The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions

PART IV

THE DOUBLE CROSS

---

I

A conspicuous feature about my small house in Surrey is its lake—eighty yards by forty of clear dark water among the oak and willows, spring-fed and with trout in it. This lake lies immediately in front of the house, where other houses have their lawns. It needs a good deal of attention, for springtime sheddings that are charming on grass are messy on water, and nothing but wind can sweep the glossy surface. But its infinite variety of mood lights up the whole place like a smiling eye, and I am very attached to it.

Not more than a quarter of an hour's bicycle-ride away is a preparatory school for boys up to the age of fourteen.

Need I say that I have had to put up a diving-platform at one end of the lake?

There are, of course, certain rules: bicycles to be left at the potting-shed, diving from the punt not allowed, not more than four bathers at one time, etc., etc. But within these limits the pond is as much theirs as mine, and seldom a summer afternoon passes without a bathing-party.

I had done Julia's bidding and had come back home again. It had been on a Wednesday morning that I had left her waiting for her books in the reading-room of the British Museum. It was now Friday, and I had not heard a word either of her or Derry.

I had tried not to think of them. Finding that impossible, I had wandered restlessly up and down, no good to myself or to anybody else. On Thursday, and again on Friday, I had almost returned to London. I could not shake off that picture of her, sitting alone in that dreary rotunda of accumulated human knowledge. Had she started that crack-brained index, he his terrifying book? Had she gone to him? What had she said? What had he replied? I could neither guess nor forget about it. As if he had infected me with something of his own calamity, my mind too was in two places at the same time—among the Surrey oaks and sweet-chestnut, and in that loft where he had lived over the South Kensington mews.

My study is an upper room at the front of the house, with French windows that open on to a wide verandah. I often drag out a table and work outside. But work that morning was impossible. I was too unsettled even to answer letters. So I walked out on to the verandah and leaned on the ramblered rail. The oaks across the lake were turning from gold to green, and the two big willows by the diving-stage were a ruffle of silver-grey. Under the clear surface the trout were basking shadows. I wished the afternoon were here. It would at least bring the boys to bathe.

Suddenly I heard my housekeeper's step on the verandah behind me. She always walks straight through the study if she gets no answer to her knock.

"Miss Oliphant," she announced.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

"Miss Oliphant! Where?"

"In the drawing-room, sir."

In five seconds I was through the study and half-way downstairs. The drawing-room is a cool, low-ceilinged apartment at the farther end of the house. It has windows on two of its sides, those to the north green with brushing leaves and a ferny bank, the others glazed doors that that morning stood wide open. As I entered I heard mingled laughter.

They both stood there.

They were silhouetted against the sunny opening, laughing like a couple of children. Perhaps the joke was that Julia only had been announced. I stood watching them for a moment; then I advanced.

"Good morning," I said.

Julia gave a swift turn. The next moment she had pushed Derry forward.

"You explain—I wash my hands of it," she laughed.

She wore thick shoes and a walking-costume, and on her head was a little felt hat with a pheasant's feather. He had on an old tweed jacket and grey flannel bags. He held out his hand.

"Hope we're not dragging you from your work, George," he laughed. "Do you good anyway. I felt like a day off, so I dug out Julia. 'Down tools, Julia,' I said; 'no work to-day. Where shall we go? Shall we give George Coverham a surprise?' So here we are, to lunch, please. By Jove, there's a kingfisher!"

He sprang out on to the terrace to see where the electric-blue flash had whistled off to.

Swiftly I glanced at Julia. In her eyes was the old deep shining. But Derry called over his shoulder:

"That was a young one, wasn't it? Is there a nest? How many hatched out? Do they go for the fish?"

He seemed splendidly fit, perfectly happy. He seemed so happy that suddenly I wondered what I had been making myself so miserable about. A weight seemed to lift all at once from my mind. Too much London had oppressed me, I supposed. Cambridge Circus is not the place for a country-living man to stay too long in. It bred too many fancies. Much better for the Circus-dweller to come into the country.

"It went over by that bank," Derry was saying, still peering after the kingfisher; and I stepped out.

"Yes. The nest's right in the bank. Six of them hatched. You'll see another in a minute."

But at that moment his eyes fell on the punt. Quickly he turned to Julia.

"Years since I've had a punt-pole in my hand!" he exclaimed. "Is it in working order, George? Come along——"

"You go, Julia," I said; and I returned into the house to see about lunch.

What had happened? Had he really brought her out for the day on his own account, as formerly he had used to do? Or was she allowing him to think that he had? Was he repeating himself even textually, in those words "Down tools, Julia, no work to-day"? I must know. It was essential that I should know. Yet already something in his manner told me that I should not learn it from him. He was here not to talk about himself, but to enjoy, keenly and vividly, every moment of his day. Whatever my own megrims had been, he showed none. Not he, but Julia, would have to explain matters.

Suddenly I took a resolution. I pushed at a baize door.

"Mrs Moxon!" I called.

My housekeeper appeared.

"Would it be upsetting your arrangements if I asked my visitors to stay for the week-end?" I asked.

She considered a moment; then she thought it could be managed. But she seemed puzzled.

"It is Mr Rose, isn't it?" she said.

Derry, I may say, had been to my house twice or thrice before.

"Of course."

"I thought it was, sir, but they told me only to say Miss Oliphant."

"Oh, that was their little surprise for me," I replied. "Very well, Mrs Moxon. Lunch, and I'll ask them to stay for the week-end. My sister left a few things, didn't she?"

"That'll be all right, sir. I'll see to Miss Oliphant."

I came out of the house again and sought the lake. They were out in the middle of it, lying down in the punt together with their heads over the side. They were watching the trout. I was on the point of hailing them when I refrained. Something dramatic in their juxtaposition pulled me up short.

Their heads were together, their laughter came across the water. She was having her summer again. But what would it cost her? Her unchanging adoration—and his affectionate indifference! He had never cared, he never would care. To-morrow he would have forgotten all about it. But she would have still another day's memories to add to those others when he had jumped five-barred gates with his pipe in his mouth and his stick in his hand—memories of my punt and pond and the greening oaks and the silvery willows.... Yet she was laughing as carelessly as he. They were playing a game. A willow-leaf had floated like a fairy shallop towards them, and he was blowing it her way, she blowing it back again.

Then a dragonfly caught their attention, and they forgot the willow-leaf, as instantly as children forget.

---

At lunch I sat with my back to the open windows, they where they could look out. Apparently he had completely forgotten that night, only three days ago, when he had told me that I was the only one of his old acquaintances to whom he dared reveal himself. He called her Julia, she him Derry, and to both of them I was George. We laughed, joked, said anything that came into our heads; but beneath it all I was in an extreme of curiosity. How had they come together? What had happened that there was now a second person in the world to whom he could pronounce his name?

Half-way through lunch I made my proposal that they should remain for a couple of days. His brow suddenly clouded. I watched him carefully, and I knew that Julia was watching him as carefully as I.

"Awfully good of you, George," he said in a suddenly altered voice, "but I really don't think I can spare the time. I only downed tools for one day, you know. I really must get back."

"But to-morrow's Saturday. I promise to let you go on Sunday evening if you really must."

"I'm so fearfully busy, you see," he said uneasily.

Under the table I felt Julia's foot touch mine. She spoke.

"Fancy Derry talking like a minor novelist about being busy!" she laughed. "Why, you always used to say that if it was as hard work as all that something was wrong and ought to be seen to!"

His brow instantly cleared again. "That's so," he said. "Did I say that? I'd forgotten. Busyness is all bunk, of course; made for duffers. A thing either does itself or it doesn't.... Right, George, I'll stop if Julia will. I hope you won't mind if I go to bed rather early though. I really have been hard at it, and I need a lot of sleep."

"This air'll make you sleep," I assured him. I did not add that if he wished to go to bed early lest he should sink into abysmal sleep in the middle of a sentence he should have his wish. Razors and a spirit-lamp were going to be put into his room. A little teapot and caddy would also be placed there. I intended to tell Mrs Moxon that he was faddy about his early-morning tea. He might then use his hot water for any purpose he wished.

We took coffee outside, and then went for a stroll round my few acres. In the kitchen-garden he had a new idea. Over a hedge at one end of it, well out of the way, was a rather unsightly dump of old household rubbish—tins, burst buckets, old zinc baths, broken utensils of every kind. A few spadefuls of earth are thrown over these from time to time, and a handful of nasturtium-seeds once in a while helps to mitigate the eyesore.

"You want an incinerator, George," he announced. "Here's all your stuff ready. Hammer this old junk out flat, get the blacksmith to cut a few rods, a cartload of stones and a few barrowloads of clay, and there you are. Lots of fine ash for your beds too, though I shouldn't think this soil needed much. Got a pencil? I'll show you——"

He made rough sketches of the incinerator on the back of an envelope.

We strolled back to the pond and the punt again, and he threw off his coat, turned up his sleeves, and poled us up and down. He glowed with vitality and power. Both for strength and delicacy of touch he did whatever he liked with the punt. One beautifully-finished little feat he performed. A blossom of water-starwort floated on the pond some fifteen yards away. Julia's hand was trailing lazily in the water.

"Keep your hand just as it is," he ordered her.

She had only to close her fingers on the blossom. With one perfect stroke, one complicated thrust of the pole, that included I knew not what components of opposite forces reconciled to one end, the flower sped swiftly to her hand and rested there. There was no jar, only a thrilling as of a sound-board as the punt fetched up still. He laughed with pleasure at his skill.

