THE TOWER OF OBLIVION

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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The Tower of Oblivion

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

AUTHOR OF
"A CASE IN CAMERA," ETC.

New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1921,
By
OLIVER ONIONS

Set up and printed. Published November, 1921.

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.

To
NIGEL PLAYFAIR
and the Ladies and Gentlemen of
"THE BEGGAR'S OPERA COMPANY"
(Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, June 5th, 1920)
who were so constantly his
"pleasure and soft repose"
while the following pages were
writing, this book is dedicated
by
their friend and well-wisher
The Author
Kensington 1921

Contents

ENGLAND

• Page

The Side-Slip[ 1 ]
The Stern Chase[ 57 ]
The Straphanger[ 91 ]
The Double Cross[ 129 ]
The Pivot[ 181 ]

FRANCE

The Long Splice[ 207 ]
The Even Keel[ 261 ]
The Cut-Out[ 327 ]
The Desert Island[ 371 ]
The Home Stretch[ 407 ]

ENGLAND

PART I

THE SIDESTEP

THE TOWER OF OBLIVION

I

I think it is Edgar Allan Poe who says that while a plain thing may on occasion be told with a certain amount of elaboration of style, one that is unusual in its very nature is best related in the simplest terms possible. I shall adopt the second of these methods in telling this story of my friend, Derwent Rose. And I will begin straight away with that afternoon of the spring of last year when, with my own eyes, I first saw, or fancied I saw, the beginning of the change in him.

The Lyonnesse Club meets in an electric-lighted basement-suite a little way off the Strand, and as I descended the stairs I saw him in the narrow passage. He was standing almost immediately under an incandescent lamp that projected on its curved petiole from the wall. The light shone brilliantly on his hair, where hardly a hint of grey or trace of thinness yet showed, and his handsome brow and straight nose were in full illumination and the rest of his face in sharp shadow. He wore a dark blue suit with an exquisitely pinned soft white silk collar, to which, as I watched, his fingers moved once; and he was examining with deep attention a print that hung on the buff-washed wall.

I spoke behind him. "Hello, Derry! One doesn't often see your face here."

Quietly as I spoke, he started. Ordinarily he had very straight and steady grey-blue eyes, alert and receptive, but for some seconds they looked from me to the print and from the print to me, irresolutely and with equally divided attention. One would almost have thought that he had heard his name called from a great distance. Then his eyes settled finally on the print, and he repeated my last words over his shoulder.

"My face? Here?... No."

"What's the picture? Anything special?"

Still without moving his eyes from it he replied, "The picture? You ought to know more about it than I—it's your Club, not mine——"

And he continued his absorbed scrutiny.

Now I had passed that picture scores of times before and had never found it worth a glance. It was a common collotype reproduction of a stodgy night-effect, a full moon in a black-leaded sky with reflections in water to match—price perhaps five shillings. Then suddenly, looking over his shoulder, I realised where his interest in it lay. He was not looking at the picture at all. In the polished glass, that made an excellent mirror in that concentrated light, I had seen his eyes earnestly fixed on his own eyes, his cheeks, his hair, his chin....

Well, Derwent Rose had better reason than most men for looking at himself in a picture-glass if he chose. Indeed it had already struck me that that afternoon he looked even more than ordinarily fresh and handsome. Let me, before we go any further, describe his personal appearance to you.

He had, as I knew, passed his forty-fifth birthday in the preceding January; but he would have been taken anywhere for at least ten years younger. You will believe this when I tell you that at the age of thirty-nine, that is to say in the year 1914, he had walked into a recruiting-office, had given his age as twenty-eight, received the compliments of the R.A.M.C. major who had examined him, had joined an infantry battalion as a private, risen to the rank of company-sergeant-major, and had hardly looked a day older when he had come out again, with a herring-bone of chevrons on his cuff and a captain's stars on his shoulder—not so much as scratched. He was just over six feet high, with the shoulders of a paviour and the heart and lung capacity of a diver. Had you not been told that he wrote novels you would have thought that he ran a ranch. His frame was a perfectly balanced combination of springiness and dead-lift power of muscle; and to see those grey-blue eyes that looked into yours out of unwrinkled lids was to wonder what secret he possessed that the cares and rubs and disillusions of life should so have passed him by.

Yet he had had his share of these, and more. His looks might be smooth, but wrinkles enough lay behind his writing. From those boyish eyes that reminded you of a handler of boats or a breaker of horses there still peeped out from time to time the qualities of his earlier, uneasy books—the gay and mortal and inhuman irony of The Vicarage of Bray, the vehement, unchecked passion of An Ape in Hell. If to the ordinary bookstall-gazer these works were unknown—well, that was part of the task that Derwent Rose had set himself. It is part of the task any writer sets himself who refuses all standards but his own, and works on the assumption that he is going to live for ever. Only his last published book, The Hands of Esau, showed a fundamental urbanity, a mellower restraint, and perhaps these were the securer the more hardly they had been come by. I for one expected that his next book would rise like a star above the vapours where we others let off our little six-shilling crackers ... but his body seemed a mere flouting of the years.

And here he stood under the corolla of an incandescent lamp, looking at himself for wrinkles!

Then in the glass he caught my eye, and flushed a little to have been caught attitudinising. He gave a covert glance round to see whether anybody else had observed him. A few yards away, in the doorway, Madge Aird was smilingly receiving the Club's guests, but for the moment Madge was looking the other way. Then he spoke in a muffled voice.

"Well? Notice anything? How do I look? How do I strike you? No, I don't want a compliment. I'm asking you a question. How do I look? I've a special reason for wanting to know."

I laughed a little, not without envy.

"How do you look!" I said. "Another ten years will be time enough for you to begin to worry about your looks, Derry. I know your age, of course, but for all practical purposes you may consider yourself thirty-five, my young friend."

Sadly, sadly now I remember the eagerness of his turn.

"How much?" he demanded.

"I said thirty-five or thereabouts, you Darling of the Gods. I'm fifty, but you make me look sixty, and when you're a hundred your picture will be in the papers with the O.M. round your neck. You'll probably have picked up the Nobel Prize too, and a few other trifles on the way. You've got a physique to match your brain, lucky fellow that you are, and nothing but accident can stop you. Don't go out and get run over, that's all. Well, are you coming in?"

But he hung back. And yet it was largely his own fault if in such places as this Club he felt like a fish out of water. It might even have been called a perverse and not very amiable vanity in him, and I had hoped he had got over this shyness, arrogance, or both. We have to live in a world, even if we are as gifted mentally and physically as was Derwent Rose. But it was no good pressing him. I remembered him of old.

"Then if you're not coming in?" I ventured to hint; and again his hand went to the soft collar.

"What have I come for, you mean? I want you to find out for me if there's a Mrs Bassett here."

"I don't think I know her."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett. Ask somebody, will you?"

"What's she like to look at?"

"Can't say. Haven't seen her for years."

"Wait a bit. Is it somebody called Daphne Bassett?"

"Yes, yes—Daphne," he said quickly.

"Who published what's called a 'first novel' some little time ago?"

Instantly I saw that I had said something he didn't like. The blood stirred in his cheeks. He spoke roughly, impolitely. And even up to this point his manner had been curt enough.

"Why do you say it like that?" he demanded. "'First' novel, with a sneer? She wrote a novel, if that's what you mean."

Yet, though he began by glaring at me, he ended by looking uneasily away. You too may have wondered why publishers so eagerly insist that some novel or other is a really-and-truly 'first' one. Your bootmaker doesn't boast that the pair of boots he sells you is his 'first' pair, and you wouldn't eat your cook's 'first' dinner if you could help it. You may take it from me that in the ordinary course of things Derwent Rose would have been far more likely to applaud the novel that ended an ignominious career than the one that began it. Yet here he was, apparently wishing to outface me about something or other, yet at the same time unable to look me in the eye.

"There's got to be a first before there can be a second, hasn't there?" he growled. "Jessica had to have a First Prayer, didn't she? And is there such a devil of a lot of difference between one novel and another when you come to think of it—yours or mine or anybody else's?"

It was at this point that I began to watch him attentively.

"Go on, Derry," I said.

"There isn't; you know there isn't; and I'm getting sick of this superior attitude. Why must everybody do the Big Bow Wow all the time? Can't somebody write something just for amuse—I mean must they always be banging the George Coverham Big Drum? As long as it doesn't make any pretence.... Have you read it?" he demanded suddenly.

"No."

"Then you don't know anything about it."

It was here that I became conscious of what I have called the Change. Whatever had happened to put him out, this was not the Derry Rose I had lately seen. Surely my remark about that "first" novel had been innocent enough; but he had replied surlily, unamiably, unfamiliarly.... "Unfamiliar?" No, that is not the word. I should rather say remotely familiar, recollected, brought forward again out of some time that was past. Just as in his resplendent physical appearance he seemed to be "too" well, if such a thing can be, so in his manner he seemed to be too ... something; I gave it up. I only knew that the author of The Hands of Esau would not have spoken thus.

"Well, will you find out for me if she's here?" he said in a softer one.

I fancy that already he was sorry he had not spoken more quietly.

"Why not come in and see for yourself?"

"Oh—you know how I hate this sort of thing."

"Not long ago you spoke of joining the Lyonnesse."

"I know. I thought I would. But I've decided it's out of my line."

"Then at least come and be introduced to Mrs Aird. She'll know whether Mrs Bassett's here or not."

The blue-grey eyes gave mine a quick and critical glance.

"Is that the Mrs Aird who writes those bright books about young women and their new clothes and how right their instincts are if you only give them plenty of pocket-money and leave 'em alone?"

I smiled. Perhaps it was a little like Madge. But I noticed his sharp distinction between the novels of one woman and the "first" novel of another. It began to look as if behind Mrs Hugo Bassett the novelist lay Daphne Bassett the woman.

"Well," I sighed, "I'm to ask for Mrs Hugo Bassett. What's the title of her book?"

"The Parthian Arrow."

"Mrs Hugo Bassett, author of The Parthian Arrow. Very well——"

I approached Madge, but before I could ask my question she had drawn me inside the doorway.

"Who is he?" she whispered ardently in my ear. Her plump ringed hand clutched my sleeve, and there was the liveliest curiosity in the dark eyes that looked up at me from under her nodding hat with black pleureuse feathers.

"Is there a Mrs Bassett here—Daphne Bassett?"

"No. But——"

"Has she been, and is she likely to come?"

"She hasn't been, and nobody'll come now. But George——"

"I'll see you presently; just let me get rid of my message," I said; and I returned to Rose.

A glance at my face was enough for him. He may have muttered a "Thank-you," but I didn't hear it; he had spun on his heel and in a moment was half-way to the cloakroom. I hope he got his own hat, for he was out again almost instantly. I had a glimpse of his magnificent back as he hurried along the passage, then a flying heel at the turn of the stairs and he was gone. Turning, I saw that Madge had watched his departure with me. She almost ran to me.

"Quickly, George—who, who is your Beautiful Bear, and why have you been keeping a superb creature like that from me?" she demanded. "I knew he was waiting for a woman. Every skirt that came in——" at the swing of her head the feathers tossed like an inky weeping-elm in a gale. "But," she added, "I confess I never saw a man admire himself quite so openly before."

My friend has scored off me often enough in the past. This time I scored off her.

"Derwent Rose always was good-looking," I remarked.

She fell a step back.

"George!—Derwent Rose! You don't mean to say that that was Derwent Rose?"

"I always thought you knew everybody in London."

"That was Derwent Rose!" Then she added, with inexpressible conviction and satisfaction, "Ah!"

I am always a little uneasy when Madge Aird says "Ah!" in that tone. She was Madge Ruthven before she married Alec Aird, and I have often wondered whether in the past any of her Scottish forbears had any traffic with France. I am not now thinking of the air with which she always wore her clothes, from whatever it was on her head to the always irresistible shoes on her tiny feet. I mean the workings of her mind. There is none of our northern softness and hesitation and mystery about these. All she thinks and says has a logical completeness and finish that somehow always seems just a little too good to be true. Few things in this world are so neatly right as that. But wrong though her conclusions may be, they are always dazzlingly effective, and you have to swallow them or reject them whole.

"Ah!" she murmured again, with the intensest self-approval; and I wondered what unreliable imperfection she was meditating now. You never know with her. She sees so many people, goes to so many places, hears so much. Often the mere mention of a name is enough to touch off that instantaneous fuse of her memory that leads straight into the heart of heaven knows what family history or hidden scandal.

"And what do you mean by 'Ah'?" I asked her.

"The gorgeous creature! I never dreamed—but this makes the situation perfectly fascinating!"

"What situation?"

"Why, of him and Daphne Bassett. But poor old George, I keep forgetting that you're the noblest Roman of them all and don't listen to our horrid petty little scandal. And evidently you haven't read The Parthian Arrow."

"I haven't. Tell me what it's about."

"But you've read An Ape in Hell?"

"Of course. Tell me what the other's about."

But at that moment she was claimed. Her next words came over her shoulder as, with a wisk of her ribboned ankles and another gale in the shake of feathers, she was off.

"Not now—another time. I shall be in fairly early this evening if you're staying in town. It's quite an interesting situation. And if you'll bring your Beautiful Bear to see me some time, I'll——"

I understood her to mean that in that case she would bring Mrs Hugo Bassett also.

II

I live out in Surrey, my car happened to be in dock, and I had my train to think of. As I walked slowly up the short street to the Strand I puzzled over Madge's words. Evidently she found some connection between that "first" novel, The Parthian Arrow, and Rose's own book, An Ape in Hell. Well, my ignorance could soon be remedied. There was a bookshop just round the corner, and I could be the possessor of a copy of Mrs Bassett's book in five minutes.

But suddenly, on the point of hailing a taxi, I dropped the point of my stick again. Somewhere at the back of my mind was the feeling that there was some invitation or appointment I had overlooked. I knew that it could be of no great importance, and, looking back on these events since, I have thought that it was perhaps a mere disinclination to go down to Surrey that night that gave me pause. I may say that I am unmarried, and have got my housekeeper fairly well trained to my ways.

So, standing on the kerb, I brought a number of papers from my pocket and began to turn them over in search of the forgotten appointment.

I found it. It was a lecture by a Fellow of a Learned Society, and it was to take place at the rather unusual hour of six o'clock. No doubt this was in order that the learned speaker might get his paper over by half-past seven, leaving his learned listeners free to dine. A taxi slowed down in front of me.

"Society of Arts," I said to the driver.

A minute later I was on my way to see Derwent Rose for the second time that afternoon.

I will tell you in a moment the subject of that lecture I had so suddenly decided to attend. First, a word as to my attitude at that time towards new discoveries and new thought in general. I was enormously, wistfully interested in them. Instinctively, at that time, I stretched out my hands to them. I had lived long enough in the world to realise that such events as Trafalgar and the French Revolution were mere events of yesterday, and the possibilities of an equally near to-morrow haunted me. I shrank from the thought that while the dead stones of the Law Courts and Australia House would still be there after I had gone, I should not at least be able to make a guess at the stream of Life, uncradled yet, that would beat and press and flow along those channels in so little a time, the new blood of London's old unchanging veins. One begins to think of these things when one is fifty.

So, at a minute or so to six, my taxi set me down in the Adelphi, when I might have been a happier man had it taken me straight to Waterloo.

And now for what that lecture was all about.

My meaning will perhaps be clearer if I give an extract from a leading article in The Times of slightly later date. On a subject of this kind I would rather use an expert's words than risk the inaccuracies that might creep into my own.

"Human beings," the article begins, "differ not only in the knowledge they have acquired, but in their dower of intelligence or natural ability. It has long been accepted that the former property may continue to increase until the natural faculties begin to abate, but that the latter has a maximum for each individual, attained early in life.... Intelligence, as opposed to knowledge, is fully developed before the age of schooling is over. Sixteen years has usually been taken as the age at which, even in those best endowed, the limit of intelligence has been reached. Obviously the standard varies in different individuals; the degree of intelligence passed through by the more fortunate at the age of ten may be the final attainment of others, and all intermediate stages occur.... Mr H. H. Goddard, an American psychologist of international repute, classifies the intelligence of his countrymen into seven grades, but believes that in exceptional cases, amounting to four and a half per cent. of the population, a superlative standard is reached at the age of nineteen. On the other hand, seventy per cent. of the citizens of the United States have to carry on their lives with the intelligence of children of fourteen, and ten per cent. with that of children of ten."

It was to hear these conclusions of Mr Goddard's expounded by a fellow-savant that I had come that afternoon to the Society of Arts.

To tell the truth, a certain whimsical humour in the idea had attracted me. When a man's books sell as well as mine do, and he is as flatteringly thought of as I am, it is rather tickling to be told that he is really an infant of sixteen or seventeen, telling fairy-stories to a gigantic public nursery the average age of which is perhaps twelve. Sir George Coverham, Knight, merely the top boy of a kindergarten of adults!... It pleased me, and I rather hoped the lecturer would approach his subject from that humorous angle.

The lights were being turned down as I entered the lecture chamber. Quietly, not to make a disturbance, I tiptoed to the nearest seat. Then, as with a preliminary hiss or two the shaft of light from the lantern pierced the gloom, I was able dimly to distinguish that the subject of the lecture had not attracted more than a couple of dozen people. These barely filled the first two rows. The rest of the theatre appeared to be empty. Of the speaker himself nothing could be seen but a glimpse of white beard as he moved slightly at the reading-lamp.

He read from a typescript in a flat, monotonous voice, with once in a while a halting explanatory remark that trailed, paused, and then stopped altogether. I watched the acute angles his wand made with its own shadow on the diagrams projected by the lantern.

Then I thought I heard an impatient movement and muttering somewhere behind me. The speaker, after another long and painful pause, had just said, "I hope I've made that clear, gentlemen"; and I was almost certain that the muffled growl had taken the shape of the words "You don't know a damned thing about it!"

Then, a few minutes later, the sound was repeated, this time accompanied by an unmistakable groan.

"Sssh!" said somebody sharply from the front or second row.

The lecture dragged on.

But about the next and final outbreak there was no doubt whatever. Neither was there about the sharp suffering of whoever was the cause of it. Somebody a couple of rows behind me must be ill, I thought, and evidently others thought so too, for the lecturer came definitely to a stop, and my eyes, now accustomed to the gloom, saw the turning of faces.

"Is anybody——?" a secretary or chairman called out, and I expected the light to go up at any moment.

In the end, however, the lecture was finished without further incident. The lights were switched on, the dingy classic painted panels on the walls could be seen, and instantly every face, my own included, was turned towards the back of a man who was seen to be hurriedly making his way to the door.

I cannot tell you what happened at the Society of Arts after that. I was already on my feet, hurrying after that back. It was the same back I had seen, in the same haste, leaving the Lyonnesse Club less than two hours ago.

He had got to the entrance hall before I caught him up. He accepted with rather disturbing docility the arm I slipped into his. All the fight had gone out of him; he might not have been the same man who had so recently tried to outface me about first novels. I looked at his face as we stood by the glass doors that opened on to John Street. It showed both fear and pain.

"What's the matter, Derry? Can I be of any help?" I asked him anxiously.

He muttered, "Yes—yes—about time I called somebody in—just about enough of it——"

"Do you want a doctor? Shall we call at a chemist's?"

He stared at me for a moment; then I vow he almost laughed.

