And yet (I asked myself as my anger began to wear itself out), who can know the mind of a man who does not know his own? More, when was anything that mattered ever settled by chop-logic of the sort that set my head spinning? Why, his brilliant beauty alone laughed to nothing all my attempts to get him off my mind. And suddenly my mind flashed back, back, it seemed interminable years back. There sprang up in my memory a lecture I had once attended at the Society of Arts, a cutting I had taken from an article in The Times.
"Human beings," said the article, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. The latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached."
Say that this was so; whither did it now lead?
A staggering vista to open before a middle-aged-to-elderly gentleman like myself, on his way to luncheon at a riant holiday villa with a moody and beautiful young creature of seventeen by his side!
For it seemed to me to lead like a ray straight into the blinding heart of the Sun of Life. The mind blinked in its attempt to follow it; I believe I actually passed my hand over my eyes as if to shut out a physical dazzling. I have said a little, a very little, about Derwent Rose's books; but how if they, foursquare and strongly-built as they were, were merely external things, well enough in their way, but clogged in the gross and unwieldy medium through which his central fire and power torturedly struggled? How if a more essential beauty should presently appear, free of these trammels of process, independent of acquirement and painful lore, dissociated from performance—shining, self-sufficient, its mere existence its own justification and law? "Every morning of my life," he had once said, "I've tried to wake up as if that was the first day of the world." Was he now on the way to his fulfilment? Was that first morning actually about to dawn for him? Was an early sun about to rise on a creature not ready-made, not pre-instructed, unfettered by the prejudice of a single word, but man given to all understanding, man at the moment of his perfection, man liberated, and without a name or foothold in the human world?
A pretty speculation, I say, for a humdrum old gentleman going home to luncheon!
Luncheon over, I took a liqueur with Alec in the pergola. The lattice of shadow flecked the ascending smoke from his pipe.
"By the way, what became of you last night? You didn't go on to the Casino, did you?" he said.
"No. I took a walk."
"I heard you come in. The others had only just gone to bed. And of course Jennie was dog-tired and went upstairs with a headache."