Then at that moment I heard the sound of boys' voices. The bathing-party had arrived. I turned to Julia.

"They come every afternoon. Would you like to go up to the house, or will you stay here in the punt under the trees?"

"Oh, in the punt, please," she said; and Derry turned quickly.

"Bathing? Did you say boys were going to bathe? I say, that's rather an idea! Got a spare costume, George?"

Across the lake a stripling figure stood on the diving-stage with a towel about his shoulders. It was Du Pré Major. He dropped the towel, stood poised, and then came the sound of a plunge. Derry's eyes shone. In a moment he had put the punt in under the trees.

"That's done it," he laughed. "Can I ask your housekeeper for a towel?"

"You know my room. You'll find everything you want there."

"Right. I've nearly forgotten how to swim——"

He stepped from the punt and ran lightly round the pond.

Julia's wet fingers still held the flower. Her head hung a little down, so that the light from the water was thrown softly up on to her face. Her eyes, but her eyes only, moved as the sound of another plunge was heard; but it was only the other Du Pré and Southby. I did not speak. There would be time enough for talking after Derry had gone to bed—early.

Then over by the house a gleam of white appeared. It was Derry with a robe of towelling over his shoulders. He did not take the path to the diving-board; instead, he dropped the towel on a grass border, looked aloft for a moment, and then took a straight run at one of the willows. It was a "cricket-bat" willow, and it overhung the diving-board at an angle out of the vertical. How he managed the leap I do not know, but in a moment he was up the tree like a squirrel, poised in the fork, laughing down at the surprised boys on the stage below.

"Stand clear," he called.

His path through the air was a swallow's. There was a soft plunge, a hissing effervescence as of black soda-water, and he shot to the surface again like a javelin, a dozen yards away.

"Oh, ripping plunge, sir!" one of the boys called rapturously. "Jimmy! Did you see it? Did you see that?"

"Come in—let's make a dog-fight of it!" Derry cried.

And one after another they tumbled in and splashed towards him.

I have been told that that Friday's four are still the envied of the whole school. He was very wonderful with them. The dog-fight over he set to work to coach them. They had never seen the stroke that consists of turning the left leg from the knee downwards into a screw-propeller, so that the swimmer travels forward, not in a series of impulses, but at a uniform rate of progress. He showed them in the water, and then hoisted himself to the diving-platform and showed them there. The stage became a comical waggling of nubile white legs.

"No, no," his voice came to us, "from the knee—think of a screw—and about a six-inch stroke with your left hand—it's worth learning—makes swimming as easy as walking——"

"Show us a racing-stroke, sir——"

"Shut up, Jimmy. Is this right? It does catch your knee, though——"

"Do that dive again, sir——"

Then, when Derry judged they had had enough of it, he ordered them out. He himself did a final dash of the whole eighty yards and back again, while the water boiled behind him. Then he sought his wrap and disappeared into the house.

"He's 'some' swimmer, isn't he?" said Julia softly. She had neither spoken nor moved.

He was.

But even I could see that he knew nothing of women.

The bit of water-starwort was still in her hand. Suddenly with a little laugh she tossed it over the side.

"Oughtn't he to have some tea?" she said....

I do not wish to labour the details of that afternoon. I may say that already I had a very distinct and curious impression of them, namely, that they were details, isolated and without continuity; but I will come to that presently. We sat rather a long time over tea, and Derry talked. The only subject he seemed to avoid was that of his work. Otherwise he was alert, keen, dead "on the spot." On athletics he was extraordinarily illuminating. Granted that as an engine his body was pretty near perfection; it was on the "fundamental brainwork" of the subject that he laid the greatest stress. The modesty of the demonstrations which he made on the verandah before our eyes was altogether charming; he was as simple and earnest with us as he had been with the boys. For such-and-such a performance (he showed) your balance must be thus and thus; for swiftness, a certain speed of movement must be the perfectly-synchronised sum-total of half a dozen different speeds. I am no very remarkable athlete myself; I have always supposed that I lacked some special gift; but Derry spoke almost as if, by the mere taking of thought, he could add a cubit to his leap or plunge. He took his sport and his writing in very much the same way. You "just helped nature all you could."

Then he was back on the subject of the incinerator again.

Shortly after that it was an oak that ought to be lightened on one side unless I wanted to have a hole torn in the bank of my pond.

Then, dinner over, he began to fidget. This was at a little after eight o'clock. At twenty past he rose abruptly.

"It's that bathe I suppose," he yawned. "If you don't mind I think I'll turn in. You said I might, you know——"

"I'll show you up," I said.

"Don't trouble," he replied, Julia's hand in his.

But I wanted to make sure that the tea-caddy was where I had told Mrs Moxon to put it.

---

II

On the night when he had half scared me out of my wits with that horrible demonstration with the electric torch on the edge of the bamboo table, he had been careful to explain that he was putting the question in its most elementary form. There were (he had said) other factors, and more important ones. One of these had already occurred to me. Stated as simply as possible, it was this:

As he had held the torch that night, with that notch that "had got to be thirty-three" in the middle of the illuminated edge, about six inches on either side of the notch had come within the lamp's beam. "Keep your eye on that edge and never mind the other dimensions," he had said, and he had proceeded to manipulate the lamp.

But how had he determined the distance at which the lamp must be held from the table's edge?

You see the enormous importance of this. The lighted portion of the edge was the extent of his memory, faculty or whatever one may call it. But what about that memory's quality as distinct from its extent? Suppose, instead of holding the torch a foot away, he had held it three inches away only? The nearer the shorter—but the brighter; the farther away the longer—but the dimmer. Our childish recollections are intense, but of small things; as we grow older we remember more, but more vaguely.... I find that I shall have to make use of the parallel columns again. Indeed I begin to suspect that I shall have to do so throughout. Was this then the position?

BY APPROACHING THE LAMP	BY WITHDRAWING THE LAMP
He might re-live a given age again with great intensity.	The intensity would diminish but the scope of memory would enlarge.
Emotion or passion might become predominant characteristics, at the expense of intellectual comparisons.	He might become comparative, critical, philosophic, but at the cost of intensity of emotional experience.
He certainly would not succeed in any task that demanded width of outlook first of all.	He might be in danger of including so much that he would become diffuse and pointless.
He might concentrate so brilliantly as to perform a momentary and sensational feat—say to knockout Carpentier.	The speculative man might get the upper hand of the practical one and he would fail in a supreme momentary effort—in other words, Carpentier would knock him out.
A summer's day in the country might be almost unbearably beautiful to him.	It would be merely a matter of fresh air and exercise, to be set off against the working hours lost and the cost of two railway tickets.

I am anxious not to go beyond my brief. I knew that for the purpose of his book he was attempting to manipulate himself, but what his success had so far been I did not know. Nevertheless all the possibilities had to be considered, and the more I thought of this one the more it impressed me. For practical purposes, these differences of memory-intensity might turn out to be the pivot on which all else turned.

For suppose that he had no choice but to go back and reopen the closed book of his life, and that nothing that Julia or I could do would stop him. Whether in that case was the better: to live as it were day by day and hour and hour, with joy and grief experienced at their highest pitch, or to continue to possess to the full this unique and double knowledge, of a past that had been a future and of a future that was once more a past?

To put it in another form, since he must do this Widdershins Walk, was it better for him to know he was doing it, or to do it knowing as little as possible about it?

Or, in its simplest form of all, would he be happier with or without a memory of any kind?

---

I said good night to him at the door of his room and closed it behind me. I had not taken more than a couple of steps when I heard him softly lock it. I went down to Julia in the drawing-room.

Even on a warm summer's evening, when the windows stand wide open, I like a wood fire. Outside the heavens were a beauteous pink glow, with one amber star. The trout were rising for their evening meal, and a sedge-warbler sang short sweet phrases. From time to time a moorhen scuttered along the surface of the pond, and the smell of night-flowering tobacco floated into the quiet room. But Julia had no wish to go out. Into a pair of my sister's slippers she had thrust her worsted-clad feet, and she was toasting her toes and smiling into the fire.

"Is that window too much for you?" I asked.

"No."

"Then put this shawl over your shoulders. You'll have hot milk to go to bed with."

"Thank you, George."

"And now," I said, drawing up my chair opposite to her, "tell me what's happened since Wednesday."

She mused. "Happened to him?"

"I want to know all that you did. Did you go to him?"

"No. He turned up at the Boltons this morning and dragged me out, exactly as he said."

"But——"

"Oh, I'd sent him a note."

"Ah! I wondered.... What did you say?"

"It was only a couple of lines. I forget what the exact words were. I merely said that I shouldn't be in the least afraid of anything, and that anyway I hadn't a dog to set at him. Just that. Nothing else. I wrote it in the Museum after you'd gone."

"And that fetched him round?"

"Yes."

"Well, what did he say?"

She hesitated. "That's just it, George. He hasn't even referred to it."

"What, not in any way?"

"Not in any way."

"He just came into the Boltons as if nothing had happened, and he's talked all day as if nothing had happened?"

"That's exactly it."

"He's not mentioned his book?"

"Only what you heard at lunch."

"He is writing it?"

"One would gather so. You know as much about it as I do."

I gazed into the fire. A louder splash came from the pond—one of the three-pound rainbows. Julia resumed of her own accord.

