Mrs Bassett rose to go. I assure you that I was on my feet
almost before she was, for I knew that my talk with Miss Oliphant was
not now to be resumed--it was to begin. The author of _The Parthian
Arrow_ was piled up with quilts, cradles and Puppetty again, and I need
say no more about the thickness of her skin than that she gave me her
telephone number and asked me to go and see her. I bowed, and Julia
Oliphant towered over her as she showed her out.

Seldom in my life have I held a door open for a woman with greater
pleasure.

The outer door closed, and Miss Oliphant reappeared and crossed slowly
to the settee. I now knew beyond all doubt that I was right. She seemed
suddenly exhausted. She passed her hand wearily over those too-lustrous
eyes. Listlessly she told me to smoke if I wanted to. Then she
continued to sit in silence.

At last she roused a little. She turned her eyes on me.

"Well--now you've seen the author of _The Parthian Arrow_."

I made no remark.

"And," she continued, "you did exactly as I expected--exactly what a man
would do."

"What was that?"

"You'd one look, and then you turned away."

"One look was enough."

"Oh, you all think you've got rid of a thing when you've turned your
backs on it. That's the way men quarrel. 'Oh, So-and-So's a bounder;
blackball him and have done with it.' And so long as he isn't in your
Club he doesn't exist for you."

I pondered, my eyes on her old-fashioned studio-trappings. "Well, say
that's a man's way of defending his friend. What's a woman's?"

Our eyes met once more, and I knew a very great deal about Miss Julia
Oliphant by the time she had uttered her next six words.

"A woman has her to tea," she replied.

Then, as if something within her would no longer be pent up, she broke
into rapid speech.

"Oh, _I_ know you men! You're all too, too kind! Forgive me if I say I
think you like the feeling. It pleases you, and you don't stop to think
that it puts all the more on us. You make your magnificent gesture, but
we have to go round picking up after you. Do you think I'd let that
woman out of my sight?... But I'm sorry I had to trick you a little."

"To trick me?"

"Yes, when you first came in. I saw you were puzzled and--disappointed
in me. You see, when a person's coming to tea and may be here any moment
you have to keep some sort of hand on yourself. It isn't the time to
indulge your real feelings. So I took no chances. I'm sorry if I threw
you off the track.... Well, you've seen her, and you've read her book.
Tell me where you think the toy dog comes in."

She was speaking vehemently enough now. She did not give me time to
reply.

"I'll tell you. You and Derry--all the decent men--a toy dog fetches you
every time. You're all so, _so_ kind! You see tragedies and empty
cradles and all the rest of it straight away. And perhaps once in a
while you're right. But you can take it from me you're wrong this time.
I've known her all my life, and I don't believe she ever for a single
moment wanted a child. She'd never have put up with the bother of one.
So Derry's worrying all about nothing. All that sticks in her throat is
that she imagines she's been pilloried as not being able to have one.
Her vanity was hurt, not her motherhood at all. Now that she's got rid
of that bookful of bile I think she's a perfectly happy woman. Her days
are just one succession of shopping and matinees and calls and
manicuring and Turkish baths and getting rid of Bassett's money. It was
just the same during the war--flag-days and driving convalescents about,
and bits of canteen-work and committees by the score.... Oh, Derry
needn't worry his head; tragedy's quite out of the picture! Let's have
the truth. No weeping Niobe--just scents and powders and Puppetty and an
imaginary grievance--that's her."

I think it is my own sex that is the merciful one, at any rate to woman.
Man has made radiant veils for her, has shut his eyes to this or that
stark aspect of her, because the world has to go on by his efforts and
he cannot afford to begin his scheme of things all over again every time
he sees the red light of the prime in a woman's eyes. Julia Oliphant had
spoken cruelly, ruthlessly, without decency; and I now knew why. No
woman cares that a wrong is done in the abstract. Her bitterness and
hate ever mean that someone dear to her has been subjected to indignity
and pain. And suddenly I rose from my seat, crossed to the settee, and,
sitting down by Julia Oliphant's side, did a thing I am not in the
habit of doing upon a short acquaintance. I took both her hands into
mine.

With as little hesitation as I had taken them her fingers closed on
mine. And I fancied the quick strong pressure answered the question I
was going to ask her before ever my lips spoke it. It had all been there
months before--all prepared and promised in that first steady intimate
look across the rosy-shaded candles of that dinner-table. I spoke quite
quietly.

"Isn't there something I'd better know--and hadn't you better tell me
now?" I said.

Again that firm cool pressure of the fingers. The tired eyes looked
gratefully into mine.

"I always knew you'd be like that if only----"

"Then tell me. Because when you've done I've something to tell you."

God knows what fires were instantly ablaze in the depths of the eyes.

"About him?" broke instantly from her lips.

"You tell me first."

The fires died down, and the voice dropped again.

"Tell you? I don't mind telling you.... Of course; all my life; ever
since we were children together. Not that he ever gave me a thought. But
that made no difference."

And having said it she had said all. I saw the beginning of the fires
again. She went straight on. "Now what were you going to tell me?"

Remember it was not yet eighteen hours since Derwent Rose had thrust me
out of his door, torn between an angel and a devil within himself. But
what are eighteen hours to a man who has two scales of time? To him they
might represent years of experience. He had clung desperately to his
better man, but--who knew?--already he might be less accessible to the
angelic. If I was not already too late, to catch him while he was of
that same mind and will was the important thing. If this woman who had
just told me with such touching simplicity that she had loved him all
her life was indeed his good angel, it seemed to me that here was her
work waiting for her. I saw her as none the less loving that she could
vehemently hate for the protection of her love. That she would fly to
him the moment her mind grasped his story I had not an instant's doubt.
Nor did I stop to consider that I might be betraying something he did
not wish known. It was no time for subtleties. Remembering his anguish,
I did not think he would refuse any help that was to be had. Here by my
side was his cure if cure there was to be found.

Still with her hands in mine, I took my plunge.

The first time she interrupted me was very much where I had interrupted
him. She wanted to know, apart from mere imaginary changes that might
have been due to variable health, what visible proofs there were of all
this. I wished to spare her those two ( )'s on Rose's neck, but she
smiled ever so faintly.

"Yes, you're all nice dears. But I know perfectly well the kind of thing
it might be. So don't let that trouble you. It's important, you know."

So I told her. She merely nodded. "He never did know anything about
women," she said. "Go on."

Her next interruption came when I spoke of his tearing the book, though
this was more of a confirmation than a true interruption.

"He was a perfectly glorious athlete," she remarked calmly, "but he
always hated pot-hunting, and later of course his books interfered with
his training a good deal. I remember once ... but never mind. I wonder
if we shall have all that over again?"

"Then you've managed to swallow the monstrous thing so far?" I said in
wonder.

"I told you his life had been one marvellous mistake after another. Go
on," she replied.

But as I proceeded her calm became less and less assured. I was
purposely omitting from my account such elements as might tend to
agitate her, but she seemed to divine this, and perhaps she thought I
suppressed more than I did. Suddenly she broke out:

"Never mind all that about ratios. I don't know anything about ratios.
The point is, when does he expect the next--attack?"

"I hardly know--I rather think----" I began, now quite violently holding
her hands, which she had tried to withdraw. She had also attempted to
rise.

"Soon? A month? A week? To-morrow?" she demanded.

"He's not sure himself, but I'm rather afraid----"

She allowed me to say no more. She plucked her hands from mine
and ran out of the studio. I heard the single faint "ting" of a
telephone-receiver being lifted from its fork, and a moment later, "Is
that the taxi-rank? The Boltons--Miss Oliphant--as quick as you can."

Three minutes later she reappeared. She had thrown a wrap over her
tea-gown, and was hurriedly tying a scarf under her chin.

"Isn't that taxi here yet? How long should it take from here to
Cambridge Circus?"

"Twenty or twenty-five minutes."

"You'd better come with me. You can tell me the rest on the way.... What
a time he is taking! Wouldn't it be quicker to pick one up outside?
Listen--no, that's only letters. Perhaps the man's waiting and hasn't
rung--let's wait at the street entrance--here's your hat----"

She opened the inner door, kicked aside the letters on the floor, and
sped along the corridor. The taxi glided up as we reached the entrance.

The next minute we were on our way.

The streets were full and our progress was slow. People were hurrying to
their homeward tubes, running along in knots of a dozen or a score at
the tails of the slowing-down omnibuses.

"Surely there ought to be a quicker way than along Oxford Street at this
hour!" she exclaimed petulantly. Then she threw herself back in the
corner. Apparently she had forgotten all about the rest of my story. One
idea and one only possessed her--haste, haste. I am perfectly sure that
had she been in the driver's seat not an uplifted blue and white cuff in
London would have stopped her.

And her restlessness communicated itself to me. I too felt that in
talking to Madge Aird the previous evening, in reading that wretched
book all night, in not having told Miss Oliphant straight away what I
had to say, I had lost precious time. Some step ought to have been taken
quicker--immediately----

"Damn!" I said as another extended arm stopped us; and Julia Oliphant
sank back, biting her lip.

Then an endless wait at the corner of Charing Cross Road....

But even that taxi-drive had to come to an end.

"It's just near here, isn't it?" she asked, her hand on the door; and I
sprang out. It would be quicker to walk the last few yards. These few
yards, however, nearly cost Miss Oliphant her life, for I only just
succeeded in dragging her out of the way of a newsboy's bicycle that
darted like a minnow from behind a heavy dray. We stood at Rose's door.

I pressed the button of his bell, which was the third of a little
vertical row of four; but even as I did so I noticed something unusual
about its appearance. The little brass slip that bore his name had gone.
I was unable to say whether it had been there on the previous evening,
as he himself had admitted me, but gone it was now, and from certain
indications it seemed not to have been unscrewed, but wrenched off. My
heart sank, but I was careful to conceal from Miss Oliphant the
foreboding I felt.

"He may be out," I muttered. "I'll ring for the housekeeper."

To fetch Mrs Hyems up from her basement took more time, but at last she
appeared, and a look of mingled perplexity and relief came into the eyes
that met mine.

"Mr Rose?" I said.

"Aren't you the gentleman as came last night, sir?" she said. "Didn't he
go out with you? I heard you come down; about eleven o'clock it would
be; and he didn't seem to be not a minute after you----"

"Hasn't he been back since?"

"I can't make it out, sir. He hasn't been to bed, and there was a note
for me on his table this morning. Paid all up he has, but not a word
about his milk nor his washing nor his letters nor when he's coming
back. And he left his door open, which that isn't his way. Perhaps you'd
like to come up, sir?"

We followed her up the stairs. His door still stood wide open, and as
far as I could see his room was exactly as I had left it last night. The
medicine-ball still lay where it had rolled on the floor, the cushions
of the sofa still bore the imprint of his body. I turned to the
caretaker.

"You say he's paid you, Mrs Hyems?"

"To the end of the week, sir, except for his washing and ceterer."

"And he's left no address?"

"No more than I tell you, sir."

"Then," I said briskly, "I should just tidy his room and close his door.
He'll probably be back to-night. If he isn't let me know. Here's my
address."

