What Rupert took was a cab. He looked at himself in one of the little horseshoe mirrors. He certainly did look ill; and he felt ill—tired, bored, and nothing seemed worth while. He drove to a doctor friend, who punched and prodded him and listened with tubes at his chest and back, looked grave, and said: “Go to Strongitharm—he’s absolutely at the top. Twenty-guinea fee. But it’s better to know where we are. You go to Strongitharm.”
Rupert went, and Strongitharm gave his opinion. He gave it with a voice that trembled with sympathy, and he supplemented it with brandy-and-soda, which he happened to have quite handy.
Then Rupert disappeared from London and from his friends—disappeared suddenly and completely. He had plenty of money, and no relations near enough to be inconveniently anxious. He went away and he left no address, and he did not even write excuses to the people with whom he should have danced and dined, nor to the editor whose style he should have gone on imitating.
The buoyant friend rejoiced at the obvious and natural following of his advice.
“He was looking a little bit below himself, you know, and I said: ‘Go round the world; there’s nothing like it,’ and, by Jove! he went. Now, that’s the kind of man I like—knows good advice when he gets it, and acts on it right off.”
So the buoyant one spread the rumour that ran its course and died, and had to be galvanised into life once more to furnish an answer to Sybil’s questionings, when, returning from the Fortunate or other Isles, she asked for news of her old friend. And the rumour did not satisfy her. She had had time to think—there was plenty of time to think in those Islands whose real name escapes me—and she knew very much more than she had known on the evening when Rupert had broken her pet fan and asked for a kiss which he had not taken. She found herself quite fervently disbelieving in the grand tour theory—and the disbelief was so strong that it distorted life and made everything else uninteresting. Sybil took to novel-reading as other folks have in their time taken to drink. She was young, and she could still lose herself in a book. One day she lost herself most completely in a new novel from Mudie’s, a book that every one was talking about. She lost herself; and suddenly, in a breathless joy that was agony too, she found him. This was his book. No one but Rupert could have written it—all that description of the park, and the race when she rode the goat and he rode the pig—and—she turned the pages hastily. Ah yes, Rupert had written this! She put the book down and she dressed herself as prettily as she knew how, and she went in a hansom cab to the office of the publisher of that book, and on the way she read. And more and more she saw how great a book it was, and how no one but Rupert could have written just that book. Thrill after thrill of pride ran through her. He had done this for her—because of what she had said.
Arrived at the publisher’s, she was met by a blank wall. Neither partner was visible. The senior clerk did not know the address of the author of “Work While it is Yet Day,” nor the name of him; and it was abundantly evident that even if he had known, he would not have told.
Sybil’s prettiness and her charm so wrought upon this dry-as-dust person, however, that he volunteered the address of the literary agent through whom the book had been purchased. And Sybil found him on a first floor in one of those imposing new buildings in Arundel Street. He was very nice and kind, but he could not give his client’s name without his client’s permission.
The disappointment was bitter.
“But I’ll send a letter for you,” he tried to soften it with.