I enclose, he writes 10.8.18, 1¾ chapters of the Couperus classical comedy-novel [The Tour], which I amused myself by doing because you insisted so emphatically that the book should be done. But I will go no further till I have your verdict. Don’t trouble to do any work on this; the marginal refs. were merely inserted as I went along. Just see if the thing is the sort of thing that’s likely to take on; and talk to me about it when you see me....
IX
In 1918 Teixeira’s health had so much improved that he was able to dispense with all violent and disabling cures.
This was the period when he was, socially, in greatest request. I introduced him, in the spring, to Mr. and Mrs. Asquith, who shewed him much hospitality and great kindness from this time until his death. His leaves were now usually spent with them at Sutton Courtney; but, since he required to take little or no sick-leave, the number of letters exchanged in this year is small.
At the armistice, he left the Intelligence Section to become secretary to the department; and, though we worked in the same building for two or three months more, I naturally saw less of him than when we shared the same table. The last communication that passed between us as colleagues, like the first, written three years before, contained an invitation. Its form must be explained by reference to Stevenson’s and Osborne’s Wrong Box. Rudyard Kipling has mentioned, in A Diversity of Creatures, the sublime brotherhood to whom this book is a second Bible.
“I remembered,” [he writes in The Vortex], “a certain Joseph Finsbury who delighted the Tregonwell Arms ... with nine ... versions of a single income of two hundred pounds, placing the imaginary person in—but I could not recall the list of towns further than ‘London, Paris, Bagdad, and Spitzbergen.’ This last I must have murmured aloud, for the Agent-General suddenly became human and went on: ‘Bussoran, Heligoland, and the Scilly Islands’—‘What?’ growled Penfentenyou. ‘Nothing,’ said the Agent-General, squeezing my hand affectionately. ‘Only we have just found out that we are brothers.... I’ve got it. Brighton, Cincinnati and Nijni-Novgorod!’ God bless R. L. S.[7]...” One of the greatest living authorities on The Wrong Box was a member of the Reform Club; and, on joining, Teixeira found it necessary to his self-protection to study the most aptly-quoted work in the world.
My invitation was couched in the cryptic terms of the brotherhood:
MATTOS. Alexander William de Bent Teixeira, if this should meet the eye of, he will hear something to his advantage by lunching with me to-day at the far end of Waterloo Station (Departure Platform) or even at Lincoln’s Inn.