Already I guessed that it would be useless to put my question; but I asked it none the less.
"You didn't see him before he left, then?"
"No. He simply left that note. It's dated the evening of the fourth, and it says he's off to-morrow.... By the way, what am I to do about letters?"
There wouldn't be any letters. Of that I was sure. But I gave him my address, wound up a pleasant chat rather quickly, and took my leave.
And now for that diary that, instead of helping me, had proved the greatest stumbling-block of all.
I had had not a moment's scruple in reading every word of it, in trying to disentangle every diagram and equation it contained. Any question of ordinary decorum had long since passed out of the relation that existed between him, Julia, and myself. And let me repeat once more that a man who has questioned the universe until he has asked one question too many involves in his own fatality all who have to endure the contact of him. His state is apocalyptic, his existence merely spatial, without zenith of virtue or nadir of disgrace. If my roof had not been abused, neither did I violate his diary. I merely read it without a qualm.
Its oddity began with its very first page. Ordinarily on the first page of a diary you look for the owner's name and address. Here was no address; on the other hand there was a string of names. There were, to be exact, eight of them, with space for more, the whole written in his small fine hand and disposed in a neat vertical column. This block of names might have been from the everyday-book of any working novelist, part of whose task it is to label his puppets appropriately. I had no reason to suppose that hitherto Derwent Rose had ever gone under any name but his own. It had certainly occurred to me that he might sooner or later have to do so. This appeared to be a preparation for such a contingency. His own name of Derwent Rose, by the way, did not appear.
Opposite the names a diagram had been pasted into the book. It was on squared paper, such as draughtsmen use, of so many squares to the inch; and these squares had been numbered horizontally along the top with the years from 1891 to 1920, that is to say from his own age of sixteen on. Lower down the page, and still horizontally, red and black lines of various lengths were set in echelon. These were sprinkled over with numbers, which I discovered to refer to the pages that followed. Certain arrows pointed in opposite directions. Over these were written, in one direction, the words "'A' memory," in the other the words "'B' memory." This completed the horizontal arrangement.
The vertical set-out appeared to have given him much more trouble. It did not appear to have been completed. A heavy black line ruled up through the year 1905 was lettered "true middle," but that appeared to be the only stable term of its kind. The rest was a mere rain of pencil-lines, momentary false middles that apparently he had tried to seize in passing. I knew by this time how unseizable they were. Not one of them lay on the right side of the true middle line. All overstepped it and travelled in a gradual procession towards the left of the diagram.
On other pages I found other diagrams. These were merely enlarged details of the foregoing, with days of the month instead of years.