As I rode home on the car, all my outer self was in a tumult, dazed and buzzing like a hive. I was dimly aware of moving, sitting upright, of paying my fare, and of great staring red posters that flashed upon me from the billboards. I remember that it occurred to me several times that if I could only understand what I read on them, it might be greatly to my profit. Somewhere deep under my confusion I was aware of being plucked by the fringes of my consciousness. Something was trying to get through to me.
I refused to see Griffin at all that evening, and got into bed early, staring into the dark and seeing nothing but fragments of red letters that seemed about to shape themselves into the saving word, and then dissolved and left me blank. I tried to pray and realized that I had no connecting wires over which help might come.
Belief in the God I had been brought up to, had been beaten out of me at Higgleston, very largely by the conviction of those who professed to know Him best, that He couldn't in any case be the God of my Gift. And I hadn't been thinking since then of the Something Without Us to which I acted, as Deity. Now it occurred to me, lying there in the dark, that if the God of the Church had cast me off, there must still be something which artists everywhere prayed to, a Distributer of Gifts who might be concerned about the conduct of His worshippers.
I reached out for Him—and I did not know His name. I must pray though, I must pray to something which stood for Help. Slowly, as I cast back in my mind to find the name for it, I remembered Eversley. Eversley was everything which any player might wish to be, and Eversley had been kind. I would pray to Eversley. All at once there flashed across the blank of my mind, his name in letters of red. That was it! That was the name on the billboards! Eversley was in town. I recalled that Griff had spoken of it. I hadn't been able to spare a penny for a paper for a long time, or I should have known it. I would see Eversley. I got up and groped around in the cupboard for a piece of dry bread and ate it. Then I went back to bed and dropped asleep suddenly with the release of tension. To-morrow I would see Eversley.
Griffin failed to understand my change of mood in the morning.
"You aren't afraid that I shall try to hold you?"
"No I'm not afraid."
"Or that anybody will find it out?"
"I shouldn't care if they did," I told him. "I'm going to see Eversley. I suppose it's fair to tell you, you'll be the last resort, Griff."
"I'll be the foundation of your fortune, if Eversley will let me, but he won't." I think there was regret in his voice, but it was never in anything he said to me.