So, all these fancies had resulted in worse than nothing; every effort I had made, on these lines, had but entangled me more. That Jones was a Confederate spy, was highly probable; this absurd notion of a double had drawn me away from the right track; he was a double, it is true, but only on the surface; he was a Confederate acting the Federal.
Jones interests me intensely. There is something extraordinary about him. No man that I ever saw or heard of seems to possess his capacity to interest me. Yet his only peculiarity is that he changes clothing. No, not his only one; he has another: he is absolutely ubiquitous.
That he has some close relationship with me is clear. Why clear? Just because I cannot get rid of him? Is that a reason? Nothing is clear. My head is not clear. All this mysterious Jones matter may be delusion. Dr. Khayme is fact, and Lydia is fact, and Willis; but as to this Jones, or these Joneses, I doubt. Doubt is not relief. Jones remains. Wherever I turn I find him. He will not down. If he is a fact, he must be the most important person related to my life. More so than Lydia?
What is Jones to me? My mind confesses defeat and struggles none the less. Could he be a brother? Can it be possible, after all, that my name is B. Jones? Anything seems possible. Yet a thought shows me that this supposition is untenable. If I am Berwick Jones, and the spy was my brother, I should have heard of him long ago.
Why? why should I hear of him, when I could not hear of myself? The Confederate army may have had a score of spies named Jones, and I had never heard of one of them.
But if he had been my brother, he would have hunted me, and would have found me! That was it.
This thought was more reasonable--but ... he might have been killed!
He must have been killed by the shell on the hill ... yes ... that is why I can trace him no farther. I have never seen him since. Why had I at first assumed that he had been wounded only? I see that I assumed too much--or too little. I had seen him under the fire, and had seen him no more; that was all.
Yet I knew absolutely and strangely that Jones had not been killed.
It is certain that the memory, in retracing a succession of events, does not voluntarily take the back track; it goes over the ground again, just as the events succeeded, from antecedent to consequent, rather than backward. It is more difficult--leaving memory aside--to take present conditions and discover the unknown which evolved these conditions, than to take present conditions and show what will be evolved from them. Of course, if we already know what preceded these conditions, there is no discovery to be claimed--and that is what I am saying: that with our knowledge of the present, the future is not a discovery; it is a mere development naturally augured from the present. An incapable general means defeat, but defeat does not imply an incapable general.