“I was involved in Paramore’s case. I’ve been to the bottom of this thing, I tell you. Paramore overflowed—emptied himself like a well; and at the end there was absolutely nothing left in his mind; it was void, up to the black brim. Then he died—quite vacuous. He had simply poured out his inner life around me. I was left alone in Dakar, swimming in the infernal pool of Paramore’s cerebrations. You can’t, on the banks of the Sénégal, refer a man to his solicitors. If Paramore had been a Catholic, I could have turned his case over to the Bishop. But bishops had nothing to do with Paramore. And that’s where you come in.”
“Oh, I come in, do I?” I asked a little fearfully. No one wants to come in where Hoyting leaves off.
“Of course. Why else did I make an appointment with you? You’ll take this packet when you leave. You don’t suppose I’m going to London!”
“I didn’t know Paramore.”
“No; but I did. And when I’ve told you, you’ll see. I don’t take a trip like this for nothing. I hate the very smell of the asphalt.”
“Go on.” It’s what one always says to Hoyting.
“I can’t tell it coherently—though I can tell it, I suppose, more coherently than he did. In the first place, what do you know about him?”
The question sent a flood of dingy reminiscence welling slowly and muddily up through my consciousness. I thought for a moment. What, after all, was there to tell about Paramore except that he had lied, and that in the end he had been discredited as lavishly as for a time he had been believed? For any one else I might have made a sprightly little story out of the elliptical narrative of the newspapers; but no one that I know of has ever tried to be a raconteur for Hoyting. He has use only for the raw material; art disgusts him. I gave him as rapid a précis as I could, suppressing all instinct to embroider it.
When I had finished: “He’s completely discredited, then?”
I waved my hands. “My dear Hoyting, no one would take Paramore’s word about the manners and customs of his own household.”