PART V
THE PIVOT
I
"George, you haven't brought your Beautiful Bear round to see me yet," said Madge Aird. And I jumped a little as she added, "By the way, does he happen to have a brother?"
"No. At least I never heard of one. Why?"
"I wondered. I've seen somebody most remarkably like him, only younger. In this neighbourhood too. I thought Nature made him and then lost the recipe, or whatever the saying is."
I assumed a lightness I hardly felt. "Did you 'fall for' this other paragon as you did for Mr Rose?"
She laughed. "Oh, I don't know. I dare say beauty of that sort would be ill to live with. Better a dinner of herbs all to yourself than a stalled ox every woman you knew would be running after. Or words to that effect. So you and Alec needn't be too downhearted. But really he was most astonishingly like. Where does Mr Rose live?"
"Mr Rose is at present abroad."
"Oh, I don't mean that it was he! I couldn't make a mistake like that—I'd far too good a look at him the other time, the dazzling creature! But you might find out if the family's seriously addicted to monogamy, unless he turns out to have a brother after all. Well, when are you coming to see us? Better hurry, as we're off very soon."
"Where are you going?"
"Dinard. The three of us. Johnnie's taken a villa. Have you settled what you're going to do yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then why not come over to us for a few weeks? When you get tired of me, Jennie's getting most take-about-able. She's seventeen. And—George——"
"When a woman tells you she's got a daughter of seventeen there are quite a number of pretty things to be said——"
We continued to talk and walk aimlessly side by side. I had met her in Queen's Gate, and I intended to retrace my steps to Queen's Gate the moment I had got rid of her. She chattered on.
"And by the way, has Hastings mentioned Mr Rose to you lately?"
"No. Why?" I said. Hastings is my literary agent, the man beside whose labours on my behalf my own seem puny.
"Because I've got a feeling that this creature of all the talents really is coming off this time," she went on. "Hastings has found a publisher who's going to see that Derwent Rose is 'It' or die in the attempt. So if you want to do the Bear a good turn send him to Hastings. When is he coming back?"
"I don't quite know."
"Well, there's no immediate hurry. Everybody'll be away in another week or two. But it would be rather joysome to see Derwent Rose at last where he really belongs! Well, think about Dinard. Any time you like. 'Bye——"
And with a wave of her hand she was off.
Even when you think you are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of a thing it can sometimes come freshly over you; and merely in the professional part of me I had felt an oddly special little pang at Madge's last words. Here, apparently, was a publisher who believed in Derwent Rose and was prepared to back his belief with money; and—it was too late! Derwent Rose, wanderer, would never write another book. A few travel-sketches, perhaps, a few pen-pictures by the way, a few evening-paper articles; but another book—no. I wished that publisher no ill, but I did wish that he had recognised Derry's struggles, endeavours, faithfulness, strength, a little sooner than a day after the fair. Poor Derry would not have even the cynical consolation that while his real books had been neglected money would be heaped on him for his bad ones. He no longer had a book left in him. A pugilist's manager would be of more use to him than a publisher now.
I passed up Queen's Gate and turned into the mews where I had arranged to meet Trenchard.
I had made my appointment with him because I had a question of special importance to ask him. I wanted to know whether Trenchard had seen him immediately before his departure, and, if he had, how old he now looked.
For the farther he travelled the more crucial this question became. From forty-five to thirty-five he might still pass as Derwent Rose, but he could hardly do so from, say, forty-five to twenty. I had not a moment's doubt that it had indeed been he whom Madge had seen and had failed to recognise—nay, had unhesitatingly assumed to be another man. Also my housekeeper's suspicions that all was not as it should have been had also been thoroughly awakened. "It is Mr Rose, isn't it?" she had asked me with a puzzled look on the Friday midday; but by Sunday morning Julia and he had become "the lady and gentleman" who had had to be fetched in to breakfast. Old Mrs Truscott again had unhesitatingly set him down as years younger than Julia. If Trenchard had seen him before his departure he had probably been the last of us to do so. Trenchard, in short, was to tell me what Derry's diary had completely failed to tell me.
For that little shiny-backed pocket book had merely brought things to a more hideously complicated pass even than before. I shall return to this diary in a moment; for the present let it suffice that, like the publisher's offer, it seemed to me to have turned up just a few hours too late. I had hoped for a survey wide enough, simplified enough, to help me to his rate of progress. I had so far found nothing of the slightest use whatever. I was without the faintest idea of his present age. He might have been thirty, twenty-five, twenty, younger. He might even be sixteen, at which age he had said he would die.
Trenchard I found to be a black-haired, pleasant-voiced, very much alive fellow of a little under thirty. His rank, I believe, had been that of major, and even the atrocious crippling he had received at La Bassée did not destroy his look of perfect efficiency. He was just able to start up a car, and cars were his livelihood and he lived in them. I introduced myself, and he hobbled cheerfully about among his cups and bread-and-butter and methylated spirits.
