“What might you know of archery, Van?” he asked.
I knew nothing of archery, save that it consisted of shooting arrows at targets, and I confessed as much.
“You’re not exactly revealin’, don’t y’ know.” He lighted one of his Régie cigarettes indolently. “However, we’re in for a little flutter of toxophily, it seems. I’m no leading authority on the subject myself, but I did a bit of potting with the bow at Oxford. It’s not a passionately excitin’ pastime—much duller than golf and fully as complicated.” He smoked a while dreamily. “I say, Van; fetch me Doctor Elmer’s tome on archery from the library—there’s a good chap.”[3]
I brought the book, and for nearly half an hour he dipped into it, tarrying over the chapters on archery associations, tournaments and matches, and scanning the long tabulation of the best American scores. At length he settled back in his chair. It was obvious he had found something that caused him troubled concern and set his sensitive mind to work.
“It’s quite mad, Van,” he remarked, his eyes in space. “A mediæval tragedy in modern New York! We don’t wear buskins and leathern doublets, and yet—By Jove!” He suddenly sat upright. “No—no! It’s absurd. I’m letting the insanity of Markham’s news affect me. . . .” He drank some more coffee, but his expression told me that he could not rid himself of the idea that had taken possession of him.
“One more favor, Van,” he said at length. “Fetch me my German diction’ry and Burton E. Stevenson’s ‘Home Book of Verse.’ ”
When I had brought the volumes, he glanced at one word in the dictionary, and pushed the book from him.
“That’s that, unfortunately—though I knew it all the time.”
Then he turned to the section in Stevenson’s gigantic anthology which included the rhymes of the nursery and of childhood. After several minutes he closed that book, too, and, stretching himself out in his chair, blew a long ribbon of smoke toward the awning overhead.
“It can’t be true,” he protested, as if to himself. “It’s too fantastic, too fiendish, too utterly distorted. A fairy tale in terms of blood—a world in anamorphosis—a perversion of all rationality. . . . It’s unthinkable, senseless, like black magic and sorcery and thaumaturgy. It’s downright demented.”