"You see, when you left me in the Museum I really didn't know what to do. After what you'd told me I didn't want to risk upsetting him by simply walking in to his place unannounced. So I wrote that note, and he'd get it last night. And he was round early this morning. But he hasn't even mentioned the note. I suppose he got it, but things aren't in the least like what you told me. You told me he was passionately grateful at finding you. Well, that doesn't at all describe his manner to me. He's jolly, keen, full of enjoyment and zest at everything that comes along—and that's all. He must have understood my note; that's why I put in that bit about the dog; if he didn't understand he'd have to ask what that meant. But not one single word. What do you suppose has happened?"

A little disingenuously I asked her what she meant by "happened."

"To him of course. I've told you all I did. It must have been rather heartrending between you two; so why this perfect composure now that there are three of us?"

I didn't know. I was a little afraid to guess. But again I pondered that distance of the torch from the table's edge.... Julia was still gazing into the fire, her long hands between her knees, so that her walking-skirt shaped them. Then suddenly she looked from the fire to me.

"How many things has he talked about to-day, since he's been here?" she asked abruptly.

I moved uneasily. "Oh—how many things does one talk about in a day? Hundreds," I replied.

"But—at such a pitch!" She threw the word at me with almost accusatory energy. "Top-note all the time—birds' nests, punts, athletics, incinerators, those boys bathing——"

Less and less at my ease, I could only urge that a holiday was a holiday, and that Derry might as well have stayed at home as bring his cares with him.

"You think it's just that?" she demanded, looking me full in the face.

"I should say so."

"Hm!"

But in spite of that rather critical "Hm!" she seemed reassured. Suddenly she gave a soft chuckle.

"He was rather wonderful with those boys," she said.

"They're nice boys."

"What a games-master he'd make!" Then, with a sly and guilty look in her eyes, "What shall we do to-morrow, George? Oh, it's ripping luck, being here unexpectedly like this!"

"What would you like to do? There's the car if you want to go anywhere!"

"N—o," she said reflectively, as if running over in her mind a dozen delectable plans. "I think just potter about here. Rushing about in cars ... no, it's perfectly adorable here. I don't want to set foot out of your grounds. George, you are a duck!" She hugged herself.

Whether he was living from moment to moment or not, there was no doubt about her. She basked shamelessly. I am not making her out to be anything she was not. She was a ready, practical creature, by no means above what is called feminine littleness, not very young, but with her own beauty. It was, too, her beauty's hour. Sitting there between the firelight and the fairness of the evening outside, long-throated, cool-browed, with the glow of the wood-flames richly in her eyes, her body seemed an ivory lamp that guarded its light with sacred and jealous care. And that flame was to all intents and purposes stolen. She now intended, calculated, planned, contrived. Up to that moment I had supposed her to be waiting (as it were) in that remembered Sussex village, waiting at the centre of whatever mystery had happened to him, waiting for him to come back to her. But now I knew that she was doing nothing so passive. She was not waiting. She was prepared to bring events about. To the little that he had spared her on his forward journey she was prepared to help herself immeasurably as he returned. Like a footpad she watched his drawing-near. Sitting there by my fire, with that day's memories still glowing about her, she was contriving further ones for the morrow....

And suddenly the whole scope of her daring flashed upon me. At twenty-eight she had failed to get him. Now, at forty, she would not scruple to make use of whatever arts she had since acquired.

She would, if she could, marry Derwent Rose.

I cannot tell you my stupefaction at my own discovery. It was wellnigh with awe that I looked at her. For in that case her adventure was hardly less tremendous than his own. That is what I meant when I said that he began to constrain us and to draw us into the wheel of his own destiny. To marry a man of diminishing age! To marry a man who had lately been forty-five, was now at some unknown point in the neighbourhood of the thirties, and would presently miraculously re-attain adolescence! What unheard-of marriage was this?

As if she enumerated something to herself, one slender finger-tip was on another. "First I shall go with him to the blacksmith's about those rods," she said softly.

I avoided her gaze. "I don't know," I said, "that I want an incinerator built."

"But Derry wants to build it," she answered, as if that settled the question.

"He may have forgotten all about it to-morrow."

Swiftly she turned on me. "What do you mean by that?"

"The plain meaning of the words—he may have forgotten."

"Do you mean something about his memory?"

"Which memory? He's two of them—so far."

"Tch!... You just this moment said that he was deliberately putting things away from him because this was a holiday. Did you say that just to keep me quiet? Don't you believe it yourself?"

"I neither believe nor disbelieve. I simply don't know."

"Oh, you're tiresome!... In plain English, then: are you suggesting that when he came to me this morning, the only reason he didn't mention my note was that he had forgotten all about it in the night?"

I shrugged my shoulders. It all happened in the night. That was why he went to bed early. That was why I had given him a spirit-kettle for tea—or shaving. Something might have happened during the night of which she spoke. Something might be happening in my house at that very moment.

"Do you mean his memory's cracking up?" she demanded.

"I think we could find out."

"How?"

"By getting him to talk about his book. To write that book he must draw on both his memories, experiences, or whatever you like to call it. That's his whole equipment for it—two conscious experiences, with himself balanced in the middle making the most of both. We might find out that way."

"Oh, there's a shorter way than that," she said.

"What?"

"To ask him."

I shrugged my shoulders again. "Yes...."

And then I took her entirely off her guard. Outside the pink had turned to peach, and the amber star had become a diamond. Suddenly, as they do, the trout had ceased to rise, and a single short squawk came from the moorhens' nest. I rose and stood before her.

"Julia," I said without warning, "would you marry him?"

She might not have heard. I thought she was never going to reply. She drew the shawl a little more closely about her shoulders, and I crossed the room and closed the windows. Then I returned to my place in front of her.

At last she spoke.

"I suppose you may ask that," she said. "The answer is—Yes."

"You've considered it?"

"Yes."

"Everything it would mean?"

"Yes."

"And you think you've—the right?"

She stared at me. "The right?"

"Yes, the right. Look at it this way. There's no doubt at all about one thing; he isn't the same man to-day, or at any rate he isn't in the same mood, that he was two days ago. He may be just deliberately putting his work aside for a day, or—he may be the other thing. He may be going on with his book on Monday morning—or he may be quite past it already. It makes a good deal of difference to you which of these two men he is."

"It makes no difference."

"Oh yes it does. In the one case you'd be simply his secretary, and things would be more or less as they were before. But for the other he wouldn't want a secretary. That mad book would be all over and done with. You saw him as he was to-day: one quick brilliant impression after another. That man might write a few vivid short stories, but never that appalling book.... Look here, Julia, I didn't want to tell you, because the whole idea gives me a shudder; but this is the way he explained it himself."

And without any more ado I told her of his demonstration with the electric torch and of my own additions thereto.

She was not afraid of much, that woman. I had almost written that she took it perfectly calmly, but that was just what she did not do. But it was no fear of immensity and the blackness of Infinity that she showed. Rather she seemed to see an opportunity to be snatched at. That face that I have likened to the ivory of a lamp betrayed the soft radiance that she tried to, but could not hide.

"Yes, that gives it," she breathed.

"So you see what I mean by 'having the right.' You'd be there, the nearest, the brightest, vivider than everything else.... Have you the right?"

She laughed softly. "You mean I'm a baby-snatcher?" she said.

I did not reply.

For that was about the size of it. Did he remain in that mood, there she would be in the punt with him, or holding iron rods for him as he set out the plan of the incinerator, or hunting with him for the kingfishers' nest, or watching him as he bathed with to-morrow's batch of boys. He would blow little boats of willow-leaves to her, bring water-blossoms gliding into her hand. To-morrow evening they would watch that amber star together, stroll along my winding paths as the glow-worms came out. That was to be her theft—to press herself home in the glamorous irresistible moment, let what would afterwards befall. My modest little estate was to be her antechamber to paradise, and unwittingly I had set open the gates of it for her myself.

And she was laughing at me for it—openly laughing at me.

"Well—the portrait for the Lyonnesse Club's getting along very nicely, George," she laughed.

"Dear, dear Julia——" I began.

"That earnest expression's rather good. What a pity I didn't bring my painting-tools—we might have got a good day's work done to-morrow."

"My dear——"

Then, suddenly, "How long have you actually known Derry, George?" she demanded.

"About fifteen years."

"Not longer? Then you don't know what's coming next?"

I don't like to be smiled at as she was smiling. I jumped up.

"Yes I do," I said with a flush. "What's coming next is that you're not going to do this. You're going to promise me not to. Be his secretary, his nurse, his housekeeper, anything else you like, but you're not to do this. It it's nothing else it's——"

"Taking a mean advantage, you mean?" she supplied the words for me. "But he never did know anything about women. Why shouldn't he learn, poor dear?"

"Julia, you can't have thought! A man without an age! A man, except for you and me, without even a name a week together! A man who says of himself that he's to all intents and purposes a ghost haunting anybody who happens to know anything about him!... Anyway you shan't."

"Shan't I, George?" she asked with a long deep look into my eyes.

"That you shall not."

She too rose and stood before me, one elbow on the mantelpiece. She drew up the walking-skirt an inch or two and pushed at a log with her foot.

"Of course it isn't as if you and I could ever quarrel, George," she said. "There, I'm burning your sister's slipper. I say we can't quarrel, because we're ever so far beyond that. Therefore we can talk quite plainly about anything on earth, or under it, or above it. So now tell me why I mustn't marry Derry."