"So," I concluded my introduction of myself, "as I'm settling up a few matters for him I wanted to know how you stood."
"Oh, everything's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned," he laughed, filling the teapot. "Place left like a new pin, Bradburys in an envelope, and a quite unnecessary letter of thanks for what he calls my kindness. I was only too glad to have somebody in the place."
"Do you know what day he left?"
"Let me see. To-day's the ninth. He left on Monday, the fifth."
(Note: he had cleared out of Trenchard's place the day after I had seen him and Julia off at Haslemere Station.)
"He didn't say where he was going?"
He gave me a quick glance. "I say, this is all right, isn't it?" Then, laughing as I smiled, "Sorry, but one has to be careful, you know. No, he didn't say. Here's his note if you care to read it. I don't even know what to do with letters if any come for him."
Already I guessed that it would be useless to put my question; but I asked it none the less.
"You didn't see him before he left, then?"
"No. He simply left that note. It's dated the evening of the fourth, and it says he's off to-morrow.... By the way, what am I to do about letters?"
There wouldn't be any letters. Of that I was sure. But I gave him my address, wound up a pleasant chat rather quickly, and took my leave.
And now for that diary that, instead of helping me, had proved the greatest stumbling-block of all.
I had had not a moment's scruple in reading every word of it, in trying to disentangle every diagram and equation it contained. Any question of ordinary decorum had long since passed out of the relation that existed between him, Julia, and myself. And let me repeat once more that a man who has questioned the universe until he has asked one question too many involves in his own fatality all who have to endure the contact of him. His state is apocalyptic, his existence merely spatial, without zenith of virtue or nadir of disgrace. If my roof had not been abused, neither did I violate his diary. I merely read it without a qualm.
Its oddity began with its very first page. Ordinarily on the first page of a diary you look for the owner's name and address. Here was no address; on the other hand there was a string of names. There were, to be exact, eight of them, with space for more, the whole written in his small fine hand and disposed in a neat vertical column. This block of names might have been from the everyday-book of any working novelist, part of whose task it is to label his puppets appropriately. I had no reason to suppose that hitherto Derwent Rose had ever gone under any name but his own. It had certainly occurred to me that he might sooner or later have to do so. This appeared to be a preparation for such a contingency. His own name of Derwent Rose, by the way, did not appear.
Opposite the names a diagram had been pasted into the book. It was on squared paper, such as draughtsmen use, of so many squares to the inch; and these squares had been numbered horizontally along the top with the years from 1891 to 1920, that is to say from his own age of sixteen on. Lower down the page, and still horizontally, red and black lines of various lengths were set in echelon. These were sprinkled over with numbers, which I discovered to refer to the pages that followed. Certain arrows pointed in opposite directions. Over these were written, in one direction, the words "'A' memory," in the other the words "'B' memory." This completed the horizontal arrangement.
The vertical set-out appeared to have given him much more trouble. It did not appear to have been completed. A heavy black line ruled up through the year 1905 was lettered "true middle," but that appeared to be the only stable term of its kind. The rest was a mere rain of pencil-lines, momentary false middles that apparently he had tried to seize in passing. I knew by this time how unseizable they were. Not one of them lay on the right side of the true middle line. All overstepped it and travelled in a gradual procession towards the left of the diagram.
On other pages I found other diagrams. These were merely enlarged details of the foregoing, with days of the month instead of years.
One wild chart was an attempt to combine the whole in a single comprehensive statement. But this had completely beaten him. A serpentine whip-lash of pencil had been flung so viciously across it that one almost heard the crack.
The rest of the book consisted of text.
I was of course prepared at any moment to receive a telegram or letter asking for the book's instant return. If it really contained the key to his speed of retrogression it was probably the most important thing he had in the world. Therefore, lest he should claim it before I had finished with it, it stayed in my breast pocket when it was not actually in my hand.
And so I had three days' madness over the hateful thing. Twenty times I nearly tore it in two as he had once torn a six-shilling novel. Then at the end of the three days I put it down, leaned back exhausted in my chair, and asked myself what it was that I was really in search of.
I wonder whether the answer will startle you as much as it startled me. True, it came pat enough. There was nothing whatever new about it. It was merely what it had been all along, and I ought to have been familiar with it by this time.... I merely wanted to know his age. Just that and nothing more.
