However, he fled back to London in August, and was there so miserably at loose ends that he had not the will to get out of the place. On this passage in the story he does not dwell, and such verisimilitude as may be, must be supplied by my imagination. I imagine him in his charmingly appointed flat,—a flat that is light without being trivial, and artistic with no want of dignity or sincerity,—finding a loss of interest in his books, a loss of beauty in the silver he (not too vehemently) collects. I imagine him wandering into that dainty little bed-room of his and around into the dressing-room, and there, rapt in a blank contemplation of the seven-and-twenty pairs of trousers (all creasing neatly in their proper stretchers) that are necessary to his conception of a wise and happy man. For every occasion he has learnt, in a natural easy progress to knowledge, the exquisitely appropriate pair of trousers, the permissible upper garment, the becoming gesture and word. He was a man who had mastered his world. And then, you know, the whisper:—
“There are better dreams.”
“What dreams?” I imagine him asking, with a defensive note. Whatever transparence the world might have had, whatever suggestion of something beyond there, in the sea garden at Sandgate, I fancy that in Melville’s apartments in London it was indisputably opaque.
And “Damn it!” he cried, “if these dreams are for Chatteris, why should she tell me? Suppose I had the chance of them— Whatever they are——”
He reflected, with a terrible sincerity in the nature of his will.
“No!” And then again, “No!
“And if one mustn’t have ’em, why should one know about ’em and be worried by them? If she comes to do mischief, why shouldn’t she do mischief without making me an accomplice?”
He walks up and down and stops at last and stares out of his window on the jaded summer traffic going Haymarket way.
He sees nothing of that traffic. He sees the little sea garden at Sandgate and that little group of people very small and bright and something—something hanging over them. “It isn’t fair on them—or me—or anybody!”
Then you know, quite suddenly, I imagine him swearing.