One wild chart was an attempt to combine the whole in a single comprehensive statement. But this had completely beaten him. A serpentine whip-lash of pencil had been flung so viciously across it that one almost heard the crack.
The rest of the book consisted of text.
I was of course prepared at any moment to receive a telegram or letter asking for the book's instant return. If it really contained the key to his speed of retrogression it was probably the most important thing he had in the world. Therefore, lest he should claim it before I had finished with it, it stayed in my breast pocket when it was not actually in my hand.
And so I had three days' madness over the hateful thing. Twenty times I nearly tore it in two as he had once torn a six-shilling novel. Then at the end of the three days I put it down, leaned back exhausted in my chair, and asked myself what it was that I was really in search of.
I wonder whether the answer will startle you as much as it startled me. True, it came pat enough. There was nothing whatever new about it. It was merely what it had been all along, and I ought to have been familiar with it by this time.... I merely wanted to know his age. Just that and nothing more.
Yet of all the shocks that a man can receive, the shock of the expected and waited-for is sometimes the most profound. You know it is coming; it is therefore pure, fundamental shock, unalleviated by the lighter element we call surprise. When something you have lived with every day, taken for granted, thought you knew all about, have become familiar with to the point of boredom, suddenly so recalls attention to itself that all your habitual notions about it drop clean away, leaving you face to face with a strange thing—a line of verse, an object in your house, a tune, a picture, a wife—when this happens, then you may know that something has been wrong all along, is still wrong, and that if you would set it right you must go back to the very beginning again.
So there I stood, an unhappy, over-confident little scholar, whom the inexorable tutor silently points back to his task.
Humbly I returned to the book that, if it told me anything at all, must at least tell me this.
And now I must ask you to bear your portion of that little shiny-backed book too; for on a point of this importance I cannot allow you to accept my own conclusions on trust. You must know how I arrived at them. Where Derwent Rose was at that moment, what manner of man he was, what he was doing, how long he might continue to do it, whether he was alive at all—these things depended on no off-handed survey of his case, but on the dry figures, dates and details that I had hitherto neglected.
Fortunately we had a roughly-sufficient starting-point. This was the date of June 8th, 1920, the day when I had met him at the Lyonnesse Club. It was not, it must be confessed, his true zero. The true zero was now indiscoverable. But I myself, in good faith and knowing nothing of all this, had judged him to be thirty-five that afternoon; he himself had confirmed my judgment, subsequent changes had sufficiently borne it out, and the diary now re-affirmed it.