“Nonsense!” he said sharply. “You know it never tires me.”
Yet, all the same, he passed his hand very wearily over his forehead, and stretched himself with the air of one who had been in a cramping position for many hours.
“You have broken your vow!” I cried. “You have been writing at night.”
“No,” he said; “it was morning when I began—three o’clock. And it pays better to get up and write than to lie awake thinking.”
Judging by the speed with which the novel grew in the next few weeks, I could tell that Derrick’s nights were of the worst.
He began, too, to look very thin and haggard, and I more than once noticed that curious ‘sleep-walking’ expression in his eyes; he seemed to me just like a man who has received his death-blow, yet still lingers—half alive, half dead. I had an odd feeling that it was his novel which kept him going, and I began to wonder what would happen when it was finished.
A month later, when I met him again at Bath, he had written the last chapter of ‘At Strife,’ and we read it over the sitting-room fire on Saturday evening. I was very much struck with the book; it seemed to me a great advance on ‘Lynwood’s Heritage,’ and the part which he had written since that day at Ben Rhydding was full of an indescribable power, as if the life of which he had been robbed had flowed into his work. When he had done, he tied up the MS. in his usual prosaic fashion, just as if it had been a bundle of clothes, and put it on a side table.
It was arranged that I should take it to Davison—the publisher of ‘Lynwood’s Heritage’—on Monday, and see what offer he would make for it. Just at that time I felt so sorry for Derrick that if he had asked me to hawk round fifty novels I would have done it.
Sunday morning proved wet and dismal; as a rule the Major, who was fond of music, attended service at the Abbey, but the weather forced him now to stay at home. I myself was at that time no church-goer, but Derrick would, I verily believe, as soon have fasted a week as have given up a Sunday morning service; and having no mind to be left to the Major’s company, and a sort of wish to be near my friend, I went with him. I believe it is not correct to admire Bath Abbey, but for all that ‘the lantern of the west’ has always seemed to me a grand place; as for Derrick, he had a horror of a ‘dim religious light,’ and always stuck up for his huge windows, and I believe he loved the Abbey with all his heart. Indeed, taking it only from a sensuous point of view, I could quite imagine what a relief he found his weekly attendance here; by contrast with his home the place was Heaven itself.
As we walked back, I asked a question that had long been in my mind: “Have you seen anything of Lawrence?”