But as I said it I seemed to see again those marks where his name-plate
had been. Derry always carried, suspended in his trousers-pocket by a
little swivelled thong, one of those fearsome-looking compendium knives
that consist of half a dozen tools in one. The plate had not been
unscrewed; what he had done had been to thrust one of these blades
behind it and to rip it bodily from its bed. I pictured it all only too
clearly. Myself carefully watched out of the way--a cheque hurriedly
written--a gulp of whisky perhaps and the call of the streets--a dash
downstairs with his door left open behind him--a minute's feverish work
over the plate.... He had left his books, his papers, his furniture, his
medicine-ball. But his name he had taken away, and I did not think that
those rooms in Cambridge Circus would see Derwent Rose's face any more.




PART II

THE STERN CHASE


I

     _Lost_: A man with a brass name-plate in his pocket, probably
     bent in wrenching. Personal appearance difficult to describe,
     because something has happened to him that does not happen to the
     generality of people. When last seen appeared to be about
     thirty-five, but may look younger. Was wearing dark blue suit and
     shirt with torn neckband.

     _Missing_: Derwent Rose, novelist, late of 120 _bis_, Cambridge
     Circus, W.C. Age forty-five, tall and very strongly built, eyes
     grey-blue, hair chestnut-brown, strikingly handsome features. In
     possession of money, as his banking account was closed the
     morning after his disappearance. Served with Second Battalion
     Royal Firthshire Fusiliers. Is thought not to have left the
     country.

     _For Disposal_: Quantity of black oak furniture, comprising
     Jacobean oval table with beaded edge (copy), six upright chairs,
     tallboy, chest; also large brass bedstead, drawers, two pairs
     heavy damask curtains, crockery, plate, etc., etc. Also several
     thousand volumes, including small collection medical works, and
     others Curious and Miscellaneous. The whole may be viewed at 120
     _bis_, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Apply Caretaker.

So the announcements might have run had there been any; but there were
none. I saw to that. The police are excellent people, but I considered
this a little out of their line and did not call them in. As for the
furniture and effects, they remained for the present where they were, I
paying his rent and putting his key into my pocket. As for Derwent Rose,
novelist, aged forty-five, it might be months before anybody missed him,
and it would be supposed that he had gone into retirement to write a
book. As for the man with the torn neckband and the brass name-plate in
his pocket, a prudent person would be a little careful how he tried to
identify him. You see what I mean. Julia Oliphant and myself were in a
class apart; we should know him on sight, since we knew what had
happened to him and what we might expect. But nobody else knew, nobody
in the whole wide world. Therefore they would be wise to look at him
twice before accosting him. Nobody wants to be certified and locked up,
and that was what might conceivably happen if anybody insisted too much
on resemblance or identity in the case of a man who was obviously
fifteen or twenty years younger than he could be proved to be. Much
safer to call the fancied resemblance a coincidence and let it go at
that.

Therefore--exit Derwent Rose, novelist, aged forty-five.

And enter in his stead--who?

Exactly. That was the whole point. He had not entered. He was somewhere
on Life's stage, but behind, or in the wings, or up in the flies, or
down underneath the traps. He was his own understudy, but whatever lines
he spoke, whatever gestures he made, happened "off." The call-boy ran
hither and thither calling his name, but in vain. Oblivion had taken
him. It had taken him so completely that he needed to dress no part, to
alter himself with no make-up. He was as free to walk about in the
limelight as you or I. Freer--far freer----

For where was the birth certificate of this man who had lost ten years
in a few months and for all anybody knew might now have lost another
ten--twelve--twenty? Of what use was his _dossier_ in the Military
Records Office? Of what value was his name on the register, his will if
he had made one, his signed contracts, his insurance policy? Of what
validity was the photograph on his passport, or who could call him into
Court as a witness? What clergyman or Justice of the Peace could certify
that he had known him for a number of years? What musty and mendacious
file in Somerset House dare produce a record to show that a man who was
obviously so many years younger had been born in the year 1875? Free,
this Apollo for beauty and Ajax for strength? As far as documents were
concerned he was more than free. He had side-stepped them all, and was
the only completely free man alive.

But he was not free from Julia Oliphant and myself, for we knew all
about it. His own brother he might fool, had he had one; he might delude
the nurse who had rocked him as a child were she still alive; but us he
could not deceive. With us his unimaginable alibi would not serve nor
his unique anonymity go down. If he wished to know us, he could come up
to us (but to us only) with a proffered hand and an ordinary "How do you
do." But if he did not wish to know us he had us to fear. We knew his
secret.

But nobody else--nobody in the whole round world else.


II

That, in its essence, and speaking very roughly, was the position; but
it is worth examining a little more particularly. I will leave aside for
the moment such questions as why we wanted to find him, whether we ought
to try to find him, whether, if a man chose to expunge his identity like
that he had not a perfect right to do so. I will assume that he was to
be sought and found. On that assumption I reasoned as follows:

Here--somewhere--was a man of unknown age and uncertain personal
appearance. When last seen he was, and looked, thirty-five, but he may
now be, and look, any age up to, or rather down to, sixteen. That
depended entirely on the rate of those backward jerks of which he
himself had failed to find the ratio. But where begin to look for him?
At what Charing Cross or Clapham Junction, where all the world passes
sooner or later, wait for him? What tube station watch? Round what
street corner lurk? Examine it, I say, a little more closely.

And take first his two scales of time. As a matter of incontrovertible
fact he was living in the year 1920. In the year 1920 a big and
handsome and athletic man was living a daily life, presumably somewhere
in London. But for him that year was 1910, and continually, day by day
and hour by hour, he must be struggling to reconcile those two periods.
It could make no difference that he knew that he was living in both
years simultaneously. A hundred times a day he might say to himself, "I
quite understand; this is both 1910 and 1920; I've got them perfectly
clear and separate in my head." But the hundred-and-first time would
catch him tripping. He would stumble over some sudden and unexpected
trifle. Let me make this clear by means of a small incident that
happened to myself. Not long ago I walked into Charbonnel's for a cup of
tea, and was passing through the shop on the ground floor and about to
mount the stairs when I was politely fetched back. I was told, with a
smile that might have been given to a man just returned from Auckland or
Mesopotamia, that the upper room had been closed for some time. I had
not been in Charbonnel's since the early days of the war, and was
looking, in 1920, for a Charbonnel's that had ceased to exist.

So Derwent Rose, however much he was on his guard, would once in a while
find himself looking for something that no longer existed.

Next, there was the question of money--common money, and how much of it
he had got. Obviously, and supposing he was to be found, it was no good
looking for him in places where he could not possibly afford to be. He
would be found in a cheaper place or a more expensive one according to
the state of his purse. I had no means of knowing how much money he had
withdrawn from the bank. I had never known much about his finances
except that sometimes he had been hard-up, at others comparatively
"flush," but that he had never, as far as I knew, borrowed. Thus the
vulgarest of all considerations had an important bearing on our very
first step: Where to look for him?

Next there was to be considered a combination of these things--the
factor of money-plus-time. Say he had drawn one hundred pounds or five
hundred pounds from the bank--for all I knew it might have been either,
or more, or less. Well, we all know that a sum that was sufficient for a
man in 1910 does not go very far in 1920. There has been a war.... So
was he haunting expensive places, having (as might have been said of
anybody but him) "a short life and a gay one," or would he be found
spinning out his Bradburys as long as possible on a modester scale? Nay,
was he even living on his capital at all? Was it not possible that he
had found employment of some kind? If so, of what kind? They ask few
questions about identity at the dock-gates; was that it, and was he to
be looked for in a workman's early-morning tram? Or had he, a man
without a shred of paper to be his warranty, managed to talk somebody
into something bigger, and was he one of these ephemeral Business
Bubbles, lording it for a few months in somebody else's car and floating
the higher because of the hotness of the air inside him? I did not
think, by the way, that either of these last two things was very likely;
but nothing was more impossible than anything else, and I am merely
trying to show the size of the haystack in which we must hunt for our
needle.

The merest glance at the problem made it plain that the only starting
point was his last actually-known age--thirty-five. All else was the
blindest guesswork. And it was equally plain that the best likelihood of
finding him lay in the chance that he would more or less repeat (or seek
to repeat) his former experiences at that age. Past associations might
pull him, he might frequent some places rather than others, some persons
or class of persons rather than others. The question was, could his life
at thirty-five be so reconstructed that this hope should not be too
slender? That was my idea, and I began to ransack my memory in search of
indications that might further it.

But almost from the start I despaired. Sketched thus airily the thing
had a deluding look of logic and simplicity; but the first contact with
actuality scattered all to the winds again. For example, I have hinted
at an echo of an earlier wildness that had for some reason or other
overtaken him again at thirty-five; but when I came to examine it I
found that I knew almost nothing at all about it. He had always had the
decency to keep these things very much to himself. I had not the vaguest
idea of who his companions had been, what his haunts. Added to this was
the difficulty that I was approaching the question in reverse. He had
slept since I had last seen him, and, sleeping, had presumably once more
slipped back. But how far back? He might be (so to speak) at the crest
of the wave, farther back still at the beginning of it, or even past it
altogether--no longer the man of _An Ape in Hell_, but him of _The
Vicarage of Bray_. It was even not impossible that he was sixteen and
dead.... So all that I could do was to nail myself firmly down to
thirty-five and as much of him at that time as I could remember or
ascertain.

And instantly the question loomed up largely: "What about Julia
Oliphant? Hadn't she better be left out of this, at any rate for the
present?"

Now my position in the world practically forces the conventional
attitude on me. All things considered, I think I should adopt that
attitude in any case, for I have only to look at any other one and my
hesitation doesn't last long. But at the same time I do go to lectures
on such subjects as Relative and Absolute Age, and in other things, as I
have explained, I liked at that time to keep in step and abreast. I have
even made an attempt to understand the mystery that is called the
Thermionic Valve.

But neither valve nor age theory is newer or stranger to me than the
change that seems to have come over the sex-relationship during these
last years. I trust that on the whole I manage to maintain a happy
medium--it is the dickens of a thing to have sprung on one latish in
life--but I only know that I myself, old-fashioned as I am, sometimes
find myself discussing with the nicest women, and as freely as I should
discuss them with a man, the--may I say the "rummest" subjects? And as
for Julia Oliphant's attitude to all this newness, I will only say that
while she might have been ten years behind Madge Aird in matters of
dress, she was not ten minutes behind her in anything else.

But discussions "in the air" with her were one thing, but discussions of
an actual Derwent Rose at thirty-five quite another. "Oh, I know
perfectly well the sort of thing it _might_ have been, so don't let that
worry you," she had said, and for once, just once, I had had to be
precise. But once was enough. Call it the old fossil in me if you will,
but it makes a very great difference when a woman has said, as simply as
Julia had spoken, "Of course; all my life; not that he ever gave me a
thought, but that doesn't matter."

For those few words had placed us, instantly and beyond all recall, on a
footing of the last intimacy. They had revealed her once for all, and
the matter need never be referred to between us again. And as to a
swimmer the wavelet that slaps his face and fills his mouth with salt is
of more importance than all the immensities below, so we kept to the
level of the trifles of life. Often, at a word or a look, we were ready
to quarrel. Perhaps, in view of those still depths beneath, our
bickering was a necessity and a refuge.


III

That there was much of my search that I should have to conduct without
her was definitely brought home to me on the very first evening when I
took a stroll through the region of the West End theatres, still wearing
the suit I had worn all day. I ought to say that as I was paying his
rent for him I had allowed myself the use of his rooms, and for the
present 120 _bis_, Cambridge Circus, was one of my addresses. There was
always the chance that he might have forgotten something in 1920 of
which he had need in 1910, and that he might steal in, if only for a
moment, any dark night when things were quiet.

