The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions

I got him a rod and warned him against the telephone-wire that has to cross one end of the pond. I left him and Julia mounting the cast on the verandah.

I went up to my study. I went there from a motive not unlike gratitude to God. An embodied ghost Derry might be to the rest of the world, but our little private triumvirate had still a normal basis. He understood the whole situation, and so to us was no ghost. Nor was even the prospect of his Wanderjahre now quite so intimidating. The terror would have been to think of him as an ignis fatuus, unconscious of himself, flitting hither and thither over the face of the Continent at large. Cogito, ergo sum. The distance of the lamp from the table's edge was apparently not an irrevocably fixed factor. "By sheer strength of will" he had been able to vary it. He could enjoy intensely and reason infallibly, if not at one and the same time, at any rate by turns. He was still capable of work and of play, and at the maximum of either.

How, then, did she stand with her wild scheme of marrying him?

I sat down at my table and worked it out thus:

While he was in his working mood he was inaccessible to her.	But while he was at play his accessibility was a raised power.
As his secretary she could not hope for more than a repetition of her former experience.	But as his playmate she met him on his return journey—he as he had been, but she far more rusée and resolved.
His work occupied by far the greater portion of his time.	Therefore his work stood in her way.
Therefore his work must be discouraged.	But I had encouraged him to speak of it.
I had done her a disservice.	But they were at play at this moment, setting up a fishing-rod on the verandah.
His Wanderjahre would presently be upon him again.	She knew this, and would lose no time.

I think that states it fairly.

And she had the whole day and the whole of to-morrow before her.

I began to wonder whether I had done wisely in asking them to stay after all.

But perhaps I was troubling myself unnecessarily about this moonshine-marriage after all. What about him? He at least would see the monstrous anomaly and would never allow it. He at any rate knew that if there was one place on earth where no woman must come it was into his room between evening and dawn. Things far too terrifying and precise happened during those hours. He knew this, and five minutes between him and myself would settle Julia's business once for all.