"Oh Lord!" groaned Teddy, "won't he swank just!" He added discontentedly: "We were quite all right without him. Yesterday was huge sport—I like Pater ever so much better than Nap." Grace yawned, and stretched her arms languidly behind her head.
"Never mind, Teddums—we need only listen once each to the tale of How I Pulled It Off. But it's a pity ... he'd have been so much more reticent if he had lost...."
"The Round Adventure" was within a few chapters of completion. But through all his hours of frenzied toil, its author knew the spell of creation had snapped on the night "The Reverse of the Medal" was among the pile of manuscripts submitted to his judgment. What he now composed was bad stuff compared to the earlier portion of the book. Nevertheless the idea, the central idea, would be sufficient to pull it through to success, if—if he got in with it first.... A furtive look towards the bottom drawer, and Gareth wrote on. Sick sometimes with loathing of his own meanness, he wrote on.
The manuscript in the bottom drawer obsessed him entirely. His eyes flew in that direction whenever he entered the room; fastened themselves mechanically on the cheap metal handle, each time he paused in his labours to worry out some knotty point. Directly some household trifle, dishcloth or corkscrew, was mislaid, he waited resignedly for Kathleen to say: "I'll just see if it can possibly have slipped into the bottom drawer of the desk;" and then: "Gareth, did you know that somebody's book has been accidentally shoved away to the back of this drawer? You had better take it up to the office to-morrow...."
Nor were his daylight hours made pleasanter by the momentary expectation of Alexander's annoyed tones: "Temple, I've just had an enquiry respecting a MS. entitled—ah, yes, "The Reverse of the Medal." I believe that you...."
Thank goodness, Campbell at least was away till the New Year.
The black china cat was exceedingly amused by all these futile terrors. His opinion of Gareth in the criminal line might be summed up by the one word "amateurish." Far beyond his loathing of himself, Gareth loathed that mean dusty little cat with the glassy yellow stare. Pat O'Neill stood third on the list of hatred. At the beginning of things he had stood first—but that was before Gareth had read the second half of "The Reverse of the Medal."
He was reading it when Kathleen wandered into the kitchen to peel potatoes. He went on reading, held by the same subtle fascination as had drawn him unwillingly to the pile of type-script. In style, "The Reverse of the Medal" was a complete contrast to "The Round Adventure." Pat O'Neill was evidently no word-spinner; lacked that tender magic of the sound and shape and colour of phrase which was so essentially Gareth's. O'Neill disdained words and was impatient of phrases; he was racingly in love with ideas, and lingered to swaddle them by language as much only as was barely necessary for interpretation to the reader. The author galloped his idea from the first page to the last, as a cavalryman might do astride of a horse from whom all burdensome equipment has been stripped. Then was Pat O'Neill himself Robert Nugent, the hero of the novel; the man so magnetic, so clear of brain, so full of ordinary human exasperating faults, of unexpected laughter, that his swift death in the last chapter caused a shock of rising tears to Gareth as he read of it. The theme now lay proven: that who lives his life as a conscious experience, must equally in this spirit accept death—more than accept it—go voluntarily to meet it ... even if he has from the very beginning carried deeply the panic of death in his soul.
Yes.... Robert Nugent realized that there are two sides to a medal, as Kay Rollinson had seen the downward as well as the upward curve to completion of a circle. And both had met with death by water—the one boldly, in fear of death; and the other mysteriously, in fear of water; after each had worked out his episode of love to discover that loss of love is as much "part of the fun" as the advent of love.