It was a beautiful London evening, not quite twilight. A tender
after-glow lay over the Circus, and, if jewels can grow, the lamps might
have been jewels a few moments after their birth. It was one of those
evenings when you delay even to dine, knowing that when you come out
again the glamour will have gone and you will have seen a loved and
familiar thing once more and once less. So I strolled, scanning faces,
sometimes remembering what I was scanning them for, sometimes forgetting
again. It might happen that I should find myself suddenly looking into
his face. Of course the chances were millions to one that I should not.

I walked as far as the Hippodrome, and then turned and crossed the road.
Even in those few minutes the sky was no longer the same. It was
mysteriously bluer, and the soft crocus-quality of the lamps had gone. I
found myself opposite a doorway with a coronet of lights over it and a
tall commissionaire beneath them. A man had just gone in. He was not in
the least like Rose, and there was no reason why I should have followed
him more than any other man; but I did follow him, not into the bright
and crowded and smoky ground-floor room of which I had a glimpse, but up
a staircase with brass-edged treads and the word "Lounge" at the bottom
of it. I found myself in an empty upper room with leather-covered sofas
set deeply into the walls, numerous little tables with green-tiled tops,
and a small quadrant of a bar in one corner. The man I had followed was
already at this bar, and the young woman behind it was preparing his
drink.

"Bit quiet, isn't it?" I heard him say. He had rather a pleasing sort of
face, of the kind that a year or two ago one associated with the brimmed
hat of an Australian trooper. "Say, is this the best London can do for a
man nowadays?"

"London nowadays!" the young woman declared with contempt. "_I_ should
say so! Where've _you_ been this long time? Where the bluebottles go to
in the winter I suppose. Don't you know this is a tea-room now?"

"Go on!"

"A tea-room, I tell you. Ladies not admitted after five. The new sign'll
be up to-morrow. Oh, you can bring your old grannie here now!"

"Bit different from Stiff Brown's time then!"

"Different!----"

The conversation continued, in the same sense. It was precisely my
Charbonnel's experience over again. Whatever notoriety the place might
once have possessed, it was now a perfectly reputable resort, a tea-room
in the afternoons, and in the evenings to all intents and purposes the
equivalent of my own Club. The woman behind the bar wore a wedding ring,
and I distinctly liked the look of her companion. And yet, with dramatic
suddenness, the whole prospect before me seemed to be all at once
illimitably enlarged.

For if a normal man like my friend at the counter was struck by the
changes of the past five years, how must they strike a man who had gone
through an experience so utterly abnormal as that of Derwent Rose?
Change is the normal condition of all things; the human mind is
marvellously able to adapt itself to altered circumstances in a week, a
day, an hour; memories lose their fresh edge, novelties amuse and give
way to newer novelties still. But all this is only for men who march
forward with their fellows. For the man who marches backwards all is
turned round. The memories stir and revive and bloom again, the
forgotten is re-remembered, laid ghosts begin to walk. The dulled brass
edges of staircases become bright again with the rubbing of light and
frail and vanished feet, recessed sofas in upper rooms thrill and rustle
with whispers and frou-frou and laughter again. Doubtless the living,
1920 successors of those ghosts were to be found elsewhere, but unless I
sought Derry in 1910 I knew not where to begin to look for him. Musingly
I descended the stairs and walked slowly back towards the Criterion
again. I no longer watched faces. The whole thing seemed hopeless. I had
about as much chance of finding Derwent Rose in London as I had of
catching one given drop of a summer shower.

And then, in that very moment, I saw him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Or rather it was the hansom that I saw first. It had just started
forward with the release of the traffic opposite Drew's, at the top of
Lower Regent Street.

Now a hansom in Piccadilly Circus to-day is perhaps not the rarity that
a sedan-chair would be; nevertheless hansoms are comparatively few, and
therefore conspicuous. The padded leaves of this one were thrown back,
and before I saw him I had already seen a white-sheathed ankle and a
white satin slipper.

Then he leaned forward for a moment.

It was unmistakably he.

The hansom passed along with the stream.

Unmistakably he--and yet, mingled with the perfect familiarity, there
was a change that I could not immediately analyse. Then (I am telling
you what flashed instantaneously through my mind in that fraction of
time before I had dashed after him)--then I had it! Familiar, yet not
altogether familiar! Of course!----

_His beard!_

At one time in the past Derwent Rose had worn a beard, the softest
sprouting of curling golden-brown. In certain lights it had been little
more than a glint that had scarcely hid the contours beneath, and it had
made him the living image of Du Maurier's drawings of Peter Ibbetson. He
now had that young beard again, and he and it and the hansom with the
white satin slippers in it had disappeared behind a bus opposite Swan
and Edgar's.

I dashed across to the island and dodged in front of the nose of a
horse; but I could not see the hansom. There were four directions in
which it could have gone: up Regent Street, Glasshouse Street,
Shaftesbury Avenue, or east past the Pavilion. Then a taxi slowed down
immediately in front of me, and I found myself standing on the step of
it, holding the door open with one hand and with the other pointing past
the driver's head.

"That hansom in front--follow that hansom----"

We tried Regent Street first, for I remember seeing the revolving doors
of the Piccadilly; but no hansom was to be seen. I thrust my head out of
the window again.

"Quick--turn--try Shaftesbury Avenue," I cried.

He turned, but not quickly. It was a good two minutes before we reached
the Grill Room entrance of the Monico. Then I lost my temper.

"A _hansom_, man--damn it, a _hansom_! Can't you follow the only hansom
left in London? Ask that man on point-duty----"

But I got the impression that the police do not look with too much
favour on roving orders to follow other vehicles to unspecified
addresses. The constable was curt.

"There was a hansom a minute ago. If you've got his number try Scotland
Yard. Come along, you can't stop here----"

I sank back cursing. In the very moment when pure chance had given him
to me I had lost him again. By this time he was probably half a mile
away. There was nothing whatever to be done.

"Where to now?" grunted the driver.

Nothing to be done--nothing whatever.

"Cambridge Circus, 120," I said.

As well there as anywhere else. He might just possibly be on his way
there. He still had a key the duplicate of which was in my own pocket.

I descended at Cambridge Circus, let myself in and mounted to his rooms.
He was not there, for no light showed under the door. I switched on,
hung up my hat in his little recess, and sat down on his sofa. Then,
mortified, but trying to tell myself that I was not actually any worse
off, I sought to dissect that momentary impression of him that was all
that remained to me.

A hansom, and his beard again! That antiquated black-mutton-chop-shape
balanced on two spidery wheels, and that fair and tender sprouting! Both
were anachronistic, and yet there was a certain suitability about both.
Comparatively few young Englishmen have beards nowadays, but then
comparatively few young Englishmen are in their forties and their
thirties at the same time. He had always looked handsome in his beard,
rather like something from a Greek or Roman gallery come to life again,
and so he was right to have let it grow. As for the hansom, he might
have taken it merely because it was the last vehicle left on the rank,
refused by everybody, else, or there might have been a subtler reason
for his choice. A browny-gold beard and a hansom! Yes, both were "in the
picture."

But neither beard nor hansom helped me to what I most anxiously wanted
to know--how far back in years he had now gone. In the ordinary way a
beard may make a young man look older; but then Rose was paradoxically
younger than he was. He might now be twenty-five who looked thirty-five
because of the beard, or he might be thirty-five looking precisely that
age.

I would have given fifty pounds at that moment for one long, steady look
at him in a good light.

However, certain things were in their way reassuring. He was in London,
and apparently he was not avoiding its most central places. He had worn
a hat of soft grey velours that I had not seen before, and a
new-looking, well-cut jacket of grey cheviot. As he had disappeared in
navy-blue, he thus had money to spend on clothes. He had further looked
in magnificent health, and a man who has health, money, youth and a
pretty satin-slippered foot near his own has a number of very good
things indeed. I might therefore dismiss the workmen's-tram and
dock-gates side of the affair. If Derwent Rose was not having a good
time he ought to have been.

And yet at the same time I was uneasy. I will not put on any airs about
the reason for my uneasiness. White satin slippers in hansoms had very
little to do with it, and tearooms that had once been something else
even less. These are ordinary everyday things, and there must be
something wrong with the eyes of a man who does not see them at every
turn--I had almost added something wrong with the mind of a man who
magnifies these beyond their proper importance. But when you propose to
find a friend by a process of reconstruction of the past phases of his
life, you must be prepared for a shock or two; and what I did now begin
extraordinarily to resent, among these vulgar and everyday things, was
Rose's not being a vulgar everyday man.

For what had the author of _The Hands of Esau_ and _The Vicarage of
Bray_ to do with all this? True, he had been in it, whether of it or
not, as we can none of us shake off the trammels of the flesh until we
do so once for all; but the only Derwent Rose with whom properly I had
any concern was the man who, into whatever suspect place he had
penetrated, had kept something fair and secret and unsullied all the
time.

Yet here I was, proposing to look for what was precious and enduring in
him, yet prepared to set (as it were) my trap with the grossest possible
bait. I was going to catch the best of him by means of the worst, and
was deliberately and cold-bloodedly laying my plans to that end.

I flushed at the thought; and then I found myself growing angry with him
also. Suddenly I resented the fact that he was alive at all. Why,
instead of having contracted this nightmare of a thing that he had
contracted, couldn't he have died? Why couldn't he have got himself
killed in the war? We respect the decency of the dead; why must I
violate his, who had chosen this extraordinary alternative to death? Was
this the way to write a friend's epitaph? Must immortelles of this
common and saddening mortality be laid on his unlocated grave? Why not
write him off--treat him as dead--give up a search that honoured neither
him nor me--go back to Julia and tell her that the thing simply couldn't
be done?

It seems to me, knitting my brows there that night in his room, that I
could do nothing better than that.

But precisely there was the dickens of it. He was _not_ dead. How regard
a man as dead whom you have seen in the flesh not an hour before? Dead?
He was alive, well-dressed, driving a woman somewhere in a hansom, and
certainly looking as if he ate four square meals a day and enjoyed them.
_Had_ he been dead, well and good; but since he was about as alive as a
man could be, the tombstone virtues I was concocting to his memory
looked unpleasantly like a sentimental shirking of the whole question.
They reminded me of hypocrite mourning, with a drop of something warm
with sugar to take the edge off the grief. They looked as if I wanted to
have him off my mind, to feel luxuriously about him, to be able to say
to myself, "This friend of mine was a good and exemplary man"--and then
perhaps at any moment to hear his step behind me, that of a man not good
or exemplary in this sense at all. I seemed to hear him softly laughing
at me: "So _that's_ the yarn you're going to put about, is it: that I
was all barley-sugar and noble prose? But let me tell you that
Shakespeare and I hit on some of our best notions with a mug of beer in
our hands! Great stuff, beer; nearly as good as music.... Don't be a
humbug, George."

So it looked as if I was for seeking him only in the politer places,
knowing all the time that I should not find him there; and I reflected a
little bitterly that had the boot been on the other leg he would have
known where to look for me. He would have walked straight into the first
place where easygoing people take the softest way with one another, give
praise for praise, and by and by get knighthoods for it. He would have
looked for me there. And he would have had an excellent chance of
finding me.

