"Yes, I fancy I talked an awful lot of rubbish that night—bit of an ass of myself—you remember——"
I did not reply. The important thing was, not whether I remembered, but whether his memory was all that it should have been, for he was forgetting something even as he spoke. He remembered that other night, he had remembered my name; but if he remembered that he had rooms and belongings in Cambridge Circus he was very deliberately turning down Shaftesbury Avenue instead of up it. But I went where he led me. I was resolved, however, that the moment his arm left mine, mine should go into his. I was not going to let him disappear again.
The typical Soho mixture thronged the pavements: Hebrew physiognomies, Italian, Greek; dark chins, bold eyes, bold noses; rings and scarfpins, fancy socks, the double-heeled silk stockings of women. As I could not very well scrutinise his face at that short range I did the next best thing; I watched the faces that advanced towards us. As if he had been a pretty woman, so heads turned as he passed. They turned as they turn for Billy Wells. It was not so much his size and proportions as his whole personal aura. He stood out among all that flashy cosmopolitanism as if a special and inherent light attended him.
"Which way are we going? Where do you live?" I suddenly asked him. It was not the question I was burning to ask him. That question was, "When do you live?" I felt the slight movement of the muscles under his sleeve, but he answered steadily enough—carefully enough.
"Oh, I've been rather lucky about that," he said. "I happened to be in the wine-bar of an hotel in Gloucester Road one night, and I got talking to a fellow. I fancied I'd come across him somewhere in France—as a matter of fact I had, though he didn't remember me. Anyway, we'd started talking, and we went on. Rather an amusing crowd there, George. If I were asked to put in one word the basic domestic factor of their lives, do you know what it would be? A pint of methylated spirits. They don't pay half a crown for it at the chemist's; they pay one-and-twopence at the oilshop. To boil their kettles, of course. They all fought, they're all gentlemen, and they're all doing damn-all to make a living. So they take garrets and rooms over garages, and cook their breakfasts with methylated spirits. This fellow was called Trenchard. Got all messed up at the Brick Stacks, La Bassée way. He had to go out of town for a month, and said I could have his place for the bare rent, twenty-five bob a week, and the use of his furniture for nothing. So that's where I am. This way——"
We turned into Leicester Square Tube Station.
In the train I sat opposite to him; and, now that he had taken his beard off, I couldn't see that he had changed very remarkably in outward appearance after all. Nevertheless I distrusted my own impression. I knew that I was full of pre-conceptions about him, knew too much of his astonishing case to observe impartially and reliably. There are some things—some scents for example—that you have to make up your mind immediately about or else to remain in indecision. The longer you delay the less sure you become. So I found it with his face in the electric-lighted Tube. It was, of course, astoundingly young for a man in the middle forties; but call him thirty-five and much of the wonder disappeared. The most that a casual acquaintance would have been likely to remark was, "How the deuce does Rose manage to keep so extraordinarily young-looking?" True, his friend Trenchard had failed to recognise the man with whom he had fought at La Bassée, but that meant little. There were millions of men in France, each the spit of the rest for mud and momentariness of acquaintance. To-day, by mere association of times and places and battles, these men are in fact resuming acquaintances they have no recollection of ever having begun. "Oh, I've a rotten memory for faces—seen So-and-so lately? And I say, do you know anybody who wants to take a quiet place for a month?" That, no doubt, had been the substance of that conversation in the Gloucester Road wine-bar.... And there was another thing of which I shall have more to say by and by. I began to suspect that whatever strange element in Derwent Rose had brought him to this pass, that element reacted on those of us who knew his secret. He probably became less extraordinary in our eyes as contemplation of him made us not quite ordinary ourselves. Julia Oliphant (it seemed to me) he had already influenced, constrained, isolated. We were getting used to him. But I shall return to this.
In the meantime I was considerably cheered. He remembered that other night; he wanted to apologise for the lunacy of it; he had given a perfectly coherent account of his present whereabouts and how he came to be there, and his summing-up of the fellows whose basic domestic factor was a pint of methylated spirits had given me a clear and straightforward picture. As for the rest—why he had left Cambridge Circus, what it was that he found restful in those slowed-down films, and especially the measured carefulness of his speech—for the present these things could wait.
We left Gloucester Road Station, turned up towards Princes Gate, and then crossed the road and entered a dark gardened Square. Three minutes further walking brought us to a high stone archway with a heavily carved and moulded entablature, beneath which a cobbled way sloped slightly down into a mews. To right and left were garage-doors, some closed, others open and flinging shafts of orange light across the way. Somewhere an engine was being allowed to "race"; somewhere else a hose was being turned on to the body of a car. High over the roofs of the mews, as if suspended at random in the sky, the oblongs of light of the South Kensington backs showed. One unshaded incandescent burned on a top landing like a star.
"Let me go first; I've got a torch," said Derry, stopping at a narrow side-door next to where the car was being washed. "You'll find the rope on the right."