It was a beautiful London evening, not quite twilight. A tender after-glow lay over the Circus, and, if jewels can grow, the lamps might have been jewels a few moments after their birth. It was one of those evenings when you delay even to dine, knowing that when you come out again the glamour will have gone and you will have seen a loved and familiar thing once more and once less. So I strolled, scanning faces, sometimes remembering what I was scanning them for, sometimes forgetting again. It might happen that I should find myself suddenly looking into his face. Of course the chances were millions to one that I should not.
I walked as far as the Hippodrome, and then turned and crossed the road. Even in those few minutes the sky was no longer the same. It was mysteriously bluer, and the soft crocus-quality of the lamps had gone. I found myself opposite a doorway with a coronet of lights over it and a tall commissionaire beneath them. A man had just gone in. He was not in the least like Rose, and there was no reason why I should have followed him more than any other man; but I did follow him, not into the bright and crowded and smoky ground-floor room of which I had a glimpse, but up a staircase with brass-edged treads and the word "Lounge" at the bottom of it. I found myself in an empty upper room with leather-covered sofas set deeply into the walls, numerous little tables with green-tiled tops, and a small quadrant of a bar in one corner. The man I had followed was already at this bar, and the young woman behind it was preparing his drink.
"Bit quiet, isn't it?" I heard him say. He had rather a pleasing sort of face, of the kind that a year or two ago one associated with the brimmed hat of an Australian trooper. "Say, is this the best London can do for a man nowadays?"
"London nowadays!" the young woman declared with contempt. "I should say so! Where've you been this long time? Where the bluebottles go to in the winter I suppose. Don't you know this is a tea-room now?"
"Go on!"
"A tea-room, I tell you. Ladies not admitted after five. The new sign'll be up to-morrow. Oh, you can bring your old grannie here now!"
"Bit different from Stiff Brown's time then!"
"Different!—--"
The conversation continued, in the same sense. It was precisely my Charbonnel's experience over again. Whatever notoriety the place might once have possessed, it was now a perfectly reputable resort, a tea-room in the afternoons, and in the evenings to all intents and purposes the equivalent of my own Club. The woman behind the bar wore a wedding ring, and I distinctly liked the look of her companion. And yet, with dramatic suddenness, the whole prospect before me seemed to be all at once illimitably enlarged.
For if a normal man like my friend at the counter was struck by the changes of the past five years, how must they strike a man who had gone through an experience so utterly abnormal as that of Derwent Rose? Change is the normal condition of all things; the human mind is marvellously able to adapt itself to altered circumstances in a week, a day, an hour; memories lose their fresh edge, novelties amuse and give way to newer novelties still. But all this is only for men who march forward with their fellows. For the man who marches backwards all is turned round. The memories stir and revive and bloom again, the forgotten is re-remembered, laid ghosts begin to walk. The dulled brass edges of staircases become bright again with the rubbing of light and frail and vanished feet, recessed sofas in upper rooms thrill and rustle with whispers and frou-frou and laughter again. Doubtless the living, 1920 successors of those ghosts were to be found elsewhere, but unless I sought Derry in 1910 I knew not where to begin to look for him. Musingly I descended the stairs and walked slowly back towards the Criterion again. I no longer watched faces. The whole thing seemed hopeless. I had about as much chance of finding Derwent Rose in London as I had of catching one given drop of a summer shower.