I hope I have not wearied you with these quasi-heroics about friendship.
They were dispelled quickly enough. Suddenly there happened something
that arrested the beating of my heart.

I heard the sound of feet on the stairs outside. They were accompanied
by a woman's soft laugh and a man's deeper muttering.

My skin turned crisp with fright. I am afraid I lost my head as
completely as ever I lost it in my life. Friendship or no friendship, I
gave him the benefit of not one single doubt. If he was coming in there
was one thing to do and one only--to make a dash and get away out of it.

Again I heard the laugh. It came from the landing immediately below. A
step or two higher, and----

I sprang to the electric light and switched it off.

The little curtained hat-and-coat recess stood just within the door. I
made a tiptoe leap for it. As I did so I remembered with thankfulness
one of the recess's peculiarities. It abutted so close up to the
door-frame on the side where the lock and handle were that Rose had had
the switch moved to the other side. The opening door would therefore be
between him and the switch. That would be my moment. He would see my
things scattered about his room the moment he turned on the light, but
that could be explained later. To get away was the urgent thing.

Violently agitated, the curtains grasped in my hand, I stood prepared to
make my spring. The feet had stopped outside the door. I heard the
striking of a match. I waited for the touch of the key on the lock.

Then, "What, up again?" I heard the man's voice say....

The feet passed on to the floor above. I never knew who lived there.
Rose's bell was the third of four, counting from the bottom.


IV

I have not told you the foregoing because I am proud of it. At the best
I had behaved childishly, at the worst--but we will come to that
presently. Had it really been he I should probably not have had the
remotest chance of ever getting past him. He would have vaulted a
handrail in the dark, taken a flight in two bounds, and would have had
his hand--that hand that tore books in two--on my neck. Had he
recognised me he would have wanted to know what the devil I was doing in
his rooms. Had he failed to recognise me I should as likely as not have
gone through the window. One takes risks when one intrudes on the loves
of the giants.

At the same time, I will do myself the justice to say that physical
risks were not my first consideration. Vast as his strength was, it was
the part of him I least feared. What I did fear, what I was now
beginning to think I had not nearly sufficiently allowed for, was the
enormous spiritual and mental range of the man.

Up to that moment in his life when he had become so mysteriously turned
round, this very width and range had resulted in a state of balance, as
the tightrope-walker is balanced by the length of his pole. But to
consider either of his extremes separately was to have a cold shiver.
Often I had thought, "I'm thankful I haven't your burden of personality
to bear, my friend. Much better to be the millionth man and take
everything on trust. The way to be happy on this earth is to be just a
shell of useful and comfortable and middling habits. Stick to the
second-hand things of life and let the new ones alone. Any kind of
singularity is a curse, and your life is one dreadful yawning question.
You've no business to have the first dawn in your eyes and the last
trump in your ears like that. The world has no need of that kind of man.
What you need is another world somewhere else."

And he had marvellously contrived to find this other world, and had it
all, all to himself.

And here was I proposing to dig him out of it.

Can you guess now what it was that I had begun to fear more than his
physical strength? It was the whole ungauged pressure of his
personality. In behaving as foolishly as I had just behaved I had wished
to spare both myself and him the humiliation of an intrusion on a vulgar
amour. Now it occurred to be, Why a "vulgar" one at all? Vulgarity is
for us smaller people, who are vulgar enough to think that anything that
is created is vulgar. But Derwent Rose had so striven that every dawn
was the first dawn of creation for him. He had no habits, had daily
sought to see the world as if it had never been seen before. Abysses
must open for him every time he passed a huddle on a park bench,
protoplasmic re-beginnings stare out at him from every chance glance of
a street-walker's eyes.... Oh, I am far from envying him. I should
blench to have a mind like that. To no possession that I have do I cling
half so dearly as I do to my narrowness and to my prejudice. I _am_ the
millionth man, and I thank God on my knees for it. One of the other kind
has been my friend....

Suppose then that one day I should surprise him in some act, stupid and
meaningless to myself, but as fraught with tremendousness for him as was
that first command, "Let there be Light!" What would happen then? You
see what I am driving at. Up to now my idea had been, quite simply, to
find him. I had sought him much as I might have sought a truant
schoolboy, who would consent to be scolded and brought back to ordinary
life again. Small practical difficulties, mostly in connection with his
altered appearance, I had anticipated, but these I had intended to deal
with as they arose. In a word, I had assumed his willingness, his also,
to be the millionth man.

But how if he should refuse with scorn? What was the state of his
balance, not in my eyes, but in his? When I had last seen him he had
trembled in equilibrium, and to his fluctuations I had off-handedly
applied the terms "worse" and "better." But what were such terms to
him?... I will do as I did before--try to set it out in parallel
columns. Here was a missing man, a man of unusual range and powers, to
whose state of poise something had happened. It was this man's daily
endeavour to accept nothing at second-hand, to disregard all names,
labels, customs, tags, appearances, verdicts, records, precedents. His
life was one long probing into the essential nature of things. I might,
therefore, expect to find:

  The Derwent Rose who      _or_    The Derwent Rose who might have
  had said, when I had              replied, "Whisky? Well, it has
  offered him the whisky,           interesting effects sometimes.
  "No, no--blast it,                Somebody once called it a short
  no--water!"                       cut to a psychic experience. If
                                    a psychic experience is what
                                    you are after, why take the
                                    roundabout way? Let's try it."

  The Derwent Rose who      _or_    The Derwent Rose who might have
  had torn off his collar,          growled, "Well, what is there
  but who had also cried,           extraordinary about that?
  "Good God, man, I'm               Perhaps it isn't anything to
  not bragging of my                make a song about, but don't
  conquests--don't think            pretend you've never heard of
  I'm not ashamed!"                 such a thing before. It happens
                                    every night, you know."

  The Derwent Rose who had  _or_    The Derwent Rose who might
  sat in a hansom with a            have said, "Men are men and
  white satin slipper as            women are women. This is also
  openly and innocently as          Piccadilly Circus. Look round.
  I might have sat to               Can't _you_ find anything
  Julia Oliphant for my             better to do than to hunt for
  portrait.                         a man who is--not at home to
                                    anybody this evening?"

  The Derwent Rose who      _or_    The Derwent Rose who cared
  loved beauty and hated            nothing for the name of
  ugliness.                         anything, destroyed stale and
                                    outworn canons of beauty with
                                    a laugh, and sought a fresher
                                    loveliness in a world where
                                    nothing is common or unclean.

But once more I had to give it up. That baffling down of golden beard
had obliterated every physical indication. He might be in a church--for
an assignation. He might be in a drinking-hell--lost in images of beauty
and sweetness and power.

And what kind of a _Salle des Pas Perdus_ is London in which to look for
a man like that? The whole thing became an illimitable phantasmagoria of
virtue and vice, nobility and degradation, expressed in terms of bricks
and stones and buildings and streets. Sitting brooding among his black
oak furniture, I tried to envisage even that merest fragment of it all
that was being enacted within a quarter of a mile at that moment.
Whitfield's Tabernacle--and for all I knew an opium den within a
biscuit's toss of it; the Synagogue--and the lady upstairs. I pictured
the tenements behind the Shaftesbury with their iron balconies and
emergency-ladders; and I saw young lovers in their stalls at the Palace.
I saw the bright Hampstead buses, and the masked covertness of the
flitting taxis. I heard the slap and thump of beer-pumps, children's
simple prayers. Images floated before me of the gloom of
cinema-interiors, the green-shaded glow-lamps of orchestras, the
rippling of incandescent advertisements, the blackness of the jam
factory yard. There were pockets with money in them, money to buy all
the world has to sell; and there were pockets empty of the price of a
cup of coffee at the back-street barrows. There were hearts with love in
them, love as boundless as heaven's blue, and there were hearts from
which love had passed, hearts as musty as the graves that waited for
them. All but Infinity itself was to be found within a few hundred yards
of where I sat.

And flitting uniquely through it all was this man whose privacy was so
public, whose publicness was so unutterably private. He might be met at
any step, and yet, of all the millions living, there was not one he
could call contemporary. For he was the only man in the world who was
growing younger instead of older. He of all men alone was passing from
experience to innocence, through the murk of his former sins to the
perfection of his own maximum and the unimpaired godhead of his prime.

       *       *       *       *       *

"But you mightn't see him again for another twenty years!" Julia
protested, shaking out her napkin and laughing for the sheer
bewilderment of it.

I had chosen the small restaurant in Jermyn Street because it had no
band to distract us.

"I know all that," I retorted. "But if you think that just sitting there
loving him is going to produce him, your way may take even longer than
mine."

"Pooh!" she said, breaking her roll. "You're wasting your time."

"Don't be irritating, Julia." It irritated me because it was so true.
"It's my time anyway."

"No it isn't, not all of it. What about my sittings?" (There had not yet
been any, by the way.) "The canvas is ready as soon as you are."

"I'll grow a beard, and then you won't want to paint me," I replied.

Her eyes had sparkled when I had told her about Derry's beard; I had
thought she was going to clap her hands. Except for Derry's golden one
(she had said) she had never seen a beard that wasn't nasty. I myself
(she had informed me) should look a perfect horror in one, and unless I
remained clean-shaven she refused to be seen about with me.... So our
customary quarrel blew up. We wrangled about one trifle and another
half-way through dinner. It probably did us good, for underneath we were
both badly on edge. Then along the edge of the table she slid a bent
little finger. It was her way of making up. The finger rested in mine
for a moment.

"Well," I sighed, "I told you all I saw. I'm afraid that beard threw me
quite out of my reckoning."

She mused. "I once drew him with his beard, from memory. In armour. He
looked just like King Arthur come to life again. I've got it yet.... But
let's look at the thing reasonably, George. I admit there's something to
be said for having a _pied-a-terre_ in his rooms. He might just possibly
turn up there. It might also be--hm!--awkward if he did.... But the
rest, all this hunting for him, that's a wash-out. You know it is."

I was silent. Then again I saw in her eyes what I had seen before--the
beginning of a soft deep shining, as if some diver's lamp moved beneath
the waters at night.

"No, I prefer my way," she said, suddenly sitting straight up.

"Doing nothing at all?"

"Fiddlesticks! _I'm_ supposed to sit and listen respectfully when _you_
talk, but _you_ never listen to what _I've_ got to say. I told you what
my way was. I'll tell you again. I had tea at Daphne Bassett's flat this
afternoon."

"I hope you found Puppetty well," I remarked.

The kindling eyes were steadily on mine.

"Puppetty," she said slowly, "is in the greatest favour. Puppetty has
wing-portions for dinner and bovril to go to bed with. Puppetty's to
have a new quilt for being a good little doggles and protecting his
mummie----"

"What on earth----" I began.

Then I sat up as suddenly as if I had been galvanised.

"Julia! You don't mean----?"

She nodded, darkling devils of mischief under that cool smooth brow.

"What, that _he's_ still looking for _her_?"

"He's found her. He spoke to her a couple of days ago."

"And she recognised him?"

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't she recognise him?"

"Didn't know him from Adam."

"Then how do you know it was he?"

I cannot convey the lightness of her disdain. "How do I know!----"

I leaned back in my chair. To think that I had not thought of this, the
oldest of all stratagems! _Guettez la femme!_ Runaways are caught by it
every day, and always will be. They are released from custody and placed
under observation so that they may walk straight into the trap. That is
why the trick is old--it never fails. And I had not thought of it!

