The Tower of Oblivion

by Oliver Onions

"Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?"

"Just what you'd expect him to say, of course—that he's awfully sick he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain."

She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed and threw her whole castle down to the ground.

"Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him."

But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not exist, but as experience they did. For him the Arrow and the Ape were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns:

He was thirty-five when he wrote his Ape.	She was thirty-one when she read it and began her rejoinder.
He was forty-five when he read the Arrow.	She was forty-one at the time that he read it.
But he was thirty-five again.	She was still forty-one.
He was going on getting younger.	She would get no younger.
He was convinced he would die at sixteen.	She——

But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.

After all (I thought testily) Rose might consider himself a confoundedly lucky fellow. What, after all, was he grumbling at? Because he was going to have his precious, precious youth all over again? His health and vigour and strength all over again, so that he could tear a book in two as I might have torn a piece of paper? His clear skin and glossy hair and the keen sight of his eyes once more? He was luckier than poor Madge and myself! And what, if that American was right, was he risking? Nothing that I could see, unless he should go beyond that age of the maximum of his faculties, which he was persuaded he would not do. And in addition to the approaching brilliance of his youth it was not impossible that he would keep the whole of his accumulated experience as well. Not for him that old and bitter cry that has so often been wrung from the rest of us: "Oh for my life over again, knowing what I know now!" So far, at any rate, he was having his life again, knowing all he knew at the turning-point. And the fellow was grumbling!

"Now tell me about him," said Madge.

But she could not suppress a yawn as she said it. I knew that she, like myself, was longing to slip out of her clothes and to get into bed.