His friendship with Aubrey was based chiefly on the certainty he felt that Aubrey was an inferior writer. He was not part of the conspiracy aimed at the minimization of Cressy, the scholar.
"Well, I'm glad to hear that, Aubrey," he congratulated his friend. "Very glad. Writing is a delight few people understand these days."
"I know. And I think you'll be interested particularly, John, because the story is of Elizabethan England. I've modeled the technique on Apuleius and the other later Roman tale-tellers."
"Indeed!" Cressy bristled. "That should be interesting."
"I'd like to have your opinion of it, John. I've always valued what you say, but this time more than ever. Because I feel I've entered your field and you're guarding the fences and all that."
Cressy's face relaxed. Quite right. His field. And if the book was any good he could leap forward as its authentic champion and through it denounce the base modernism of the day. But how did Aubrey who was a superficial dabbler come by Elizabethan England?
Aubrey promised to produce the manuscript within a few days and left the club. A July sun hammered at the streets. The heat added to his inward discomfort. It was too hot to think. Yet it was necessary to think. Something was piling up and unless he thought it out clearly, it would fall on him.
He had made up his mind to publish his father's manuscript as his own. But in the weeks that had passed he had become aware that he was not going to carry out his intention. There were things that kept him from it. A morbid sense that his father was watching him had grown in his mind. He was afraid. At night in bed he conducted himself with a scrupulous politeness toward his wife, certain that his every action was being observed by his father.
There was another restriction. The appearance of the manuscript with his name to it would be a distasteful anti-climax. He had lost himself so long and so ardently in the creation of an inner Aubrey—the hawk-faced Isaiah redeeming men—that the prospect of a frankly sensual volume signed by Aubrey Gilchrist made him uncomfortable.
In the face of the realities that would ensue—the praise for instance, of the healthy animalism of the book—he would have to abandon the secret characterization that had grown almost an essential of his life. He could not go ahead redeeming men and lifting them toward a life of asceticism while people were talking and writing about the fact that Aubrey Gilchrist was a sensual realist. And finally there was a feeling of dishonesty, inseparable from his fear of his father, but adding its weight to the restrictions.