"A doctor? No thanks. One dose a day's quite enough."

"One dose of what?"

"Words," he replied, with a jerk of his head in the direction of the lecture chamber.

We passed out and into John Street, he accommodating his ordinary London-to-Brighton pace to mine. He once told me that five miles an hour was walking, six stepping out a bit, and anything over six and a half really "going."

"Which way?" I asked at the end of the street.

"I suppose you'd better come round to my place," he replied; and we crossed the Strand and struck north past Trafalgar Square.

He lived (I am not troubling you with the lobster we shared standing up at a counter, during which repast we did not exchange one single word)—he lived in Cambridge Circus, and I hope I have not given you the impression that Derwent Rose was desperately poor. When I spoke of him as having none too much either of money or success I meant as by comparison with myself. Until, quite suddenly and by no means early in life, my own reward came to me, I should have considered his quarters luxurious—once you had got there. This you did by means of a narrow staircase from the various landings of which branched off the offices of variety-agents, film-brokers, furriers, jewellers and I don't know what else. The double windows he had had fitted into his room subdued the noises of the Circus outside, and if he cared to draw his thick brocade curtains as well he could obtain almost dead silence. His black oak furniture was brightly polished by some basement person or other, his saddlebag chairs scrupulously beaten and brushed. The two or three thousand books that completely filled two of his walls might have been arranged by a librarian, so methodically and conveniently were they disposed, with lettered and numbered tickets at intervals along the edges of the shelves; and I knew that he had begun a catalogue of them. All this portion of his room spoke of a man settling down into meticulousness, whom disorderly habits and departures from routine begin to irritate. In marked contrast with it was the topsy-turvy state of the large oval table with the beaded edge. This was in an appalling state of confusion. Newspapers had been tossed aside on to it, open books with their faces downwards sprawled over it. Empty shells of brown paper still kept something of the shape of the books they had contained, and ends of packer's string with bits of sealing-wax twined among them. A teacup lay on its side in a wet saucer, a large oval milk-can stood next to it. And on the top of all were the snaky rubber cords of an exerciser and a ten-pound, horsehair-stuffed medicine-ball.

I was about to hang up my hat in the neatly-curtained recess he had had fitted up as a lobby when he exclaimed "Oh, chuck it anywhere," and set me the example by throwing his own hat and stick on to the clutter. They caught the medicine-ball, which rolled an inch or two, tottered, and then fell with a soft dead thump to the floor. The next instant, as if now that his own door was closed behind him there was no longer any need to keep up appearances, he himself had fallen with a similar thud to the sofa. He, this piece of physical perfection who called six miles an hour "stepping out a bit," lay all limp and relaxed, with lids quivering lightly over his closed eyes. He spoke with his eyes closed.

"Well, what did you think of it?" he said, breathing deeply.

I tried to keep my anxiety out of my tone.

"What did I think of the lecture?"

"Yes, the lecture if you like. That'll do to start with. No, I don't want anything, thanks. Tell me what you thought of the lecture."

I began to say something, I hardly remember what, when, still with his eyes closed and twitching, he interrupted me.

"All those silly charts—all those useless figures about the American Army—that's all waste of time. Making work for work's sake. I could have told him all that straight away."

I remembered those groans in the obscurity of the lecture-room. I spoke quietly.

"Is that what you were going to tell him when you—interrupted a little?"

I had to wait for his reply. When it did come I hardly heard it, so low did he speak.

"I know what you mean; but I can only tell you that if you'd been vivisected like that you'd have squirmed a bit too."

I couldn't help thinking he had taken that lecture in a curiously personal sense, and I said so.

"Vivisected?" I exclaimed. "I was vivisected, as you call it, just as much as you were—perhaps more in some ways. What on earth are you talking about? It's a general question. It's human functions and faculties at large he was vivisecting, not you or me. So," I concluded, "we were all vivisected alike, and when everybody's vivisected—you see——" I made a little gesture.

Then he opened his eyes, and there was an expression in them that suddenly dried me up. It was an even more remarkable throw-back to a remembered and earlier manner than that I had witnessed earlier in the afternoon. In short, it was an expression of unconcealed contempt.

"Q.E.D.," he said. "Finis, Explicit, and the Upper Fourth next Term. You'd have made a good schoolmaster.... I tell you that when I say 'I' and 'myself'"—he positively glared with irascibility and impatience—"I mean myself singly and specially, understand—the egregious and indestructible ego—and not merely just as much or as little as anybody else. Get that well into your head or I won't talk to you."

Had he not been so visibly suffering I shouldn't have stood the tone of it for a moment, not even from him. And let me tell you at once the surmise that had already flashed through my brain. I am a dependable sort of person myself, one of the kind that nothing startlingly new is ever likely to happen to; but I was not so sure about his kind. Brains like his often fly off at queer tangents, and I wondered whether he had been reading too much of this current cant about "multiple personality" and had allowed it to run away with him. Every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to rush to that for an explanation of everything nowadays. I had already noticed, by the way, that one of the books that sprawled cover uppermost on his table was a book on the thyroid gland. But suddenly he seemed to guess at my thoughts. He spoke more quietly. Indeed he seemed to be fully aware of these outbreaks of his, and to be trying to resist them more and more strenuously as our conversation proceeded.

"Sorry, old fellow," he said contritely. "I'm very sorry. I oughtn't to have spoken like that. But I'm not what they call 'disintegrating'; I'm the last man to do that. When I say 'I' I mean the 'I' I've always been. That's just the devil of it."

"Suppose you begin at the beginning," I suggested.

"There you are!" was his swift reply. He was sitting up on the sofa now, and was facing it, whatever "it" was, with a calmer courage. "I can't begin at the beginning. All I really know yet's the end, and of course that hasn't come.... It's a damn-all of a problem. Get yourself a drink if you want one. No, I won't have one; I—I daren't. And you might draw the curtains. When I hear the buses and taxis it makes me want to go out."

I drew his curtains for him, but did not take the drink. He sat on the sofa leaning a little forward, his great hands clasped between his knees and working slightly and powerfully, as if he cracked walnuts in the palms of them. The grey-blue eyes avoided mine. I have seen that same avoiding glance in the eyes of a man who had something perfectly true to tell, but so utterly improbable that he was self-convicted of lying even in speaking of it.

"About what you were saying this afternoon in that Club place—my age," he began in a constrained voice. "You—you meant it, I suppose?"

"That you'd live to be a hundred and be world-famous? Yes, I meant it in a way. I didn't mean you to take me too literally, of course."

"And you thought"—he hesitated for a moment and shivered slightly—"it was something to be congratulated about?"

"Well—isn't it? Professionally you've staked out a magnificent course for yourself in which time means practically everything, and so, if you live long enough, as you look like doing——"

Yet I cannot tell you what premonition of calamity seemed already to flow like an induced current from him to me. Ordinarily I am not specially sensitised to receive impressions of this kind. I am just a man who had had the luck to think as most other people think and to be able to express their thoughts for them. The greater therefore must have been that current's projecting force. Certainly the greater was my shock when it did come.

"I shan't live to be a hundred," he said in a low voice.

I cannot remember what I said, or whether I said anything at all. All that I do remember is his own next words, the swift and agonising collapse of the whole man as he said them, and the feeling of my own nape and spine.

"No, not a hundred. You're counting the wrong way. You got my age quite right this afternoon. I'm thirty-five. And I shall live till I'm sixteen."

III

Among the things that have contributed to the wordly success of Sir George Coverham, Knight, has been that author's rigid exclusion from his books of everything that does not commend itself to the average common sense of his fellow-beings. The most he seeks in his modest writings—I speak of him in the third person because, as Derry's head dropped over his knees, it seemed impossible that this Sir George Coverham and I could be one and the same person—the most he seeks is a line somewhere between ordinary experience and the most, rather than the least, attractive presentation of it. In a word, his books are polite, debonair, and deliberately planned so as not to shock anybody.

Therefore in some ways he may be quite the wrong person to be writing this story of Derwent Rose. For example: he had known Rose for some fifteen years, and, not to mince matters, there had been many highly impolite things in Rose's life during that time. More than once it had seemed a very good thing indeed that he had had to work hard for his money. The great mental concentration necessary for the writing of some of his books must have kept him out of a good deal of mischief.

So I (I am allowing myself the man and Sir George Coverham the novelist gradually to reunite, as they gradually reunited that evening)—I, his friend, had already done what we all do when we are completely bowled over. I had instinctively sought refuge from his lunatic announcement in trifles—any trifle that lay nearest to hand. Suddenly I found myself wondering why he was afraid to take a drink, and why I had had to draw his curtains lest the sound of the buses and taxis should call him out into the streets.

But presently he had recovered a little. He was even able to look at me with the faint shadow of a smile.

"Well, that's the lot," he said. "I've given you the whole thing in a nutshell. You heard that lecture and you know me. You can fill in the rest for yourself."

Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was not yet half-past nine. I got on to my feet.

"You'd better get your hat and come down to Haslemere with me," I said. "We can catch the ten-ten. You're all on edge about something and you want a change. Leave word here that you'll be back in a week, and come along."

But he did not move, except to shake his head.

"I expected you'd say that. It's what anybody would say. It simply means that you haven't taken it in yet. No, since we've started we'll go on—unless you'd rather not. I warn you there's a good deal to be said for not going on."

"Why not talk about it down at Haslemere?"

Once more there was the hint of irascibility.

"Do you want to hear or don't you?"

Slowly I sat down again, and he resumed his former attitude of cracking nuts with his palms for nutcrackers.

"There's not an atom of doubt about what I'm going to tell you," he began. "Not an atom. Unless I'm mistaken you saw for yourself this afternoon—though of course you didn't know what you were seeing. You simply thought I looked younger, didn't you?"

I waited in silence.

"And I fancy my manner got a bit on your nerves—does a bit now for that matter?"

This also I let pass without remark.

"Well, let's start from that point. You said I looked thirty-five. Well, it's just that that's getting on your nerves—the less amiable side of my character when I was thirty-five, and—and—well, when you go you might take that bottle of whisky with you and make me sign the pledge or something. I'm trying—I'm honestly trying—to hang on, you see."

I sighed. "I wish you could make it a bit plainer," I said.

"I'm making it as plain as I can. Is this plain—that something's happened to me, I don't know what, and I'm getting younger instead of older?"

"Derry——" I began, half rising; but he held up one heroically-moulded hand.

"Let me finish. And if I happen to go to sleep suddenly you just walk straight out, do you hear? Walk right out and shut the door. You're to promise that. There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through.... So there it is. Instead of getting older like everybody else I'm simply getting younger. I'm perfectly sober—I haven't had a drink for five days—and I tell you I shall go on till I'm thirty, and then twenty-five, and then twenty, and then, at sixteen or thereabouts—that fellow wasn't very sound on his ages to-night—I shall die. Now have you got it?"

Even about human nature there are some things that you have to accept as it were mathematically. I am no mathematician, but I do know (for example) that the common phrase "mathematically certain" is a misnomer. The whole essence of mathematics lies, not in its certainties, but in its assumptions, its power to embrace any concept whatever and pin it down in the form of a symbol. Once you have adopted the symbol you don't trouble about what lies behind it. You merely proceed to reason on it.

It can only have been in some such way that I accepted Derwent Rose's mad statement and was willing to see what superstructure he was prepared to raise upon it. I was even able to speak in an almost calm and ordinary voice.

"Tell me how you know all this," I said.

He was logical and prompt.

"By my knowledge of myself, and also by my memory. I know what I was at thirty-five, and I know what I did; well, I simply know that I'm that man again, and that I shall go on and re-do more or less what he's already done. At some point in my life I must have got turned round, and now I'm living it backwards again. And put multiple personality quite out of your head. That's the whole point. I'm not anybody else, and I shan't be anybody else. At this moment I'm Derwent Rose, as he always was and always will be, but simply back at the mental and physical stage when he wrote An Ape in Hell."

To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal idea that had sent that cold shiver up my spine was capable of an ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment. Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less. You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or hell is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning anyway—the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process, didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But—you'd hardly call this spiritual, would you?"

I think I mentioned that he wore a soft white collar, pinned and tied with exquisite neatness. A moment later he wore it no longer. Without troubling about pin, studs or buttons, with a swift movement he had ripped the collar, tie and half the shirt-band from his neck, and showed, of an angry and recent purply-red, vivid on his magnificent throat, two curved marks like these brackets—().

Now I am not more squeamish than most men. I am far from having lived the whole of my life in cotton-wool. But it needed no course in medical jurisprudence to tell me what those marks were—the marks of teeth, and of a woman's teeth. I was deeply wounded. Rose's amusements in this sort were no affair of mine, and I strongly resented this humiliation both of himself and of me.

But his hand gripped my arm like a vice. Suddenly I saw a quite new pair in his grey-blue eyes. It was a swift fear lest, instead of helping him, I should turn against him.

"Good God, man!" he cried in a high voice. "Don't think that! Don't think I'm such a cur as to—oh, my God, that isn't the point! I'm not bragging about my conquests!... The point is that these marks are ten years old and they weren't there last night!"

I tried to free myself from his grip, but he wouldn't let me go. He ran agitatedly on, repeating himself over and over again.

"There isn't much imagination about that, is there? That isn't fancy, is it? That doesn't happen to any man any day, does it? A man would be likely to remember that, wouldn't he? He wouldn't forget it, if it was only for the shame of it! Is that just ordinary memory? And how would you feel when everything was healed over and forgotten, and you'd settled decently down, and hoped everything was forgiven you—and then you were to be dragged back over the ploughshares like that! I tell you you've got to see it all crowding back on you again, before you realise that forgetting's the greatest happiness in life!... I tell you on my word of honour that that happened ten years ago, when I was thirty-five before, and that it wasn't there last night! Now tell me I'm drunk or dreaming!"

Stupefied I stared at him. The issue was plain. Either he was telling the truth, or he was not. Either those marks were as recent as they looked or as old as he said. He was to be believed or disbelieved. There was no middle way.

And my heart sank like a stone in my breast as suddenly I found myself believing him. He saw that I did, and fumblingly sought to fasten the collar again. But he had torn both buttonhole and band, and could only cover up those shameful marks by turning up the collar of his dark blue jacket. He sat with his collar turned up for the rest of our talk.

Presently I felt a little more master of myself. I had moved over to the sofa and was sitting by his side. He, this youthful Hercules of forty-five, who wrote books and made you think of boats and horses, was weeping softly. He was weeping for misery and hate of what, apparently, he must go through again. Stupidly my eyes rested on the carefully lettered and numbered shelves of books, and then on the slovenly litter of the table. The electric light gave the merest flicker—they were doing something at the power-station—and then burned quietly on. It shone on the black oak furniture and the saddlebag chairs, on our two hats on the table, on the neatly curtained recess where the hats should have been. It was impossible not to see that in its contrast of orderliness and disorder the very room showed two sharp and distinct phases. Almost with voices the inanimate things seemed to cry it aloud. The man who had catalogued those bays of books had been the author of The Hands of Esau. He who now threw everything down on to that disgraceful table was he who had written An Ape in Hell.

He still wept quietly. I put my hand on his knee.

"All right, Derry," I said. "Try to pull yourself together. You say you can't begin at the beginning. Very well, begin anywhere you like. I dare say something can be done. It may turn out to be—oh, shellshock or something."

But already my heart told me that it would turn out to be nothing of the kind.

IV

I am not going to direct your attention specially to the more fantastic part of what Derwent Rose told me in his rooms that night. I have found no issue in that direction. Neither am I going into the metaphysics of the thing; I know no more about that than he ever knew himself. But if you care to read, in reverse, the progress of a man out of the sad shadows of middle-age back into the light and beauty and belief that once were his—always the same man, undeviating from the lines laid down by his own nature, re-approaching each phase as he had formerly approached it, but in times and circumstances so complex and altered that nothing in the pilgrimage was constant but himself—if, I say, you care to read that extraordinary intertwining of what he had done and what he re-did, and are content with this, and will not pull me up every time the mystery of the deeper cause confounds us both, then I am content too and we can go ahead.

It had been going on (he told me) for six months past; but at the outset I ought to warn you that he had two scales of time. Here I wish that we were all mathematicians, and that I could write and you could read his wondrous history in symbolised concepts. However, we will do the best we can with words.

Broadly speaking, he went backwards, not at a uniform rate, but in a series of irregular and unequal slips. That is to say, that though in six months or so of actual time he had retrograded the ten years between forty-five and thirty-five, it did not follow that he had gone back five years in three months or two and a half in any given six weeks. I went carefully into this point with him. I asked him, if the ratio was not a steady twenty to one (or a hundred and twenty months of experienced time as against six by the clock) what he estimated it at for shorter periods of either. But to this he could give no clear answer. Being unable to fix the precise turning-point, and hardly knowing when the indications in himself had begun (since at first he had put the whole thing aside as an absurdity), he had no datum. He had only become fully awake to the phenomenon when it had not been possible to disregard it any longer.

"Well, as we've got to assume something let's assume that," I said. "When was it that you first had no doubt at all?"

This he did more or less remember. I give his account in his own words.

"It was about two months ago," he said. "I'd no book on hand. I don't mind admitting that I'd never felt so stale and empty and sick of everything I'd ever done. In fact I'd got to the point you noticed this afternoon."

"What point was that? Don't let's take anything for granted."

"When you rubbed me up about that first novel. I'd got to the point of hardly seeing any difference worth mentioning between the worst stuff and the best, Shakespeare included. Do you mind if I go into that rather in detail?"

"Do."

"Here, I thought, is this creature man, this fellow called George Coverham or Derwent Rose, brought naked into a world that marvellously doesn't care a rap about him—but that he's got to contrive to make some sort of an interpretation of, because it's where he's got to live. He hasn't got too long to live there either—a strictly limited time—so that there's just him and this wonderful uncaring universe for it. This and nothing else is what happens every time a human being's brought into the world. All this procreation and child-bearing are just for that—so that somebody can make head or tail of the world.... Well, what do they do to him? By and by they send him to school. That's the first step towards taking him away from this universe he's trying to make something of and telling him instead what some other naked being before him thought about it all. That's all right as far as it goes. Just once in a while, I suppose, two heads may be better than one. But"—he paused for emphasis—"when a third begins to repeat what a second has already repeated, and a fourth a third, and so on, by and by the universe begins to drop right away into the background. The process goes on—it has gone on—till not one in ten million dreams there's a universe at all. You know what I mean—all talk about talk about talk about it. So, if you've any sense of proportion at all, where does the difference between one book and another come in?"

"Well—that's the state of mind you were in," I observed. Goodness knows I wasn't trying to shut him up. If it did him good to talk I would gladly have listened to him all night. As for sharing these Olympian views of his, however, I have never had either the strength or the audacity. It is because of my own indefatigability in talking about talk about talk that they made me a Knight.

"I was only trying to explain how I felt," he answered apologetically. "Let's start again. It was two months ago within a few days, and I know it was a Monday morning, because Mrs Hyems doesn't come up on Sundays, and she brought a parcel that had been overlooked from Saturday night. It was half-past eight, and I was in there shaving"—he nodded in the direction of his bedroom. "She wanted to call my attention to the parcel because it was registered."

"Is this just to fix the date, or has the parcel anything to do with it?"

