IV
I am not going to direct your attention specially to the more fantastic part of what Derwent Rose told me in his rooms that night. I have found no issue in that direction. Neither am I going into the metaphysics of the thing; I know no more about that than he ever knew himself. But if you care to read, in reverse, the progress of a man out of the sad shadows of middle-age back into the light and beauty and belief that once were his—always the same man, undeviating from the lines laid down by his own nature, re-approaching each phase as he had formerly approached it, but in times and circumstances so complex and altered that nothing in the pilgrimage was constant but himself—if, I say, you care to read that extraordinary intertwining of what he had done and what he re-did, and are content with this, and will not pull me up every time the mystery of the deeper cause confounds us both, then I am content too and we can go ahead.
It had been going on (he told me) for six months past; but at the outset I ought to warn you that he had two scales of time. Here I wish that we were all mathematicians, and that I could write and you could read his wondrous history in symbolised concepts. However, we will do the best we can with words.
Broadly speaking, he went backwards, not at a uniform rate, but in a series of irregular and unequal slips. That is to say, that though in six months or so of actual time he had retrograded the ten years between forty-five and thirty-five, it did not follow that he had gone back five years in three months or two and a half in any given six weeks. I went carefully into this point with him. I asked him, if the ratio was not a steady twenty to one (or a hundred and twenty months of experienced time as against six by the clock) what he estimated it at for shorter periods of either. But to this he could give no clear answer. Being unable to fix the precise turning-point, and hardly knowing when the indications in himself had begun (since at first he had put the whole thing aside as an absurdity), he had no datum. He had only become fully awake to the phenomenon when it had not been possible to disregard it any longer.
"Well, as we've got to assume something let's assume that," I said. "When was it that you first had no doubt at all?"
This he did more or less remember. I give his account in his own words.
"It was about two months ago," he said. "I'd no book on hand. I don't mind admitting that I'd never felt so stale and empty and sick of everything I'd ever done. In fact I'd got to the point you noticed this afternoon."
"What point was that? Don't let's take anything for granted."
"When you rubbed me up about that first novel. I'd got to the point of hardly seeing any difference worth mentioning between the worst stuff and the best, Shakespeare included. Do you mind if I go into that rather in detail?"
"Do."