I thought of the man upstairs, of the spirit-kettle on his table, of why he must be alone when he woke in the morning.

"There are physical reasons, if there weren't any others."

"Of course. He'll get younger. He'll be sixteen. Well, I can be his mother then. But I shall have been his wife."

"For how long?"

She lifted her beautiful shoulders. "What does that matter? I said his wife. Does any bride on her wedding-day ask herself how long it's for? There have been widows who've never even taken breakfast with their husbands."

"But they married men like other men."

"Pooh! Tell that to any woman in love! They're all Derrys as long as it lasts, and he's Derry as long as it lasts."

"But his memory?"

"We don't know that anything's the matter with it. Really you're very hard to please, George. First you complain that he's got too much memory and he's writing what you call a wicked book with it. Now you seem afraid he hasn't enough to get married with. If he's happier without a memory at all, what's the odds?"

"But yourself?"

"Oh, I can look after myself—now! And anyway you needn't worry about my memory!"

Yet that was what I was worrying about. How gorgeously she had enriched her memories that very day I had seen for myself. Openly she exulted in her treasures. But what was to be the end of it all? By marriage did she mean one last wild lovely memory more and after that—nothing? If so, was ever degree so inconceivably prohibited? A dark-haired child in the wrong seat in a village church—a few odd hours in the country that it might have been a mercy to spare her—that day in my own house and grounds—to-morrow with whatever it might bring—perhaps another day or two unless he overtook another milestone before then ... and then the relative and inevitable sequence: his bride, his elder sister, his mother, aunt, elderly adviser and friend, and so on to the close. This was the prospect she was deliberately embracing. Here she espied her joy....

And should there be a child?...

She had sat down again. That appearance of a quarrel between two people who could never quarrel was at an end. I lifted the logs, arranged her shawl again, and then also sat down. Mrs Moxon brought in a tray, with hot milk and biscuits for her and whisky for myself. She set a small table between us. Julia's slender fingers played as it were a tune as she moved the too-hot glass from one position to another. Mrs Moxon gave a final glance round, wished us good night, and went out again. I mixed myself a peg, and then turned to Julia.

"I think you were going to tell me, when I interrupted you, what happened before I knew Derry," I said.

Little pistol-like cracks began to break from the green-oak logs I had moved. A thin pouring of amethyst streamed up the chimney-back, and the heart of the fire was intense pink and salmon. The glow from the ceiling made semi-transparent the rich shadows of the farther recesses of the room. It was true that as against my fifteen years she had known him for more than thirty. My own personal knowledge of his history was now on the point of failing. Only to her could I look for an anticipation of what might next be expected.

"Yes," she said musingly. "Anyway I'm prepared for it."

"What was it?"

"You don't know?"

"Only in a general way that at some time or other he must have travelled a good deal."

She nodded. "That's it. His Wanderjahre. He walked mostly—Italy, Germany, France, racketed about all over the place. Broke hearts wherever he went too I expect. It was then that he picked up his wonderful French."

"Then do you think that that phase is—falling due again?"

She shook her head slowly. How could she tell? "I only had occasional letters from him at that time. Usually to smuggle him out some tobacco or see about a letter of credit or something. I had one from Siena, and one from Trieste, and another from Nîmes.... But," she added briskly, "if I married him of course I should go with him. That would solve everything."

"Would it!"

"I mean if his appearance changed much. You say yourself he can't stop in one place for long. He can't even take an ordinary job. And you seem to think that's a reason why I shouldn't marry him. But to my mind it's the very reason why I should. He shan't be left to tramp the world all alone, poor boy. I'm quite a good walker."

But for the shawl round her shoulders, the glass of hot milk and my sister's slippers, she seemed ready to start immediately.

"Julia, are you well off?" I suddenly asked her.

She smiled. "The sooner I'm paid for that portrait of you the better, George," she said.

"Because," I continued, "his royalties won't keep his boots soled, and as for that mad idea of fighting Carpentier——"

She made an indifferent gesture within the shawl and sipped her milk.

"And now," I pursued her, "I want you to notice how you've changed your mind this last half-hour or so. As you sit there now you haven't the least intention of becoming his secretary. In fact you're calmly planning how you can murder that book of his."

"How do you know that, George?"

"You are. Remember the flash-lamp. He wants to light up his time-scale from sixteen to forty or thereabouts. You want it like a burning-glass, all concentrated in one brilliant spot—yourself. In other words you're planning a mental assault on him."

She laughed delightedly. "Before committing a physical one? George, you shock me! I hope you're not going to lock me into my room!"

"Further than that. You don't intend to lose a moment of time, because those Wanderjahre may be drawing very near."

Her mouth was prim. "It's a difficult position, George."

"Do you intend to ask him outright to marry you?"

"It's a very difficult position," she repeated demurely. "Suppose he accepted me one day and forgot all about it the next. I should have to propose to him daily, shouldn't I?"

"I don't think you need joke about it."

Her daring eyes positively fondled my face. She showed all her teeth in a wide smile.

"Why not?" she asked. "What else is there to do? You wouldn't have me take it seriously, would you? How can it be taken seriously?"

And she added, stretching her long hands to the fire, "Why, it would be the least serious marriage there ever was!"

---

III

By breakfast-time the next morning I had taken a resolve. I had slept little for thinking of it. I intended, if I could, to make Derry talk about his book.

For while I abhorred the very idea of that book, there was one thing I abhorred more. This was the thought of the collapse of his memory. If anything happened to that the situation was horribly simple. A man who, from having had two memories, passes to not having one at all, is—gently but without any further pother—locked up. And had that been the end of it I don't think I should have had the heart to write Derry's tale.

He came down, shaven, radiant, hungry. I had heard his plunge into the lake three quarters of an hour before. Julia too was fresh as the dew, and ate heartily. So, over coffee and kidneys and bacon, with such offhandedness as I could assume, I asked him point-blank how his book was getting on.

A wave of thankfulness passed over me at his very first words.

"I say, George," he protested, "this is a holiday, you know. Must we talk shop? By sheer strength of will I've put it all on one side for a couple of days, and here you are trying to shove my nose back on to the grindstone again! Bit of a nigger-driver you are.... Well, just for the length of one pipe; after that shop's taboo for the rest of the day. What is it you want to know about it?"

"Oh, just how it's shaping."

He told me. His account of it as far as it had gone, his projection of the continuing portion, were perfectly lucid, reasoned, logical. He brought all his faculties to bear, was completely master of himself. His memory was as clear in both directions as it had been. I tested this by means of one or two questions that otherwise are of no importance here. All was well. My most dreaded fear was removed. Indeed it was I who, at the end of our pipe, had to change the subject.

One awkward, rather shamefaced explanation, however, he did make. This was both to Julia and to myself.

"I ought to say one thing while I'm about it," he said in a halting and embarrassed voice. "I got your note, Julia. I know what you mean. How you tumbled to it I don't know, and I needn't say it's an unspeakable comfort having the two of you. I'm not going to look a gift-horse like that in the mouth, so if you don't mind we won't talk about it. I suppose George told you, though?"

"Yes."

"Then that's all right. Of course he won't tell anybody else. If he'd asked me first I might have kicked a bit, but it's turned out all right, so that's all we need worry about.... Now what are we going to do to-day? Those trout at all muddy, George? Give me a mayfly and let's have a try at one of 'em——"

I got him a rod and warned him against the telephone-wire that has to cross one end of the pond. I left him and Julia mounting the cast on the verandah.

I went up to my study. I went there from a motive not unlike gratitude to God. An embodied ghost Derry might be to the rest of the world, but our little private triumvirate had still a normal basis. He understood the whole situation, and so to us was no ghost. Nor was even the prospect of his Wanderjahre now quite so intimidating. The terror would have been to think of him as an ignis fatuus, unconscious of himself, flitting hither and thither over the face of the Continent at large. Cogito, ergo sum. The distance of the lamp from the table's edge was apparently not an irrevocably fixed factor. "By sheer strength of will" he had been able to vary it. He could enjoy intensely and reason infallibly, if not at one and the same time, at any rate by turns. He was still capable of work and of play, and at the maximum of either.

How, then, did she stand with her wild scheme of marrying him?

I sat down at my table and worked it out thus:

While he was in his working mood he was inaccessible to her.	But while he was at play his accessibility was a raised power.
As his secretary she could not hope for more than a repetition of her former experience.	But as his playmate she met him on his return journey—he as he had been, but she far more rusée and resolved.
His work occupied by far the greater portion of his time.	Therefore his work stood in her way.
Therefore his work must be discouraged.	But I had encouraged him to speak of it.
I had done her a disservice.	But they were at play at this moment, setting up a fishing-rod on the verandah.
His Wanderjahre would presently be upon him again.	She knew this, and would lose no time.

I think that states it fairly.

And she had the whole day and the whole of to-morrow before her.

I began to wonder whether I had done wisely in asking them to stay after all.

But perhaps I was troubling myself unnecessarily about this moonshine-marriage after all. What about him? He at least would see the monstrous anomaly and would never allow it. He at any rate knew that if there was one place on earth where no woman must come it was into his room between evening and dawn. Things far too terrifying and precise happened during those hours. He knew this, and five minutes between him and myself would settle Julia's business once for all.