"Both. I'm coming to the parcel in a minute. Well, as I was saying, I was just about fed up with things in general. Books in particular. Nice state of mind for an author with his living to earn to begin the week in! I remember stopping shaving to have a good hard look at myself. I remember saying to myself in the glass, 'You're young, you're a perfect miracle of youth; you've got quite a good brain as brains go; and yet instead of getting out of doors and living every minute of one of God's good days you'll sit down there, and make scratches on bits of paper that have got to be just like the scratches everybody else makes or you won't sell 'em; isn't there something wrong somewhere?' I asked myself that in the glass. And mind you, I was feeling extraordinarily fit physically. That's important. I'd felt like that for days past. Who wants to work when he feels like that?"

I sighed a little. Even I, with my modicum of health, have occasionally felt too fit to work.

"So I finished dressing and came in here to breakfast, and I was half-way through breakfast when that book caught my eye."

"What book?"

"The parcel I spoke of. It was a book. As a matter of fact it was Mrs Bassett's book, The Parthian Arrow."

I glanced at him. "Registered?"

"Yes. You mean one doesn't usually register a common or garden novel unless you want there to be no mistake about the person getting it?"

"Go on."

"So I opened it there and then and began to read it. I read it at a single sitting. Then I tore it in two. Wait a bit, I'll show you. Pass me a book, any one. They're all the same."

I passed him a book from the untidy table, an ordinary two-inch-thick octavo volume in a cloth binding. Now read carefully. He didn't even change his position on the sofa. Using his knees only as a support, with his hands he tore the back into halves. Let me say it again. I don't mean he tore it lengthwise along the stitching. He didn't separate the pages into dozens or scores, nor bend or break it. He just tore it across as I might have torn a postcard. I can still see the creeping and fanning of the leaves under the dreadful pressure of his hands, the soft whity-grey fur of paper as the gap widened relentlessly before my eyes, hear the slightly harsher sound of the rending cloth and the little "zip" at the end.

Then he tossed the two halves on to the table again.

"I used to do a bit of that sort of thing years ago," he remarked, without even a quickening of his breath. "Half-crowns and packs of cards, you know. But I'd had to drop it. Your muscles have changed by the time you're forty-five. I'd tried to tear a pack of cards not long before, but I could only make a mess of them and had to give it up."

I found not a word to say. As much as the feat itself the terrifying ease with which he had done it made me gape.

"Yes, my strength came on me like Samson's that morning," he continued. "I was scared of it myself. I didn't know what was happening, you see. I'm simply trying to tell you the first time I knew there was no mistake about it."

I found my voice.

"But why did you tear the book? I—I hope you weren't looking for the author this afternoon to tear her too!" I laughed nervously.

He turned earnest eyes on me.

"I swear I never meant her, George—in that accursed Ape book of mine, I mean. Of course she must have thought I did, and—and—well, to be perfectly honest, I'm not quite sure she didn't start me on the idea. You've got to start somewhere. But I went over it a dozen times afterwards. Am I the man to take it out of a woman in print?" he appealed piteously.

He was not, and I tried to reassure him; but he broke in anew.

"Why, I'd forgotten all about her before I'd written a couple of chapters! You're a novelist; you understand. If only she'd.... But I suppose I left something in—some damnable wounding oversight—but I can't find it even yet"—he glared round the room as if in search of a copy of his own book to submit to cross-examination all over again.

And then abruptly he seemed to put the book aside. His manner changed. He lifted himself from the cushions and spoke in a strained voice.

"Look here, George," he said hurriedly, jumping from point to point, "let's be getting on. I may be having to turn you out soon; this may be no place for you. Where had we got to? Where I tore that book. You were asking me when I first felt sure of all this. Well, it wasn't just the book, it was what happened inside me as well. Something gave way. I was afraid. I'm afraid now. You've known me a long time, George; known scandalous things about me, I'm afraid. But a man can live a pretty queer sort of life and yet manage to keep something safe from harm all the time. It's that that I'm hanging on to now. You see, I've never had any habits or customs. I've never been the millionth man—the fellow who repeats what they've all said before him. Every morning of my life I've tried to look at the universe as if I'd never seen it before—as if it had never been seen by anybody before. Dashed risky way of living.... But I managed to keep something clean inside me ... thank God ... need it ... badly ... no time to go into all that now...."

He muttered unintelligibly. He was not actually looking at his watch, and yet he gave the impression of having his eye on the passage of time. Suddenly he went on with a new spurt.

"Don't interrupt, please. I may have made a miscalculation. You see, when I drop off to sleep.... About that book. I started it at breakfast, sent Mrs Hyems away, and never moved from my chair till I'd finished it in the afternoon. Then, when I ripped it in two, I seemed to rip something in myself with it. I can't describe it any other way. Something in me seemed to open and take me right back. Before breakfast that morning I was what they call 'settling down in life.' I'd written Esau since the Ape, and had lots of things planned. I'd even got a bit old-maidish about all this"—he indicated his tidy walls. "Then—piff! All that stage of my development seemed to go like smoke. No, no pain; no physical feeling of any kind except that sudden rush of bodily strength. I just tore myself in two as I'd torn the book, and I ran to my glass—the glass I'd shaved in only a few hours ago."

"And you saw——?" the words broke breathlessly from me.

Slowly he shook his head. "Nothing—that time. I hadn't been to sleep, you see. A sleep's got to come in between. That's why you mustn't be here if I go to sleep.... No, it was the next morning I saw it."

Faintly I asked him what it was he had seen the next morning.

But before he could reply there had come a sudden wicked glitter into his grey-blue eyes. His hand had once more gone to his upturned coat collar. And he chuckled—chuckled.

"Not this, if that's what you mean," he said with a jerk of his head. "That was my last adventure; the one I'm telling you about now was two before that." Then his chuckle dying away again, "You notice your face when you shave, don't you?—the texture of your skin and so on? Well, that was what I saw: just a few years younger, a few years softer, a few years smoother. The corners of your eyebrows here; you know how the brow gets thin at the sides and those sprouts of long hair begin to come? Well, they'd gone. And I was scared at my strength coming back like that.... I say, get me a drink, will you? No, no, blast it—not that stuff—plain water."

I got him the water. He gulped it down. His fingertips were still feeling his eyebrows. Then with another spurt:

"What's the time now? Never mind—but I keep a diary now, you see. Have to. Memory isn't to be trusted in a matter of this kind. And speaking of memory, it'll be hell's delight if that goes. You see, this isn't 1920 for me; it's 1910, and I shan't have written The Hands of Esau for another three years yet. Or you can call it both 1920 and 1910 if you like. Bit mixing, isn't it? It's demoniac. I call it——" he called it something rather too violent for me to set down, and I have omitted one or two other strong expressions that had begun to creep into his speech. "And just one other thing before I shove you out," he positively raced on. "I said I should die at sixteen. If it comes to the worst I hope to God I shall; none of your scarlet second childhoods for me! But how the Erebus and Terror do I know when sixteen will come?... I say, where are you sleeping to-night? Perhaps you'd better—— Have some whisky. If only we had that damned datum point! Do have some whisky. Have the—— lot. Are those curtains drawn? Take my key and lock me in and give it to Mrs Hyems downstairs. Where's that diary of mine?"

Then all in a moment he was on his feet. Without ceremony he had thrust my hat into my hands. Comparatively gently, seeing what his strength was, he was hustling me towards the door.

"Sorry, old man"—the words came thickly—"thanks awfully—I expect I shall be all right—don't bother about me.... But I shall have to move sooner or later—looks so dashed queer one man coming in and another going out—too comic if they arrested me on a charge of making away with myself.... See you soon—yourself out—quick, if you don't mind—go, go!"

The next moment I was out on his landing. He had almost carried me out. I heard the locking of his door, but after that, though I listened, nothing.

V

Presently it occurred to me that there was nothing to be gained by waiting. It did not seem to be an occasion for calling for help, and if there was something he did not wish me to see it was hardly a friend's part to stand there listening for it. Slowly I descended past the closed offices of the cinema and variety agents and let myself out into the street. Involuntarily my eyes went up to his window, but no light showed there, and I remembered that I had drawn his curtains myself. Among a knot of people who waited for omnibuses I stood on the kerb, lost in thought.

It was after eleven o'clock, and Haslemere was now out of the question. I could have got a bed at my Club, but I vaguely felt that there might be something rather more to the purpose to do than that. For some minutes I couldn't for the life of me think what it was. Four o'clock of that afternoon seemed an age ago.... Then I remembered. Madge Aird might at least be able to throw a little light on the Daphne Bassett aspect of the affair. She had said she would be at home that evening, and I can always have a bed at the Airds' for the asking.

I mounted a bus, descended at my Club, telephoned to Alec Aird, seized a bag I kept ready packed in town, and by half-past eleven was on my way to Empress Gate.

Alec himself opened the door to me. He was in his dinner-jacket, but had thrust his feet into a comfortable pair of bedroom slippers and was smoking his everlasting bulldog briar pipe. There were neither hats nor coats on the hall table, and he had the air of having the house to himself.

"Thought it would be you," he said. "Lost your train? Give me your bag—I'm scared to death of asking a servant to do anything after dinner these days. Come up."

"Isn't Madge in? She said she was going to be at home."

"Oh, Madge calls it being at home if she's in by midnight. She's only at the Nobles. I don't think she's going on anywhere. Listen"—the click of a key had sounded in the hall—"there she is, I expect."

It was Madge. She followed us up into the drawing-room a moment later, gave me a glance that was half surprised and half amused, and proceeded to unscarf herself. Alec was relighting his pipe with the long twisted-paper poker. There was a question in the eye he cocked at her. Alec is fond of home, and lives a good deal of his social life vicariously, sending Madge to represent him and relying on her account of the proceedings when she gets back. This is frequently lively.

"Oh, nobody much," she chattered. "The Tank Beverleys and the Hobsons, and Connie Fairham and her escapade, and Jock Diver with Mrs Hatchett. Washout of an evening; makes home seem quite nice, especially with George here. Do give me a decent peg; they'd nothing but filthy cup." Then, as Alec busied himself at a tray, she shot another amused glance at me. "Brought the Beautiful Bear, George?"

"I've just left him. I want to talk to you."

"Alec," she said promptly, "go to bed. George and I want to talk."

"Dashed if I do without a tune," Alec grumbled. "Play something."

Madge crossed to the music-stool, set her whisky-and-soda on the sliding rest, and began to play.

I waited in an extreme of impatience. The bus-ride to the Club, getting my bag, coming on to Empress Gate, greeting Alec—I suppose these things had occupied me just sufficiently to put away for half an hour the weight that had been placed upon me; but now, as I frowned at Alec Aird's tiles and cut steel fender, that weight began to reimpose itself. Anxiously I wondered what might be happening at that very moment in that other room with the drawn curtains, the orderly shelves and the disreputable table.

A man who grew younger instead of older! A man who already was ten years younger than he had been a few months ago! He had been quite right in saying, when I had tried to take him down to Haslemere, that that only meant that I had not yet taken it in. I was as far from being able to take it in as ever. More and more it forced itself on me as menacing, inimical, wild. What sane man could believe it? And yet, if it was not to be believed, why could I not shake it off? Why did it lurk, as it were, in the half-lighted corners of Madge's drawing-room, allowing me all the time I wished in which to demonstrate it to be nonsense, and then, when I had left not one aspect of it uncriticised and undenied, reunite and face me again exactly as before?

It happened, he said, while he slept; and he had strictly enjoined on me that if I saw him falling asleep I was to walk straight out of the place. "There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through." That meant that during his sleep those tufts of his eyebrows disappeared and that terrifying strength descended on him again. But what happened before then? Was the actual and physical change simultaneous with the inner and mental one, or was it merely a confirmation that came afterwards? Had he changed in every respect but form and feature even as I had talked to him? It frightened me to think that he had; but the more I thought of it the more it looked like it.

For there had taken place a struggle within him that had but increased in intensity as the minutes had passed. I remembered the gravity with which he had pondered my suggestion that for the stuff of his novels he had been too directly to heaven, too straight to hell. I don't pretend to know any more about heaven and hell than anybody else, but I have the ordinary man's conception of the difference between good and evil, better and worse, and these principles, it seemed to me, had contended in him. And he had striven to throw the weight of his personal will into the worthier scale. There were things he did not wish to re-do, episodes he did not wish to re-live. He had even wept that he must be dislodged from that rock of his life to which his forty-five years had brought him.... But what had followed? Suddenly a wicked chuckle. Violent expressions had crept into his speech. A glitter had awakened in his eyes, as if, since the thing must be gone through with, devilry and defiance were a more manly part than weeping. "Well, if there's no help for it, let's be thorough one way or the other," I could have imagined him grimly saying....

And if this was so, what did it mean but that he had actually grown younger before my very eyes? I was merely shown, invisibly and a little in advance, what the whole world would realise when his sleep had smoothed out a few more wrinkles, given a newer gloss to his hair and an added brightness to his eyes....

And in that case why had I come to see Madge Aird? What could Madge do? What could anybody do? If the thing was true it was inescapable. He must go back. Not one single stage could be avoided. Beyond these episodes which he dreaded lay others that perhaps he need not dread, and others beyond those, and others beyond those ... until he attained sixteen....

I continued to muse and Madge to play.

At last Alec got contentedly up. He straightened the creases from his dinner-jacket.

"Thanks, old girl," he said. "Well, I'm going to turn in, and you two can sit up and yarn about your royalties if you like. You look after him, Madge, and see he doesn't get hold of The Times before I do in the morning. Night, George. You know where everything is——"

And, refilling his pipe as he went, he was off. Madge drew up a small table between us, untied the ribbons of her cothurnes, rubbed the creases from her ankles, and worked her toes inside their sheath of silk.

"Well?" she said; and then with a little rapturous gush, "I can't get the creature's beauty out of my head! That skin—that hair—and those wonderful books! It isn't fair. It's too many gifts for one person. He ought to be nationalised or something—turned over to the public like a park."

"I want you to tell me who Mrs Bassett is," I said.

She bargained. "It's a swap, mind. If I tell you about her you tell me about him."

"Tell me about her first."

"Well"—she settled herself comfortably—"I'm sorry to see you come down to my own scandalmongering level. Do you want to put her into Nonentities I Have Known? If so, I'll Who's-Who her for you. Here goes. Bassett, Daphne, née Daphne Wade. O.D. (only daughter, George) of Horatio Wade, rector of somewhere in Sussex, I forget where, but Julia Oliphant will tell you. He, the rector, M. (married) 1, Daphne's mother, and was M.B. (married by) 2, the child's governess. He died in the year of his Lord I forget exactly when, leaving Daphne a little money, otherwise I can hardly see Bassett marrying her. But Hugo pulled it off all right. My broker knows him. He's in the Oil Crush now, but he was playing margins on a capital of twenty pounds when Daphne (excuse my vulgarity) caught the last bus home."

"She's a friend of Miss Oliphant's, is she?"

"She was. She and Julia and Rose were children together. But I'm not sure Julia speaks to her since The Parthian Arrow. She meant it for him all right, whether he meant his for her or not. Life's full of quiet humour, isn't it?"

I will abridge a little of my friend's liveliness. Indeed as she caught as it were out of the air something of my own mood, she dropped much of it herself. This was the substance of what she told me:

Derwent Rose had written a book called An Ape in Hell. I don't know, Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "A woman who dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell." Had I written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over. Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine.

Yet one person had done so—a friend of his childhood, the author of The Parthian Arrow.

"One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only appeared quite lately."

"That's so," she admitted.

"But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event."

"Well—she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book immediately his appeared, in 1910."

"How do you know that?"

"Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up to date."

So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well.

"Well—go on," I said.

But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see where the Ape must have hurt her!"

"As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book——"

"But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness that she felt it."

"What!" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like Derwent Rose would——"

"Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine. She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to. They were boy and girl together. Now suppose I'd had an affair with somebody in my young days, and had married somebody else, and then he'd gone and—rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a Parthian Arrow even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear that another woman did."

"But—ten years!"

"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book. But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth—well, thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years."

"But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so."

"Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?"

"Just what you'd expect him to say, of course—that he's awfully sick he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain."

She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed and threw her whole castle down to the ground.

"Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him."

But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not exist, but as experience they did. For him the Arrow and the Ape were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns:

But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.

After all (I thought testily) Rose might consider himself a confoundedly lucky fellow. What, after all, was he grumbling at? Because he was going to have his precious, precious youth all over again? His health and vigour and strength all over again, so that he could tear a book in two as I might have torn a piece of paper? His clear skin and glossy hair and the keen sight of his eyes once more? He was luckier than poor Madge and myself! And what, if that American was right, was he risking? Nothing that I could see, unless he should go beyond that age of the maximum of his faculties, which he was persuaded he would not do. And in addition to the approaching brilliance of his youth it was not impossible that he would keep the whole of his accumulated experience as well. Not for him that old and bitter cry that has so often been wrung from the rest of us: "Oh for my life over again, knowing what I know now!" So far, at any rate, he was having his life again, knowing all he knew at the turning-point. And the fellow was grumbling!

"Now tell me about him," said Madge.

But she could not suppress a yawn as she said it. I knew that she, like myself, was longing to slip out of her clothes and to get into bed.

"Another time," I said, wearily rising. "Which room are you putting me in?"

As she rose I did not notice what it was that she caught up from a side-table and put under her wrap. She preceded me upstairs. The room into which she showed me was one I had occupied before, and only a minor change or two had since been made. One of these caught my eye. It was a leather-framed photograph of Miss Oliphant that stood with the reading-lamp on the bedside table.

"Well, good night," Madge yawned. "They'll bring you tea up. Don't read too long—bad for the eyes and the electric-light bill——"

Then it was that I noticed the book she had quietly slipped on to the table. It was Mrs Bassett's book, The Parthian Arrow.

VI

Part of the fuss my numerous friends made about my Knighthood was this desire of theirs that my portrait should be painted and hung up in the Lyonnesse Club. Whether in fact I shall ever look down from those buff-washed walls I am at present unable to say. That rests with Miss Julia Oliphant. I myself merely have the feeling that if she doesn't paint me I hardly wish to be painted.

Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.

"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."

"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and see her this afternoon."

"You say you don't know her well?"

"I've met her once."

We entered the station. I took my friend's ticket. I saw her to the gate of her lift, and the attendant paused, his hand on the iron lattice.

"Well," she said, "I think you'll find that won't matter. Let me know how you go on. Good-bye—and you can tell the Bear from me that no decent person believes a word of it."

And with a wave of her hand across the grille she sank with the lift into the ground.

I walked to my Club, lunched alone, and then, in a corner of the smoking-room, busied myself with my rather scanty recollections of the lady I was going to see that afternoon. Though I had only actually met her upon one occasion, we had a sort of hearsay acquaintance in addition. She and Derwent Rose had been children together, and one does not begin quite at the beginning with the friends of one's friends. Moreover, there are these people whom one may actually meet only at wide intervals, but over whom absence does not seem to have its ordinary power. Nothing seems to ice over, you come together again at the point where you left off. Perhaps because you draw your nourishment from the same elements, you are able to take the gaps for granted.

Nevertheless, of my own single personal meeting with Miss Oliphant I could remember little but her eyes. I had been presented to her across a small dinner-table, with rosy-shaded electric candles, that had turned those great eyes pansy-black in the pinky gloom. I had guessed that in the daylight they were of the deep brown kind that, alas, so frequently means glasses for reading and distressing headaches; but what had struck me at the time had been their quiet readiness and familiarity, as if they said to me, "He's told me about you; I wonder what he's said to you about me!"

