I had spent the intervening time in Italy. I had heard once or twice from Mrs. Summer, and sometimes from Kranitski. He had gone to South Africa with Canning and had stayed there He liked the country. Miss Brandon was not yet married. Princess Kouragine I had not seen again. Rudd I had neither heard from nor of. Apparently he had published one book since he had been to Haréville and several short stories in magazines. The book was called The Silver Sandal, and had nothing to do with any of his experiences here or with any of the fancies which they had called up. It was, on the contrary, a semi-historical romance of a fantastic nature.
During the first days of my stay here I made no acquaintances, and I was already counting on a dreary three weeks of unrelieved dullness when my doctor here introduced me to Sabran, the malaria specialist, who had been away during my first cure.
Dr. Sabran, besides being a specialist with a reverberating reputation and a widely travelled man of great experience and European culture, had a different side to his nature which was not even suspected by many of his patients.
Under the pseudonym of Gaspard Lautrec he had written some charming stories and some interesting studies in art and literature. Historical questions interested him; and still more, the quainter facts of human nature, psychological puzzles, mysterious episodes, unvisited by-ways, and baffling and unsolved problems in history, romance and everyday life. He was a voracious reader, and there was little that had escaped his notice in the contemporary literature of Europe.
I found him an extraordinarily interesting companion, and he was kind enough, busy as I knew him to be, either to come and see me daily, or to invite me to his house. I often dined with him, and we would remain talking in his sitting-room till late in the night, while he would tell me of some of the remarkable things that had come under his notice or sometimes weave startling and paradoxical theories about nature and man.
I asked him one day if he knew Rudd's work. He said he admired it, but it had always struck him as strange that a writer could be as intelligent as Rudd and yet, at the same time, so obviously à côté with regard to some of the more important springs and factors of human nature.
I asked him what made him think that.
"All his books," he said, "any of them. I have just been reading his last book in the Tauchnitz edition, a book of stories, not short stories: nouvelles. It is called Unfinished Dramas. I will lend it you if you like."
We talked of other things, and I took the book away with me when I went away. The next day I received a letter from Rudd, sending me a privately printed story (one of 500 signed copies) called Overlooked, which, he said, completed the series of his "Unfinished Dramas," but which he had not published for reasons which I would understand.
Henry read out Rudd's new book to me. There were three stories in the book. They did not interest me greatly, and I made Henry hurry through them; but the privately printed story Overlooked was none other than the story he had thought of writing when we were at Haréville together.