"Here, I thought, is this creature man, this fellow called George Coverham or Derwent Rose, brought naked into a world that marvellously doesn't care a rap about him—but that he's got to contrive to make some sort of an interpretation of, because it's where he's got to live. He hasn't got too long to live there either—a strictly limited time—so that there's just him and this wonderful uncaring universe for it. This and nothing else is what happens every time a human being's brought into the world. All this procreation and child-bearing are just for that—so that somebody can make head or tail of the world.... Well, what do they do to him? By and by they send him to school. That's the first step towards taking him away from this universe he's trying to make something of and telling him instead what some other naked being before him thought about it all. That's all right as far as it goes. Just once in a while, I suppose, two heads may be better than one. But"—he paused for emphasis—"when a third begins to repeat what a second has already repeated, and a fourth a third, and so on, by and by the universe begins to drop right away into the background. The process goes on—it has gone on—till not one in ten million dreams there's a universe at all. You know what I mean—all talk about talk about talk about it. So, if you've any sense of proportion at all, where does the difference between one book and another come in?"
"Well—that's the state of mind you were in," I observed. Goodness knows I wasn't trying to shut him up. If it did him good to talk I would gladly have listened to him all night. As for sharing these Olympian views of his, however, I have never had either the strength or the audacity. It is because of my own indefatigability in talking about talk about talk that they made me a Knight.
"I was only trying to explain how I felt," he answered apologetically. "Let's start again. It was two months ago within a few days, and I know it was a Monday morning, because Mrs Hyems doesn't come up on Sundays, and she brought a parcel that had been overlooked from Saturday night. It was half-past eight, and I was in there shaving"—he nodded in the direction of his bedroom. "She wanted to call my attention to the parcel because it was registered."
"Is this just to fix the date, or has the parcel anything to do with it?"
"Both. I'm coming to the parcel in a minute. Well, as I was saying, I was just about fed up with things in general. Books in particular. Nice state of mind for an author with his living to earn to begin the week in! I remember stopping shaving to have a good hard look at myself. I remember saying to myself in the glass, 'You're young, you're a perfect miracle of youth; you've got quite a good brain as brains go; and yet instead of getting out of doors and living every minute of one of God's good days you'll sit down there, and make scratches on bits of paper that have got to be just like the scratches everybody else makes or you won't sell 'em; isn't there something wrong somewhere?' I asked myself that in the glass. And mind you, I was feeling extraordinarily fit physically. That's important. I'd felt like that for days past. Who wants to work when he feels like that?"
I sighed a little. Even I, with my modicum of health, have occasionally felt too fit to work.
"So I finished dressing and came in here to breakfast, and I was half-way through breakfast when that book caught my eye."
"What book?"
"The parcel I spoke of. It was a book. As a matter of fact it was Mrs Bassett's book, The Parthian Arrow."
I glanced at him. "Registered?"