But again I saw in a flash where I was wrong. Five minutes between him and myself? It couldn't be done. Why? For the simple reason that, in order to talk to me at all on such a matter, he would have to be in his aware and "working" mood—the very mood in which he had always been inaccessible to her. My answer would be a stare from those steady grey-blue eyes. "Marry Julia!" he would exclaim. "My dear chap, what on earth are you talking about? If I'd ever dreamed of marrying Julia shouldn't I have done it years ago? It's the very last thing in the world I ever thought of!" That would be his reply to me. I should be warning him against a contingency he had never for a moment entertained.

And yet—for even that was not the end of it—it was perfectly possible that with that word "Preposterous!" still on his lips he might go straight to her, hand her into the punt, once more alter his focus of intelligence, and be under her spell again before they were half-way across the pond....

Suddenly I heard his call below: "Quick, Julia, the net—I've got him on!" I stepped out on to the balcony to watch. It was one of the three-pounders, making a good fight for it. But he had little chance against my green-heart in Derry's hand. Three minutes settled it. There he lay on the bank, with Derry and Julia bending over him. I think she thought him a lucky fish to have been caught by Derry. I descended and joined them.

"Going to try for another?" I asked him. But already he was taking down the rod.

"No, we thought of doing a bit of crosscut sawing for a change."

"Not the incinerator?" I hinted with a glance at Julia.

"Ah yes, I'd forgotten about the incinerator," he exclaimed. "Which shall we do, Julia? Walk on to the blacksmith's or do the sawing? The sawing I think; it'll take some time to cut the rods, and we can send a lad with the sizes and fetch them after lunch. Do the boys come to bathe on Saturdays, George?"

"They do," I said with another glance at her.

I saw the little mutinous dip of the corners of her mouth.

I am not going to take you in detail through the whole of that day. For half the afternoon they disappeared; they had gone for a walk in the neighbouring woods; but they were back in time for the bathing-parade. Again Derry swam, with the boys, while I lay with Julia in the punt.

We occupied opposite ends of it, and hardly spoke. The commotion made by the swimmers was almost spent by the time it reached our end of the pond, and we moved almost imperceptibly under the oaks, with now a soft touch on the bank, then a little way out, and then the glide to the bank again. A sort of amicable hostility seemed to have settled between us. It seemed to be understood that she would do what she would do, and I should prevent it if I could. I could see the soles of her walking-shoes and her worsted-clad ankles as I lay, and I mused on the contrasts in her. She was ready to be off with him anywhere, anyhow; but the evening before she had been glad of a glass of hot milk and a fire to warm her hands at. She might, as she said, be a good walker, but she had drawn my sister's shawl closely enough about her shoulders to keep out the night air. She was a young forty, yet somehow hardly young enough to traipse houseless after him wherever his whim might lead him. She was not altogether irresponsible, and yet she contemplated "the least serious marriage there ever was."

The punt rocked as she suddenly sat half up. "Are you asleep, George?"

"No."

"I nearly was. I can't imagine why you ever come to London when you've a place like this to bask in. How do you manage to get any work done?"

"I can't say I am doing a great deal at present."

"Now that's the first inhospitable thing you've said. Which is your study—the end room there?" She glanced up at the balcony.

"Yes."

"Don't you ever sleep out?"

"No. My room's at the back, and it's two wide-open windows."

"I love the ramblers up the pillars! May I have some to take back?"

"Mais naturellement."

"Ah, but you can't stay that like Derry, George——"

"I can't do anything like Derry. On the whole I'm not sure that I want to."

"You don't believe that sometimes one single hour may be worth all the rest of life put together?"

"I suppose I'm the other kind of man."

"Ah well!" She stretched herself luxuriously. "I used to think as you do. But I've learned a lot since then. An awful lot."

"'Awful's' perhaps the word."

"But lovely. Anyway who cares? What does it matter? What does anything matter? (Oh, look at his dive!) Nothing matters, George—nothing. I dare you to say it does."

"It might be difficult to run the world on those lines."

"Oh, I don't know. It's in a pretty ghastly muddle as it is. Do you know, I've made a discovery about that, George."

"Really?"

"It's this: That we make the mistake of regarding the world as full of rational people, with perhaps a few particularly stupid ones here and there. Now if you'll only regard it as full of perfect zenies, with just once in a while a reasonable being among them, that would explain everything."

"You'd better go to sleep again, Julia."

"But it is so. I see it, oh so clearly! And you don't worry about anything then—what anybody thinks or says or does or anything. You just take the funny old peepshow as it is. That's the way to live."

"On an endless walking-tour?"

"Why not, if you're in jolly places all the time?"

"Siena? Nîmes? Trieste?"

"Literal George!... But really, nothing matters. Everything except the present moment is meant to be forgotten. It's the only one you live in. In the past you're dead and in the future you aren't born yet—except him.... George——"

"Hm?"

"Girls nowadays do have an awfully easy time!... You've only got to look at their clothes. We dressed down to our toes and up to our ears, and that meant we had to take a good deal of trouble about things. We had to make a little go a long way, so to speak—talk, and smile, and be amusing, and think what we said. If we didn't we were soon left out in the cold. But girls nowadays simply powder their shoulder blades and dress to their knees more or less, and that's all. Lots of 'em never open their mouths except to eat. They don't do anything; they get there by undoing something.... But how boring for you, George. What does it matter as long as you do get there?"

"I hope you'll think twice before you commit a very great folly," I said.

She laughed. "No, no. I've finished thinking. It was one of my mother's maxims: 'Take care of your health and don't ever give way to serious thinking.' Don't you think it's rather good?"

"I agree as far as your health's concerned."

"Oh, the other too. She was a wise woman. I've only lately begun to realise how wise.... Ah, they're going in. Come along."

She stood up in the punt to see whether Derry appeared on the balcony on his way to dress.

At teatime I had a caller, a gentle old friend and neighbour of mine, Mrs Truscott. I saw her old-fashioned victoria standing in the drive as we reached the terrace. Derry was charming to the old lady; Julia—also charming, but with some subtle difference that I cannot explain. After tea Derry and Julia strolled off to see whether the rods had come from the blacksmith's yet, but they stopped to examine the victoria on the way. Mrs Truscott turned to me.

"What an exceedingly handsome man! But surely she's a good deal older than he?"

"Why do you couple them like that?" I asked.

"Aren't they engaged?"

"No."

She smiled. "Not yet?"

"Nor likely to be," I risked.

She shook her head, so that her grey curls trembled about her cheeks.

"Ah, you bachelors, Sir George! All sorts of things happen under your noses that you don't see!"

"I don't think anything's happening here. They've simply been friends since they were boy and girl together."

"That's a handicap, I admit," she replied. "Perhaps the worst a woman has to put up with. But occasionally things happen in spite of it."

"I really think you're mistaken this time, Mrs Truscott."

"Well, well, well, well.... And are you writing us another of your charming books?"

It passed at that, but it left me with an uneasy feeling. These old ladies are so very acute.

Nothing remarkable happened at dinner, except a curious little covert duel between Julia and myself when I once more tried to draw out Derry to talk about his book. I am afraid that she won and I failed. Good-temperedly but flatly he refused to discuss it; he wanted to look at my Hogarths instead. So I drew the large folio-stand up in front of the drawing-room fire, arranged the lights and we turned over the prints. He seemed very much less drowsy; indeed it was half-past nine before he spoke of going to bed; and as in the country that is not an unreasonably early hour, and since moreover Julia had sat up late the night before, I was not surprised when she also said that she would retire early. He went first, but she was not long after him. I was therefore left either to sit over my fire alone, or to follow them, which ever I liked best.

I went my nightly round, of window-fastenings and so forth; for although Mrs Moxon has always been round before me, it is my house, and there would be small satisfaction in scolding her were anything to happen. As a matter of fact I had that night to reopen the side door, for it had occurred to me that the driver of Mrs Truscott's victoria, who was almost as old as herself, had the bad habit of leaving the drive-gate open. Accordingly I walked up the drive, saw that the gate was properly fastened, and then stood for a moment enjoying the cool air.

It was a full and late-rising moon, and only the faintest hint of yellow yet lighted the trunks of the plantation behind the house. The overflow from the lake, which I never heard in the daytime, sounded loudly. The evening star had set; the others were exceedingly tiny, pale and remote; in another hour or so they would be almost extinguished in the moon's effulgence. A glow-worm burned stilly, lighting up the whole leaf as a ship's sidelight lights up its painted box. Through a gleam from the house a bat flickered. I stood for several minutes; then I turned, went in, locked up, and ascended to my bedroom.

This room, I should explain, is at the back of the house and does not overlook the pond. This is in some ways a drawback, but it has its advantages. By foregoing the amenity of sleeping in one of the rooms with the pleasantest view I was able to have a practically self-contained suite all to myself—study in front, and dressing-room, bathroom and bedroom all communicating. My books alone run into all three rooms, and are thus kept together; and the rest of the upper floor is left for my guests and servants. Derry's room was the one next to my study. Julia's, like my own, was at the back. I had put her there partly because of the second bathroom, and partly because Mrs Moxon would be within call had she need of anything.

All was quiet as I entered the room. I switched on my bedside light, undressed, and got into bed. But I was not very sleepy, so I got out again, reached down a book at random, punched my pillow into position and began to read.

I was not very lucky in my book, however, and my attention wandered. From wondering what was wrong with my author I passed away from him altogether, and presently found myself spinning, as it were, fantasias on life in human terms. And as I continued to do this these fantasias began to accrete more and more about the figure of Derwent Rose.