And now those same eyes, photographed in a leather frame, had watched me during the whole of the previous night. They had watched me as I had read that awful book. Darkly watchful and expectant, they had seen my first amazed incredulity, then my successive waves of anger. "But go on," they had seemed ever to urge me; "there's much more to come!"

And under the bedside lamp they had been still watching me when the maid had brought in tea and had flung the curtains aside, admitting the bright sunshine.

Then, when the book had dropped from my hand to the floor, they had said, "Don't you think it would be rather a good thing if you were to come to see me?"

I am not going to advertise that hateful book of Mrs Bassett's. If I could have torn it in two as Rose had torn it I should have done so. She had hardly changed his name—for what was "Kendal Thorne" but Derwent Rose? So I will merely say that to old memories she had added new and malicious inventions, and had produced a ridiculous grotesque of a vain and peevish childhood, an impossibly blatant youth, and a culmination born of her own distorted imagination. It was for her, and not for himself, that he had blushed. For her sake he would have torn up every single copy of it if by that means it could never have been. He could have scolded her, shaken her, smacked her, ashamed, angry and helpless as one is before an ill-conditioned child who nevertheless has claims on one. That there could ever have been any passage between them her book put entirely out of the question. And so much for The Parthian Arrow.

At half-past three that afternoon I was at the Boltons, ringing Miss Oliphant's bell. A tiny maid admitted me, and I was shown into a sort of alcove with a good deal of tapestry and bric-à-brac and brass about, the sort of things the artists of half a generation ago affected for the sake of their "colour." Nor was the studio into which I was presently shown much different from a hundred other studios I had seen. These glass-roofed, indigo-blinded, north-lighted wells, I may say, always depress me, and had I to live in one of them I should instantly have a side-window cut, so that I might at least have a glimpse once in a while of somebody who passed in the outer world.

But somehow the place suited Miss Oliphant. Perhaps it was the north light. Artists choose the north light because it varies little, and there was something about her that didn't vary very much either. She came through a portière-hung door, and as she stood there for a moment, not surprised (for I had telephoned that I was coming), but with that familiarity and expectancy once more in her dark eyes, I was able to check this cool and composed impression of her with my former one of over-lustrous eyes in the pinky gloom of the shaded lamps of the dinner-table.

Her hair, like her eyes, was dark; but she had a habit rather than a style of dressing it. It was piled in a high mass over her white brow, quite neatly, but rather as if to have it out of the way and done with than as making the most of its rich glossy treasure. A dateless, but by no means inappropriate tea-gown of filmy grey with a gold thread somewhere in it showed her long harmonious lines of limb and allowed her breasts to be guessed at; and the ripeness of her shoulders set off her long and almost too slender neck. She had cool and beautiful hands, sleeved to the wrist; but the daylight added to her years. At our former meeting I should have said she was thirty-five. Now I saw that she could hardly be less than forty.

She took my hand for a moment, smiled, but without speaking, and began to busy herself at a Benares tray. She reinserted the plug of an electric kettle, which immediately broke into a purr. She listened for a moment with her ear at the kettle, and then suddenly filled the teapot. She spoke, once more smiling, through the little cloudlet of steam.

"Do sit down," she said, indicating a "property" curule chair. "Well, how's Derry? Have you seen him lately?"

I made a note of the name she too called him by, and said, Yes, I had seen him yesterday. "I'm sorry to say he seemed worried," I added.

"Oh? What's worrying him?" she asked, withdrawing the plug from the wall and popping a cosy over the pot. It was a French cosy, a dainty little porcelain Marie Antoinette, with a sac and a padded and filigreed petticoat, and I remember thinking that if Miss Oliphant ever went to fancy-dress dances the costume of her cosy would have suited her very well.

"Have you read that horrible woman's horrible book?" I asked her point-blank.

"The Parthian Arrow? Yes, I've read it," she said equably.

"Well, I should say that's one of the things that's worrying him," I replied. "I've just read it, and the taste of it's in my mouth still."

She considered the teapot. "We'll give it two minutes and then take the bag out," she remarked. Then, "Oh yes, I've read it. I don't think she need have written it either. But it is written, and there's an end of it. As for Derry, anybody who knows him knows that his whole life's been one marvellous mistake after another. He dodges it somehow in his books, but he knows nothing whatever about women in real life. Never did. Sugar?"

This was hardly what Madge Aird had led me to expect. I had gathered from her that Miss Oliphant and Mrs Bassett had more or less fallen out about that book; in fact Madge had definitely said, "I'm not sure that they speak now." But here was Miss Oliphant, Rose's friend, not only quite inadequately angry on the one hand, but on the other talking about Rose's ignorance of women almost as if he had been as much to blame as Mrs Bassett herself.... Moreover, when a woman tells a man that another man knows nothing about women, the man who is spoken to invariably tries the words on himself to see whether he too is included in the disparagement. My understanding of Miss Oliphant, such as it was, suddenly failed me. I looked at her again to see whether, and if so where, I had made a mistake.

She was doing a perfectly innocent little thing, one that at any other time I might have found charming. Her long fingers were slyly lifting the tops of sandwich after sandwich in search of the kind she wanted. A child does the same thing with sweets—and sometimes goes beyond mere peeping. But the infantility of the gesture jarred on me, and jarred no less when, her eyes meeting mine, she laughed, pouted, and said: "Well, after all, I cut them." I did not smile. Her coolness and unconcern when a friend was savagely attacked disappointed me. As for the portrait that was to have been the excuse for my call on her, I was glad now that it hadn't been mentioned. I now doubted whether I should mention it. I had supposed her to be a woman—not merely a female painter who gave a male sitter tea in her studio.

"I don't understand you," I said, a little curtly I'm afraid. "You speak as if that book was a mere point of view to which she's entitled."

Again she smiled at me, as if she liked me very much.

"Well, she has her point of view. It's evident that you don't know Mrs Bassett."

"Her book's told me all about her that I ever want to know."

"So," she laughed, "you're just showing how cross you can be?"

At that moment there came a ring at the bell. She was on her feet instantly, as if to forestall the little maid. With less tact than ever, I thought, her fingertips touched my shoulder lightly as she passed by me. It was only then that I noticed that the Benares tray held a third cup and saucer.

The next moment she had shown Mrs Bassett herself in.

I am going to show Mrs Bassett in and out of this story again with all possible speed. Only once have I set eyes on the lady since, and that was in a moment when I was far too occupied with other matters to give her more than a glance. She came in, a fluff of cendré hair, surmounted by a hat made of a thousand brilliant tiny blue feathers. This was intended to enhance the pallid blue of her eyes; as a matter of fact it completely extinguished it. She was a Christmas-tree of silver stole and silver muff, toy dog, and a pale blue padded and embroidered object that I presently discovered to be the dog's quilt. I was presented to her, bowed, and—suddenly found myself alone with her. Miss Oliphant had picked up the teapot and was nowhere to be seen.

And this was the kind of arch ripple that proceeded from the author of The Parthian Arrow:

"Oh, how d'you do, Sir George? Really a red-letter day. Sir George Coverham and Julia Oliphant together. Quite a galaxy—or is galaxy wrong and does it take more than two to make one, like the Milky Way?—Oh, Puppetty, my stole!—You mustn't mind if I ask you thousands of questions—I always do when I meet distinguished people—peep behind the scenes, eh?—Puppetty, I shall slap you!"—a tap on the beast's boot-button of a nose. "So handsome, Julia is, don't you think? Not in a picture-postcard sort of way, perhaps, but such character (don't you call it?) and such a lovely figure! I know if I were a man I should fall head over ears in love with her! Do you mind, Sir George?"

She meant, not did I mind falling in love with Miss Oliphant, but did I mind taking the dog's cradle and quilt from her arms. I did so, made my bow as Miss Oliphant appeared again, and moved quickly towards the alcove where I had left my hat.

But it was Miss Oliphant herself who stopped me, and stopped me not so much by her quietly-spoken words—"I want you to stay"—as by the sudden command in her eyes. This was quite unmistakable. For the first time since I had entered her studio I saw the woman I had expected to see. That look was too imperious altogether to disobey. I sat down again.

I swear that Mrs Bassett wore that silver stole twenty different ways in as many minutes. The air about her was ceaselessly in motion. If Puppetty was in his quilted cradle she had him out; if he was out she put him back again and tucked him in. She kissed and scolded the wretched beast, and discussed Miss Oliphant's pictures and my own books. Only her own book she never once mentioned. And I sat, saying as little as possible, looking from one to the other of the two women.

Then, out of the very excess of the contrast between them, light began to dawn on me. All at once I found myself saying to myself, "This can't be what it appears to be. There's something behind it all. Look at them sitting there, and believe if you can that the one who's pouring out tea couldn't, for sheer womanliness, eat the other alive! Look at her! She's a whole packed-full history behind her, and one that's by no means at an end yet. It radiates from every particle of her. Of course Miss Oliphant cares just as much as you do when her friend's attacked. She's a different way of showing it, that's all. See if she isn't putting that other one through her paces now, and for your benefit. She's not keeping you here without a reason. Sit still and watch."

I repeat that I said this to myself.

And from that moment I knew I was on the right track.

At last Mrs Bassett rose to go. I assure you that I was on my feet almost before she was, for I knew that my talk with Miss Oliphant was not now to be resumed—it was to begin. The author of The Parthian Arrow was piled up with quilts, cradles and Puppetty again, and I need say no more about the thickness of her skin than that she gave me her telephone number and asked me to go and see her. I bowed, and Julia Oliphant towered over her as she showed her out.

Seldom in my life have I held a door open for a woman with greater pleasure.

The outer door closed, and Miss Oliphant reappeared and crossed slowly to the settee. I now knew beyond all doubt that I was right. She seemed suddenly exhausted. She passed her hand wearily over those too-lustrous eyes. Listlessly she told me to smoke if I wanted to. Then she continued to sit in silence.

At last she roused a little. She turned her eyes on me.

"Well—now you've seen the author of The Parthian Arrow."

I made no remark.

"And," she continued, "you did exactly as I expected—exactly what a man would do."

"What was that?"

"You'd one look, and then you turned away."

"One look was enough."

"Oh, you all think you've got rid of a thing when you've turned your backs on it. That's the way men quarrel. 'Oh, So-and-So's a bounder; blackball him and have done with it.' And so long as he isn't in your Club he doesn't exist for you."

I pondered, my eyes on her old-fashioned studio-trappings. "Well, say that's a man's way of defending his friend. What's a woman's?"

Our eyes met once more, and I knew a very great deal about Miss Julia Oliphant by the time she had uttered her next six words.

"A woman has her to tea," she replied.

Then, as if something within her would no longer be pent up, she broke into rapid speech.

"Oh, I know you men! You're all too, too kind! Forgive me if I say I think you like the feeling. It pleases you, and you don't stop to think that it puts all the more on us. You make your magnificent gesture, but we have to go round picking up after you. Do you think I'd let that woman out of my sight?... But I'm sorry I had to trick you a little."

"To trick me?"

"Yes, when you first came in. I saw you were puzzled and—disappointed in me. You see, when a person's coming to tea and may be here any moment you have to keep some sort of hand on yourself. It isn't the time to indulge your real feelings. So I took no chances. I'm sorry if I threw you off the track.... Well, you've seen her, and you've read her book. Tell me where you think the toy dog comes in."

She was speaking vehemently enough now. She did not give me time to reply.

"I'll tell you. You and Derry—all the decent men—a toy dog fetches you every time. You're all so, so kind! You see tragedies and empty cradles and all the rest of it straight away. And perhaps once in a while you're right. But you can take it from me you're wrong this time. I've known her all my life, and I don't believe she ever for a single moment wanted a child. She'd never have put up with the bother of one. So Derry's worrying all about nothing. All that sticks in her throat is that she imagines she's been pilloried as not being able to have one. Her vanity was hurt, not her motherhood at all. Now that she's got rid of that bookful of bile I think she's a perfectly happy woman. Her days are just one succession of shopping and matinées and calls and manicuring and Turkish baths and getting rid of Bassett's money. It was just the same during the war—flag-days and driving convalescents about, and bits of canteen-work and committees by the score.... Oh, Derry needn't worry his head; tragedy's quite out of the picture! Let's have the truth. No weeping Niobe—just scents and powders and Puppetty and an imaginary grievance—that's her."

I think it is my own sex that is the merciful one, at any rate to woman. Man has made radiant veils for her, has shut his eyes to this or that stark aspect of her, because the world has to go on by his efforts and he cannot afford to begin his scheme of things all over again every time he sees the red light of the prime in a woman's eyes. Julia Oliphant had spoken cruelly, ruthlessly, without decency; and I now knew why. No woman cares that a wrong is done in the abstract. Her bitterness and hate ever mean that someone dear to her has been subjected to indignity and pain. And suddenly I rose from my seat, crossed to the settee, and, sitting down by Julia Oliphant's side, did a thing I am not in the habit of doing upon a short acquaintance. I took both her hands into mine.

With as little hesitation as I had taken them her fingers closed on mine. And I fancied the quick strong pressure answered the question I was going to ask her before ever my lips spoke it. It had all been there months before—all prepared and promised in that first steady intimate look across the rosy-shaded candles of that dinner-table. I spoke quite quietly.

"Isn't there something I'd better know—and hadn't you better tell me now?" I said.

Again that firm cool pressure of the fingers. The tired eyes looked gratefully into mine.

"I always knew you'd be like that if only——"

"Then tell me. Because when you've done I've something to tell you."

God knows what fires were instantly ablaze in the depths of the eyes.

"About him?" broke instantly from her lips.

"You tell me first."

The fires died down, and the voice dropped again.

"Tell you? I don't mind telling you.... Of course; all my life; ever since we were children together. Not that he ever gave me a thought. But that made no difference."

And having said it she had said all. I saw the beginning of the fires again. She went straight on. "Now what were you going to tell me?"

Remember it was not yet eighteen hours since Derwent Rose had thrust me out of his door, torn between an angel and a devil within himself. But what are eighteen hours to a man who has two scales of time? To him they might represent years of experience. He had clung desperately to his better man, but—who knew?—already he might be less accessible to the angelic. If I was not already too late, to catch him while he was of that same mind and will was the important thing. If this woman who had just told me with such touching simplicity that she had loved him all her life was indeed his good angel, it seemed to me that here was her work waiting for her. I saw her as none the less loving that she could vehemently hate for the protection of her love. That she would fly to him the moment her mind grasped his story I had not an instant's doubt. Nor did I stop to consider that I might be betraying something he did not wish known. It was no time for subtleties. Remembering his anguish, I did not think he would refuse any help that was to be had. Here by my side was his cure if cure there was to be found.

Still with her hands in mine, I took my plunge.

The first time she interrupted me was very much where I had interrupted him. She wanted to know, apart from mere imaginary changes that might have been due to variable health, what visible proofs there were of all this. I wished to spare her those two ( )'s on Rose's neck, but she smiled ever so faintly.

"Yes, you're all nice dears. But I know perfectly well the kind of thing it might be. So don't let that trouble you. It's important, you know."

So I told her. She merely nodded. "He never did know anything about women," she said. "Go on."

Her next interruption came when I spoke of his tearing the book, though this was more of a confirmation than a true interruption.

"He was a perfectly glorious athlete," she remarked calmly, "but he always hated pot-hunting, and later of course his books interfered with his training a good deal. I remember once ... but never mind. I wonder if we shall have all that over again?"

"Then you've managed to swallow the monstrous thing so far?" I said in wonder.

"I told you his life had been one marvellous mistake after another. Go on," she replied.

But as I proceeded her calm became less and less assured. I was purposely omitting from my account such elements as might tend to agitate her, but she seemed to divine this, and perhaps she thought I suppressed more than I did. Suddenly she broke out:

"Never mind all that about ratios. I don't know anything about ratios. The point is, when does he expect the next—attack?"

"I hardly know—I rather think——" I began, now quite violently holding her hands, which she had tried to withdraw. She had also attempted to rise.

"Soon? A month? A week? To-morrow?" she demanded.

"He's not sure himself, but I'm rather afraid——"

She allowed me to say no more. She plucked her hands from mine and ran out of the studio. I heard the single faint "ting" of a telephone-receiver being lifted from its fork, and a moment later, "Is that the taxi-rank? The Boltons—Miss Oliphant—as quick as you can."

Three minutes later she reappeared. She had thrown a wrap over her tea-gown, and was hurriedly tying a scarf under her chin.

"Isn't that taxi here yet? How long should it take from here to Cambridge Circus?"

"Twenty or twenty-five minutes."

"You'd better come with me. You can tell me the rest on the way.... What a time he is taking! Wouldn't it be quicker to pick one up outside? Listen—no, that's only letters. Perhaps the man's waiting and hasn't rung—let's wait at the street entrance—here's your hat——"

She opened the inner door, kicked aside the letters on the floor, and sped along the corridor. The taxi glided up as we reached the entrance.

The next minute we were on our way.

The streets were full and our progress was slow. People were hurrying to their homeward tubes, running along in knots of a dozen or a score at the tails of the slowing-down omnibuses.

"Surely there ought to be a quicker way than along Oxford Street at this hour!" she exclaimed petulantly. Then she threw herself back in the corner. Apparently she had forgotten all about the rest of my story. One idea and one only possessed her—haste, haste. I am perfectly sure that had she been in the driver's seat not an uplifted blue and white cuff in London would have stopped her.

And her restlessness communicated itself to me. I too felt that in talking to Madge Aird the previous evening, in reading that wretched book all night, in not having told Miss Oliphant straight away what I had to say, I had lost precious time. Some step ought to have been taken quicker—immediately——

"Damn!" I said as another extended arm stopped us; and Julia Oliphant sank back, biting her lip.

Then an endless wait at the corner of Charing Cross Road....

But even that taxi-drive had to come to an end.

"It's just near here, isn't it?" she asked, her hand on the door; and I sprang out. It would be quicker to walk the last few yards. These few yards, however, nearly cost Miss Oliphant her life, for I only just succeeded in dragging her out of the way of a newsboy's bicycle that darted like a minnow from behind a heavy dray. We stood at Rose's door.

I pressed the button of his bell, which was the third of a little vertical row of four; but even as I did so I noticed something unusual about its appearance. The little brass slip that bore his name had gone. I was unable to say whether it had been there on the previous evening, as he himself had admitted me, but gone it was now, and from certain indications it seemed not to have been unscrewed, but wrenched off. My heart sank, but I was careful to conceal from Miss Oliphant the foreboding I felt.

"He may be out," I muttered. "I'll ring for the housekeeper."

To fetch Mrs Hyems up from her basement took more time, but at last she appeared, and a look of mingled perplexity and relief came into the eyes that met mine.

"Mr Rose?" I said.

"Aren't you the gentleman as came last night, sir?" she said. "Didn't he go out with you? I heard you come down; about eleven o'clock it would be; and he didn't seem to be not a minute after you——"

"Hasn't he been back since?"

"I can't make it out, sir. He hasn't been to bed, and there was a note for me on his table this morning. Paid all up he has, but not a word about his milk nor his washing nor his letters nor when he's coming back. And he left his door open, which that isn't his way. Perhaps you'd like to come up, sir?"

