“Excuse me for not having introduced you to Hopkins. Don’t think it strange of him to make off like that. He’s a student, you see, very retiring and preoccupied.”
“Hopkins!”
“Yes, there he goes—that man with a pronounced stoop, a Norfolk jacket, and a soft hat.”
The square was absolutely empty except for Orchard and me. There was no man with a stoop and a Norfolk jacket anywhere in sight; there never had been. Orchard, with his halting, timid walk, had crossed the square alone, had come out of his own doorway alone. Absolutely alone. I had watched him. I had never taken my eyes off him, from first to last. I took his arm.
“Come over to No. 2 and see Harrowsmith,” I entreated. “You don’t look well. He’ll give you a tonic. Perhaps you’re smoking too much—don’t believe in a pipe myself. There isn’t half so much harm in a mild cigarette.”
The square was empty, empty. It was a shock to me. It came so suddenly, it was utterly unexpected—the fact that Hopkins was a mere myth. There possibly was a Hopkins, that absent man, reputed to be abroad, whose name had been painted up on the right-hand set, who had, so I’d heard, been in the habit of sending regularly every quarter day the rent for his empty rooms. But Orchard’s Hopkins—the man who played the violin, who was a crank on early Italian art—simply didn’t exist. It was then I remembered that when Orchard had said casually, “There’s his violin,” I had not noticed one, that I had never heard a violin, or a strange voice, or a second pair of feet in the set immediately above my own. I remembered, too, that when Orchard had said, with annoyance, “Hopkins is an untidy chap; he leaves his things about,” the room had been in perfect order. I had never seen the collection of books on Italian art—the man was a delusion, the product of an excited brain. Orchard was in a bad way. I repeated, “Come up to No. 2 and see Harrowsmith.”
He dragged his arm away, gave another keen look across the square, and said impatiently:
“I shall do nothing of the sort. Don’t believe in doctors. When I’m hard up for a chronic disease I’ll consult one, not before. Hundreds of men have been killed by going to a specialist or by trying to get their lives insured. The specialist shakes his head, the insurance doctor looks grave, and you’re done. No! It’s a preliminary to going to the undertaker.”
This had been one of his many eccentricities in the old extravagant days. I simply said soothingly:
“But you don’t go to the undertaker. Someone else has to go—when the time comes. So the bottom’s knocked out of your argument. Come on.”