What a history had unfolded since that afternoon when I had found him in the Lyonnesse Club, gazing at his image in the glass of a framed print on the wall! Hitherto I had contemplated that unfolding only a portion at a time. I had typified him as it were in terms of his books, had seen the man who had written The Hands of Esau give way to him who had written An Ape in Hell, and this one in turn to the author of The Vicarage of Bray. I had taken him phase by phase; I was not yet sure of a single unit of the repeating-pattern of his backward life. But these books were not merely his three principal books. They were his only books of any importance. All prior to the Vicarage had been experimental, fragmentary, partial—as indeed all he had ever done was fragmentary and partial by the side of the huge and desperate work he now contemplated. Therefore we were at the end of measurement by books. The rest was in Julia Oliphant's possession. She was now his sole authentic companion, and soon she would have shouldered even me completely out of his life, and would go forward—backward—with him alone.

My thoughts passed to her. What a history for her too since that afternoon when I had taken her hands in mine, had asked her a question, and had had her matter-of-fact reply, "Of course; all my life; but it never made any difference to him." Now it was to make a difference to him. Though he presently eluded her never so swiftly down the slippery years, she had come to the conclusion that it was worth it. And, for a few weeks, a few hours yet, I had to admit that they were not ill-matched. Mrs Truscott had thought that she was older than he, but had none the less assumed them to be lovers. He, of course, had sunk into a vast of sleep an hour ago, but I wondered whether she was at that moment lying awake, scheming, contriving, making sure....

Then, tired of thought, I switched off my lamp and closed my eyes.

The rather secluded situation of my house has its reaction on the quality of my sleep. I don't mean that I don't ordinarily sleep perfectly soundly and naturally, but the routine of locking up for the night sets, as it were, a timepiece in my head. The running of the lake, the night-sounds of animals and birds, the creaking of a bough, the motion of a window-blind in the wind—these are every-night sounds to which I have grown accustomed; but any unusual sound will bring me wide awake in a moment. Robbery in the neighbourhood is not entirely unknown.

I had slept for perhaps a couple of hours when I was thus brought suddenly awake.

The moon was high over the plantation; it slanted whitely across my window-sash, cut into relief the folds of the casement curtains. Outside the night creatures would be at play or about their nocturnal employments. But it was no owl nor rabbit that I had heard. It had been the light crackling of something under a foot. I sat up, still, listening.

I heard nothing further, and after a minute noiselessly uncovered myself and slipped out of bed. All the doors of my little suite stood open, so that I had no handle to turn as I tiptoed from my bedroom into the dressing-room. Thence I could look through the study to the balcony beyond. The night was palely brilliant; my eyes could penetrate into the detailed depths of the oaks across the pond; I could see the pebbles on the path, the shadow of a chimney-stack over the bathing-stage. The balcony itself, however, was a blackness. On that side of the house a marauder could easily hide.

I went back to the dressing-room, took down a dark-coloured gown, put it on, and returned through the study. If anybody was lurking about I wished to be inconspicuous. I reached my writing-table and was about to step outside when again I heard the sound. It came, not from below, but from the balcony itself.

My study doors are so arranged that I can either hook them half back, at an angle of forty-five, or entirely so, flush against the walls. That night they stood at their fullest width, so that, if anybody was on the verandah, I had not to risk discovering myself as it were obliquely. I advanced to the hinged edge and peered cautiously forth.

Derry was not asleep. He was moving irresolutely, now a few steps this way, now a few steps that, at the farther end of the balcony, and the noise I had heard had been the cracking of a fir-cone or fragment of bark under his feet. His hair was tumbled, he had put on his old tweed jacket, but the pyjama-suit I had lent him was small for him, and his bare ankles showed above his heelless slippers. There was no light in his room, and I suddenly remembered that that evening he had not shown his usual anxiety to be off early upstairs.

After those immensities of sleep, was he now suffering from insomnia?

I was about to step out to him when something within me, I really can't tell you what, drew me swiftly back again. The room past Derry's, opposite which he now stood, was unoccupied, and its windows were closed except for the little doors in the upper panes. But somebody was undoing a fastening. I had seen the turn of Derry's head towards me, and had withdrawn my own head only just in time. The sound of unfastening continued.

I think already I knew what I was going to see. By crossing the corridor Julia could enter that unoccupied room, pass through it, and gain the balcony. Indeed (I struggled to persuade myself) were she sleepless and in need of air there was no reason why she shouldn't. But I knew that I mocked myself. I knew that not sleeplessness had brought her out. Almost, I thought, they must hear the thumping of my heart. I wondered whether I dared look again.

I dared not—yet I had to——

She had cast over her the Burberry she had brought out for the single day. She left the bedroom door open behind her and stood with her pale hand on the edge of it, not advancing. Slowly his head lifted. His eyes met hers. I think I could have stepped bodily out and he would not have seen me for the look he gave her. It was hard, fixed, tranced. Still she did not move. All her life she had waited for him; it was proper now that he should come to her.

Very slowly he lifted his hands——

Already I had turned away.

For I had heard the little flutter of her garments, the rush and catch of her breath——

Grim King of the Ghosts!

She was in his arms.

---

IV

The next morning I did not hear his plunge into the lake. This was not because I was not back in my own house in time.

For I had not remained in it. I had dressed, had crept softly downstairs, and had let myself out, easing the catch of the side-door behind me. I had walked to Hindhead, and from the edge of the Punch Bowl had seen the night end and the day begin. I had watched the cloudlets kindle like plumes of the wings of cherubim, ineffable, indifferent, anguishing in that the eye and heart ached and fainted for more than they could endure, gazed and yet saw not because of their own overbrimming. I had turned away, weary of the heavenly thing, yet had returned with tears for more of it. I had cast myself down with my face hidden in the wet earth. I had tried not to think or feel. Had it been possible I would have been, not a few miles, but a few worlds away. And in sober fact I am not sure that I was not worlds away. In the thing that had happened time, distance, had no meaning. Nothing so mystic in its very nature can be merely a little in error; once it is not right, it is wrong with an unimaginable totality. Ordinary measurement is annihilated; in the very instant of identity the last conceivable differences are wrapped up together as in the vital element of a seed. I am sorry I cannot make this plainer. You either see what had happened or you don't. It beat and bludgeoned my spirit as I lay there, sometimes quivering, sometimes still, while the sun had risen over the Devil's Punch Bowl.

On my return to the house Mrs Moxon met me. She is an efficient creature, but a little given to impressionistic fancies, and there was perplexity in her face as I entered by the way I had left—the side door.

"The gentleman and lady don't seem to be having any breakfast, sir," she said.

"Why not?"

"I'm sure I can't tell you, sir. Mr—Mr Rose asked where you were, and then said perhaps I'd better keep breakfast back."

"Where are Mr Rose and Miss Oliphant now?"

"They went off that way, sir." She nodded in the direction of the kitchen-garden.

"Then I'll see about it. Have breakfast ready in ten minutes, please."

The kitchen-garden is not very large, but it is a straggling sort of place, being, in fact, the oddments of ground left over when the tennis-court was made. I looked for my guests among the dewy canes, but did not see them; they were not behind the sweet-pea hedge that made my lungs open of themselves to receive its fragrance. But they had been there, for I saw that the roller on the court had been moved. Its barrel was wet all round with dew, and the patch of grass where it had stood during the night was dry.

Then, just as I was on the point of calling their names, they appeared from behind the tall artichoke brake.

I spoke first, ignoring what Mrs Moxon had told me.

"Good morning," I called. "Breakfast is just ready. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting. Come along."

It was Derry who answered, advancing across the court towards me.

"Ah, there you are. I've been looking for you. I wanted to thank you and say good-bye. I'm afraid I've got to be pushing along."

I acted my part as well as I could. "Pushing along! What are you talking about? What train are you going by? This is Sunday. Come along in to breakfast."

"Oh, I'd a cup of tea and a biscuit in my room, thanks," he said hesitatingly. "I know it's springing it on you rather suddenly, George, but I really must be getting along."

"What's all this about? Your book?" I demanded.

"Yes, the book. Yes, the book, George."

"But I tell you it's Sunday. There the twelve-forty-six and the four-fifty. You've missed the eight-fifty-five."

"I thought of walking," he said.

"All the way to London? That would take you two days. So it isn't your book after all."

"Oh, I meant part of the way," he evaded, fidgeting. "Guildford or Weybridge or somewhere."

"And is Julia going to walk to Guildford or Weybridge too? Don't be absurd. Come along to breakfast."

Reluctantly he turned his face towards the house.

I say I acted as well as I could; but it was acting. I had to act because I was afraid to face the reality. His haste to be off seemed to make that reality a twofold possibility. In the highly peculiar circumstances it was not for me, his host, to inquire whether he scrupled to breakfast or sit down in my house; but it was for me, technically still his friend, to wonder why he had tried to put me off with some tale about wanting to get on with his book and, in his eagerness to be gone, proposed to walk to London. It might have been decency and delicacy. On the other hand, he now experienced everything with the greatest intensity, and this sudden and imperious urge to walk might have been the first faint thrilling of that communicating nerve that, traced back, led to his Wanderjahre.

At Julia I had not yet dared to look.