She wore her triumph with such present moderation that I knew I had not
heard the last of it.

"Yes," she continued, "she told me all about it. It was on Monday
evening, about seven o'clock, and she was coming up the little street by
St. James's Church, where the Post Office is. She fancied she'd noticed
a man following her, a very big handsome man with a golden beard."

"Is that her description of him?" I interrupted.

"Yes. That's why I wasn't much surprised when you told me about his
beard. Then outside the Post Office the outrage happened. He spoke to
her. Spoke to her, George. Try to realise it."

"Well, if she'd no idea who he was it wasn't a pleasant thing to have
happen."

She gave a soft laugh. "He's very good-looking," she said brazenly.

"Julia, if you were naturally a catty sort of woman----"

"Don't interrupt, George. I am artificially then. If you don't want to
hear go out and look for hansoms. And whatever else you're sententious
about don't be sententious about women. Now I've forgotten what I was
going to say."

"You said he spoke to her outside the Post Office."

"Behave yourself then. He did speak to her, and she set Puppetty at
him."

"_What!_" I cried.

"Quite so, dear George. _As_ you say. Fearfully pleased and excited
really. Quite a romance. And of course she'd have given anything _not_
to set Puppetty at him."

"Then why in the name of goodness did she?"

Julia gave an exhausted sigh. "If ever you marry, George, heaven help
Lady Coverham!... Why did she? Because she had to. She's that sort.
They've got to do certain things because that sort does, but they _do_
so wish they needn't! Virtue's a funny thing. If you don't want that ice
may I have it?"

"But look here," I said presently. "If he'd said straight out, as any
man in his position would have done, 'I say, I know this is a bit
unusual, but my name's Derwent Rose, and there's something I want to
explain'--and so on--you see what I mean. Then she'd have known who he
was."

"Well, I'm afraid I'm not responsible for what he didn't say."

"What exactly did he say?"

She gave a shrug. "What do men say? They don't stop _me_ outside post
offices. You never did; if all this hadn't happened I don't suppose I
should ever have known you one scrap better. I dare say he was a bit
rattled too. Anyway she didn't stop to think. She just set the dog at
him, legged it, and she's as pleased as Punch still."

"You're quite sure she didn't recognise him?"

"Oh, quite. She'd tell me in a minute. She'd love to be able to say
she'd had Derwent Rose at her feet."

"I suppose so," I sighed. "Did you ask her what aged man
this--marauder--looked?"

"What do you think? Of course I did. Doesn't everything turn on that?
But she could only tell me, 'Oh, about thirty-three or four--thirty-five
perhaps.' The very thing we want to know ... but she was in such a hurry
to be virtuous...."

Her brow was no longer smooth. Her voice rose a little and then dropped
again.

"You see how much turns on which it is--thirty-five or thirty-three. You
say he was struggling with himself that night, sweating with funk,
wanting to hang on. And yet the moment you turned your back he bolted,
and he's riding about with ladies in hansoms."

"Come, my dear!" I protested. "There's nothing in that! All men drive
about with women. For that matter I drove you part of the way here."

But she cut me impatiently short.

"Oh, I don't mean that at all! That's nothing to me! I don't care who he
takes in hansoms; I've nothing to gain and nothing to lose. I want him
to have just whatever he wants. But I told you he knew nothing about
women. He's never been in love in his life. Oh, I'm explaining badly,
but what I mean is that if you're going to find him by going through
London with a dustman's besom and scraper, that's as much as to say that
he isn't happy. That's what hurts me. He was miserable at thirty-five
before--miserable and ashamed. _But the moment he's thirty-three
again_----"

I watched the long white fingers that tapped softly for a minute on the
table before she resumed.

"_Then_ he's all right," she said in a low and moved voice. "He was
writing the _Vicarage_ then. I saw--oh, quite lots of him. He used to
'blow in,' as he called it, with a 'Hallo, Julia! I'm having rather a
devil of a good time these days; writing a book that will make some of
'em sit up and take notice; I've done a quarter of it in three weeks;
how's that for a little gentle occupation?' Yes, I saw quite a lot of
him at thirty-three. I had a studio near Cremorne Road. It wasn't really
a studio, but a sort of gutted top floor, big enough to have given a
dance in, and my bed was behind a curtain that was drawn right across
one end. I used to give him tea there--Patum Paperium sandwiches he
liked--and he was sweet. Once I'd an illustration to do for some stupid
story or other, about a sort of Sandow-and-Hackenschmidt all rolled into
one, and do you know what he did? He looked at my drawing, took it to
the window, and then laughed. 'I say, Julia, this will never do!' he
said. 'When a man lifts a heavy thing like that he does it _from the
earth_, you understand--you do everything that's worth doing from the
earth. So you've got to see his feet are right. Anybody likely to come
in here? No? Right; I don't mind you. Got anything heavy here? You get
your paper and pencil.' And he stripped to the belt and picked up my
sewing-machine and posed for me. He did...."


V

I seemed to see the scene in bright illumination, him in that upper room
with the curtains drawn across one end, his jacket and shirt tossed on
to a chair, his great torso stripped to the buff, the sewing-machine
held aloft. She would be at her board or easel, sketching--pretending to
sketch--I don't know what. He had merely said, "Anybody likely to come
in? No? Right! I don't mind you!"

It was true. He hadn't minded her. Otherwise he would never have
displayed himself so gloriously before her eyes.

"Did that illustration ever appear?" I asked without looking at her.

I knew without looking that she smiled as she shook her head.

"Not that one. You know it didn't. The first one was good enough for
them."

And she still had the King Arthur sketch too.

"And that was when he was thirty-three?"

Now that she was off there was no stopping her, even had I wished it.

"Yes. Did you know--will you believe--that he wrote his _Vicarage_ in
just over three months?"

"He was a furious worker."

"That's just where you're wrong, George," she said eagerly. "At that
time at any rate. He was as cool as this ice. He just digested those
gigantic masses of information, and then, except for the trouble of
writing it down, he never turned a hair. I'll tell you the things that
did make him furious; those were his rottenest short stories, the things
he used to have to do to pay his rent. He always knew they were the
wrong sort of rottenness. Any kind of rottenness won't do for the
public. You've got to be rotten in quite a specialised way."

"Thank you."

"But the bigger a thing was the easier he always found it. He used to
say that if a thing was hard work there was something wrong somewhere.
Why, he'd take whole days off when he was at his very busiest. He came
into my place one morning--the same place, Cremorne Road--before
half-past eight. I was just finishing breakfast; I hadn't done my hair;
if you must know, I was rather a sloven at that time. He was in his
breeches and cap and a soft collar. 'Down tools, Julia,' he said; 'we're
off into the country for the day.' 'But, Derry, your book!' I said,
rather aghast (he'd told me a day or two before that the _Vicarage_ was
a race against time or else bankruptcy for him in the autumn). 'Oh,
that's all right; it's finished as far as I'm concerned; the pen'll do
the rest; come along just as you are.' So I put my hair up, and we went
to Chalfont, and got horribly midge-bitten, and there was an old man
playing the harp outside a little public-house where we had tea, and I
remember Derry jumped over a five-barred gate with his stick in his hand
and his pipe in his mouth...."

She remembered every detail. I don't think she had ever once seen him
but she remembered what he had on, how he had looked, what he had talked
about. These were the still depths I spoke of, of which the rest was no
more than the salt spray surface. I might be hanging about Cambridge
Circus on the off-chance of his coming for a paper or a book or
something; but I believe that in her heart something was already
rekindling, and that she was even then waiting to receive him again in
that upper room off Cremorne Road.

"Well," she said at last, "this is all very well, but it isn't getting
us much forrader. Of course he may be thirty-five still. In that case I
suppose you'll carry on as you are doing. But let's suppose for a moment
he's back at thirty-three. I'm afraid that'll mean a good deal of work
for you, George. You've got to start on an entirely new set of places.
Let me see, what year would that be? Yes, 1908. Where was he mostly in
1908?"

"In your studio apparently."

"Oh, he was never there very much really. I dare say he only came at all
because it was near and he'd drawn a blank somewhere else; he lived in
Paulton's Square, you know. No, you'd have to look for him in the
British Museum Reading Room, or the lobby of the House of Commons, or
wherever the Blue Books are kept, or some other place where he'd be
digging out all that terrible _Vicarage_ stuff. Or if it happened to be
a Thursday night you might try the Eyre Arms; he used to go up there to
the Belsize Boxing Club. Cheer up, George. I'm only showing you what
you've let yourself in for."

"Well, it's no good looking for him in the fourth dimension. He's got to
be in some sort of a place. And I admit that I was a fool, and that you
found him simply by sitting in Mrs Bassett's pocket."

"I didn't do that at all," she remarked composedly.

"Then I'm afraid I haven't understood you."

"Then let me tell you. I didn't sit in Daphne Bassett's pocket. I sat in
Daphne Wade's."

I stared at her. Was she suggesting that while she herself had loved him
since childhood, he for his part had loved Daphne Wade?

"Surely you're wrong there. If there was ever anything between her and
him I'm no judge of men."

"There may not have 'been anything.' But there was everything for all
that," she replied.

"That's merely enigmatic. Never mind 'everything.' Tell me what thing."

"All his dreams and ideals when he was a boy," she answered promptly.
"Isn't that everything in a man like him--the everything he's on his way
back to?"

"But he never loved her in the least, nor she him, as far as I'm aware."

"That I shall _never_ forgive her.... Don't you know yet why he never
knew anything about real women? It was simply because he was too wrapped
up in his dreams. He was so full of them that he couldn't see anything
truly for them. And now I'm afraid I'm going to dispel one of your most
cherished illusions, George. Do you know why his dreams all settled on
Daphne Wade? Oh, it had nothing to do with loving her!... It was simply
because she had that coloured hair. It _was_ rather like an aureole when
she was a child. And her eyes _were_ blue. In fact she'd all the
conventional angelic appliances except the wings, and he supplied those.
She'd nothing whatever else--little fool."

I frowned. Certainly she was entitled to speak of those early days
towards which his face was once more set, since she had known him then,
and I had not.

"Have some more coffee," I said. "I want to think this over."

But she only laughed softly.

"Oh, you needn't. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by simply taking
my word for it. In any case it's getting on for thirty years ago. Oh,
don't I just remember!... I was nine and he was fourteen; I was ten and
he was fifteen; I was eleven and he was sixteen. She's just a year older
than I am. Our pew was half-way down the church, but she sat up one of
the aisles, right under a stained-glass window there was. It used to
make that light on her hair. My hair was the wrong colour--I knew it
then--just a dark mop--but anyway it was full of life. It would still
have been dark, of course, even if I'd sat under the window instead of
her, but I've sometimes thought it might have made a difference. Then
there was all the rest; Dicksee's 'Harmony' sort of effect; all so cool
and dim and saintly; and the organ and the Psalms. _That's_ what filled
his head, and I honestly believe that unless women are just animals to
him he sees them like that still--just about as much flesh and blood as
that window was. All she had to do was to have that hair and those eyes
and to sit in the vicarage pew. Things are made very simple for some
women."

A long silence fell between us. Evidently she was back in that church,
an adoring wrong-coloured-haired girl of eleven, shifting in her seat to
see, past intervening bonnets and bald heads, Derry's browny-gold crown,
while he watched Daffy Wade and the window.