We followed her up the stairs. His door still stood wide open, and as far as I could see his room was exactly as I had left it last night. The medicine-ball still lay where it had rolled on the floor, the cushions of the sofa still bore the imprint of his body. I turned to the caretaker.

"You say he's paid you, Mrs Hyems?"

"To the end of the week, sir, except for his washing and ceterer."

"And he's left no address?"

"No more than I tell you, sir."

"Then," I said briskly, "I should just tidy his room and close his door. He'll probably be back to-night. If he isn't let me know. Here's my address."

But as I said it I seemed to see again those marks where his name-plate had been. Derry always carried, suspended in his trousers-pocket by a little swivelled thong, one of those fearsome-looking compendium knives that consist of half a dozen tools in one. The plate had not been unscrewed; what he had done had been to thrust one of these blades behind it and to rip it bodily from its bed. I pictured it all only too clearly. Myself carefully watched out of the way—a cheque hurriedly written—a gulp of whisky perhaps and the call of the streets—a dash downstairs with his door left open behind him—a minute's feverish work over the plate.... He had left his books, his papers, his furniture, his medicine-ball. But his name he had taken away, and I did not think that those rooms in Cambridge Circus would see Derwent Rose's face any more.

PART II

THE STERN CHASE

I

Lost: A man with a brass name-plate in his pocket, probably bent in wrenching. Personal appearance difficult to describe, because something has happened to him that does not happen to the generality of people. When last seen appeared to be about thirty-five, but may look younger. Was wearing dark blue suit and shirt with torn neckband.

Missing: Derwent Rose, novelist, late of 120 bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Age forty-five, tall and very strongly built, eyes grey-blue, hair chestnut-brown, strikingly handsome features. In possession of money, as his banking account was closed the morning after his disappearance. Served with Second Battalion Royal Firthshire Fusiliers. Is thought not to have left the country.

For Disposal: Quantity of black oak furniture, comprising Jacobean oval table with beaded edge (copy), six upright chairs, tallboy, chest; also large brass bedstead, drawers, two pairs heavy damask curtains, crockery, plate, etc., etc. Also several thousand volumes, including small collection medical works, and others Curious and Miscellaneous. The whole may be viewed at 120 bis, Cambridge Circus, W.C. Apply Caretaker.

So the announcements might have run had there been any; but there were none. I saw to that. The police are excellent people, but I considered this a little out of their line and did not call them in. As for the furniture and effects, they remained for the present where they were, I paying his rent and putting his key into my pocket. As for Derwent Rose, novelist, aged forty-five, it might be months before anybody missed him, and it would be supposed that he had gone into retirement to write a book. As for the man with the torn neckband and the brass name-plate in his pocket, a prudent person would be a little careful how he tried to identify him. You see what I mean. Julia Oliphant and myself were in a class apart; we should know him on sight, since we knew what had happened to him and what we might expect. But nobody else knew, nobody in the whole wide world. Therefore they would be wise to look at him twice before accosting him. Nobody wants to be certified and locked up, and that was what might conceivably happen if anybody insisted too much on resemblance or identity in the case of a man who was obviously fifteen or twenty years younger than he could be proved to be. Much safer to call the fancied resemblance a coincidence and let it go at that.

Therefore—exit Derwent Rose, novelist, aged forty-five.

And enter in his stead—who?

Exactly. That was the whole point. He had not entered. He was somewhere on Life's stage, but behind, or in the wings, or up in the flies, or down underneath the traps. He was his own understudy, but whatever lines he spoke, whatever gestures he made, happened "off." The call-boy ran hither and thither calling his name, but in vain. Oblivion had taken him. It had taken him so completely that he needed to dress no part, to alter himself with no make-up. He was as free to walk about in the limelight as you or I. Freer—far freer——

For where was the birth certificate of this man who had lost ten years in a few months and for all anybody knew might now have lost another ten—twelve—twenty? Of what use was his dossier in the Military Records Office? Of what value was his name on the register, his will if he had made one, his signed contracts, his insurance policy? Of what validity was the photograph on his passport, or who could call him into Court as a witness? What clergyman or Justice of the Peace could certify that he had known him for a number of years? What musty and mendacious file in Somerset House dare produce a record to show that a man who was obviously so many years younger had been born in the year 1875? Free, this Apollo for beauty and Ajax for strength? As far as documents were concerned he was more than free. He had side-stepped them all, and was the only completely free man alive.

But he was not free from Julia Oliphant and myself, for we knew all about it. His own brother he might fool, had he had one; he might delude the nurse who had rocked him as a child were she still alive; but us he could not deceive. With us his unimaginable alibi would not serve nor his unique anonymity go down. If he wished to know us, he could come up to us (but to us only) with a proffered hand and an ordinary "How do you do." But if he did not wish to know us he had us to fear. We knew his secret.

But nobody else—nobody in the whole round world else.

II

That, in its essence, and speaking very roughly, was the position; but it is worth examining a little more particularly. I will leave aside for the moment such questions as why we wanted to find him, whether we ought to try to find him, whether, if a man chose to expunge his identity like that he had not a perfect right to do so. I will assume that he was to be sought and found. On that assumption I reasoned as follows:

Here—somewhere—was a man of unknown age and uncertain personal appearance. When last seen he was, and looked, thirty-five, but he may now be, and look, any age up to, or rather down to, sixteen. That depended entirely on the rate of those backward jerks of which he himself had failed to find the ratio. But where begin to look for him? At what Charing Cross or Clapham Junction, where all the world passes sooner or later, wait for him? What tube station watch? Round what street corner lurk? Examine it, I say, a little more closely.

And take first his two scales of time. As a matter of incontrovertible fact he was living in the year 1920. In the year 1920 a big and handsome and athletic man was living a daily life, presumably somewhere in London. But for him that year was 1910, and continually, day by day and hour by hour, he must be struggling to reconcile those two periods. It could make no difference that he knew that he was living in both years simultaneously. A hundred times a day he might say to himself, "I quite understand; this is both 1910 and 1920; I've got them perfectly clear and separate in my head." But the hundred-and-first time would catch him tripping. He would stumble over some sudden and unexpected trifle. Let me make this clear by means of a small incident that happened to myself. Not long ago I walked into Charbonnel's for a cup of tea, and was passing through the shop on the ground floor and about to mount the stairs when I was politely fetched back. I was told, with a smile that might have been given to a man just returned from Auckland or Mesopotamia, that the upper room had been closed for some time. I had not been in Charbonnel's since the early days of the war, and was looking, in 1920, for a Charbonnel's that had ceased to exist.

So Derwent Rose, however much he was on his guard, would once in a while find himself looking for something that no longer existed.

Next, there was the question of money—common money, and how much of it he had got. Obviously, and supposing he was to be found, it was no good looking for him in places where he could not possibly afford to be. He would be found in a cheaper place or a more expensive one according to the state of his purse. I had no means of knowing how much money he had withdrawn from the bank. I had never known much about his finances except that sometimes he had been hard-up, at others comparatively "flush," but that he had never, as far as I knew, borrowed. Thus the vulgarest of all considerations had an important bearing on our very first step: Where to look for him?

Next there was to be considered a combination of these things—the factor of money-plus-time. Say he had drawn one hundred pounds or five hundred pounds from the bank—for all I knew it might have been either, or more, or less. Well, we all know that a sum that was sufficient for a man in 1910 does not go very far in 1920. There has been a war.... So was he haunting expensive places, having (as might have been said of anybody but him) "a short life and a gay one," or would he be found spinning out his Bradburys as long as possible on a modester scale? Nay, was he even living on his capital at all? Was it not possible that he had found employment of some kind? If so, of what kind? They ask few questions about identity at the dock-gates; was that it, and was he to be looked for in a workman's early-morning tram? Or had he, a man without a shred of paper to be his warranty, managed to talk somebody into something bigger, and was he one of these ephemeral Business Bubbles, lording it for a few months in somebody else's car and floating the higher because of the hotness of the air inside him? I did not think, by the way, that either of these last two things was very likely; but nothing was more impossible than anything else, and I am merely trying to show the size of the haystack in which we must hunt for our needle.

The merest glance at the problem made it plain that the only starting point was his last actually-known age—thirty-five. All else was the blindest guesswork. And it was equally plain that the best likelihood of finding him lay in the chance that he would more or less repeat (or seek to repeat) his former experiences at that age. Past associations might pull him, he might frequent some places rather than others, some persons or class of persons rather than others. The question was, could his life at thirty-five be so reconstructed that this hope should not be too slender? That was my idea, and I began to ransack my memory in search of indications that might further it.

But almost from the start I despaired. Sketched thus airily the thing had a deluding look of logic and simplicity; but the first contact with actuality scattered all to the winds again. For example, I have hinted at an echo of an earlier wildness that had for some reason or other overtaken him again at thirty-five; but when I came to examine it I found that I knew almost nothing at all about it. He had always had the decency to keep these things very much to himself. I had not the vaguest idea of who his companions had been, what his haunts. Added to this was the difficulty that I was approaching the question in reverse. He had slept since I had last seen him, and, sleeping, had presumably once more slipped back. But how far back? He might be (so to speak) at the crest of the wave, farther back still at the beginning of it, or even past it altogether—no longer the man of An Ape in Hell, but him of The Vicarage of Bray. It was even not impossible that he was sixteen and dead.... So all that I could do was to nail myself firmly down to thirty-five and as much of him at that time as I could remember or ascertain.

And instantly the question loomed up largely: "What about Julia Oliphant? Hadn't she better be left out of this, at any rate for the present?"

Now my position in the world practically forces the conventional attitude on me. All things considered, I think I should adopt that attitude in any case, for I have only to look at any other one and my hesitation doesn't last long. But at the same time I do go to lectures on such subjects as Relative and Absolute Age, and in other things, as I have explained, I liked at that time to keep in step and abreast. I have even made an attempt to understand the mystery that is called the Thermionic Valve.

But neither valve nor age theory is newer or stranger to me than the change that seems to have come over the sex-relationship during these last years. I trust that on the whole I manage to maintain a happy medium—it is the dickens of a thing to have sprung on one latish in life—but I only know that I myself, old-fashioned as I am, sometimes find myself discussing with the nicest women, and as freely as I should discuss them with a man, the—may I say the "rummest" subjects? And as for Julia Oliphant's attitude to all this newness, I will only say that while she might have been ten years behind Madge Aird in matters of dress, she was not ten minutes behind her in anything else.

But discussions "in the air" with her were one thing, but discussions of an actual Derwent Rose at thirty-five quite another. "Oh, I know perfectly well the sort of thing it might have been, so don't let that worry you," she had said, and for once, just once, I had had to be precise. But once was enough. Call it the old fossil in me if you will, but it makes a very great difference when a woman has said, as simply as Julia had spoken, "Of course; all my life; not that he ever gave me a thought, but that doesn't matter."

For those few words had placed us, instantly and beyond all recall, on a footing of the last intimacy. They had revealed her once for all, and the matter need never be referred to between us again. And as to a swimmer the wavelet that slaps his face and fills his mouth with salt is of more importance than all the immensities below, so we kept to the level of the trifles of life. Often, at a word or a look, we were ready to quarrel. Perhaps, in view of those still depths beneath, our bickering was a necessity and a refuge.

III

That there was much of my search that I should have to conduct without her was definitely brought home to me on the very first evening when I took a stroll through the region of the West End theatres, still wearing the suit I had worn all day. I ought to say that as I was paying his rent for him I had allowed myself the use of his rooms, and for the present 120 bis, Cambridge Circus, was one of my addresses. There was always the chance that he might have forgotten something in 1920 of which he had need in 1910, and that he might steal in, if only for a moment, any dark night when things were quiet.

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.

And then, in that very moment, I saw him.

Or rather it was the hansom that I saw first. It had just started forward with the release of the traffic opposite Drew's, at the top of Lower Regent Street.

Now a hansom in Piccadilly Circus to-day is perhaps not the rarity that a sedan-chair would be; nevertheless hansoms are comparatively few, and therefore conspicuous. The padded leaves of this one were thrown back, and before I saw him I had already seen a white-sheathed ankle and a white satin slipper.

Then he leaned forward for a moment.

It was unmistakably he.

The hansom passed along with the stream.

Unmistakably he—and yet, mingled with the perfect familiarity, there was a change that I could not immediately analyse. Then (I am telling you what flashed instantaneously through my mind in that fraction of time before I had dashed after him)—then I had it! Familiar, yet not altogether familiar! Of course!——

His beard!

At one time in the past Derwent Rose had worn a beard, the softest sprouting of curling golden-brown. In certain lights it had been little more than a glint that had scarcely hid the contours beneath, and it had made him the living image of Du Maurier's drawings of Peter Ibbetson. He now had that young beard again, and he and it and the hansom with the white satin slippers in it had disappeared behind a bus opposite Swan and Edgar's.

I dashed across to the island and dodged in front of the nose of a horse; but I could not see the hansom. There were four directions in which it could have gone: up Regent Street, Glasshouse Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, or east past the Pavilion. Then a taxi slowed down immediately in front of me, and I found myself standing on the step of it, holding the door open with one hand and with the other pointing past the driver's head.

"That hansom in front—follow that hansom——"

We tried Regent Street first, for I remember seeing the revolving doors of the Piccadilly; but no hansom was to be seen. I thrust my head out of the window again.

"Quick—turn—try Shaftesbury Avenue," I cried.

He turned, but not quickly. It was a good two minutes before we reached the Grill Room entrance of the Monico. Then I lost my temper.

"A hansom, man—damn it, a hansom! Can't you follow the only hansom left in London? Ask that man on point-duty——"

But I got the impression that the police do not look with too much favour on roving orders to follow other vehicles to unspecified addresses. The constable was curt.

"There was a hansom a minute ago. If you've got his number try Scotland Yard. Come along, you can't stop here——"

I sank back cursing. In the very moment when pure chance had given him to me I had lost him again. By this time he was probably half a mile away. There was nothing whatever to be done.

"Where to now?" grunted the driver.

Nothing to be done—nothing whatever.

"Cambridge Circus, 120," I said.

As well there as anywhere else. He might just possibly be on his way there. He still had a key the duplicate of which was in my own pocket.

I descended at Cambridge Circus, let myself in and mounted to his rooms. He was not there, for no light showed under the door. I switched on, hung up my hat in his little recess, and sat down on his sofa. Then, mortified, but trying to tell myself that I was not actually any worse off, I sought to dissect that momentary impression of him that was all that remained to me.

A hansom, and his beard again! That antiquated black-mutton-chop-shape balanced on two spidery wheels, and that fair and tender sprouting! Both were anachronistic, and yet there was a certain suitability about both. Comparatively few young Englishmen have beards nowadays, but then comparatively few young Englishmen are in their forties and their thirties at the same time. He had always looked handsome in his beard, rather like something from a Greek or Roman gallery come to life again, and so he was right to have let it grow. As for the hansom, he might have taken it merely because it was the last vehicle left on the rank, refused by everybody, else, or there might have been a subtler reason for his choice. A browny-gold beard and a hansom! Yes, both were "in the picture."

But neither beard nor hansom helped me to what I most anxiously wanted to know—how far back in years he had now gone. In the ordinary way a beard may make a young man look older; but then Rose was paradoxically younger than he was. He might now be twenty-five who looked thirty-five because of the beard, or he might be thirty-five looking precisely that age.

I would have given fifty pounds at that moment for one long, steady look at him in a good light.

However, certain things were in their way reassuring. He was in London, and apparently he was not avoiding its most central places. He had worn a hat of soft grey velours that I had not seen before, and a new-looking, well-cut jacket of grey cheviot. As he had disappeared in navy-blue, he thus had money to spend on clothes. He had further looked in magnificent health, and a man who has health, money, youth and a pretty satin-slippered foot near his own has a number of very good things indeed. I might therefore dismiss the workmen's-tram and dock-gates side of the affair. If Derwent Rose was not having a good time he ought to have been.

And yet at the same time I was uneasy. I will not put on any airs about the reason for my uneasiness. White satin slippers in hansoms had very little to do with it, and tearooms that had once been something else even less. These are ordinary everyday things, and there must be something wrong with the eyes of a man who does not see them at every turn—I had almost added something wrong with the mind of a man who magnifies these beyond their proper importance. But when you propose to find a friend by a process of reconstruction of the past phases of his life, you must be prepared for a shock or two; and what I did now begin extraordinarily to resent, among these vulgar and everyday things, was Rose's not being a vulgar everyday man.

For what had the author of The Hands of Esau and The Vicarage of Bray to do with all this? True, he had been in it, whether of it or not, as we can none of us shake off the trammels of the flesh until we do so once for all; but the only Derwent Rose with whom properly I had any concern was the man who, into whatever suspect place he had penetrated, had kept something fair and secret and unsullied all the time.

Yet here I was, proposing to look for what was precious and enduring in him, yet prepared to set (as it were) my trap with the grossest possible bait. I was going to catch the best of him by means of the worst, and was deliberately and cold-bloodedly laying my plans to that end.

I flushed at the thought; and then I found myself growing angry with him also. Suddenly I resented the fact that he was alive at all. Why, instead of having contracted this nightmare of a thing that he had contracted, couldn't he have died? Why couldn't he have got himself killed in the war? We respect the decency of the dead; why must I violate his, who had chosen this extraordinary alternative to death? Was this the way to write a friend's epitaph? Must immortelles of this common and saddening mortality be laid on his unlocated grave? Why not write him off—treat him as dead—give up a search that honoured neither him nor me—go back to Julia and tell her that the thing simply couldn't be done?

It seems to me, knitting my brows there that night in his room, that I could do nothing better than that.

But precisely there was the dickens of it. He was not dead. How regard a man as dead whom you have seen in the flesh not an hour before? Dead? He was alive, well-dressed, driving a woman somewhere in a hansom, and certainly looking as if he ate four square meals a day and enjoyed them. Had he been dead, well and good; but since he was about as alive as a man could be, the tombstone virtues I was concocting to his memory looked unpleasantly like a sentimental shirking of the whole question. They reminded me of hypocrite mourning, with a drop of something warm with sugar to take the edge off the grief. They looked as if I wanted to have him off my mind, to feel luxuriously about him, to be able to say to myself, "This friend of mine was a good and exemplary man"—and then perhaps at any moment to hear his step behind me, that of a man not good or exemplary in this sense at all. I seemed to hear him softly laughing at me: "So that's the yarn you're going to put about, is it: that I was all barley-sugar and noble prose? But let me tell you that Shakespeare and I hit on some of our best notions with a mug of beer in our hands! Great stuff, beer; nearly as good as music.... Don't be a humbug, George."

So it looked as if I was for seeking him only in the politer places, knowing all the time that I should not find him there; and I reflected a little bitterly that had the boot been on the other leg he would have known where to look for me. He would have walked straight into the first place where easygoing people take the softest way with one another, give praise for praise, and by and by get knighthoods for it. He would have looked for me there. And he would have had an excellent chance of finding me.

I hope I have not wearied you with these quasi-heroics about friendship. They were dispelled quickly enough. Suddenly there happened something that arrested the beating of my heart.

I heard the sound of feet on the stairs outside. They were accompanied by a woman's soft laugh and a man's deeper muttering.