I made him eat whether he wished it or not; oh, I was not above using my advantage. For he was entirely unaware that the cracking of a fir-cone under his foot had brought me out of my bed and to the door of my study. It was because he supposed me to have been soundly asleep all night that I was able to compel him to swallow his punctiliousness at the same time that he swallowed his trout, coffee and marmalade. If either or all of them stuck in his throat there was no remedy for that.... At least so at first I thought. But as breakfast proceeded, I began to be strangely aware of my complete helplessness. Much as I might wish it, I could not wash my hands of him. Once more, the choice was not mine, but his.

For what could I do with him? Nothing—nothing at all. I was bound hand and foot. You cannot turn a two-memoried man out of your house as you can another. You don't get rid of him if you do. He has his own—ubiquity. There is only one of him, and you never know where he isn't. It was not now a question of whether he should marry Julia Oliphant, but whether he was to be suffered to vanish, to be swallowed up in the world of men, a drop in the human ocean that did not merge but still remained a drop, a grain on humanity's shore yet numbered too, an anomaly, a contradiction in nature, a ghost in the flesh, a man among ghosts. For if he was a ghost to us we must be ghosts to him. And ghost does not bring ghost to book for reasons of the flesh. No, he was still Derry, on whom this enormous destiny had alighted. He was not to be judged.

Nevertheless he must settle his soul's affairs and eat his breakfast like anybody else.

We got through that meal somehow. Julia talked to Derry, and I suppose I also was included, but I have no memory of what it was all about. One vivid little incident, however, I do remember. I learned why the heavy roller on the tennis court had been moved. She had asked Derry whether he could lift it, and for answer he had picked it up and held it above his head, as once he had held her sewing-machine. So she had gloried in him.... But of the rest of the conversation I remember nothing. Breakfast over, I excused myself and left them at the table together. It had occurred to me that I was still as I had returned from the Devil's Punch Bowl, and that I had neither shaved nor bathed.

But on my way to my room Mrs Moxon again met me. She was replacing flowers, and she carried a pail of withered ones in her hand.

"I beg pardon, sir, but may I ask if you got up in the night?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered. "Why?"

"Only that I fancied I heard somebody moving about," she said.

"Yes. I went into Mr Rose's room. Then I went out for a walk. I'm not sleeping very well, Mrs Moxon. To-night I shall take a draught."

She knows my tone. I hope she was satisfied. I passed on to my dressing-room.

Three quarters of an hour later I came down again. I found Julia at one of the drawing-room windows, alone and gazing out over the pond. She started at the sound of my voice behind her.

"Where's Derry?" I had asked.

"Over there by the punt," she replied.

I had not noticed him as he had stooped behind the little shelter to untie it.

"Is he leaving to-day?"

"I don't know."

"Are you trying to keep him?"

She had turned her back on me again and was once more looking out of the window. "Of course I'm trying to keep him—so far as I may in somebody else's house."

"Oh.... Why 'of course?'"

"Of course it's of course. Do you think I'm going to take my eyes off him for a single moment? You heard what he said before breakfast."

"About walking to London as the quickest way of getting back to that book of his?"

She did not answer. Derry had moved, and her eyes had instantly moved with him.

"Why is he putting out by himself? Why aren't you with him?" I asked.

"Oh—as long as I know where he is——"

"Didn't he ask you to join him?"

"No."

"The first time for two days?"

No reply.

"I wonder why he didn't ask you?"

"I wonder," she repeated.

"Have you no idea?"

With that she suddenly confronted me. She stood with her hands on either side of the window-frame, dark against the morning light. She looked straight into my eyes.

"Isn't this rather a catechism, George?" she said. "Your tone too. I want you to tell me something. It's this; Are these really the questions you're wanting to ask me?"

She said it with the proudest calm; but whatever it was that existed between us made me for some moments longer as calm as herself.

"I do want to know those things. Otherwise I shouldn't have asked you."

"Oh, I'm afraid I said it badly. That's not what I meant. I mean are those the only questions you want to ask me?"

The moment she said it I was much less certain that they were not. Her next words plunged me still deeper into doubt. She spoke as it were direct from the heart of some uttermost complexity.

"What is the relation between you and me, George?" she demanded.

I considered, my eyes downcast. I felt hers steadily on my face all the time. I spoke in a low voice.

"I'm beginning to know less than ever."

"You'd hardly call it ordinary, would you—conventional and so on?"

"That's quite the last word I should use."

"It's not ordinary because of an extraordinary element that's at the very root of it. You know what that is; it's"—her eyes went towards the punt—"it's all him. He's got us all on the run. Give him his head and he could have the whole world on the run. There's no reason about it; as many people as knew about him would simply be bewitched. So I've taken it for granted that we don't quite come under everyday rules. We have to break and make rules as we go along.... About those questions. They really are all that you want to know—just what he'll do next and so on?" she challenged me.

I think I should have broken in on the spot with a "Yes—I want to know nothing else—nothing at all!" But she gave me no time. Her eyes called my own downcast ones peremptorily up from the floor.

"Because," she said, with the utmost distinctness in the shaping of each syllable, "I notice that since breakfast you've shaved, George. You've also changed your clothes. One does not usually change one's clothes immediately after breakfast. I suppose Mrs Moxon is brushing the others. They needed brushing. They had bits of dried grass and heather on them.... George—George dear—thank you——"

I spoke in little more than a whisper. "For—going out?"

"Oh no. For only thinking of it—for only thinking of it. But you would think of it; I always knew you'd be like that.... Now ask me anything you like. Anything you like. Only don't ask Derry. It made"—for an instant only there was the slightest tremor in her voice—"it made no difference to him."

What, as she had said, was our relation? Had he "got us going"? Had he subdued all our standards to his own standardlessness? Had he withdrawn some linchpin of ordinary conduct from the wheel on which the whole world revolves? I didn't know. I don't know now. The more I think of it the less I know. I only know what I did. Her affairs were her affairs, and I have ado enough to look after my own. I took one of her cool hands in mine, bowed as low over it as if she had been a queen, and kissed it.

Her other hand rested lightly for a moment on my head as I did so.

"And now," she resumed in her ordinary tones, "about him."

He was sitting alone in the punt, some forty yards away, gazing straight before him. He had ceased to paddle, the water had ceased to drip from his resting blade. It accentuated his isolation that for two whole days he had hardly left her side. Restlessness and impatience plainly possessed him. He was straining to be off. It would not have surprised me to see him suddenly thrust the paddle in, swirl across the lake, tie up the punt, walk straight up to me, hold out his hand, and say, "George, old man, it's no good—I've got to go this moment." I turned to Julia.

"If he leaves shall you go with him?" I asked.

"Leaves here? This house? To-day?"

"I didn't mean that."

"You mean if he buckles on his knapsack again?"

"If that's the next stage."

"I'm afraid to think."

"Then you do think he might just—go off?"

She sighed a little. "I suppose it has to be faced."

"And in that case would you go with him?"

She started nervously. He had put in the paddle. But he only gave a couple of strokes, and withdrew it again. Her voice was low.

"I would, of course. To the end of the world. But that's the whole point. He never wanted me. He doesn't want me now. He won't want me then."

I saw—only too plainly. Naturally he would not want her. It was the very essence of his wandering that he should be unhampered and alone. That which she now had she had; but it seemed to me that it was all she would ever have. She had thrown, and—won? Lost? Which? That was for her to say. Had she remained content as she was she might have kept him on the original terms in perpetuity; but it looked as if in precipitating the event she had encompassed her own defeat. Her eyes were now on him as if they would never see him again.

"Shall we go across to him?" I said.

She shook her head. "Don't worry him. There's no stopping it. He's bound to go. There, I didn't want to say it, but it's better to face it. He's fighting with the Wanderlust now. And if he goes it isn't the end. There are stages beyond that, and there's no stopping them either. He'll come back in the end."

"Then you'll let him go?"

"He shall do whatever he wishes. It mayn't be for long."

"How many Wanderjahre had he?"

"Two—three—I don't quite remember. But that may not mean more than a week or a fortnight really."

"And—he'll come back?"

"He'll come back, or we can go to him. Probably he won't be able to get very far. Anyway nothing on earth can stop it, so there's no more to be said."

I looked at her fixedly, earnestly. "But there is more to be said. What about yourself?" I said quietly.

For a moment her eyes left that man in the punt who fidgeted to feel the stick in his hand again, the pack on his back and the hard road under his feet. They smiled dimly into mine.

"Oh, I'm a painter. There'll be that portrait of yours to start presently, George."

And back went the eyes to the motionless figure in the punt.

---

V

Derry stayed to lunch without further pressing. He had made his book his excuse; that brushed aside, he had no choice but to stay or give his reason for not staying. So, as a man who is starting on a walking-tour of indefinite duration can hardly boggle at an hour or two sooner or later in the starting, and as, moreover, having brought Julia, he must in ordinary politeness take her back again, he stayed.