Yet of all the shocks that a man can receive, the shock of the expected and waited-for is sometimes the most profound. You know it is coming; it is therefore pure, fundamental shock, unalleviated by the lighter element we call surprise. When something you have lived with every day, taken for granted, thought you knew all about, have become familiar with to the point of boredom, suddenly so recalls attention to itself that all your habitual notions about it drop clean away, leaving you face to face with a strange thing—a line of verse, an object in your house, a tune, a picture, a wife—when this happens, then you may know that something has been wrong all along, is still wrong, and that if you would set it right you must go back to the very beginning again.
So there I stood, an unhappy, over-confident little scholar, whom the inexorable tutor silently points back to his task.
Humbly I returned to the book that, if it told me anything at all, must at least tell me this.
And now I must ask you to bear your portion of that little shiny-backed book too; for on a point of this importance I cannot allow you to accept my own conclusions on trust. You must know how I arrived at them. Where Derwent Rose was at that moment, what manner of man he was, what he was doing, how long he might continue to do it, whether he was alive at all—these things depended on no off-handed survey of his case, but on the dry figures, dates and details that I had hitherto neglected.
Fortunately we had a roughly-sufficient starting-point. This was the date of June 8th, 1920, the day when I had met him at the Lyonnesse Club. It was not, it must be confessed, his true zero. The true zero was now indiscoverable. But I myself, in good faith and knowing nothing of all this, had judged him to be thirty-five that afternoon; he himself had confirmed my judgment, subsequent changes had sufficiently borne it out, and the diary now re-affirmed it.
So much for June 8th, when, if he had had an age at all, it had presumably been thirty-five. Thereafter he had disappeared for exactly three weeks, and on June 29th, a Tuesday, he had spoken to me in the picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue.
On the following day, Wednesday, June 30th, I had returned to Haslemere, having left Julia waiting for her books in the reading-room of the British Museum.
Then, two days later still, on Friday, July 2nd, they had unexpectedly turned up together at my house.
Now a definite note in the diary, written as a matter of fact in my own house (for he kept it instantly up to date), told me that on that day, July 2nd, he had "felt twenty-nine." True, he had later admitted the vagueness of these mere "feelings" as an index to age, but there it was for what it was worth, and it agreed with the impression I had myself formed, based on his vivid and ecstatic and momentary moods. Except when I had compelled him to speak of his book, Saturday had been the counterpart of Friday. That is to say, that during the whole of Friday and Saturday he had remained twenty-nine.
Therefore (and omitting the loss of the years forty-five to thirty-five, now untraceable), during the twenty-five days from June 8th to July 3rd he had dropped a total of six years.
So far so good; but that was not quite what I wanted to know. What I was trying to ascertain was a far more important thing—the shortest actual time in which he had lost the great length of apparent time. It would make the greatest practical difference in the world whether this figure were a high or a low one.
And now groan, as I groaned, when you look at the four days between June 29th and July 3rd—those four days in which, in order that he might be at the very top of his power for the writing of his book, he had vehemently denied his age, had juggled with it, wrestled with it, refused it, ignored it, vowed that a false middle was or should be a true one, and had hung as it were to a strap while the whole momentum of his being had tried to sway him in another direction.
The entry for those four days was a mere question-mark with an open choice. It read:
"Thirty-three—thirty?"
And yet on the fifth day he had been twenty-nine!
Now let us take the queried figures separately and subtract.
If on the fourth day he had been the lower figure—thirty—then he had only dropped a year in a night.
But if on the fourth day he had been thirty-three, then he had dropped four whole years in the same time.
Either was possible, and yet in the one case the ratio was, appallingly, four times as great as in the other.
And now that I was getting to the root of the matter I wished to take nothing for granted. His equations were high above my head, but I reviewed the position in terms of my own. This is how I set it out:
| I HAD ALREADY KNOWN | THE DIARY NOW TOLD ME |
|---|---|
| That by June 8th he had slipped back from forty-five to thirty-five. | That his "straphanging" age three weeks later (on June 29th) was "thirty-three—thirty." |
| That on Wednesday, June 30th, Julia had been scheming to make herself his secretary. | In a pathetic little jotting of the same date, that he feared he would never write his book, that he was "getting too young for it," but that he intended to attempt it at all costs. |
| That on the following Friday and Saturday, at my house, he had been vivid, momentary, intense. | That he now doubted whether what he had at first thought to be will-power had really been that at all; in fact, that the real effort of will would have been, not to put his work out of his head for a couple of days, but to remember it. |
At this point I began to grow excited. It seemed to me that at last I began to see light. I had taken him step by step from the starting-point of June 8th to the evening of Saturday, July 3rd, and the reason I had not gone beyond that date was that the diary itself stopped there. Its last entry was the one I have just given—that he feared he had been mistaken in supposing that will-power had had anything whatever to do with that stolen week-end's holiday.
Oh, had there but been one, one single entry dated Sunday, July 4th!
For if it was possible for him to shuffle off four years in what I may call an ordinary night, what was impossible after an experience as stupefying as had been his on the night of Saturday-Sunday?