"But," I said at last, "aren't you rather anticipating? I thought we'd
settled he was thirty-five or thirty-three. That's making him sixteen
already."

She rose abruptly.

"George, do you realise that we're the last people here and that they've
turned half the lights out?" Then, drawing forward her furs from the
back of her chair, "It isn't making him anything of the sort. You're
more than thirty-five; but you sometimes _remember_ what you were at
sixteen, don't you?... Come and put me into my Tube and off you go to
bed. Who knows?--he might 'blow in' to Cambridge Circus----"

       *       *       *       *       *

"_You sometimes remember what you were at sixteen!_"

I wondered, as I walked slowly up Shaftesbury Avenue that night, whether
she realised what she had said. I hoped not. I prayed not; because her
words seemed to me to murder her own cherished hope--that he was safely
past that turbulent phase and back at thirty-three again.

For that poignancy of remembrance, I am glad to think, is more
frequently a man's than a woman's. It is the man who, slipping away,
away from his youth and innocence, down, down, slip after slip into the
mire of life, lifts his red and weeping eyes to what he used to be. And
when does that vision shine most agonisingly fair? Not in the hours of
his philosophy, when nothing unduly elates him and nothing too much
casts him down, but when he is in the slough as deep as he can get. Oh,
I know it, for I have sinned myself, have myself wept, for that
impossible heart-break--to be as I once was. And if Julia was right, and
he was not seeking Mrs Bassett at all, nor even Daphne Wade, but merely
his remembered self at sixteen, then he was _not_ thirty-three at all.
He had _not_ yet passed beyond that phase he had dreaded to re-live. He
was still in the mud, to have had that tear-blurred vision; still a
sinful man of thirty-five who remembered the morning star.

Well, Julia must not know that. This dark corollary was for my
shouldering, not hers. And as I resolved to keep it from her I wondered
at the marvel her own inner life had been.

For nearly thirty years it had consisted of Derwent Rose and of nothing
whatever else! None would have guessed it, none but I knew it, nothing
but Derry's unprecedented adventure would have dragged it from her. She
was a busy painter, of but moderate talent, and with her living to earn.
She could purr when she was pleased, but had claws ready to scratch with
as well. And, deep and unguessed behind it all, lay the story of those
Sussex fields and lanes, of that dreaming and ecstatic and unheeding
boy, of that same boy, grown-up and still unheeding, who had stalked in
and out of her studio, borne her off to Chalfont, held aloft her
sewing-machine. It seemed to me that her case was little less
extraordinary than his. I saw her as a woman who had never grown. She
was as she had always been, her life stultified with beauty, a poised
and arrested development of love.

And, unless I was mistaken, she had hardly sought to conceal her joy
that, as it had been, so it was to be again.

For he was journeying back to a place that in this sense she had never
left; and so he was journeying back to her. What though he had never
loved her? At any rate she was now rid of her last living rival. That
had been put to the test when Daphne Bassett had failed to recognise the
man who had spoken to her outside the Post Office in St. James's. She
would recognise him less and less as time went on. As for him, he would
merely go deeper and deeper into the heart of his inconceivable
solitude, and there, in the last and the centre of it, he would find
Julia Oliphant waiting for him--waiting for her always loved and lordly
boy of sixteen.

But how much must happen before then! For the first time I envisaged it
in its heartbreaking beauty. Lovely, apparently inevitable the close ...
but the way there? What, steeling her heart, must she see before that
meeting?

She must see a man whose last kiss was his first one, who unlived a
thousand adventures to become virgin in the end. She must see a man
living so unutterably long that he lived to write his first poem again.
She would see a man who had fought through a war of flame and poison
puckering his smooth brows over his first percussion-cap pistol. She
would see the dust of his athletic laurels stir, reassemble, bloom anew.
She would see the miracle of youth synthesised, the grail of his purity
mystically reappear. Not even Joshua saw what those liquid and already
tired brown eyes of hers must see--the sun of a man's life pause at
noon, swing contrary to its orbit, and move back to set where it rose.

And all at once there came over me a whelming of passionate emotion for
this woman so singled out. It was the emotion one feels over an infant
whose eyes open for the first time on the world--compassion and ache and
hapless tenderness and hope for the best. Would she be able to bear her
destiny? Would she, had such a thing been possible, have elected never
to have been born rather than bear it? Could I help her? If things
should unfold as they were well in motion to unfold, could any power on
earth help her?

I began to suspect that, unless she renounced him once for all, and that
quickly, no power on earth would be able to help her.

       *       *       *       *       *

I don't know why I did not pack up my things and go back to Haslemere. I
no longer pretended to be looking for Derwent Rose in London, and I had
not given one single sitting for my portrait. Yet, though I could not
help Julia, I felt myself unable to leave her. If I did not see her for
an evening I was disturbed, lost what to do with myself. Several of
these evenings came, and still I lingered on.

Then, I think on the fourth evening after I had given Julia dinner in
Jermyn Street, the history of Derwent Rose moved forward--or
backward--once more.

I had thought of looking up Madge Aird that evening, but at the last
moment had changed my mind. I did not feel up to Madge's liveliness. So
I hung round that now so-drearily-familiar neighbourhood instead--the
neighbourhood between Leicester Square Tube Station and Tottenham Court
Road. I walked till I was tired, and then, more for the sake of sitting
down than for any other reason, I entered a picture-house on the west
side of Shaftesbury Avenue. I did not choose that one in particular. It
was just like any other picture-house except that it had a small organ
built into the wall high up in one corner. This organ was ceasing to
play as I entered. The principal drama of the programme was just over.

As it chanced, I had arrived just in time for one of those rather
curious effects that are obtained when the film is put through the
machine extremely slowly. You know the kind I mean. A racehorse in full
career picks up and puts down his legs as if they were fronds of seaweed
moving lazily in water; a golf-ball trickles uncannily across the green,
rising and falling idly over each minute obstacle, and then floats
gently down into the hole. In spite of my languor I found myself
interested in these analyses of motion. It is curious to see
instantaneousness taking its time over a thing like that.

Then that series also finished, and I felt in my pocket for my cigarette
case. As I drew out a cigarette and struck a match somebody behind me
leaned forward and touched me lightly on the shoulder.

"I say, isn't your name Coverham?" a man's voice said.

The match was still in my fingers. I looked over my shoulder in the
light of it. Then I dropped the match.

I had not found him. He had found me. It was Derwent Rose.




PART III

THE STRAPHANGER


I

He was not far from the end of the row, and in reaching him I had not to
disturb more than three or four people. Though it is inadequate, I have
decided that the single word that best expresses the way in which he
spoke is the word "careful." He spoke slowly, and, it seemed to me, with
extreme care.

"Interesting idea that last, isn't it? Restful. Things go at such a
deuce of a rate nowadays that it's a comfort to see anything slow. Well,
how are you, George? I haven't seen you for--some little time."

It was precisely three weeks since he had last seen me, and I noted that
slight, that very slight hesitation before his last words.

"Do you often come here? I--I rather keep away from these places myself;
they put everything through much too quickly; but I rather like this one
because of the organ. Of course they only play 'effects'--'Ora Pro
Nobis' and the 'Wedding March'--but there's something about an
organ.... I say, George," he said a little uncomfortably, "I've a sort
of feeling I owe you an apology."

"Well, this is hardly the place for it. We can't talk here. If you've
seen all you want suppose we go outside?"

The thing I wanted first of all was to have a good look at him. Already
I could see that he no longer had a beard. But my surreptitious glance
at him as we passed out into the lighted vestibule and past the
box-office told me little. On the pavement of Shaftesbury Avenue he
slipped his arm into mine.

"Yes, I fancy I talked an awful lot of rubbish that night--bit of an ass
of myself--you remember----"

I did not reply. The important thing was, not whether I remembered, but
whether his memory was all that it should have been, for he was
forgetting something even as he spoke. He remembered that other night,
he had remembered my name; but if he remembered that he had rooms and
belongings in Cambridge Circus he was very deliberately turning down
Shaftesbury Avenue instead of up it. But I went where he led me. I was
resolved, however, that the moment his arm left mine, mine should go
into his. I was not going to let him disappear again.

The typical Soho mixture thronged the pavements: Hebrew physiognomies,
Italian, Greek; dark chins, bold eyes, bold noses; rings and scarfpins,
fancy socks, the double-heeled silk stockings of women. As I could not
very well scrutinise his face at that short range I did the next best
thing; I watched the faces that advanced towards us. As if he had been a
pretty woman, so heads turned as he passed. They turned as they turn for
Billy Wells. It was not so much his size and proportions as his whole
personal aura. He stood out among all that flashy cosmopolitanism as if
a special and inherent light attended him.

"Which way are we going? Where do you live?" I suddenly asked him. It
was not the question I was burning to ask him. That question was,
"_When_ do you live?" I felt the slight movement of the muscles under
his sleeve, but he answered steadily enough--carefully enough.

"Oh, I've been rather lucky about that," he said. "I happened to be in
the wine-bar of an hotel in Gloucester Road one night, and I got talking
to a fellow. I fancied I'd come across him somewhere in France--as a
matter of fact I had, though he didn't remember me. Anyway, we'd started
talking, and we went on. Rather an amusing crowd there, George. If I
were asked to put in one word the basic domestic factor of their lives,
do you know what it would be? A pint of methylated spirits. They don't
pay half a crown for it at the chemist's; they pay one-and-twopence at
the oilshop. To boil their kettles, of course. They all fought, they're
all gentlemen, and they're all doing damn-all to make a living. So they
take garrets and rooms over garages, and cook their breakfasts with
methylated spirits. This fellow was called Trenchard. Got all messed up
at the Brick Stacks, La Bassee way. He had to go out of town for a
month, and said I could have his place for the bare rent, twenty-five
bob a week, and the use of his furniture for nothing. So that's where I
am. This way----"

We turned into Leicester Square Tube Station.

In the train I sat opposite to him; and, now that he had taken his beard
off, I couldn't see that he had changed very remarkably in outward
appearance after all. Nevertheless I distrusted my own impression. I
knew that I was full of pre-conceptions about him, knew too much of his
astonishing case to observe impartially and reliably. There are some
things--some scents for example--that you have to make up your mind
immediately about or else to remain in indecision. The longer you delay
the less sure you become. So I found it with his face in the
electric-lighted Tube. It was, of course, astoundingly young for a man
in the middle forties; but call him thirty-five and much of the wonder
disappeared. The most that a casual acquaintance would have been likely
to remark was, "How the deuce does Rose manage to keep so
extraordinarily young-looking?" True, his friend Trenchard had failed to
recognise the man with whom he had fought at La Bassee, but that meant
little. There were millions of men in France, each the spit of the rest
for mud and momentariness of acquaintance. To-day, by mere association
of times and places and battles, these men are in fact resuming
acquaintances they have no recollection of ever having begun. "Oh, I've
a rotten memory for faces--seen So-and-so lately? And I say, do you know
anybody who wants to take a quiet place for a month?" That, no doubt,
had been the substance of that conversation in the Gloucester Road
wine-bar.... And there was another thing of which I shall have more to
say by and by. I began to suspect that whatever strange element in
Derwent Rose had brought him to this pass, that element reacted on those
of us who knew his secret. He probably became less extraordinary in our
eyes as contemplation of him made us not quite ordinary ourselves.
Julia Oliphant (it seemed to me) he had already influenced, constrained,
isolated. We were getting used to him. But I shall return to this.