But lunch was nearly as extraordinary as breakfast had been. Once more he tried to urge his book, and again failed. And I remembered how formerly, in Cambridge Circus, his very thought and essence had been modified in my presence, awaiting only sleep to put the visible and physical seal upon it. It needed only half an eye to see that he no longer had the least interest in that book. The more he urged it, the more plainly it became a thing of the past. Vivaciously, yet as if repeating them from memory, he said things he had said twice and thrice before; echoes, mere echoes.... And then suddenly he ceased to talk about his book. He wanted a change, he said; wanted to get away somewhere; and this rang instantly true. I fancied he even became a little cunning. "Do you know, George, I've never in my life been in Ireland?" he said. "Only an hour or two away, and I've never been! Lord, how we do sit still in one place! I feel positively ashamed. We settle down—get sitzfleich—heavens, I do want a change!" ... And somehow I knew that he was dragging in Ireland as a red-herring. He had no intention of going there. That was purely for our benefit. He not only wanted to go away alone, but he did not wish to have his whereabouts known. Only a few hours before he had made much of Julia and myself, as his only rest and comfort in that wavering ebb of his life; now he no longer did not need, but very definitely did not want companionship. And he threw dust in our eyes. Yes, just a little cunning. I made a note of it.

I have said that the afternoon train to town was at four-forty. There was not another till seven-eighteen, reaching Waterloo at eight-forty-one. There was little doubt which of the two he would choose. As we all three took a stroll backwards and forwards after lunch he turned to Julia.

"Will the four-forty suit you all right?" he asked.

She only nodded.

"Right. And I say: would you mind if when we got to town I put you on your bus at Waterloo and left you? There's a little job I must do."

"Very well, Derry," she said.

"And now, George, if you could spare me just a moment——," this time he turned to me.

Julia walked rather quickly away.

The "little job" of which he had spoken was this:

He wanted me—quite at my own convenience, of course, and whenever I next happened to be in town—to arrange for the sale of his things at Cambridge Circus. To attend to this himself might be to ask for trouble. So I was to sell everything for what it would fetch and remit the money to him.

"Where?" I asked him. ("Ireland?" I thought.)

"I shall have to let you know that later," he replied. "I want to sell the lot and pay all up there; chairs and curtains are no good to a man like me. I don't suppose I shall ever want 'em again. I shall have to settle up with Trenchard too, and money's as well in your pocket as anywhere else."

"Will you have some now to be going on with?"

"No, that's quite all right. I have all I want for the present, if you wouldn't mind doing this other for me. Thanks, old fellow."

"Is it to Cambridge Circus that you're going to-night when you leave Julia?" I asked.

"Yes. There are one or two small things I want, and also a few things I think I'd better destroy."

"Couldn't you," I said slowly and quite deliberately, "have taken her home and seen about your things to-morrow?"

I felt the beginning of his perturbation. "It's so dashed awkward, George," he stammered. "I don't want to go in the daytime."

"Couldn't you go to-morrow night and still take her home?"

Again he muttered, his eyes on the ground. "Why waste a day?"

"If, as you say, you want a change—supposing you were to go off somewhere for a bit—wouldn't you like somebody with you?"

"No, George," he answered curtly.

"You are going away?"

"Yes," he admitted.

"Immediately?"

"Yes."

"Where to?"

"I don't know yet."

"Would you let me come with you?"

"No."

"Would you, if it were possible, take Julia?"

"No."

"Might both of us come with you together?"

"No." And, raising his voice, "No, I tell you, no!" he said.

We had stopped by a rather shabby-looking thicket of rugosa roses near the diving-stage. The pink-flowered hedge hid us from the house. I spoke quietly, not to give my own agitation too much head.

"Derry," I said, "you remember what you showed me with that flashlight that night in your rooms?"

With marked reluctance he answered, "Yes I do."

"I've been thinking about that. I've been thinking a lot about it. Of course it makes a considerable difference how far away you hold the lamp."

"A hell of a difference," he muttered.

"Do you always hold it at the same distance?"

His whole mind seemed to wriggle. "I haven't, if you must know. But why drag all this up again? I offered to tell you before but you wouldn't listen."

"I hadn't the reason then that I have now. Do you—move it about deliberately?"

"I have to some extent. I told you that. I did by an effort of will when I came here for a day's rest."

"A day's rest?... You're not going back to that book. You know that better than I do. That book's all past and done with. Something's happened since."

I saw him turn pale. "What do you mean?" he asked almost inaudibly.

"You came here on Friday midday. I've watched you carefully ever since. Let's—well, let's stick to terms of the flash-lamp. Except for a quarter of an hour or so at breakfast yesterday morning, when you talked about your book, you've had that lamp steadily rather close to the edge of the table. Isn't that so?"

"I tell you a holiday's a holiday," he said faintly.

"Let me go on. I want to know how close that lamp has been. The closer you hold it the more ecstatically you experience, you know. Very well. Now has there been a moment since yesterday when ... you've held it as close as you could get it?"

I was in time to catch him as he swayed. He clutched at my shoulder.

"George——"

"Steady—but tell me——"

"George—I've been trying to remember——"

"What! Good God! You don't remem—so close that you don't remember?"

"I honestly—but no, that isn't true—I seem to remember something—let me think, let me think.... What time did I go to bed last night?"

"Later than usual. Not till half-past nine."

"What was I doing? Tell me what I was doing. I was looking at pictures or something, wasn't I?"

"You were looking at the Hogarth prints."

"Yes, yes, that's right.... I didn't fall asleep, did I?"

"No, you didn't."

He muttered thickly. Outrageous, extravagant, beyond reason as it was, his sincerity could not be doubted. "It made no difference to him," Julia had said; but that her words should be taken au pied de la lettre like that!... He continued to mutter.

"I do remember something—I do remember—at least I did this morning—I thought I did—but it went. Why didn't I come into breakfast? Why was I going away without any breakfast? Why wouldn't I have breakfast, George? I'm sure there was a reason, but I can't for the life of me remember." Then he began to talk rapidly. "That lamp—very close, you say—touching—something all instantaneous and burning—one intense brilliant spot—no before or after—all isolated by itself—but I'll swear I didn't fake the lamp that time! By all that's sacred I swear it, George! Something happened in the night that had nothing to do with me at all! It all happens in the night. Why"—he flung out his arms in a perfectly amazing appeal—"if I'd moved the light at all it would have been farther away! I wanted to do that book! I thought about nothing else from the moment I went upstairs! I ached to be at it—wished this wasted week-end was over—I saw it all again perfectly clearly, beautifully clearly! I'd got out of bed. And then ... everything went out. It was exactly as if somebody'd taken that torch out of my hand, somebody with a stronger will than mine, and concentrated it—in the very moment when I saw that book practically written—one bright blazing bull's-eye——"

There was a little bench about four yards away. I think I needed its support more than he. Together we reached it and sat down. He turned the beautiful grey-blue eyes on me.

"George," he said more quietly, "something happened. I know it did."

I made no reply.

"Something happened. Something's been done to me. Somebody's been taking a hand in my life. At breakfast-time I almost knew what it was. Do you know what it was?"

There was only one possible answer to this. I made it, in a broken voice.

"No, old man, I don't."

"Except of course that I've slipped back again."

"Except that, I suppose."

He passed his hand wearily over his brow, and, much as I hated that insolent vainglorious book of his, the gesture with which he wiped it away went strangely to my heart.

"Then what's that make the year now? 1903 or 4 I suppose; all blind guessing though; how can you tell your age to a year or two simply by how you feel?... But that would be about it. I was in the Adriatic in 1903; Venice, and across to Genoa and Marseilles. I'd been in Marseilles a few years before and thought I'd like another look at it. Gay place. There was a little café on the Vieux Port with a little stage where a woman used to dance. Andalusian; very dark-eyed; pretty sort of wild animal. She had a little sloping mirror at the top of the stage so she could see who was in front when she was behind. Wicked show; I wasn't having any; knives come out too easily there. But of course she'd gone when I went again in 1904."

I made one more appeal. "Derry, can't you stay here a little longer?"

But it had now resumed its possession of him. He was almost cheerful again.

"Sorry, George. It's good of you to ask me, but it's quite impossible. Glad Julia was able to take a run down with me; she's a rattling good sort. I feel rather beastly about shaking her at Waterloo, but I really must get up to Cambridge Circus to-night. And if you'll see about selling those things, George—any time will do—I've got nearly a hundred pounds, so there's really no hurry—I'll let you know where to send the money to——"

---

I drove them to the station. As the car turned out of the drive Julia's eyes took a last look at my balconied house. His spirits were now high; he was on the eve of a holiday. They got into an empty third-class carriage.

"Well, thanks most awfully, George," he said.

We waved hands.

Both their heads were framed in the window as the train glided out of the station.

That night I once more roamed restlessly from room to room of my house. The place seemed extraordinarily and insistently empty, and I could not have told you whether I was glad or sorry for it. For this thing was getting altogether too much for me. Remember that I am merely a commercially successful English novelist, not a person accustomed to the contemplation of the mysteries of life and death in terms of electric torches and bamboo tables. Also a man of my years does not spend a night at the Devil's Punch Bowl without knowing something about it afterwards. In this connection, going into my dressing-room, I found that after all my suit of clothes had not been brushed. I summoned Mrs Moxon and told her to take them away. She stiffened a little, and some part of her clothing creaked.

"It's made a good deal of extra work for the week-end," she reminded me.

"I'm sorry for that, but you were consulted beforehand," I said.

"It was more than I reckoned for," she announced with dignity.

A little of this was enough.

"Very well, Mrs Moxon. Take the clothes away, please, and let me have them to-morrow. By the way, I shall be going up to town by the midday train."

"In that case, sir," she said, "if you're seeing Mr Rose perhaps you'd give him this. I suppose it's his. I found it in his room."

She put into my hand a small book covered with shiny black cloth. I opened it to see what it was.

A single glance told me. It was Derwent Rose's diary.

---