And yet in appearance it had not altered him. I had spent practically the whole of Sunday with him, and there had been nothing to indicate that he was not still twenty-nine. His manner, it is true, had been alternately jumpy and morose, but that might have been the mere vague pull of his Wanderjahre. Therefore it looked as if that mad onslaught of Julia's on his stability had passed him over after all.
Ah, but wait a moment!... I sat up at my desk, vociferating the words aloud. Were we at such a dead end after all? Perhaps not....
And first of all I remembered that question I had asked him about the flash-lamp as he had stood behind the screen of rugosa roses on the Sunday afternoon. "Has there been a moment since yesterday when that lamp has been held as close as it could be held?" Again I saw his sudden pallor. Again I felt his clutch on my shoulder, again heard his faint "George—I've been trying to remember ... the lamp ... very close ... touching ... one intense brilliant spot ... but I swear I never moved it ... it was as if somebody took the torch out of my hand ... somebody meddled in my life...."
And he had made me go through his Saturday evening's programme again—his inspection of the Hogarths, his unusual wakefulness, the hour at which he had gone upstairs.
Only for a few moments on the Sunday morning had he seemed dimly to surmise that something of the last importance might have happened to him during the hours of darkness. He had then forgotten all about it.
Nevertheless, would not his next rejuvenation date, not the moment of the fact itself, but from that of the beginning of his realisation of it?
No—no—I was not quite right even yet. Even that moment of wild fear, so quickly gone again, was not the moment I sought. Even after that he might to all appearances have remained twenty-nine for some hours longer.
For his change happened while he slept, and I had not reckoned with that sleep that must come in between.
His next sleep had been, not in my house, but in Trenchard's loft.
Monday morning, July 5th, had been his new starting-point, and that day he had disappeared.
You have now all the material dates that I had. You know that in comparatively uneventful, unexciting circumstances he could go back four years in a night. And I have told you of the headlong rôle Julia Oliphant had taken upon herself.
How old, then, was Derwent Rose when he woke up in Trenchard's rooms on the morning of Monday, July 5th, 1920?
Twenty-five?
Twenty?
Or sixteen and already dead?
II
I now turn to that portion of the diary that seemed to confirm my impression that he had gone to France.
Both his memories, "A" and "B," appeared so far to be functioning normally. In order to ascertain this he had applied a number of ingenious tests to himself. But it immediately struck me that while all his "A" (or Age) notes were written in English, all those in the "B" (or Boyhood) direction were in French.
And not only was the language French. The illustrations and incidents were French in character also. Thus, he wrote in English: "Have been trying to see how much of Esau I can remember without looking at the book"; but of something that had once happened in Marseilles I read: "Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." There might have been purpose in this alternation of the two languages, but I was more inclined to think that he had done it purely instinctively. When a man speaks a language as Derwent Rose spoke French he finds a pleasure in the mere exercise of his attainment. France had always attracted him, he had not unlimited money at his disposal, and mere considerations of ordinary time (an intensely special thing to him) might preclude his getting more than a few hours' journey away. Anyway, with one thing and another, I had chanced it, and guessed that somewhere on the north coast of France would find him.
"And you're going over there to stay with the Airds," Julia mused. "Then there's just a possibility——"
"Oh, the whole coast will be swarming with English by the end of the month."
"Still——"
"Do you want me to let you know if I come across him?"
"Oh, I don't know. I leave it to you. Do just as you think. When are you going?"
"On the thirtieth."
"What about his money?"
"Oh, he needn't worry about that."
"George"—she looked at me accusingly—"I believe you've bought those things of his yourself."
"Bought's hardly the word," I laughed. "Anyway, why shouldn't I?"
"And you're going to finance him."
"Well, the man's got to eat. And Carpentier might knock him out."
She looked away down the crowded tea-room and made no reply.
She herself had chosen the Piccadilly, and I looked at her again as she sat there, tucked away in a far corner of the room, with merry parties at the neighbouring tables and De Groot playing the "Relicario." She was differently and quite brilliantly dressed. As far as externals could assist her, she appeared to have resolved to go back step by step and hand in hand with Derwent Rose. Her furs were thrown back, showing the V-shaped opening of her brown charmeuse, perfectly plain except for a tiny bronze beading at the edge and a lump of amber on a fine gold chain. Her arms were dropped over the sides of her chair, making from throat and dropped shoulders to the tips of her fingers one mantle-like flowing line. Her dark hair was arranged after a different fashion, and on it was a little brown brocade toque with owl's ears sticking out. About her younger women chattered and laughed, but among them she seemed to be—I hardly know how to express it—above rather than out of the picture, architecture to their building, a contralto melody underrunning their treble and fragmentary tunes, a white marble against which their fountains glittered and rainbowed and splashed. No shawls, worsted stockings and hot milk here! If Derry must be young, she too would be as young as clothes could make her. And I could not deny her success.
