"I accepted definitely for myself, and conditionally for you," said Hartley cheerfully. "Now I will ring up Wilder and tell him that the prodigal has reappeared, and that you will come."
Coryndon submitted to the inevitable with a good grace; it was one of his best social qualifications, and arose from a keen sensitiveness that made it nearly impossible for him ever to disappoint anyone. He had hoped for a quiet evening, when he might expect to get to bed early and have time to think over every tiny detail of his time in the Mangadone Bazaar; but as this was not possible, he agreed with sufficient alacrity to deceive his kind host.
His face was drawn and tired, and his eyes were heavy; he noticed this as he glanced into his glass, but after all it did not matter. His social importance was small, and for to-night he was nothing more than an adjunct of Hartley, a mere postscript put in out of formal politeness. He was not going in order to please Mrs. Wilder—though, as she appeared on his mental list of names, she had her place in the structure that filled his mind—but to please Hartley. Any time would have done for Mrs. Wilder, she was but a cypher in the total, but if he had begged off to-night he would have had to hurt Hartley. Coryndon could never get away from the other man's point of view; it dogged him in great things and in small, and he was obliged to realize Hartley's pleasure in seeing him, and his further pleasure in carrying him off to a house where he himself enjoyed life thoroughly. Coryndon could as easily have disappointed a child, or been cruel to a small, wagging puppy as to Hartley in his present mood.
He knew that he would have to shut the door upon his dominating thought, unless something occurred to open it during the evening. Women liked to play with fire, and he wondered if Mrs. Wilder would show any inclination to fiddle with gunpowder, but he hardly expected that she would, though she had played some part in the extensive drama that reached from Heath's bungalow to the Colonnade in the Chinese quarter, leaving a gap between that his brain struggled with in vain.
It was like the imaginable space between life and death, where both conditions existed, and one was the key to the other. Something was lacking. One small master touch wanting to lay the whole thing bare of mystery. Coryndon's weary eyes reflected the state of his mind. He felt like an inventor who is baffled for the lack of a tiny clue that makes the impossible natural and easy, or a composer who hears a refrain and cannot call it into birth in clear defiant chords. To think too much when thought cannot carry the mind over the limiting barrier is to spend substance on fruitless effort, and Coryndon deliberately shut the door of his mind and put the key away before he started out with Hartley.
The night was clear as the two men went off together hatless through the soft moonlight. Neither Coryndon nor Hartley talked much as they walked by a short cut across the park to the Wilders' bungalow, a servant carrying a lantern going before them like a dim will-o'-the-wisp; the yellow lamplight paling into an ineffectual blur against the clear moonlight.
"I think it is only ourselves," said Hartley after a long pause. "You are looking a bit done, Coryndon, so you'll be glad if it isn't a late night."
Coryndon agreed, and conversation flagged again. They crossed the road, turned up the avenue and were lost in the shadows of the trees, coming out again into a white bay of light outside the door.
Everyone, man or woman, who is endowed at birth with a sensitive nature is subject to occasional inrushes of detachment that without warning cut him off from realities for moments or hours, converting everyday matters into the consistency of dream-life. It was through this medium that Coryndon saw Mrs. Wilder when he came into the large upstairs drawing-room. It would have annoyed her to know that she appeared indefinite and shadowy to his mind, just as it annoyed Alice when she was told that she was only "Something in the Red King's dream," but Coryndon could not help his sensations. Mrs. Wilder was smiling with her careless, easy, confident smile, and yet he saw only an unaccounted bit of the puzzle, that he could not fit in. She was dressed in the latest fashion, and talked with a kind of regal amiability, but nevertheless, she was not a real woman, a real hostess, or a positive entity; she was vague, and the touch of her floating personality added to the baffled sensation that drained Coryndon's mind of concentrated force, and made him physically exhausted.
Wilder had something to say to Hartley, and Coryndon handed himself over like a coat or an umbrella to Mrs. Wilder, who, he knew, was placing a low valuation upon him, and was already a little impatient at his lack of vitality. She was calling him a bore, behind her fine, hard eyes, and having exhausted Mangadone in a few sentences, wondered what sort of bore he really was. There were golf bores, fishing bores, and shooting bores, but Coryndon hardly appeared to belong to any of those families, and she began to suspect him of "superiority," a type of bore aggressive to others of his cult. Mrs. Wilder did not tolerate a type to which she herself undoubtedly owned to some slight connection, and she gave up all effort to awaken interest in the slim, weary young man, who looked half-asleep.