In the meantime I was considerably cheered. He remembered that other
night; he wanted to apologise for the lunacy of it; he had given a
perfectly coherent account of his present whereabouts and how he came to
be there, and his summing-up of the fellows whose basic domestic factor
was a pint of methylated spirits had given me a clear and
straightforward picture. As for the rest--why he had left Cambridge
Circus, what it was that he found restful in those slowed-down films,
and especially the measured carefulness of his speech--for the present
these things could wait.

We left Gloucester Road Station, turned up towards Princes Gate, and
then crossed the road and entered a dark gardened Square. Three minutes
further walking brought us to a high stone archway with a heavily carved
and moulded entablature, beneath which a cobbled way sloped slightly
down into a mews. To right and left were garage-doors, some closed,
others open and flinging shafts of orange light across the way.
Somewhere an engine was being allowed to "race"; somewhere else a hose
was being turned on to the body of a car. High over the roofs of the
mews, as if suspended at random in the sky, the oblongs of light of the
South Kensington backs showed. One unshaded incandescent burned on a top
landing like a star.

"Let me go first; I've got a torch," said Derry, stopping at a narrow
side-door next to where the car was being washed. "You'll find the rope
on the right."

The moon of his electric torch shone on the broad treads of a
steep-pitched ladder that rose to a loft above. Up one side of it ran a
hand-rope. He preceded me, and on the upper landing lighted a wire-caged
gas-jet. Then I followed him into Trenchard's abode.

He had described the place admirably well when he had spoken of the
methylated spirits, adding that Trenchard was a gentleman. A few pieces
of furniture--notably a tall walnut hanging-cupboard and a handsome
lacquered cabinet--were evidently family possessions; the rest--his
cretonne curtains, floor-mats, the blue-and-white check tablecloth on
the thick-legged Victorian table and the glimpse into his
kitchen--probably represented the greater part of his gratuity-money.
Every ledge and angle and cheap bracket was crowded with photographs,
and there were trees in his long row of boots. His central incandescent
mantle was unshaded. Two deep basket chairs stood one on either side of
where the hearth should have been. The portable oil-burning stove was
tucked away in a corner.

"You soon get used to the noises," said Rose with a downward nod of his
head. "I scarcely hear 'em now.--Lemonade? It's bottled, but not bad;
tastes of lemons anyway. There's a siphon behind you there."

He put me into one of the basket chairs and himself took the other.
Then, without the least warning, but still with that marked effort at
steadiness and care, he said:

"Well, what price the world-political state, George? Not home-politics,
but the whole thing--democracy--civilisation if you like----"

If he had asked me what I thought of the theory of relativity I should
have been readier with an answer. As it was I looked askance at him and
asked him what made him so suddenly ask me that.

"Oh, same old reason," he replied. "I expect it's a subject I shall have
to tackle. In a book. I wonder if it's too big! It pulls me enormously.
I don't know whether we're in for a general smash-up or not. Sometimes
I've the feeling we are."

Something within me, I don't know what, warned me that here it might be
well to be as careful as he. The safest thing to do appeared to be to
let him run on, and I did so.

"Yes," he continued, his fine smooth brow gathered in thought, "I know
it's enormous; perhaps too staggering altogether for one man. But do you
know," he laughed a little as if at himself, "I wonder whether it _is_
so enormous after all! There might be quite a simple idea underlying it,
I mean. What's more enormous than human nature? Yet every wretched
little novelist tackles that every time he writes a book. It all depends
on how much you see in a thing. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't as soon
tackle one day of the whole world's life as one single hour of a human
being's heart."

I spoke warily. "You haven't tackled it yet?"

He hesitated. "N--o," he said slowly. Then, quickening a little, "The
fact is, George, a job like that would have to be rather specially
approached. I mean unless you were at the very top of your form you'd be
bound to come a cropper. No good starting a thing till you know your
tools are sharp--in this case your faculties. I'm--I'm sharpening myself
now, if you know what I mean."

At this point I became incautious. I ceased to listen to the voice that
warned me too to be careful.

"Well, that's what I want to ask you," I said. "I want to know what
you're doing here and why you left Cambridge Circus like that."

I was instantly sorry I had said it. Just as wrestlers on a mat lie
locked, with little apparent movement, yet in the fiercest intensity of
prolonged strain, so I felt that something struggled in him. I heard it
in his voice, I saw it in the boyish grey-blue eyes that sought mine.

"Don't, please, old fellow," he pleaded anxiously. "If you mean the rot
I talked that other night, I apologise now once for all. I've been
hoping for months and mon--for a long time, I mean, that I might run
across you. You're so magnificently steady. That other place stopped
being steady.... This is the place to write that book. I want to write
it. I've never wanted anything so much. It would be on _Vicarage_ lines,
I suppose, but oh--immensely bigger! Freedom, scope! The _Vicarage_ was
well enough in its way, but fussy and niggly and scratchy. I can do this
largely, grandly--I _know_ so much more, you see--and as long as I don't
take any risks----"

Then, in spite of his own last words, he swung suddenly round, and the
youthful grey-blue eyes were all a-sparkle. They sparkled with daring,
as if, though a risk was a risk, there was sometimes prudence in taking
it. The wicker of his chair began to creak under the working of his
hand.

"One little talk can't make much difference," he muttered. "Do me good
probably--magnificently steady----" Then he flashed brightly round on
me--an artist at the height of his power confronting a stupendous and
magnificent task.

"You see, don't you, George? You see how I'm placed, don't you?" he
demanded.

"Not very clearly."

"Then I'll tell you. I _want_ to write this book. I want to write it as
Cheops made his Pyramid, as Moses made his Decalogue--to last for ever.
If I can't write it no living man can. Why? Because no living man
combines in himself what I combine--the ripest and fullest store of
knowledge and experience and all the irresistible recklessness and
belief of youth at the same time. Here I stand, between the two, and if
I can only stay so I shall write--I shall write--oh, such a book as
never was dreamed of! So I've got to stand still just where I am now. I
haven't got to budge from thirty-three--that, as nearly as I can tell
from myself, is the age I am now. You see----"

Uneasily I began to wish myself elsewhere. I knew that I began to be
afraid in his presence; it is an eerie thing to hear a man deliberately
proposing to manipulate his age. The man down below continued to wash
the car; I heard the clank of his bucket, the rushing of his hose.

"Thirty-three," he continued, his eyes still glittering with the
excitement of it. "If I can only stay so for six months nothing matters
after that! God, just for six months!... But it's not so easy as it
sounds, George. You've got to be on the watch every moment. As long as
you're moving the thing's simple enough; it's when you try to stop that
it's like trying to stand still on a bicycle. Wait, I'll show you. Push
that table over. And if you don't mind I'll turn down the gas."

It was not the heavy-legged Victorian table he wanted me to push over,
but the one on which our glasses of lemonade stood, a flimsy affair of
bamboo and wicker, hardly more than eighteen inches square. He rose,
turned the yellow incandescent down to a glimmer, drew the table up
before us, and brought the electric torch from his pocket. He began to
speak with very much more volubility, very much less care.

"The line of that table-edge is what I want you to keep your mind on,"
he began. "Never mind any other dimension. You'll get the idea
presently. I want you to imagine that edge a scale of years, with the
higher numbers at your end and the lower ones at mine. You're to imagine
that, and then you're to imagine that this lamp's my mind, me, my
faculties, whatever you like to call it. You'll get on to it presently.
Now watch."

The torch was not of the stick-pattern, but of the flask type with a
wider angle. In the middle of the table's edge he made a minute notch
with his nail. A foot or so of the split-bamboo edge was illuminated,
with this notch in the middle of it.

"Now," he said. "You see that notch I've made. That's my present
age--thirty-three--dead in the middle of the lighted portion. Now let's
start. First of all I've got two memories. I've got one in each
direction. I'm the only man who has. And this part of the edge that the
torch lights up is my total range both ways. Now watch me move the
torch. If I move it your way"--he did so--"I get more of memory 'A' ('A'
for Age) and less of memory 'B' ('B' for Boyhood). And if I move it my
way"--he moved it his way--"I get less of 'A' and more of 'B.' See?"

I saw. I began to wish I didn't.

"Very well," he went on. "Obviously it's for me to decide where I want
to stop, and then--to do so if I can. And now the bother begins.
If--that--scale--could be numbered properly"--he divided the words as I
have divided them, and I felt cold at the intensity of his emphasis--"if
it could be divided as I want it divided, with thirty-three dead in the
middle--then forty-five would come _here_." He crossed his left hand
over the one that held the torch, as a pianist picks out a single treble
note, and dug another nick at my end of the illuminated portion. "Now,"
he continued, "let's see what the figure would be at my end. Forty-five
less thirty-three is twelve, and twelve from thirty-three's twenty-one.
It would be twenty-one." He registered another notch, this time at his
own end. "But"--swiftly he slid the torch his way--"twenty-one's no good
to me at all. No more good than a sick headache. I've got to be younger
than that. You see what I've got to do. I've got to combine the two
maximum phases of myself if I'm to write that book. But at the same time
I've got to write it when I _did_ write that kind of thing before. What
does that mean? Where's a bit of paper?"

He set the torch down on the table, where it made a vivid flat parabola
of light, and took an envelope from his pocket. In the semi-darkness he
began to jot down figures.

"Here you are. Just a few specimen numbers for trial and error. I'm
assuming that the scale's capable of regular division, which it isn't,
for many reasons; but let's take it in its simplest form.

    16:33:50--21:33:45--30:33:36

We needn't bother about the last one; I only put it in to show that
thirty-three's got to come in the middle by hook or by crook. Now do you
see what I'm up against? I _must_ have sixteen at one end, I _must_ have
forty-five at the other, and I _must_ if possible have thirty-three in
the middle, because if I don't write this as I wrote _The Vicarage of
Bray_, only infinitely more so, I shan't write it at all. But
thirty-three's a false middle. Thirty's the true middle, and thirty's
perfectly useless to me. I was doing quite other things when I was
thirty before.... But as matters stand, if I'm thirty-three I can only
remember forty-five and twenty-one. If I'm thirty-three and remember
sixteen, which is what I'm after, then ... God knows what would happen
at your end; I should have to remember fifty, I suppose, and I've never
been fifty to remember. So something's wrong, and I'm trying to fake
it."

"Derry!" I choked. "For the love of God turn up that light!"

"Eh? Certainly. Then I can show you my diagrams. This is all elementary
stuff, but I thought it would give you a faint idea of the problem. Now
the most important factor of all----"

But I didn't want to see the hideous thing in diagram form. It even
added to my horror that he didn't seem to see it as hideous at all. He
was perplexed, impatient, angry even, but for the rest he had approached
his problem as methodically and dispassionately as if he had merely been
taking the reading of his gas-meter. Just so in the past he had
approached that sufficiently-enormous work, _The Vicarage of Bray_--and
in the intervals had taken Julia Oliphant to Chalfont, jumped
five-barred gates, and had posed for her, stripped to the waist with her
sewing-machine held above his head.

He had turned up the gas again, and was hunting in a corner--for his
diagrams, I supposed. Suddenly I rose, crossed over to him, and put my
hand on his shoulder.

"Leave it alone, old man," I said in a shocked voice. "I don't want to
see them. I won't look at them. I'm too afraid. Give that book up now.
We aren't meant to write books of that kind. Give it up, clear out of
here, and let's go away together somewhere."