Not a word had I said to her about my discovery of his diary. I did not see what help it would be to do so. It could only open up the rather dreadful question, whether, in suddenly thrusting into the infinitely-delicate mechanism of his progression no less potent a factor than herself, she had not brought irreparable ruin upon him. More and more I had begun to fear that this might be so. I have already said how little I was concerned with the mere right or wrong of her theft, gift, or whatever else she liked to call it. That was swept aside in the singularity of the whole catastrophe. But for him I was deeply anxious. I could not shake off the impression that this time he must have "dropped" very heavily indeed. I thought I knew now why he had not telegraphed for that diary. It was of little further use to him. He had begun it with that torch at the cool and wide and "philosophic" range; he had continued it at the "emotional" focus of keen and rapid sensation; but at that point the diary had stopped. There was no entry since Julia Oliphant, seeing her Eden twice and no angel with a flaming sword guarding this unsuspected postern of it, had set all a-flux in one blinding spot of irrevocable contact. Could the torch, after that climax, ever be withdrawn again? Was he at this moment burning out the residue of his youth at its whitest heat of combustion? Was he, since that last sleep in Trenchard's place, rushing through the months and years so swiftly as to gasp for very breath?
And if so, what were those experiences that swept down on him in one wild blurr of things long since finished with, unrepeatable in their original form, and yet inevitably to be repeated in that form or in another?
To all this Julia was still the key. One or two trivia in his diary apart, she was the only key. She it was who had received those letters of his from Nîmes, Arles, Trieste, and who farther back still had known his childhood, its happiness, aspirations, beliefs, dreams. Whatever soil he trod at this moment he must still be the boy she had known in a Sussex village. French stained-glass instead of English might hold his rapt eyes, the organ of a High Mass evoke raptures in his Anglican heart, but he was still the same.
And, before that stage was reached, the wild and reckless English years might even now be re-enacting themselves somewhere in the Pas de Calais, Ille-et-Vilaine or the Côte du Nord.
And she who had given that extra spin to the already whizzing wheel of his fate sat there in the Piccadilly, her head a little back, her lips a little parted, her dark eyes sensitised to all the glitter of the room, the fingers of one down-hung hand moving in time to Raquel's song.
Suddenly I broke in on her mood.
"Julia. As a practical matter. How do you suppose he got to France? It isn't easy for a man without papers of any kind, you know."
"Oh, he'd get there if he wanted to," she answered, the fingers still beating time.
"Easy enough to talk, but we may as well look at the practical side of it. He'll have to."
"If you mean his money, that's very nice of you, George, but I thought that was all arranged? Or do you mean that as he used to write to me before he may do so again? If that's it you can hand his money over to me."
"I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking——"
But she interrupted me vivaciously. "Oh, look at that woman in the cloak just getting up! That's rather a wrap, isn't it? And I wonder whether I could wear those shoes!... Now that's what I call having the best of both worlds, George. She's all the advantages of that flapper with the nice fair-haired boy there—the one smoking a cigarette and showing her garters—as well as being a woman. But perhaps she isn't your type. Men do run to types, don't they?... George, you're not listening. I asked you whether men ran to types."
"If you mean do I, you've had most of my time lately."
"Don't be silly. I mean women men are in love with. Or are you all ready to toy with anything that comes along?"
"I thought that you said the end of that man was that he knew nothing about women."
"Oh, what's the use of telling me what I used to say!" She tossed the little cap with the owl's ears. "At any rate I don't talk the same folly twice. Life's too short. Do you like my hat?"
"Very charming."
"Not absurd on me? Nor the way I've done my hair for it? I'm not mutton-dressed-as-lamb? And you haven't seen my shoes——"
Round the leg of her chair she pushed a suede sheath slender as one of the willow-leaves on my pond.
"I do hold my own? Among all these smooth hairs and pretty complexions? I haven't got a touch of powder on; do you think I should? Don't natter; honestly; should I be all right if I met Derry?"
I looked at her without smiling. "Which Derry?" I asked.
"Oh, any Derry! Derry at his maddest, his wildest! Tell me, George: if I'd had just one grain of sense before instead of being a sloppy art-student he only remembered once in six months, all flat heels and hair in her eyes, thinking that by cutting sandwiches ... don't you think, George? Mightn't it have made a wee bit of difference? And won't it still when——"
"When what?"
"Oh—any moment! Who knows?"
I tried to break the current of her infatuated fancies. "Julia, don't you think——" But her eyes laughed me down.
"Think, George!... But this is thinking! You've no idea of the amount of brainwork there is in it! Oh, I'm not talking about rubbishy books and pictures now! Why, this is all the thinking I've ever done!"
