Yet when he entered his room he did not proceed at once to letter-writing or to business of any kind. He flung himself down in an easy-chair. He felt unaccountably tired. All day he had had business to attend to, necessary no doubt for the carrying out of his somewhat wild and romantic scheme, none the less wearisome to a man of poetical temperament and of poor physique. He was a man of slight build, with fair and rather fluffy hair, a pretty, thin-lipped mouth, and plaintive blue eyes. To the world in general his lot would have seemed a fairly easy one. He had sufficient means of his own; and no one in any way depended upon him. His volume of poems, Under the Sea, published a year or two before, had excited a great deal of public attention and some controversy; what had seemed genius to one critic had seemed insanity to another. He was not unpopular at his club although he was thought to be slightly ridiculous. It was not supposed that he had any trouble of any kind. Women, of whom in his poems he wrote with such knowledge and such fervency, had never really come much into his life.
As he lay there and smoked endless cigarettes, he admitted the truth to himself. It was vanity that was at the root of it. He had seen the talented and remarkable Evan Hurst dwindling down into nobody again. Once it was supposed that Evan Hurst was dead, dead by his own act, and leaving such strange communications behind him, interest would revive. People would speak again of Under the Sea, his unpublished poems would be produced, and there would be obituary notices. There would be, for a while at least, breathless interest in the poet and the suicide, and he, alive and not dead, under another name and acting another part, would read and enjoy it all. To carry out his scheme meant many sacrifices, but the fascination of it was too strong for him, and the success of it seemed to be certain.
His sensations were really very much those of a man who actually knows that he is about to die. He had withdrawn a large balance from his bank and transferred it to another bank in the name which he now intended to take, but it was essential if Evan Hurst were to die that he should leave money behind him. That money he willingly sacrificed. It was enough if he retained for his new incarnation sufficient for a reasonable livelihood. It annoyed him far more to think that he must leave also his books, the collections, the furniture and the treasures of his Jermyn Street flat. They had all come together slowly, and all represented in a way his individuality. The scattering of them by public auction would be like the disintegration of death. He could imagine already the notice in the catalogue of a second-hand bookseller offering that exquisitely-bound set of Huysman's works, "containing the book-plate of the late Evan Hurst." There were prints and engravings that from long affection and study had given him almost a feeling as if he had had a part in their creation. The Durer, a splendid impression, would fetch fifty pounds at least. Men at the club would remember this evening. They would recall that Evan Hurst was there only a few days before his death, and that even then they had remarked how gloomy and silent he seemed to be.
He laughed bitterly and aloud, flung down his cigarette and passed into his bedroom. There for a while he packed energetically, but soon he had to stop for a feeling of intense and almost painful weariness came over him again. After all there would be time to finish the packing in the morning. He decided to go to bed.
On the following afternoon he left King's Cross for Salsay on the Yorkshire coast.
II
Salsay is a small fishing village that has not yet suffered from the curse of popularity. Evan Hurst put up at the one hotel in the place and constituted its one permanent visitor. Occasionally a commercial traveller would arrive one day and leave on the next, and would talk as much as possible to Evan Hurst. Evan Hurst, in return, would talk as little as possible, consistent with bare politeness, to the commercial traveller. Every morning he bathed from the shore before breakfast at a point at some considerable distance from the village. Here there was a small cave in the cliffs, a useful shelter if rain came on, and useful to Evan Hurst for other purposes; for it was here that gradually, bit by bit, he collected the slender outfit with which he was to begin the world in his new character on the day that Evan Hurst was supposed to commit suicide. His plan was simplicity itself. He would go out to bathe as usual, and he would not return. His clothes would be found on the shore, and in the pocket of his coat there would be a letter to the landlord of the hotel leaving no doubt whatever as to his intentions. In the meantime, in a little cave, he would have altered his appearance, put on different clothes, and from there struck out for the nearest railway station. In the evening he would be in Dover, and next day in Paris, without one tie left between what he had once been and what he was now going to be.
He looked forward to the change with pleasurable excitement. It was something more than vanity after all. As Evan Hurst he had begun in a rôle which he was not competent to sustain; to have continued in it would have been to disappoint the public opinion of him. In a new part he could write as he liked; act as he liked; talk as he liked. There would be no preconceived opinion of him in the world; it would be all for him to make with the benefit of his experience of his past blunders.
He took immense care with the composition of that brief letter to the landlord. It ran as follows:—
"Dear Sir,—It would be impossible to explain to you the reasons why I intend this morning to take my life, but undoubtedly some apology is due to you for any inconvenience which my death may cause you. I leave behind me at the hotel a quantity of money which will be more than sufficient to discharge my obligations to you. Nor have I any explanation to offer to the coroner and the British jury. These good people will return their usual verdict. Not to be interested in so extremely uninteresting a thing as my life has become, would be a clear proof to them of insanity. I shall swim out so long as my strength lasts, and the end will come under the sea.—Faithfully yours,