My skin turned crisp with fright. I am afraid I lost my head as completely as ever I lost it in my life. Friendship or no friendship, I gave him the benefit of not one single doubt. If he was coming in there was one thing to do and one only—to make a dash and get away out of it.

Again I heard the laugh. It came from the landing immediately below. A step or two higher, and——

I sprang to the electric light and switched it off.

The little curtained hat-and-coat recess stood just within the door. I made a tiptoe leap for it. As I did so I remembered with thankfulness one of the recess's peculiarities. It abutted so close up to the door-frame on the side where the lock and handle were that Rose had had the switch moved to the other side. The opening door would therefore be between him and the switch. That would be my moment. He would see my things scattered about his room the moment he turned on the light, but that could be explained later. To get away was the urgent thing.

Violently agitated, the curtains grasped in my hand, I stood prepared to make my spring. The feet had stopped outside the door. I heard the striking of a match. I waited for the touch of the key on the lock.

Then, "What, up again?" I heard the man's voice say....

The feet passed on to the floor above. I never knew who lived there. Rose's bell was the third of four, counting from the bottom.

IV

I have not told you the foregoing because I am proud of it. At the best I had behaved childishly, at the worst—but we will come to that presently. Had it really been he I should probably not have had the remotest chance of ever getting past him. He would have vaulted a handrail in the dark, taken a flight in two bounds, and would have had his hand—that hand that tore books in two—on my neck. Had he recognised me he would have wanted to know what the devil I was doing in his rooms. Had he failed to recognise me I should as likely as not have gone through the window. One takes risks when one intrudes on the loves of the giants.

At the same time, I will do myself the justice to say that physical risks were not my first consideration. Vast as his strength was, it was the part of him I least feared. What I did fear, what I was now beginning to think I had not nearly sufficiently allowed for, was the enormous spiritual and mental range of the man.

Up to that moment in his life when he had become so mysteriously turned round, this very width and range had resulted in a state of balance, as the tightrope-walker is balanced by the length of his pole. But to consider either of his extremes separately was to have a cold shiver. Often I had thought, "I'm thankful I haven't your burden of personality to bear, my friend. Much better to be the millionth man and take everything on trust. The way to be happy on this earth is to be just a shell of useful and comfortable and middling habits. Stick to the second-hand things of life and let the new ones alone. Any kind of singularity is a curse, and your life is one dreadful yawning question. You've no business to have the first dawn in your eyes and the last trump in your ears like that. The world has no need of that kind of man. What you need is another world somewhere else."

And he had marvellously contrived to find this other world, and had it all, all to himself.

And here was I proposing to dig him out of it.

Can you guess now what it was that I had begun to fear more than his physical strength? It was the whole ungauged pressure of his personality. In behaving as foolishly as I had just behaved I had wished to spare both myself and him the humiliation of an intrusion on a vulgar amour. Now it occurred to be, Why a "vulgar" one at all? Vulgarity is for us smaller people, who are vulgar enough to think that anything that is created is vulgar. But Derwent Rose had so striven that every dawn was the first dawn of creation for him. He had no habits, had daily sought to see the world as if it had never been seen before. Abysses must open for him every time he passed a huddle on a park bench, protoplasmic re-beginnings stare out at him from every chance glance of a street-walker's eyes.... Oh, I am far from envying him. I should blench to have a mind like that. To no possession that I have do I cling half so dearly as I do to my narrowness and to my prejudice. I am the millionth man, and I thank God on my knees for it. One of the other kind has been my friend....

Suppose then that one day I should surprise him in some act, stupid and meaningless to myself, but as fraught with tremendousness for him as was that first command, "Let there be Light!" What would happen then? You see what I am driving at. Up to now my idea had been, quite simply, to find him. I had sought him much as I might have sought a truant schoolboy, who would consent to be scolded and brought back to ordinary life again. Small practical difficulties, mostly in connection with his altered appearance, I had anticipated, but these I had intended to deal with as they arose. In a word, I had assumed his willingness, his also, to be the millionth man.

But how if he should refuse with scorn? What was the state of his balance, not in my eyes, but in his? When I had last seen him he had trembled in equilibrium, and to his fluctuations I had off-handedly applied the terms "worse" and "better." But what were such terms to him?... I will do as I did before—try to set it out in parallel columns. Here was a missing man, a man of unusual range and powers, to whose state of poise something had happened. It was this man's daily endeavour to accept nothing at second-hand, to disregard all names, labels, customs, tags, appearances, verdicts, records, precedents. His life was one long probing into the essential nature of things. I might, therefore, expect to find:

But once more I had to give it up. That baffling down of golden beard had obliterated every physical indication. He might be in a church—for an assignation. He might be in a drinking-hell—lost in images of beauty and sweetness and power.

And what kind of a Salle des Pas Perdus is London in which to look for a man like that? The whole thing became an illimitable phantasmagoria of virtue and vice, nobility and degradation, expressed in terms of bricks and stones and buildings and streets. Sitting brooding among his black oak furniture, I tried to envisage even that merest fragment of it all that was being enacted within a quarter of a mile at that moment. Whitfield's Tabernacle—and for all I knew an opium den within a biscuit's toss of it; the Synagogue—and the lady upstairs. I pictured the tenements behind the Shaftesbury with their iron balconies and emergency-ladders; and I saw young lovers in their stalls at the Palace. I saw the bright Hampstead buses, and the masked covertness of the flitting taxis. I heard the slap and thump of beer-pumps, children's simple prayers. Images floated before me of the gloom of cinema-interiors, the green-shaded glow-lamps of orchestras, the rippling of incandescent advertisements, the blackness of the jam factory yard. There were pockets with money in them, money to buy all the world has to sell; and there were pockets empty of the price of a cup of coffee at the back-street barrows. There were hearts with love in them, love as boundless as heaven's blue, and there were hearts from which love had passed, hearts as musty as the graves that waited for them. All but Infinity itself was to be found within a few hundred yards of where I sat.

And flitting uniquely through it all was this man whose privacy was so public, whose publicness was so unutterably private. He might be met at any step, and yet, of all the millions living, there was not one he could call contemporary. For he was the only man in the world who was growing younger instead of older. He of all men alone was passing from experience to innocence, through the murk of his former sins to the perfection of his own maximum and the unimpaired godhead of his prime.

"But you mightn't see him again for another twenty years!" Julia protested, shaking out her napkin and laughing for the sheer bewilderment of it.

I had chosen the small restaurant in Jermyn Street because it had no band to distract us.

"I know all that," I retorted. "But if you think that just sitting there loving him is going to produce him, your way may take even longer than mine."

"Pooh!" she said, breaking her roll. "You're wasting your time."

"Don't be irritating, Julia." It irritated me because it was so true. "It's my time anyway."

"No it isn't, not all of it. What about my sittings?" (There had not yet been any, by the way.) "The canvas is ready as soon as you are."

"I'll grow a beard, and then you won't want to paint me," I replied.

Her eyes had sparkled when I had told her about Derry's beard; I had thought she was going to clap her hands. Except for Derry's golden one (she had said) she had never seen a beard that wasn't nasty. I myself (she had informed me) should look a perfect horror in one, and unless I remained clean-shaven she refused to be seen about with me.... So our customary quarrel blew up. We wrangled about one trifle and another half-way through dinner. It probably did us good, for underneath we were both badly on edge. Then along the edge of the table she slid a bent little finger. It was her way of making up. The finger rested in mine for a moment.

"Well," I sighed, "I told you all I saw. I'm afraid that beard threw me quite out of my reckoning."

She mused. "I once drew him with his beard, from memory. In armour. He looked just like King Arthur come to life again. I've got it yet.... But let's look at the thing reasonably, George. I admit there's something to be said for having a pied-à-terre in his rooms. He might just possibly turn up there. It might also be—hm!—awkward if he did.... But the rest, all this hunting for him, that's a wash-out. You know it is."

I was silent. Then again I saw in her eyes what I had seen before—the beginning of a soft deep shining, as if some diver's lamp moved beneath the waters at night.

"No, I prefer my way," she said, suddenly sitting straight up.

"Doing nothing at all?"

"Fiddlesticks! I'm supposed to sit and listen respectfully when you talk, but you never listen to what I've got to say. I told you what my way was. I'll tell you again. I had tea at Daphne Bassett's flat this afternoon."

"I hope you found Puppetty well," I remarked.

The kindling eyes were steadily on mine.

"Puppetty," she said slowly, "is in the greatest favour. Puppetty has wing-portions for dinner and bovril to go to bed with. Puppetty's to have a new quilt for being a good little doggles and protecting his mummie——"

"What on earth——" I began.

Then I sat up as suddenly as if I had been galvanised.

"Julia! You don't mean——?"

She nodded, darkling devils of mischief under that cool smooth brow.

"What, that he's still looking for her?"

"He's found her. He spoke to her a couple of days ago."

"And she recognised him?"

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't she recognise him?"

"Didn't know him from Adam."

"Then how do you know it was he?"

I cannot convey the lightness of her disdain. "How do I know!—--"

I leaned back in my chair. To think that I had not thought of this, the oldest of all stratagems! Guettez la femme! Runaways are caught by it every day, and always will be. They are released from custody and placed under observation so that they may walk straight into the trap. That is why the trick is old—it never fails. And I had not thought of it!

She wore her triumph with such present moderation that I knew I had not heard the last of it.

"Yes," she continued, "she told me all about it. It was on Monday evening, about seven o'clock, and she was coming up the little street by St. James's Church, where the Post Office is. She fancied she'd noticed a man following her, a very big handsome man with a golden beard."

"Is that her description of him?" I interrupted.

"Yes. That's why I wasn't much surprised when you told me about his beard. Then outside the Post Office the outrage happened. He spoke to her. Spoke to her, George. Try to realise it."

"Well, if she'd no idea who he was it wasn't a pleasant thing to have happen."

She gave a soft laugh. "He's very good-looking," she said brazenly.

"Julia, if you were naturally a catty sort of woman——"

"Don't interrupt, George. I am artificially then. If you don't want to hear go out and look for hansoms. And whatever else you're sententious about don't be sententious about women. Now I've forgotten what I was going to say."

"You said he spoke to her outside the Post Office."

"Behave yourself then. He did speak to her, and she set Puppetty at him."

"What!" I cried.

"Quite so, dear George. As you say. Fearfully pleased and excited really. Quite a romance. And of course she'd have given anything not to set Puppetty at him."

"Then why in the name of goodness did she?"

Julia gave an exhausted sigh. "If ever you marry, George, heaven help Lady Coverham!... Why did she? Because she had to. She's that sort. They've got to do certain things because that sort does, but they do so wish they needn't! Virtue's a funny thing. If you don't want that ice may I have it?"

"But look here," I said presently. "If he'd said straight out, as any man in his position would have done, 'I say, I know this is a bit unusual, but my name's Derwent Rose, and there's something I want to explain'—and so on—you see what I mean. Then she'd have known who he was."

"Well, I'm afraid I'm not responsible for what he didn't say."

"What exactly did he say?"

She gave a shrug. "What do men say? They don't stop me outside post offices. You never did; if all this hadn't happened I don't suppose I should ever have known you one scrap better. I dare say he was a bit rattled too. Anyway she didn't stop to think. She just set the dog at him, legged it, and she's as pleased as Punch still."

"You're quite sure she didn't recognise him?"

"Oh, quite. She'd tell me in a minute. She'd love to be able to say she'd had Derwent Rose at her feet."

"I suppose so," I sighed. "Did you ask her what aged man this—marauder—looked?"

"What do you think? Of course I did. Doesn't everything turn on that? But she could only tell me, 'Oh, about thirty-three or four—thirty-five perhaps.' The very thing we want to know ... but she was in such a hurry to be virtuous...."

Her brow was no longer smooth. Her voice rose a little and then dropped again.

"You see how much turns on which it is—thirty-five or thirty-three. You say he was struggling with himself that night, sweating with funk, wanting to hang on. And yet the moment you turned your back he bolted, and he's riding about with ladies in hansoms."

"Come, my dear!" I protested. "There's nothing in that! All men drive about with women. For that matter I drove you part of the way here."

But she cut me impatiently short.

"Oh, I don't mean that at all! That's nothing to me! I don't care who he takes in hansoms; I've nothing to gain and nothing to lose. I want him to have just whatever he wants. But I told you he knew nothing about women. He's never been in love in his life. Oh, I'm explaining badly, but what I mean is that if you're going to find him by going through London with a dustman's besom and scraper, that's as much as to say that he isn't happy. That's what hurts me. He was miserable at thirty-five before—miserable and ashamed. But the moment he's thirty-three again——"

I watched the long white fingers that tapped softly for a minute on the table before she resumed.

"Then he's all right," she said in a low and moved voice. "He was writing the Vicarage then. I saw—oh, quite lots of him. He used to 'blow in,' as he called it, with a 'Hallo, Julia! I'm having rather a devil of a good time these days; writing a book that will make some of 'em sit up and take notice; I've done a quarter of it in three weeks; how's that for a little gentle occupation?' Yes, I saw quite a lot of him at thirty-three. I had a studio near Cremorne Road. It wasn't really a studio, but a sort of gutted top floor, big enough to have given a dance in, and my bed was behind a curtain that was drawn right across one end. I used to give him tea there—Patum Paperium sandwiches he liked—and he was sweet. Once I'd an illustration to do for some stupid story or other, about a sort of Sandow-and-Hackenschmidt all rolled into one, and do you know what he did? He looked at my drawing, took it to the window, and then laughed. 'I say, Julia, this will never do!' he said. 'When a man lifts a heavy thing like that he does it from the earth, you understand—you do everything that's worth doing from the earth. So you've got to see his feet are right. Anybody likely to come in here? No? Right; I don't mind you. Got anything heavy here? You get your paper and pencil.' And he stripped to the belt and picked up my sewing-machine and posed for me. He did...."

V

I seemed to see the scene in bright illumination, him in that upper room with the curtains drawn across one end, his jacket and shirt tossed on to a chair, his great torso stripped to the buff, the sewing-machine held aloft. She would be at her board or easel, sketching—pretending to sketch—I don't know what. He had merely said, "Anybody likely to come in? No? Right! I don't mind you!"

It was true. He hadn't minded her. Otherwise he would never have displayed himself so gloriously before her eyes.

"Did that illustration ever appear?" I asked without looking at her.

I knew without looking that she smiled as she shook her head.

"Not that one. You know it didn't. The first one was good enough for them."

And she still had the King Arthur sketch too.

"And that was when he was thirty-three?"

Now that she was off there was no stopping her, even had I wished it.

"Yes. Did you know—will you believe—that he wrote his Vicarage in just over three months?"

"He was a furious worker."

"That's just where you're wrong, George," she said eagerly. "At that time at any rate. He was as cool as this ice. He just digested those gigantic masses of information, and then, except for the trouble of writing it down, he never turned a hair. I'll tell you the things that did make him furious; those were his rottenest short stories, the things he used to have to do to pay his rent. He always knew they were the wrong sort of rottenness. Any kind of rottenness won't do for the public. You've got to be rotten in quite a specialised way."

"Thank you."

"But the bigger a thing was the easier he always found it. He used to say that if a thing was hard work there was something wrong somewhere. Why, he'd take whole days off when he was at his very busiest. He came into my place one morning—the same place, Cremorne Road—before half-past eight. I was just finishing breakfast; I hadn't done my hair; if you must know, I was rather a sloven at that time. He was in his breeches and cap and a soft collar. 'Down tools, Julia,' he said; 'we're off into the country for the day.' 'But, Derry, your book!' I said, rather aghast (he'd told me a day or two before that the Vicarage was a race against time or else bankruptcy for him in the autumn). 'Oh, that's all right; it's finished as far as I'm concerned; the pen'll do the rest; come along just as you are.' So I put my hair up, and we went to Chalfont, and got horribly midge-bitten, and there was an old man playing the harp outside a little public-house where we had tea, and I remember Derry jumped over a five-barred gate with his stick in his hand and his pipe in his mouth...."

She remembered every detail. I don't think she had ever once seen him but she remembered what he had on, how he had looked, what he had talked about. These were the still depths I spoke of, of which the rest was no more than the salt spray surface. I might be hanging about Cambridge Circus on the off-chance of his coming for a paper or a book or something; but I believe that in her heart something was already rekindling, and that she was even then waiting to receive him again in that upper room off Cremorne Road.

"Well," she said at last, "this is all very well, but it isn't getting us much forrader. Of course he may be thirty-five still. In that case I suppose you'll carry on as you are doing. But let's suppose for a moment he's back at thirty-three. I'm afraid that'll mean a good deal of work for you, George. You've got to start on an entirely new set of places. Let me see, what year would that be? Yes, 1908. Where was he mostly in 1908?"

"In your studio apparently."

"Oh, he was never there very much really. I dare say he only came at all because it was near and he'd drawn a blank somewhere else; he lived in Paulton's Square, you know. No, you'd have to look for him in the British Museum Reading Room, or the lobby of the House of Commons, or wherever the Blue Books are kept, or some other place where he'd be digging out all that terrible Vicarage stuff. Or if it happened to be a Thursday night you might try the Eyre Arms; he used to go up there to the Belsize Boxing Club. Cheer up, George. I'm only showing you what you've let yourself in for."

"Well, it's no good looking for him in the fourth dimension. He's got to be in some sort of a place. And I admit that I was a fool, and that you found him simply by sitting in Mrs Bassett's pocket."

"I didn't do that at all," she remarked composedly.

"Then I'm afraid I haven't understood you."

"Then let me tell you. I didn't sit in Daphne Bassett's pocket. I sat in Daphne Wade's."

I stared at her. Was she suggesting that while she herself had loved him since childhood, he for his part had loved Daphne Wade?

"Surely you're wrong there. If there was ever anything between her and him I'm no judge of men."

"There may not have 'been anything.' But there was everything for all that," she replied.

"That's merely enigmatic. Never mind 'everything.' Tell me what thing."

"All his dreams and ideals when he was a boy," she answered promptly. "Isn't that everything in a man like him—the everything he's on his way back to?"

"But he never loved her in the least, nor she him, as far as I'm aware."

"That I shall never forgive her.... Don't you know yet why he never knew anything about real women? It was simply because he was too wrapped up in his dreams. He was so full of them that he couldn't see anything truly for them. And now I'm afraid I'm going to dispel one of your most cherished illusions, George. Do you know why his dreams all settled on Daphne Wade? Oh, it had nothing to do with loving her!... It was simply because she had that coloured hair. It was rather like an aureole when she was a child. And her eyes were blue. In fact she'd all the conventional angelic appliances except the wings, and he supplied those. She'd nothing whatever else—little fool."

I frowned. Certainly she was entitled to speak of those early days towards which his face was once more set, since she had known him then, and I had not.

"Have some more coffee," I said. "I want to think this over."

But she only laughed softly.

"Oh, you needn't. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble by simply taking my word for it. In any case it's getting on for thirty years ago. Oh, don't I just remember!... I was nine and he was fourteen; I was ten and he was fifteen; I was eleven and he was sixteen. She's just a year older than I am. Our pew was half-way down the church, but she sat up one of the aisles, right under a stained-glass window there was. It used to make that light on her hair. My hair was the wrong colour—I knew it then—just a dark mop—but anyway it was full of life. It would still have been dark, of course, even if I'd sat under the window instead of her, but I've sometimes thought it might have made a difference. Then there was all the rest; Dicksee's 'Harmony' sort of effect; all so cool and dim and saintly; and the organ and the Psalms. That's what filled his head, and I honestly believe that unless women are just animals to him he sees them like that still—just about as much flesh and blood as that window was. All she had to do was to have that hair and those eyes and to sit in the vicarage pew. Things are made very simple for some women."