"I was going to ask you whether you thought that things with him were—going quicker than they ought to, let us say."
"Not if they bring him back to me."
"But you let him go away."
"Oh, on his Wanderjahre. I dare say that's all over by now."
"Then you do think he may have—speeded up?"
"It wouldn't surprise me."
"Why wouldn't it?"
"Nothing would surprise me."
"But this particular thing?"
She shook with soft laughter. "Oh, George, some nice steady-going woman—like I used to be—ought to adopt you.... Why, you stupid, as if I wasn't willing him to speed up, as you call it, with every particle that's in me, if only I can manage to be somewhere at hand when he gets there!"
I gave her a quick look. "Do you mean that you're going to slip over to France after all?" I demanded.
"No. Wasn't thinking of it. As far as I know at present I shall just stay here. But," she said meaningly, "if I were going anywhere it wouldn't be France."
"Where would it be?"
"Belgium's about the last place anybody with his war-experience would go to for a holiday."
"What, Antwerp in August?"
"I don't see. Sorry."
"Aren't they holding the Olympic games there?"
"Ah!... So you think they might draw him?"
"I didn't say so. I don't know as a matter of fact that I should go to Antwerp either. But you once asked me whether I thought I could bring him by just sitting still and loving him. Well"—a victorious smile—"I almost believe I could—now. But I shouldn't cut him sandwiches—now. I shouldn't be just somebody he remembered when he was at a loose end—now. I'd have him keen, George-old-Thing. He'd think anything I gave him a devil of a favour. Look at that wise young minx with the garters there; I'd have him to heel as she has her boy. Look, she's having a cocktail. Order me a cocktail, please."
"Which? Martini? Manhattan? Bronx?"
"I dunno. Never tasted one in my life. But I'm not too proud to learn. And—Geordie"—she shot a sidelong glance at me—"I've half a mind to begin practising on you!"
"Well—if that will keep you from practising on anybody else——"
"You think you'd be safe, George?"
"Wretchedly safe."
All at once the hectic manner seemed to fall from her. A little incision appeared for a moment between her brows. She pressed it away again with her fingers.
"I suppose so," she said quietly. "You can't say ours isn't an extraordinary relation. It's safe to say there's nothing like it in this room."
Nor anywhere else, I thought; and I was glad to think so. I am an average, more or less straight-living man, with a bias towards virtue rather than the other way; but almost any relation, it seemed to me, was to be preferred to this unnatural inhibition that had so singularly little to do with virtue. Allow me, as a man who possibly has been nearer to these things than you have, to give you a little advice. Avoid, by all means in your power, contact with a man who has put over the reversing-gear of his life as Derwent Rose had done. He will land you in his own net. Unless you are more magnificently steady than I, even when it comes to your relations with an admirable woman you will find yourself interfered with at every step you take. Even the evil that you would you do not, and the good that you would not, that you do.
But it was a question of her rather than of me. I was only at the fringe of the moral commotion Derwent Rose had made on this planet. She was deliberately advancing on its very storm-centre. And in the very nature of things she was doomed to frustration. It seemed to me that she had already frustrated herself. For suppose she should succeed in her aim, and should pull off—well, whatever Rose had hinted at when he had spoken of Andalusian dancers and tilted mirrors in Marseilles sailors' kens. What then? That had not been Derwent Rose! "Je tâche de me débrouiller de ces souvenirs-ci." Where was her success, seeing that it had been the greatest of his dreads that he must re-live that dingy phase before finding the lovelier Derwent Rose who dwelt away on the other side?
Therefore, do what she would, her lot was as predestined as his own. Her successive rôles awaited her also—sister, aunt, elderly friend. But the way to Eden—ah, that she would terribly contrive! He, sick with a twice-lived anxiety, might turn away from his fence; but she approached it from the other side. Dust and ashes to him were all enticement to her. Once already she had put herself in his way; but what was once?... Ah, these inappeasable human hearts of ours! We cry "Give me but this, Lord, and I ask no more." But, having it, we must have more. "Nay, Lord, so quickly gone?" ... She recked not that presently his sins would be all un-sinned again, while her own would be upheaped an hundredfold. Her lot was his. Jointly they advanced on a common fate. When all was over she would put off those crafty garments again. But until then he was to be tripped—at his maddest, at his wildest.
"Julia," I said with a failing voice, "for his sake can't you let it rest?"
She turned quickly. "What do you mean—for his sake?"
"For pity of him—perhaps even for his life."
She broke out, softly, but with a concentration of energy that I can hardly express.
"For pity of him! And why of him? What about me? Why do you try to separate us? We never were separated really. All that ever separated us was my own ignorance and conceit and not having the right hair! I'll bob it—I'll peroxide it—I'll do anything—but I'm not going to stop now!"
