DEARTH’S FARM
IT is really not far: our fast train does it in eighty minutes. But so sequestered is the little valley in which I have made my solitary home that I never go to town without the delicious sensation of poising my hand over a lucky-bag full of old memories. In the train I amuse myself by summoning up some of those ghosts of the past, a past not distant but sufficiently remote in atmosphere from my present to be invested with a certain sentimental glamour. ‘Perhaps I shall meet you—or you.’ But never yet have I succeeded in guessing what London held up her sleeve for me. She has that happiest of tricks—without which paradise will be dull indeed—the trick of surprise. In London, if in no other place, it is the unexpected that happens. For me Fleet Street is the scene par excellence of these adventurous encounters, and it was in Fleet Street, three months ago, that I ran across Bailey, of Queens’, whom I hadn’t seen for five years. Bailey is not his name, nor Queens’ his college, but these names will serve to reveal what is germane to my purpose and to conceal the rest.
His recognition of me was instant; mine of him more slow. He told me his name twice; we stared at each other, and I struggled to disguise the blankness of my memory. The situation became awkward. I was the more embarrassed because I feared lest he should too odiously misinterpret my non-recognition of him, for the man was shabby and unshaven enough to be suspicious of an intentional slight. Bailey, Bailey ... now who the devil was Bailey? And then, when he had already made a gesture of moving on, memory stirred to activity.
‘Of course, I remember. Bailey. Theosophy. You used to talk to me about theosophy, didn’t you? I remember perfectly now.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘If you’re not busy let’s go and have tea somewhere.’
He smiled, with a hint of irony in his eyes, as he answered: ‘I’m not busy.’ I received the uncomfortable impression that he was hungry and with no ordinary hunger, and the idea kept me silent, like an awkward school-boy, while we walked together to a tea-shop that I knew.
Seated on opposite sides of the tea-table we took stock of each other. He was thin, and his hair greying; his complexion had a soiled unhealthy appearance; the cheeks had sunk in a little, throwing into prominence the high cheekbones above which his sensitive eyes glittered with a new light, a light not of heaven. Compared with the Bailey I now remembered so well, a rather sleek young man with an almost feline love of luxury blossoming like a tropical plant in the exotic atmosphere of his Cambridge rooms, compared with that man this was but a pale wraith. In those days he had been a flaming personality, suited well—too well, for my plain taste—to the highly-coloured orientalism that he affected in his mural decorations. And co-existent in him with this lust for soft cushions and chromatic orgies, which repelled me, there was an imagination that attracted me: an imagination delighting in highly-coloured metaphysical theories of the universe. These theories, which were as fantastic as The Arabian Nights and perhaps as unreal, proved his academic undoing: he came down badly in his Tripos, and had to leave without a degree. Many a man has done that and yet prospered, but Bailey, it was apparent, hadn’t prospered. I made the conventional inquiries, adding, ‘It must be six or seven years since we met last.’
‘More than that,’ said Bailey morosely, and lapsed into silence. ‘Look here,’ he burst out suddenly, ‘I’m going to behave like a cad. I’m going to ask you to lend me a pound note. And don’t expect it back in a hurry.’
We both winced a little as the note changed hands. ‘You’ve had bad luck,’ I remarked, without, I hope, a hint of pity in my voice. ‘What’s wrong?’
He eyed me over the rim of his teacup. ‘I look a lot older to you, I expect?’
‘You don’t look very fit,’ I conceded.
‘No, I don’t.’ His cup came down with a nervous slam upon the saucer. ‘Going grey, too, aren’t I?’ I was forced to nod agreement. ‘Yet, do you know, a month ago there wasn’t a grey hair in my head. You write stories, don’t you? I saw your name somewhere. I wonder if you could write my story. You may get your money back after all.... By God, that would be funny, wouldn’t it!’
I couldn’t see the joke, but I was curious about his story. And after we had lit our cigarettes he told it to me, to the accompaniment of a driving storm of rain that tapped like a thousand idiot fingers upon the plate-glass windows of the shop.