“I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the idea—his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In the end his idea rode him—and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but you can work that out for yourself—how his inspiration would have come, and what would have happened.”
“But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the ‘lust of making a beautiful book’—quite the contrary.”
“Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve. Place aux dames! ...
“Before he had struck out into the fatal west for himself, he had stopped with a planter. The planter’s name, of course, was Whitaker. There was a man who had isolated himself, and worked like a navvy, and made good. His history, I suppose, was much like all other local histories. His place, on one of the rivers that flow into Lake Eyre, was a kind of outpost. He was very glad to let Paramore sit on his verandah and talk to him in the evenings. Paramore must have been there six weeks before he finally started on his expedition—if you can call an unsuccessful, hand-made thing that leaked at every pore an expedition. The daughter, Joan Whitaker, was back from school in Melbourne. There was a fiancé of sorts about the place. I don’t remember much about him, least of all his name. He was approved by Whitaker. Paramore seems not to have noticed the girl—rather deliberately not to have noticed her, she being another man’s property. So Whitaker had no objection to prolonging Paramore’s stay. Paramore talked, I feel convinced, as well as he wrote. I saw of him only dregs and delirium, but I made that out. The love affair went on all over the plantation, while Whitaker and Paramore sat on the verandah and constituted society. They got on well enough, apparently. Paramore certainly liked Joan Whitaker, but he kept out of the way of the fortunate affair. Remember that; there’s no reason to doubt his word. It all came out, bit by bit, in troubled references—mixed up with his symptoms and medicines, and the ebb and flow of the fever.
“But out in the bush, later, the memory of her had grown upon him; I suppose, simply because, though so far away, she was the nearest feminine thing. At the heart of all that despair over the frustrated research, was an irrelevant sentimental regret that he shouldn’t be able to make love to her if he ever saw her again. In her flittings about, she had pricked his imagination once or twice—this bright creature that flitted at another man’s behest. You can see how it might be; and Paramore up to that time had been heart-whole. Moreover, his exploration was shocking and disgusting to him, as I’ve said—it was aimless nastiness without even the grace of bolstering up a theory. He didn’t love the work for itself, remember; only for its results and what he believed its sacred importance. He hated the technique of it. And Joan Whitaker was as different as a Melbourne schooling, and a fair complexion, and the awkwardness of innocence, could make her. She was all the things those unsatisfactory aborigines weren’t. I don’t think it went deeper than that. She merely served the moment. Any other girl would have done as well. Or, at least, that’s my notion.
“Well—you can see the rest from here. He went back with his big, insane idea, leaving despair farther behind him at every step. He struck straight back again to Whitaker’s place, and after nuisances and delays and impossible absurd misadventures, he got there. All the time, he carried his idea carefully intact, like a cup filled with precious liquid. He was most anxious to get to some place where he could sit down with pens and ink. He didn’t doubt Whitaker would take him in. Everything was to be completed before he sailed for England. The story would have been very different, I’m inclined to think, and Paramore might have been living to this day if the fiancé hadn’t turned out a bad lot and been shipped—or if Paramore himself hadn’t been a bit of a Puritan.
“He found Whitaker very much surprised to see him back so long before the date he had set, but only too glad to have him stay; and he also found the girl, no longer flitting about, but brooding on the bough. The rest was inevitable....
“Paramore got to work at once—making love to Joan Whitaker in the intervals, almost from the beginning. Then—mark the nature of the man—he found that the two things he was doing were incompatible. There’s no telling whether Joan Whitaker would have objected to his idea, but he seems to have been sure that she would if she knew. His idea rode him—the idea of getting the better of his bad luck. He didn’t want to cheat his fellow scientists, who had done him no harm, but he did want to cheat his mean destiny. He personified it like an enemy, I fancy. It must have been an obsession with him. Day by day, he saw better what the book—his revenge—was becoming; and in the end there was no mistaking it for a monstrous, magnificent lie, out of all proportion to what he had first intended. Some men might have managed even so—the men who keep life in water-tight compartments. Not Paramore. He didn’t see his way to offering Joan Whitaker a liar for a husband. It apparently never occurred to him to put the case before her. There are very few cases you can put to a girl of eighteen. And, as I’ve said, his feeling for her was all reverence and illusion and reversion to type. Any niceish girl would have done the trick for him; and any man would have looked eligible to her smarting conceit. But it was no marriage of true minds—just an affair of circumstance and of innocent senses, riotously collaborating. Madame Pothier—a finished creature—would have been a very different matter. But he had never seen her then....
“Oh, well; you see how it went. He was virtually staking everything on that book, which was virtually writing itself, ‘like a damned planchette,’ he told me. But he couldn’t let her stake anything on it; he couldn’t even ask her to. Moreover, it was one of those inconvenient situations where no explanation except the right one is of the slightest use. So he packed up his manuscript and left for some address, that he didn’t give, in New South Wales.”
“Like that?” I asked. The sudden turns of the thing were beginning to interest me, in spite of my Pharisaism.