"Much obliged," said Mr. Carville placidly, "but I don't know as you need bother. I threw a book over the side once."
"A manuscript!" I said, aghast. He nodded, looking at his boots. "I thought a lot of it once; called it Dreams on a Sea-Weed Bed, and got a funny faced little girl in Nagasaki to type it for me. But one voyage, when I'd been reading a book called New Grub Street, I got sick of the whole thing and dumped it in the Java Sea, half way between Sourabaja and Singapore."
"I can't approve of that, Mr. Carville," I said, standing up and confronting him. "A foolish thing to do!"
"How's that? It might just as well be twenty fathoms deep in the Java Sea as twenty volumes deep in the British Museum? Eh! It was mine."
"Oh yes, yes; but it's hardly fair to deprive the world of it."
"Humph! I guess the world won't sweat, sir. It would be a good thing if a lot of modern stuff was dumped. Some of the authors too, by your leave!"
"I quite agree," I said. We had been to see Brieux' Damaged Goods in New York a week or so before, and we were in the mood to sympathize with Mr. Carville's doubt of modern tendencies. He stood by the door of the studio, one hand on the jamb, the other under his coat, the plain gold albert stretched across his broad person, the light shining on his smooth pink forehead as he looked down at his crossed legs. It has occurred to me from time to time that this unobtrusive man, with his bizarre record and eccentric mentality, was evolving behind the mask of his mediocrity a new type. That this process was only half deliberate I am ready to believe. A man who disciplines his soul by flinging overboard the manuscript of a book does not thereby slay his imagination. He only drives it inward. When we first came to America we planted all our seeds in the garden too deep and they grew downward, assuming awful and grotesque forms. In some such way Mr. Carville's imagination was working within him, fashioning, as I say, a new type. I insist upon this, inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. He had given strange hostages to Fortune, so that Fortune hardly knew what to do with them. It is possible that the abrupt and dramatic disappearance from his life (I refer to his brother) has slackened the intensity of his hold upon this idea; but I do not know.
He left us that evening quietly and without fuss. He had, in a notable degree, the neat movements and economy of gesture which I can imagine indispensable to those who live in confined cabins and take their walks upon decks beneath which their shipmates sleep. In a quiet indescribable way there was manifest in his demeanour a gentle repudiation of all things traditionally English. You could not possibly imagine him vociferating "God save the King" or "Sons of the Sea." With a simple dignity he had assumed the dun livery of the alien, and there was to me a certain fineness in the sentiment that forbade any flaunting of his nationality in the faces of his native-born children.
And in the midst of our musings, just before we turned out the lights, it occurred to me quite suddenly that, since he had finished his story, it was quite possible that we should not see him again.