I tried to quieten her, but she went passionately on.
"Pity of him! Why, it's for pity of him that I'm doing it! Why should he for ever give, give, give, and get nothing in return? He never did get anything—nothing out of his books, nothing out of his life, only this one magnificent thing that's happened! He's flung pearls away, all the splendid pearls of himself, flung them to the grunters as they did in the Bible, and all they wanted was common greasy farthings! Farthings would have done, and he showered pearls on 'em! And not one single thing did he ever get back! Oh, it makes me boil!... But I've picked up a wrinkle or two since then, George! Nobody ever told me anything about life, nothing that was true. They told me that if I opened my mouth and shut my eyes and never forgot that I'd been nicely brought up all sorts of lovely things would come of themselves. Nobody ever told me I should have to get up and get and fight for my own hand. I was to speak when I was spoken to, and what did it matter how I did my hair or what sort of shoes I wore as long as men understood I was a nice girl and not to be taken liberties with? They took their liberties somewhere else we weren't supposed to know anything about. The un-nice girls got the insults—and the pearls. We just went on being respected, and sometimes, if we'd been very nice indeed, one of us would get a greasy farthing after all the pearls were gone. They called that marriage, and said it was the crown of a woman's life. That's what we were taught, George. That's what every woman of my age was taught. And look at Peggy there getting away with it as fast as she can!"
I touched her sleeve, but she refused to be stopped.
"And it was all my own fault for believing them. I ought to have thought it out for myself, like Peggy. It was my job, and I didn't do it. I painted idiotic canvases instead. It wasn't Derry's job. It isn't any man's job. I'd been throwing sheep's-eyes at him all my life; why didn't I say to myself, 'Look here, Julia my girl, this doesn't appear to be working somehow. Cutting sandwiches and letting him pose for you and mooning about him afterwards isn't doing the trick. You know he's—obtainable—because you know other women do it. What's the matter with you?'—I ought to have asked myself that, and I didn't. I let myself drift into being a 'good sort' to him. Stupidest thing a woman can do. I expect he'd have thought it a sort of sacrilege to kiss me. Sacrilege!—--"
She checked contemptuously at the word, but went straight on.
"And now this has happened, just to him and me, and if it never happened before, all the more gorgeous luck! He shall have something back for his life. He shall know what love is before he dies. You can go to anybody you like for your portrait, George; Peggy and I are out for blood. What's the good of having luck if you don't believe in it? If being nice didn't work let's have a shot at the other thing. (Ah, so that's a cocktail!) So that's that, George. Something's bound to happen. He'll be writing to me or something; I'm not worrying in the least.... But I mustn't let my neck get all pink like this just with thinking of him." She fetched out a little mirror and a puff. "Nice girls used to do that, and it was called maiden modesty, and I'm damned if it paid. I'm perfectly willing to learn, either from Peggy with her garters or anybody else.... Ah, she's getting up! I must see her close to——"
She was on her feet. I heard her murmur, "I'm taller than she is anyway——"
"Sit down till I've got the waiter," I said.
But she continued to stand. She was looking after the girl she had called Peggy—erect, ready, perilously instructed, a beautiful danger. Her life had been one unvarying, starry lamp of love; now, for the beguiling of the Derry of those onrushing years of the heat of his blood, a hundred false fires were being prepared. And I could only remain silent at the wonder of it, that all was one, and that the false was no less true than the true.
III
It still wanted a week to the thirtieth, but I had various matters to set in order, and the time passed quickly. I saw Julia once more before I left. She still nonchalantly left it to me, should I come across Derry, to let her know or not, as I thought best. She herself was not going very far—merely into Buckingham to stay with friends. She gave me dates and addresses, and then her manner seemed to me to show some hesitation.
"If he should write to me for money suddenly," she said. "You see, you won't be at hand."
"Oh, that's all arranged. He wouldn't wait till he was actually starving before he wrote, and Mrs Moxon is readdressing all letters immediately."
"But suppose he wrote to me. I've no money."
"Then you can wire me. I'll arrange for a sight-draft."
Her hands smoothed down the body of a frock I had not seen before—a sooty shower of black chiffon over I know not what intricately-simple and expensive-looking swathing below.
"I believe you're afraid to trust me with his money," she smiled, preening herself.
This conversation, I ought to say, took place in her studio. Suddenly I looked up.
"Julia," I demanded, "where's that tallboy gone?"
"The tallboy? Oh, it's somewhere about the place."
"On your back?"
"Not all of it. Some of it's on my feet. Don't you like them?"
She showed them. I turned away.
"Then," I said, "if he's selling furniture to pay for a holiday, and you're selling it to buy frocks, I certainly shan't trust you with a penny. If he writes to you you'd better wire me."