I don't think I altered his resolution in the least. He merely patted my
shoulder, humouring me.

"Oh, we'll start it anyway, George. Once I get fairly going I don't mind
taking a day or two or a week off with you. I always enjoyed stealing a
few days when I was busiest. No, the thing's got hold of me, and it will
have to run its course, like measles. I may possibly be able to split
the difference between thirty and thirty-three. I'm doing my very
utmost."

"How?"

It seemed to me that he became evasive. "Oh--just little dodges----"

"Like watching slowed-down pictures?"

He became still more evasive. "If I hadn't spoken to you to-night you'd
never have seen me, you know," he reproached me.

"I've been looking for you though. And I did see you once."

"Where was that?" he asked quickly.

"In a hansom, in Piccadilly Circus."

He winced. "Don't, George," he begged me.

"And you weren't alone."

"George--I say, George--you see how I'm trying to keep steady. Must you
throw me all over the shop again like this?"

But somehow I was no longer afraid of him. It seemed to me that it might
be no ill thing to anger him. Anger was at least a more human feeling
than those hideous speculations of his.

"What have you been doing since you left Cambridge Circus?" I demanded.

My plan looked like working. He confronted me.

"And what's that got to do with you?" he said.

"I think I could tell you what you've been doing. Naturally I shan't."

He looked coldly down on me. "No," he said slowly, "I don't think I
would if I were you.... And if you've seen me, I've seen you too," he
added menacingly.

"Before to-night?"

"Yes, before to-night."

"Where was that?"

There was contempt in his tone. "Oh, nowhere discreditable. You're too
magnificently steady for that."

I cannot tell you why we were standing together in one corner of the
room, body to body, with all the rest of the room empty. I only know
that I was not afraid of him, and that my intention to provoke him was
now fixed. Quite apart from those inhuman figures and graphs, this book
that he was contemplating approached--I will risk saying it--the
impious.

"Well, where was it?" I asked again.

His eyes were unwinkingly on mine. "You were coming out of my place, if
you must know. And I imagine my place is still mine. Since we're
friends, I haven't asked you what you were doing there."

"Then I'll tell you without asking. I've been staying there, on the
chance of your coming back for something you'd forgotten. I've got your
key in my pocket now, and I'm going back there to-night."

He muttered, his eyes now removed from mine. "Damned good guess. I did
come back. But I saw you across the road and turned away again."

"What did you come back for?"

"That Gland book. But I got a copy somewhere else."

"I hope you found it useful."

Then, all in a moment, the thing for which I was longing happened. He
broke down completely. Instead of a man trying to maintain an insane
tight-rope-balance on an indeterminable moment of time, there pitched
against me, crushing me against the wall and bringing down a shower of
Trenchard's photographs, a man who could be met on common ground of
normal experience. His arms were folded over his face. I heard his groan
within them.

"Lord have mercy upon me!... I oughtn't to have talked--I oughtn't to
have talked ... all unsettled again ... but I _can't_ let sixteen go ...
perhaps it won't let me go...."

"For heaven's sake forget that nightmare!"

But he mumbled despairingly on. "Shall have to be thirty ... no way out
of it ... why did I let myself talk!... Give us a hand, there's a good
fellow----"

I got him into his chair again. I soothed him. I talked to him as if he
had been a child. I told him he should be whatever age he wished, should
write any kind of book he pleased, should come abroad with me. Then for
a minute or so he seemed to go to sleep. I watched him. The sounds of
car-washing had ceased, up the yard somebody whistled, and I heard a
voice call "Good night." Past Trenchard's cretonne curtains that star of
an incandescent on the upper landing went suddenly out. It must have
been half-past eleven. A more peaceful beauty stole over and possessed
his face.

But he was not asleep. He opened his eyes. He smiled faintly at me.

"Well, George----" he said with a heavy sigh.

Then he told me the history of his past three weeks.


II

Of his past three weeks or his past two or three years, whichever you
like; for it was both. And now that he was in comparative peace I wished
to spare him questions. That illustration with the flash-lamp on the
table's edge had scared me half out of my wits; and if the determination
of "ratios" or what not meant much of that kind of thing, for the
present we were as well without them.

He had gone back to the point where, returning that afternoon to
Cambridge Circus to fetch a book, he had seen me coming out of his house
and had turned tail again.

"The Gland book, you said?" I asked. "But I thought you'd decided that
that road led nowhere."

"So I had," he replied, "but in the meantime I'd seen a doctor."

"Ah! You've seen a doctor? When was that?"

"Not quite a fortnight ago. I'd been in here just two days; I've now
been fourteen in all; I've got every day and hour down in my diary; as
you may imagine, I've studied myself with the greatest care and tried
all sorts of things by way of experiment. I simply must know how much is
exact repetition, and if it isn't where the variations come in, you see.
But it all ends the same way. There's always an unaccountable 'x' that's
constantly shifting, I suppose," he sighed.

"But tell me about the doctor. I thought you'd decided that this was
quite out of their line."

"So I had, and so it is," he replied promptly. "I didn't go to a doctor
to ask him to cure me."

"Then why----?"

"Well, I'd several reasons. One was that I'd met this man just once
before, and for that reason alone he was part of my investigations. So
far I'd experimented on people who'd met me twice, or three or four
times before. I'm still experimenting, but at present the result seems
to be that the better people know me the less they recognise me, and
those who only knew me slightly take me for granted, I suppose."

"And did this doctor recognise you?"

"Well--there you are. I simply couldn't tell. I waited for him in the
full light of a window; I gave him every chance; but--well, I'd had to
send my name up, and he was expecting me, you see. He simply said 'How
d'you do, Mr Rose' and shook hands. Probably he never looked at me. He
knew that Mr Rose was waiting, and therefore the person who was waiting
must be Mr Rose."

"So that was a wash-out. What else did you want to see him about?"

"Next, I wanted to be thoroughly vetted--as a man of thirty-three, you
understand. It's all very well looking young, but you want to know
whether you're really as young inside as you look. So I told him some
sort of a yarn about an insurance policy and wanting to be overhauled
for my own satisfaction before going to the company's doctor. So he
asked me my age--thirty-three, I said--and ran all over me; and he was
good enough to say that I was a very fine man and needn't worry about
not being passed as a first-class life."

"And then?"

"Then I told him another cock-and-bull story. It was as an author that
he'd met me before, you see, so I told him I was writing some fantastic
sort of a book, and wanted one or two medical facts right. I had to go
rather carefully here, of course, but I gave him, as nearly as I dared,
an outline of what had happened, and asked him what about it."

"And what did he say?"

"He saw nothing very extraordinary in it," said Derwent Rose.

I jumped half out of my chair. "_What!_ What madman was this?"

Then I saw the faint flicker of his smile, and sat down again.

"Quite a distinguished madman, George; incidentally he's a Knight....
But I don't want to pull your leg, old fellow. He didn't put it quite
that way. What he actually did say was that the more a man studied these
things the less he would swear that anything was an impossibility. And
he's a remarkable man, mind you. I've not much use for the average
doctor, but this fellow's big enough to use plain English and when he
doesn't know a thing to say so. His knowledge isn't just how to conceal
his ignorance. And he might have been a novelist himself from the way he
instantly grasped what I wanted to know."

Not an impossibility!... I couldn't have spoken. I waited enthralled.
Derry continued.

"So he began to talk about the ductless glands. Not just the thyroid.
Everybody's got thyroid on the brain nowadays, but the thyroid's only
one of them. There are a dozen others. And then he told me that
practically nothing was known about them."

As I hadn't the faintest idea what a ductless gland was I continued
silent.

"'Well, Mr Rose,' he said at last, 'if you want something of that sort
to happen to one of your characters I should put him through the War and
let him get a bash over the pineal gland.'

"'Where's that situated?' I asked.

"'Here,' he said."

And Rose tapped the middle of the back of his head with his forefinger.

"'And what would the effect of that be?' I asked; and he laughed.

"'Heaven above knows. You can say whatever you like. It might be
anything.'

"'Would it account for actual morphological changes of tissue?' I
asked.

"'I wouldn't say it wouldn't; that would depend on the changes; but I
should be very pleased to look through those portions of your proofs, Mr
Rose,' he said....

"So that was that. I went straight off to Cambridge Circus to get the
Blair-Bell book, but, as I say, I saw you across the road, so I got the
book somewhere else."

"The pineal gland!" I murmured, dazed.

"Yes. One name for it's The Third Eye. Don't ask me to explain it. But
if I understand my doctor-man the idea's something like this: There are
these degenerated organs that man in his present stage of development
has outgrown. A lizard's got what they call The Third Eye, and so has a
lamprey, and lots of creatures. And the whole thing's the wildest
nightmare imaginable. Takes you right back to fecund mud and the first
seminal atom. One fellow, I forget his name, has a most hair-raising
theory. He says that what they call the 'ancestral type' lived in the
sea, rolling about like a log I suppose--anyway it doesn't seem to have
mattered whether he was upside-down or not. So its back and front were
both alike. But as time went on it was more often one way up than
another, and the creature began to adapt itself. It grew new eyes where
it found them most convenient and stopped using the old one. Very likely
the old one's the pineal gland. Or words to that effect.... So if you're
now a 'bilaterally symmetrical animal with forward progression,' and
your front's where you back used to be, and anything goes wrong, you're
a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways, with two memories like me and all the
rest of it.... And a whole philosophy's been built up on it. Roughly, a
man's spirit and matter interpenetrate throughout every particle of him
so that there's no dividing them--everywhere except in one place. There
they exist independently and side by side. All the mystery of life and
death's supposed to be located there. And that place is the pineal
gland."

Remember, please, that this conversation took place, not in Bedlam, but
in South Kensington. We were sitting in a commonplace loft over a
garage, on ordinary chairs, with two half-emptied glasses of everyday
lemonade before us. A gas-jet in an incandescent mantle hung from the
ceiling, and in the neighbouring houses average people were beginning to
think of their accustomed beds. They had pineal glands too, and might
"get a bash over them," or fall downstairs, or collide with something,
or meet with a street accident. Would they, respectable ratepayers of
South Kensington, revert to that dim time before the waters were divided
from the dry land, when they had rolled about like logs, slumbering and
amorphous and unspecialised types, creation's first blind gropings
towards the glory that at present is man? Would they develop an "A"
memory and a "B"? Would these "bilaterally symmetrical animals with
forward progression" resuscitate that degenerated Third Eye in the backs
of their heads and do this Widdershins-Walk back to their beginnings?
Rose's friend the doctor had said that nobody knew anything about these
things. Man was only on the verge of this knowledge. It belonged to
to-morrow and the days to come.

And for the first time in my life I found myself wondering whether I did
want to know so very much about those morrows after all.

At last I found my voice. "Then you accept that explanation?" I said.

"No," he replied.

"Thank God for something! Why not?"

"Oh, for various reasons. In the first place I only got it as a sort of
fiction-stunt, remember. He merely said that nobody could contradict
me."

"And in the second place?"

"In the second place, I still think yours is the better explanation--not
biology at all, but simple right and wrong, good and evil. Nothing of
that kind ever did happen to me in the War that I know of--I never got
any whack over the head--and there's one other thing that seems to me to
prove it."

"What's that?"

"That I do know the difference between 

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