A long silence fell between us. Evidently she was back in that church, an adoring wrong-coloured-haired girl of eleven, shifting in her seat to see, past intervening bonnets and bald heads, Derry's browny-gold crown, while he watched Daffy Wade and the window.

"But," I said at last, "aren't you rather anticipating? I thought we'd settled he was thirty-five or thirty-three. That's making him sixteen already."

She rose abruptly.

"George, do you realise that we're the last people here and that they've turned half the lights out?" Then, drawing forward her furs from the back of her chair, "It isn't making him anything of the sort. You're more than thirty-five; but you sometimes remember what you were at sixteen, don't you?... Come and put me into my Tube and off you go to bed. Who knows?—he might 'blow in' to Cambridge Circus——"

"You sometimes remember what you were at sixteen!"

I wondered, as I walked slowly up Shaftesbury Avenue that night, whether she realised what she had said. I hoped not. I prayed not; because her words seemed to me to murder her own cherished hope—that he was safely past that turbulent phase and back at thirty-three again.

For that poignancy of remembrance, I am glad to think, is more frequently a man's than a woman's. It is the man who, slipping away, away from his youth and innocence, down, down, slip after slip into the mire of life, lifts his red and weeping eyes to what he used to be. And when does that vision shine most agonisingly fair? Not in the hours of his philosophy, when nothing unduly elates him and nothing too much casts him down, but when he is in the slough as deep as he can get. Oh, I know it, for I have sinned myself, have myself wept, for that impossible heart-break—to be as I once was. And if Julia was right, and he was not seeking Mrs Bassett at all, nor even Daphne Wade, but merely his remembered self at sixteen, then he was not thirty-three at all. He had not yet passed beyond that phase he had dreaded to re-live. He was still in the mud, to have had that tear-blurred vision; still a sinful man of thirty-five who remembered the morning star.

Well, Julia must not know that. This dark corollary was for my shouldering, not hers. And as I resolved to keep it from her I wondered at the marvel her own inner life had been.

For nearly thirty years it had consisted of Derwent Rose and of nothing whatever else! None would have guessed it, none but I knew it, nothing but Derry's unprecedented adventure would have dragged it from her. She was a busy painter, of but moderate talent, and with her living to earn. She could purr when she was pleased, but had claws ready to scratch with as well. And, deep and unguessed behind it all, lay the story of those Sussex fields and lanes, of that dreaming and ecstatic and unheeding boy, of that same boy, grown-up and still unheeding, who had stalked in and out of her studio, borne her off to Chalfont, held aloft her sewing-machine. It seemed to me that her case was little less extraordinary than his. I saw her as a woman who had never grown. She was as she had always been, her life stultified with beauty, a poised and arrested development of love.

And, unless I was mistaken, she had hardly sought to conceal her joy that, as it had been, so it was to be again.

For he was journeying back to a place that in this sense she had never left; and so he was journeying back to her. What though he had never loved her? At any rate she was now rid of her last living rival. That had been put to the test when Daphne Bassett had failed to recognise the man who had spoken to her outside the Post Office in St. James's. She would recognise him less and less as time went on. As for him, he would merely go deeper and deeper into the heart of his inconceivable solitude, and there, in the last and the centre of it, he would find Julia Oliphant waiting for him—waiting for her always loved and lordly boy of sixteen.

But how much must happen before then! For the first time I envisaged it in its heartbreaking beauty. Lovely, apparently inevitable the close ... but the way there? What, steeling her heart, must she see before that meeting?

She must see a man whose last kiss was his first one, who unlived a thousand adventures to become virgin in the end. She must see a man living so unutterably long that he lived to write his first poem again. She would see a man who had fought through a war of flame and poison puckering his smooth brows over his first percussion-cap pistol. She would see the dust of his athletic laurels stir, reassemble, bloom anew. She would see the miracle of youth synthesised, the grail of his purity mystically reappear. Not even Joshua saw what those liquid and already tired brown eyes of hers must see—the sun of a man's life pause at noon, swing contrary to its orbit, and move back to set where it rose.

And all at once there came over me a whelming of passionate emotion for this woman so singled out. It was the emotion one feels over an infant whose eyes open for the first time on the world—compassion and ache and hapless tenderness and hope for the best. Would she be able to bear her destiny? Would she, had such a thing been possible, have elected never to have been born rather than bear it? Could I help her? If things should unfold as they were well in motion to unfold, could any power on earth help her?

I began to suspect that, unless she renounced him once for all, and that quickly, no power on earth would be able to help her.

I don't know why I did not pack up my things and go back to Haslemere. I no longer pretended to be looking for Derwent Rose in London, and I had not given one single sitting for my portrait. Yet, though I could not help Julia, I felt myself unable to leave her. If I did not see her for an evening I was disturbed, lost what to do with myself. Several of these evenings came, and still I lingered on.

Then, I think on the fourth evening after I had given Julia dinner in Jermyn Street, the history of Derwent Rose moved forward—or backward—once more.

I had thought of looking up Madge Aird that evening, but at the last moment had changed my mind. I did not feel up to Madge's liveliness. So I hung round that now so-drearily-familiar neighbourhood instead—the neighbourhood between Leicester Square Tube Station and Tottenham Court Road. I walked till I was tired, and then, more for the sake of sitting down than for any other reason, I entered a picture-house on the west side of Shaftesbury Avenue. I did not choose that one in particular. It was just like any other picture-house except that it had a small organ built into the wall high up in one corner. This organ was ceasing to play as I entered. The principal drama of the programme was just over.

As it chanced, I had arrived just in time for one of those rather curious effects that are obtained when the film is put through the machine extremely slowly. You know the kind I mean. A racehorse in full career picks up and puts down his legs as if they were fronds of seaweed moving lazily in water; a golf-ball trickles uncannily across the green, rising and falling idly over each minute obstacle, and then floats gently down into the hole. In spite of my languor I found myself interested in these analyses of motion. It is curious to see instantaneousness taking its time over a thing like that.

Then that series also finished, and I felt in my pocket for my cigarette case. As I drew out a cigarette and struck a match somebody behind me leaned forward and touched me lightly on the shoulder.

"I say, isn't your name Coverham?" a man's voice said.

The match was still in my fingers. I looked over my shoulder in the light of it. Then I dropped the match.

I had not found him. He had found me. It was Derwent Rose.

PART III

THE STRAPHANGER

I

He was not far from the end of the row, and in reaching him I had not to disturb more than three or four people. Though it is inadequate, I have decided that the single word that best expresses the way in which he spoke is the word "careful." He spoke slowly, and, it seemed to me, with extreme care.

"Interesting idea that last, isn't it? Restful. Things go at such a deuce of a rate nowadays that it's a comfort to see anything slow. Well, how are you, George? I haven't seen you for—some little time."

It was precisely three weeks since he had last seen me, and I noted that slight, that very slight hesitation before his last words.

"Do you often come here? I—I rather keep away from these places myself; they put everything through much too quickly; but I rather like this one because of the organ. Of course they only play 'effects'—'Ora Pro Nobis' and the 'Wedding March'—but there's something about an organ.... I say, George," he said a little uncomfortably, "I've a sort of feeling I owe you an apology."

"Well, this is hardly the place for it. We can't talk here. If you've seen all you want suppose we go outside?"

The thing I wanted first of all was to have a good look at him. Already I could see that he no longer had a beard. But my surreptitious glance at him as we passed out into the lighted vestibule and past the box-office told me little. On the pavement of Shaftesbury Avenue he slipped his arm into mine.

"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."

The moon of his electric torch shone on the broad treads of a steep-pitched ladder that rose to a loft above. Up one side of it ran a hand-rope. He preceded me, and on the upper landing lighted a wire-caged gas-jet. Then I followed him into Trenchard's abode.

He had described the place admirably well when he had spoken of the methylated spirits, adding that Trenchard was a gentleman. A few pieces of furniture—notably a tall walnut hanging-cupboard and a handsome lacquered cabinet—were evidently family possessions; the rest—his cretonne curtains, floor-mats, the blue-and-white check tablecloth on the thick-legged Victorian table and the glimpse into his kitchen—probably represented the greater part of his gratuity-money. Every ledge and angle and cheap bracket was crowded with photographs, and there were trees in his long row of boots. His central incandescent mantle was unshaded. Two deep basket chairs stood one on either side of where the hearth should have been. The portable oil-burning stove was tucked away in a corner.

"You soon get used to the noises," said Rose with a downward nod of his head. "I scarcely hear 'em now.—Lemonade? It's bottled, but not bad; tastes of lemons anyway. There's a siphon behind you there."

He put me into one of the basket chairs and himself took the other. Then, without the least warning, but still with that marked effort at steadiness and care, he said:

"Well, what price the world-political state, George? Not home-politics, but the whole thing—democracy—civilisation if you like——"

If he had asked me what I thought of the theory of relativity I should have been readier with an answer. As it was I looked askance at him and asked him what made him so suddenly ask me that.

"Oh, same old reason," he replied. "I expect it's a subject I shall have to tackle. In a book. I wonder if it's too big! It pulls me enormously. I don't know whether we're in for a general smash-up or not. Sometimes I've the feeling we are."

Something within me, I don't know what, warned me that here it might be well to be as careful as he. The safest thing to do appeared to be to let him run on, and I did so.

"Yes," he continued, his fine smooth brow gathered in thought, "I know it's enormous; perhaps too staggering altogether for one man. But do you know," he laughed a little as if at himself, "I wonder whether it is so enormous after all! There might be quite a simple idea underlying it, I mean. What's more enormous than human nature? Yet every wretched little novelist tackles that every time he writes a book. It all depends on how much you see in a thing. I'm not so sure that I wouldn't as soon tackle one day of the whole world's life as one single hour of a human being's heart."

I spoke warily. "You haven't tackled it yet?"

He hesitated. "N—o," he said slowly. Then, quickening a little, "The fact is, George, a job like that would have to be rather specially approached. I mean unless you were at the very top of your form you'd be bound to come a cropper. No good starting a thing till you know your tools are sharp—in this case your faculties. I'm—I'm sharpening myself now, if you know what I mean."

At this point I became incautious. I ceased to listen to the voice that warned me too to be careful.

"Well, that's what I want to ask you," I said. "I want to know what you're doing here and why you left Cambridge Circus like that."

I was instantly sorry I had said it. Just as wrestlers on a mat lie locked, with little apparent movement, yet in the fiercest intensity of prolonged strain, so I felt that something struggled in him. I heard it in his voice, I saw it in the boyish grey-blue eyes that sought mine.

"Don't, please, old fellow," he pleaded anxiously. "If you mean the rot I talked that other night, I apologise now once for all. I've been hoping for months and mon—for a long time, I mean, that I might run across you. You're so magnificently steady. That other place stopped being steady.... This is the place to write that book. I want to write it. I've never wanted anything so much. It would be on Vicarage lines, I suppose, but oh—immensely bigger! Freedom, scope! The Vicarage was well enough in its way, but fussy and niggly and scratchy. I can do this largely, grandly—I know so much more, you see—and as long as I don't take any risks——"

Then, in spite of his own last words, he swung suddenly round, and the youthful grey-blue eyes were all a-sparkle. They sparkled with daring, as if, though a risk was a risk, there was sometimes prudence in taking it. The wicker of his chair began to creak under the working of his hand.

"One little talk can't make much difference," he muttered. "Do me good probably—magnificently steady——" Then he flashed brightly round on me—an artist at the height of his power confronting a stupendous and magnificent task.

"You see, don't you, George? You see how I'm placed, don't you?" he demanded.

"Not very clearly."

"Then I'll tell you. I want to write this book. I want to write it as Cheops made his Pyramid, as Moses made his Decalogue—to last for ever. If I can't write it no living man can. Why? Because no living man combines in himself what I combine—the ripest and fullest store of knowledge and experience and all the irresistible recklessness and belief of youth at the same time. Here I stand, between the two, and if I can only stay so I shall write—I shall write—oh, such a book as never was dreamed of! So I've got to stand still just where I am now. I haven't got to budge from thirty-three—that, as nearly as I can tell from myself, is the age I am now. You see——"

Uneasily I began to wish myself elsewhere. I knew that I began to be afraid in his presence; it is an eerie thing to hear a man deliberately proposing to manipulate his age. The man down below continued to wash the car; I heard the clank of his bucket, the rushing of his hose.

"Thirty-three," he continued, his eyes still glittering with the excitement of it. "If I can only stay so for six months nothing matters after that! God, just for six months!... But it's not so easy as it sounds, George. You've got to be on the watch every moment. As long as you're moving the thing's simple enough; it's when you try to stop that it's like trying to stand still on a bicycle. Wait, I'll show you. Push that table over. And if you don't mind I'll turn down the gas."

It was not the heavy-legged Victorian table he wanted me to push over, but the one on which our glasses of lemonade stood, a flimsy affair of bamboo and wicker, hardly more than eighteen inches square. He rose, turned the yellow incandescent down to a glimmer, drew the table up before us, and brought the electric torch from his pocket. He began to speak with very much more volubility, very much less care.

"The line of that table-edge is what I want you to keep your mind on," he began. "Never mind any other dimension. You'll get the idea presently. I want you to imagine that edge a scale of years, with the higher numbers at your end and the lower ones at mine. You're to imagine that, and then you're to imagine that this lamp's my mind, me, my faculties, whatever you like to call it. You'll get on to it presently. Now watch."

The torch was not of the stick-pattern, but of the flask type with a wider angle. In the middle of the table's edge he made a minute notch with his nail. A foot or so of the split-bamboo edge was illuminated, with this notch in the middle of it.

"Now," he said. "You see that notch I've made. That's my present age—thirty-three—dead in the middle of the lighted portion. Now let's start. First of all I've got two memories. I've got one in each direction. I'm the only man who has. And this part of the edge that the torch lights up is my total range both ways. Now watch me move the torch. If I move it your way"—he did so—"I get more of memory 'A' ('A' for Age) and less of memory 'B' ('B' for Boyhood). And if I move it my way"—he moved it his way—"I get less of 'A' and more of 'B.' See?"

I saw. I began to wish I didn't.

"Very well," he went on. "Obviously it's for me to decide where I want to stop, and then—to do so if I can. And now the bother begins. If—that—scale—could be numbered properly"—he divided the words as I have divided them, and I felt cold at the intensity of his emphasis—"if it could be divided as I want it divided, with thirty-three dead in the middle—then forty-five would come here." He crossed his left hand over the one that held the torch, as a pianist picks out a single treble note, and dug another nick at my end of the illuminated portion. "Now," he continued, "let's see what the figure would be at my end. Forty-five less thirty-three is twelve, and twelve from thirty-three's twenty-one. It would be twenty-one." He registered another notch, this time at his own end. "But"—swiftly he slid the torch his way—"twenty-one's no good to me at all. No more good than a sick headache. I've got to be younger than that. You see what I've got to do. I've got to combine the two maximum phases of myself if I'm to write that book. But at the same time I've got to write it when I did write that kind of thing before. What does that mean? Where's a bit of paper?"

He set the torch down on the table, where it made a vivid flat parabola of light, and took an envelope from his pocket. In the semi-darkness he began to jot down figures.

"Here you are. Just a few specimen numbers for trial and error. I'm assuming that the scale's capable of regular division, which it isn't, for many reasons; but let's take it in its simplest form.

16:33:50—21:33:45—30:33:36

We needn't bother about the last one; I only put it in to show that thirty-three's got to come in the middle by hook or by crook. Now do you see what I'm up against? I must have sixteen at one end, I must have forty-five at the other, and I must if possible have thirty-three in the middle, because if I don't write this as I wrote The Vicarage of Bray, only infinitely more so, I shan't write it at all. But thirty-three's a false middle. Thirty's the true middle, and thirty's perfectly useless to me. I was doing quite other things when I was thirty before.... But as matters stand, if I'm thirty-three I can only remember forty-five and twenty-one. If I'm thirty-three and remember sixteen, which is what I'm after, then ... God knows what would happen at your end; I should have to remember fifty, I suppose, and I've never been fifty to remember. So something's wrong, and I'm trying to fake it."

"Derry!" I choked. "For the love of God turn up that light!"

"Eh? Certainly. Then I can show you my diagrams. This is all elementary stuff, but I thought it would give you a faint idea of the problem. Now the most important factor of all——"

But I didn't want to see the hideous thing in diagram form. It even added to my horror that he didn't seem to see it as hideous at all. He was perplexed, impatient, angry even, but for the rest he had approached his problem as methodically and dispassionately as if he had merely been taking the reading of his gas-meter. Just so in the past he had approached that sufficiently-enormous work, The Vicarage of Bray—and in the intervals had taken Julia Oliphant to Chalfont, jumped five-barred gates, and had posed for her, stripped to the waist with her sewing-machine held above his head.

He had turned up the gas again, and was hunting in a corner—for his diagrams, I supposed. Suddenly I rose, crossed over to him, and put my hand on his shoulder.

"Leave it alone, old man," I said in a shocked voice. "I don't want to see them. I won't look at them. I'm too afraid. Give that book up now. We aren't meant to write books of that kind. Give it up, clear out of here, and let's go away together somewhere."

I don't think I altered his resolution in the least. He merely patted my shoulder, humouring me.

"Oh, we'll start it anyway, George. Once I get fairly going I don't mind taking a day or two or a week off with you. I always enjoyed stealing a few days when I was busiest. No, the thing's got hold of me, and it will have to run its course, like measles. I may possibly be able to split the difference between thirty and thirty-three. I'm doing my very utmost."

"How?"

It seemed to me that he became evasive. "Oh—just little dodges——"

"Like watching slowed-down pictures?"

He became still more evasive. "If I hadn't spoken to you to-night you'd never have seen me, you know," he reproached me.

"I've been looking for you though. And I did see you once."

"Where was that?" he asked quickly.

"In a hansom, in Piccadilly Circus."

He winced. "Don't, George," he begged me.

"And you weren't alone."

"George—I say, George—you see how I'm trying to keep steady. Must you throw me all over the shop again like this?"

But somehow I was no longer afraid of him. It seemed to me that it might be no ill thing to anger him. Anger was at least a more human feeling than those hideous speculations of his.

"What have you been doing since you left Cambridge Circus?" I demanded.

My plan looked like working. He confronted me.

"And what's that got to do with you?" he said.

"I think I could tell you what you've been doing. Naturally I shan't."

He looked coldly down on me. "No," he said slowly, "I don't think I would if I were you.... And if you've seen me, I've seen you too," he added menacingly.

"Before to-night?"

"Yes, before to-night."

"Where was that?"

There was contempt in his tone. "Oh, nowhere discreditable. You're too magnificently steady for that."

I cannot tell you why we were standing together in one corner of the room, body to body, with all the rest of the room empty. I only know that I was not afraid of him, and that my intention to provoke him was now fixed. Quite apart from those inhuman figures and graphs, this book that he was contemplating approached—I will risk saying it—the impious.

"Well, where was it?" I asked again.