"Poor Julia!" she laughed. "When she was sensible she could do nothing right, and now that she's quite mad she's as wrong as ever. Well, a short life and a gay one. Good-bye, George, and a happy holiday——"
So the evening of the thirtieth found me on the St Malo boat, hoping it wasn't going to rain—for I had looked down below and preferred the deck. Smoothly we glided down Southampton Water. The boat was packed, and I was unable to dine till ten o'clock. Then I came up on deck again and set about making myself comfortable for the night.
It did rain, but I was well tucked away in the shelter of a deck-house, and was little the worse for it. A fresh south-west wind blew, and I watched the phantom-grey water that hissed and rustled hoarsely past our sides. The throbbing of the engines began to beat softly and incessantly in my head, and half dozing, I found myself wondering what Derry had done about his passport. "Throb-throb," churned the engines ... perhaps he had forged himself a seaman's and fireman's ticket, signed on as a deckhand or stoker, and had given the L.S.W. Railway Company the slip the moment he had got across. Dreamily, muffled up in my wrappings, I tried to picture it. He would be careful. He would be careful about his beard, for example. He would let it grow a day or so before; perhaps he would now continue to wear a beard. Unless.... And he would sleep the day before and stoke through the night. A stoker for a night, dressed in a boiler-suit or stripped to the waist, as he had stripped when he had held Julia Oliphant's sewing-machine aloft. And grime in his golden beard. Or else the author of The Vicarage of Bray bending the warp on to the drum of the steam-winch or putting the luggage in the slings in the hold. Oh, as she had said, he would get across somehow if he wanted to.....
And once across he would have very little trouble. He would mingle with the porters and camionneurs, carrying his gear in his hand. Probably he would pretend it was somebody else's. Then—the small luggage through first—rien à declarer—his perfect French—he would be along the quay and in the vedette before they had begun to get the big stuff out of the hold. As for his passport—oh, he would manage....
An employe picked his way through the dark huddles on the deck, took the reading of the log, and retired again. The masthead lights made loops and circles in the rain. I took a nip from my flask and dropped back into my doze. Alderney Light winked, and up the Race it blew stiffly....
Yes, he would get across if he had made up his mind to. As for his permis de séjour—oh, things like that were for ordinary people. What would he do with a permis de séjour who had no permis de séjour in life itself, but must doubly dodge through it, from this place to that and from one date to the date before?... But I rather fancied he had gone by Dover. Certain notes almost at the end of his diary seemed an indication of that. These notes had no coherence—just odd words like "Lord Warden," "boat," "tide," and a little time-table of figures. Apparently he had worked it out just before that week-end he had spent with me.... "Lord Warden"—that meant Dover—tide—time.... Again the Company's man came to take the reading of the log. Again the throbbing of the engines evoked the image of Derry, stripped, moving in the red glare of the furnaces, sweating, coal-dust in his beard. But perhaps he no longer had a beard. Perhaps Julia had made sure of that. Julia, desperate creature, wild, disturbing creature.... Peggy in her garters ... selling furniture to buy frocks, shoes, stockings, scent.... "Pour Troubler," "Mysterieuse" ... "Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse," sighed the water rushing past.... And in the Piccadilly, that long white throat, the fine angle of her jaw, among little double chins, little buttons of chins, short necks, thrust-forward necks, square shoulders instead of that long mantle-like line down over her shoulders like swift water before it breaks, to the fingers that moved softly in time to the "Relicario" ... the "Relicario" ... De Groot ... De Groot, De Groot, De Groot.... Mysterieuse, Mysterieuse.... Again the reading of the log, again the sailor's return through the dozing huddles on the deck; the phantom-grey water rustling hoarsely past, the masthead lights swinging aloft. I hate these short and crowded crossings when it is hardly worth while to take off your clothes and you arrive cramped, crumpled, unshaven, unrefreshed. I wondered how early it would be possible to get a cup of tea. A cup of tea—a cocktail—cocktails for tea—"So that's a cocktail!"—Manhattan, Manhattan, De Groot, De Groot, De Groot....
Another pull at my flask, and then I really did sleep.
The day was grey when I awoke. The huddles on the deck had begun to stir. The east kindled, as I had last seen it kindle over the Devil's Punch Bowl and Gibbet Hill. The sun flashed on the waves, on people bestirring themselves, opening dressing-cases, making such toilets as they could. Then I heard the welcome click of teacups and flung off my rugs. I went below, secured a seat for breakfast, and made myself less unpresentable. Hot breakfast, after all, goes a long way towards obliterating the discomforts of a night on deck. As I rose from the table I glanced through the open port. Pale on the starboard bow was the long line of Cap Fréhel, ahead was St Malo's spire.