His eyes were unwinkingly on mine. "You were coming out of my place, if you must know. And I imagine my place is still mine. Since we're friends, I haven't asked you what you were doing there."

"Then I'll tell you without asking. I've been staying there, on the chance of your coming back for something you'd forgotten. I've got your key in my pocket now, and I'm going back there to-night."

He muttered, his eyes now removed from mine. "Damned good guess. I did come back. But I saw you across the road and turned away again."

"What did you come back for?"

"That Gland book. But I got a copy somewhere else."

"I hope you found it useful."

Then, all in a moment, the thing for which I was longing happened. He broke down completely. Instead of a man trying to maintain an insane tight-rope-balance on an indeterminable moment of time, there pitched against me, crushing me against the wall and bringing down a shower of Trenchard's photographs, a man who could be met on common ground of normal experience. His arms were folded over his face. I heard his groan within them.

"Lord have mercy upon me!... I oughtn't to have talked—I oughtn't to have talked ... all unsettled again ... but I can't let sixteen go ... perhaps it won't let me go...."

"For heaven's sake forget that nightmare!"

But he mumbled despairingly on. "Shall have to be thirty ... no way out of it ... why did I let myself talk!... Give us a hand, there's a good fellow——"

I got him into his chair again. I soothed him. I talked to him as if he had been a child. I told him he should be whatever age he wished, should write any kind of book he pleased, should come abroad with me. Then for a minute or so he seemed to go to sleep. I watched him. The sounds of car-washing had ceased, up the yard somebody whistled, and I heard a voice call "Good night." Past Trenchard's cretonne curtains that star of an incandescent on the upper landing went suddenly out. It must have been half-past eleven. A more peaceful beauty stole over and possessed his face.

But he was not asleep. He opened his eyes. He smiled faintly at me.

"Well, George——" he said with a heavy sigh.

Then he told me the history of his past three weeks.

II

Of his past three weeks or his past two or three years, whichever you like; for it was both. And now that he was in comparative peace I wished to spare him questions. That illustration with the flash-lamp on the table's edge had scared me half out of my wits; and if the determination of "ratios" or what not meant much of that kind of thing, for the present we were as well without them.

He had gone back to the point where, returning that afternoon to Cambridge Circus to fetch a book, he had seen me coming out of his house and had turned tail again.

"The Gland book, you said?" I asked. "But I thought you'd decided that that road led nowhere."

"So I had," he replied, "but in the meantime I'd seen a doctor."

"Ah! You've seen a doctor? When was that?"

"Not quite a fortnight ago. I'd been in here just two days; I've now been fourteen in all; I've got every day and hour down in my diary; as you may imagine, I've studied myself with the greatest care and tried all sorts of things by way of experiment. I simply must know how much is exact repetition, and if it isn't where the variations come in, you see. But it all ends the same way. There's always an unaccountable 'x' that's constantly shifting, I suppose," he sighed.

"But tell me about the doctor. I thought you'd decided that this was quite out of their line."

"So I had, and so it is," he replied promptly. "I didn't go to a doctor to ask him to cure me."

"Then why——?"

"Well, I'd several reasons. One was that I'd met this man just once before, and for that reason alone he was part of my investigations. So far I'd experimented on people who'd met me twice, or three or four times before. I'm still experimenting, but at present the result seems to be that the better people know me the less they recognise me, and those who only knew me slightly take me for granted, I suppose."

"And did this doctor recognise you?"

"Well—there you are. I simply couldn't tell. I waited for him in the full light of a window; I gave him every chance; but—well, I'd had to send my name up, and he was expecting me, you see. He simply said 'How d'you do, Mr Rose' and shook hands. Probably he never looked at me. He knew that Mr Rose was waiting, and therefore the person who was waiting must be Mr Rose."

"So that was a wash-out. What else did you want to see him about?"

"Next, I wanted to be thoroughly vetted—as a man of thirty-three, you understand. It's all very well looking young, but you want to know whether you're really as young inside as you look. So I told him some sort of a yarn about an insurance policy and wanting to be overhauled for my own satisfaction before going to the company's doctor. So he asked me my age—thirty-three, I said—and ran all over me; and he was good enough to say that I was a very fine man and needn't worry about not being passed as a first-class life."

"And then?"

"Then I told him another cock-and-bull story. It was as an author that he'd met me before, you see, so I told him I was writing some fantastic sort of a book, and wanted one or two medical facts right. I had to go rather carefully here, of course, but I gave him, as nearly as I dared, an outline of what had happened, and asked him what about it."

"And what did he say?"

"He saw nothing very extraordinary in it," said Derwent Rose.

I jumped half out of my chair. "What! What madman was this?"

Then I saw the faint flicker of his smile, and sat down again.

"Quite a distinguished madman, George; incidentally he's a Knight.... But I don't want to pull your leg, old fellow. He didn't put it quite that way. What he actually did say was that the more a man studied these things the less he would swear that anything was an impossibility. And he's a remarkable man, mind you. I've not much use for the average doctor, but this fellow's big enough to use plain English and when he doesn't know a thing to say so. His knowledge isn't just how to conceal his ignorance. And he might have been a novelist himself from the way he instantly grasped what I wanted to know."

Not an impossibility!... I couldn't have spoken. I waited enthralled. Derry continued.

"So he began to talk about the ductless glands. Not just the thyroid. Everybody's got thyroid on the brain nowadays, but the thyroid's only one of them. There are a dozen others. And then he told me that practically nothing was known about them."

As I hadn't the faintest idea what a ductless gland was I continued silent.

"'Well, Mr Rose,' he said at last, 'if you want something of that sort to happen to one of your characters I should put him through the War and let him get a bash over the pineal gland.'

"'Where's that situated?' I asked.

"'Here,' he said."

And Rose tapped the middle of the back of his head with his forefinger.

"'And what would the effect of that be?' I asked; and he laughed.

"'Heaven above knows. You can say whatever you like. It might be anything.'

"'Would it account for actual morphological changes of tissue?' I asked.

"'I wouldn't say it wouldn't; that would depend on the changes; but I should be very pleased to look through those portions of your proofs, Mr Rose,' he said....

"So that was that. I went straight off to Cambridge Circus to get the Blair-Bell book, but, as I say, I saw you across the road, so I got the book somewhere else."

"The pineal gland!" I murmured, dazed.

"Yes. One name for it's The Third Eye. Don't ask me to explain it. But if I understand my doctor-man the idea's something like this: There are these degenerated organs that man in his present stage of development has outgrown. A lizard's got what they call The Third Eye, and so has a lamprey, and lots of creatures. And the whole thing's the wildest nightmare imaginable. Takes you right back to fecund mud and the first seminal atom. One fellow, I forget his name, has a most hair-raising theory. He says that what they call the 'ancestral type' lived in the sea, rolling about like a log I suppose—anyway it doesn't seem to have mattered whether he was upside-down or not. So its back and front were both alike. But as time went on it was more often one way up than another, and the creature began to adapt itself. It grew new eyes where it found them most convenient and stopped using the old one. Very likely the old one's the pineal gland. Or words to that effect.... So if you're now a 'bilaterally symmetrical animal with forward progression,' and your front's where you back used to be, and anything goes wrong, you're a sort of Mr Facing-Both-Ways, with two memories like me and all the rest of it.... And a whole philosophy's been built up on it. Roughly, a man's spirit and matter interpenetrate throughout every particle of him so that there's no dividing them—everywhere except in one place. There they exist independently and side by side. All the mystery of life and death's supposed to be located there. And that place is the pineal gland."

Remember, please, that this conversation took place, not in Bedlam, but in South Kensington. We were sitting in a commonplace loft over a garage, on ordinary chairs, with two half-emptied glasses of everyday lemonade before us. A gas-jet in an incandescent mantle hung from the ceiling, and in the neighbouring houses average people were beginning to think of their accustomed beds. They had pineal glands too, and might "get a bash over them," or fall downstairs, or collide with something, or meet with a street accident. Would they, respectable ratepayers of South Kensington, revert to that dim time before the waters were divided from the dry land, when they had rolled about like logs, slumbering and amorphous and unspecialised types, creation's first blind gropings towards the glory that at present is man? Would they develop an "A" memory and a "B"? Would these "bilaterally symmetrical animals with forward progression" resuscitate that degenerated Third Eye in the backs of their heads and do this Widdershins-Walk back to their beginnings? Rose's friend the doctor had said that nobody knew anything about these things. Man was only on the verge of this knowledge. It belonged to to-morrow and the days to come.

And for the first time in my life I found myself wondering whether I did want to know so very much about those morrows after all.

At last I found my voice. "Then you accept that explanation?" I said.

"No," he replied.

"Thank God for something! Why not?"

"Oh, for various reasons. In the first place I only got it as a sort of fiction-stunt, remember. He merely said that nobody could contradict me."

"And in the second place?"

"In the second place, I still think yours is the better explanation—not biology at all, but simple right and wrong, good and evil. Nothing of that kind ever did happen to me in the War that I know of—I never got any whack over the head—and there's one other thing that seems to me to prove it."

"What's that?"

"That I do know the difference between the better and the worse, and want the better all the time."

"In other words—God?"

"I think God comes before a gland," he replied.

Quite apart from his extraordinary interview with his doctor, the past few weeks had been a series of the commonest everyday incidents mixed up with sheer impossibilities in the most bewildering fashion. As I stoutly refused to see his diagrams and the details of his diary (though I saw them later), I could only touch the fringe of his experience at that time. I gathered, however, that in those slowed-down pictures he had found a certain relief, as also in some music, particularly organ-music; and he had other alleviations of a similar nature. But I noticed that obstinately (as it seemed to me) he chose to regard the interval of time since I had last seen him, not as the three weeks it really was, but as the fortnight he had spent in that loft over the garage. Of the first of the three weeks he spoke not one single word. I need hardly mention the reason. He was looking farther back still. As he had been at thirty-five, so he had been in the twenties. Those "A" memories, so recent, were "B" memories too.... But that was a long way off yet.

Yet among so much vagueness and fluctuation one thing was abundantly clear. He had left behind him the last vestige of the man who had written An Ape in Hell. At the very least he was now the man who had written The Vicarage of Bray, and not impossibly he was an earlier man still. And here I had better say a word or two about the Vicarage, not as describing the book itself, but as isolating the stage he had reached and differentiating between his former and his present experiences of it.

It was, of course, the "Tite Barnacle" portions of the book that had pleased the public, supposing the public to have been pleased at all. Yet, witty as these were, they were the least essential parts of the work. The book had to be classed as Political, Social, Economic, or some welding of all three descriptions; and Rose was never the man to approach a subject of this kind with his mind already made up. He recognised frankly (for example) that the mere mechanism of a Ministry or a Department is a gigantic thing, the men with the habit of running it necessarily few, and that to give control to an unpractised hand would be fatal. Thus his book was no mere slap at what it was the fashion some little time ago to call The Old Gang. He refrained from the common gibe that the surest qualification for success in one department is to have failed in another. Instead, he examined, first the machine, and then the man in charge of it. Between these two an accommodation has always to be found. No system of government will prove altogether a failure if it is in the hands of the right men, and equally none will work if it is in the hands of the wrong ones. So he sought the equilibrium between the two.

Not one reader in a million, laughing over that merciless and iridescent book that Julia Oliphant said he had written in little more than three months, had the faintest idea of the sheer burden of merely intellectual work that lay behind it. Piece by piece he had dissected the whole of our national economy before setting pen to paper at all. Bear with me for a moment if I take one little piece only—Shipping. It will give an idea of the scale, not so much of the Vicarage only as of that far vaster thing—the book he now projected and for the sake of which he clung so desperately to his "false middle" of thirty-three.

Men (he argued) need ships; but, over and above those who actually handle them, ships need men no less. From one standpoint ships exist in order that men may be carried from one place to another; but from the opposite standpoint a ship is merely a hungry belly that must be constantly fed with its human food—passengers. Without its meal of passengers it cannot live for a week. Thus, the Thing must move the Man from one place to another whether he wishes it or not, whether in itself it is desirable that he should be moved or not. The ships of one nation snarl at those of another for this sustenance. Where then is the balance? Where does blind force get the upper hand, and where wise control? What happens if the power is usurped by a "Vicar" who can by no means be dislodged?... I need say no more. You see the yawning immensities of it.

And that was only Shipping. There were a hundred other things. He had applied his brilliant intellect to them all in turn, and had (as I may say) so "orchestrated" the whole that in the result it seemed the easiest of improvisations.

And now think what his present plan was!

He contemplated, not an analysis of one system, but a welding of analyses of all systems!

That was why he sought to juggle with his own years—that he might combine the enthusiasm of sixteen with the grasp and certainty and power of forty-five, and at the same time assure the coincidence between his past and his present impulses to create.

Montesquieu had never dreamed of such a work—Moses' task had been simpler.

Therefore I saw the position as follows:

One thing was clear. He would have to give it up. If necessary he would have to be made to give it up. If I couldn't persuade him, Julia must. But already I saw the cost to him. He was an artist, with a passionate need to create. He was an artist so highly specialised that the creation of a small thing merely irritated him. But see where he was placed! So close to the dreamed splendour that he brushed it with his fingertips, and then perhaps to see it recede, diminish, go out! To be conscious of that inordinate power, and to have the agony of knowing that it could not last long enough for the task to be completed! To be unique, as he was unique, and yet to be forced to share the common bitterness and humiliation and despair!... A few moments ago I risked the word "impious." To my way of thinking it was impiety. If it was not impiety I do not see why Prometheus was bound.

For what was this monstrous right that Derwent Rose claimed, to put all the rest of us into the shadow of his own overweening and presumptuous glory? Who was he, to seize on immortality like this? Not satin slippers with poor little feet inside them that would soon, too soon be dust—not this was the sin. It was this other that is not forgiven. And man is forbidden to call his brother by the name that fitted Derwent Rose.

Poor Derry! Apparently he could do nothing right. As Julia had said, his whole life had been one marvellous mistake after another.

Suddenly I introduced Julia's name.

He had not moved since his last words some minutes ago—that he thought God was more than a gland. The mews outside had come to life again. Cars were returning from suppers and the theatres; the glare of their headlights played palely about the upper part of his window-frame. He now turned his head and smiled.

"Good sort, Julia. But she's forgotten all about me long ago."

"What makes you think that?"

But instead of answering my question he went musingly on. "Funny, that. Dashed funny. I forgot all about Julia when I was making those notes."

"What notes?"

"Why, of the way I strike people. Those who remember me and those who don't. I remembered that doctor, who'd only seen me once, but Julia, who's known me practically all my life, I go and forget all about. In fact there's only about one other person who's known me as long as Julia has, and she absolutely failed to recognise me when I spoke to her a year or so ago."

My nerves became all jangled again. "Derry—how long ago?"

"About a year.... As you were. What am I talking about? Must stick to one scale of time, I suppose. I ought to have said about ten days ago."

"What was all this?" I asked, though I knew well enough; and he became grave as he unfolded another aspect of his singular case to me.

"It's difficult to explain to you, George, because you know the whole thing—though how you kept your reason when I told you I can't imagine; magnificently steady!... As a matter of fact this other person I mean was Mrs Bassett; you remember I'd been looking for her. Well, I met her one day and spoke to her"—he coloured a little at the memory of the details he suppressed; "and by Jove, it was a lesson to me! A perfectly hideous risk! I was on the point of telling her who I was when I drew back, just in time. God, how I sweated! I'm cold now when I think she might have recognised me.... Imagine the scene, George; woman screaming and falling down in a fit in the street because she thinks a ghost's spoken to her. And the ghost himself—this ghost"—he tapped his solid chest—"a ghost marched off between a couple of policemen—if two could hold me—I don't believe ten could—my strength's immense—immense——"

"But—but—then haven't you even a name to anybody who sees you more than once or twice?"

Slowly he shook his head. "You see. You see as well as I do. It seems to me that to everybody but you I'm simply dead. I can't go about giving people fits like that. That was a lesson to me, speaking to Daphne Bassett. I'll never do such a thing again.... So that cuts out Julia Oliphant. Pity, because she was a good sort. Always the same to me; just a pal. She used to give me expensive paste-sandwiches for tea when I knew she couldn't afford it; I used sometimes to stop away on that account. That was when she lived in Chelsea. Then I lost sight of her for a bit, but I've thought a good deal of her lately. I never had a sister.... Don't mind my running on like this, old fellow. I've nobody but you to talk to, nobody at all. Funny sort of situation, isn't it—a ghost like me mourning for living people? That's practically what it amounts to."

At something in his tone I interposed abruptly.

"Derry," I said, "you haven't been thinking of putting an end to yourself, have you?"

He stared at me for a moment.

"Eh?" he said. "Why not? Of course I have. One of the first things I did think of. I've been pretty near it, and if I find I can't write that book I shall be near it again. And"—he bent the grey-blue eyes solemnly on mine—"shall I tell you what would completely settle it? If anybody should see that ghost and scream!... I've got a most fearful power, George. A man who can make people scream as I could oughtn't to be at large. Ghosts ought to get where they belong—off the map altogether. My God, if it slipped out one day when I didn't mean it—just these three words—'I'm Derwent Rose'——"

Then suddenly his voice shook pitiably. He spread out his hands.

"George, old fellow, you can't imagine what a joy it was to see you at that place to-night! You haven't realised it yet—you don't know what I went through before I plucked up courage to speak to you. You're the only living creature I used to know that I can know now—the only one—the only one on earth. I know them, but I daren't—daren't—let them know me. It gets very, very, very lonely sometimes——"

Lonely sometimes! My heart ached for him. It seemed to me that that loneliness was a gulf that all the pity in the universe could not fill. No, I had not realised. I had thought I had, but I hadn't. It now came quite home to me that, while he was free to make a new acquaintance at any moment he pleased, that acquaintance could hardly last longer than the moment in which it was made. For say it lasted for three weeks. At the end of those three weeks the hand he had taken would be three weeks older, but his own hand might be a hundred weeks younger. And so it must go on: hail—and farewell. He, beyond measure gifted, was denied this gift. He could not stop by the way to make a single friend. For others the calm and gentle progress to age, the greetings among themselves, the accosting by the loved familiar name; but Derwent Rose had no name. Without a name Daphne Bassett had set a dog on him; what would she have set on him had he said "I'm Derwent Rose"? Lightning was safer to handle than that name of his. It might miss—but it might hit, make mad, kill.

Sooner or later, I supposed, I should have to tell him that Julia Oliphant knew as much about his state as I knew myself. I had had no shadow of right to betray him to her thus. But in the meantime he was resolved that he would not turn that voltage of his identity either on to her or anybody else.

III

In its way, one of the most singular portions of our conversation occurred when I asked him how he was placed as regards money. After all he must have money. Even a man who lives his life backwards must eat and have his boots soled, and pay twenty-five shillings a week for a loft over a garage. At first he seemed reluctant to answer me.

"I'm afraid I ran through rather a lot just at first," he said hesitatingly—his first admission that he had not inhabited Trenchard's garret for the whole of the time since I had last seen him. "But that will be all right. I can make lots of money."

"How?" ("Not by that book of yours," I said emphatically to myself.)

"Oh, you needn't worry about that. I assure you I can. I've thought it all out most carefully."

"I wish you'd tell me."

Then, eagerly, jerkily, he unfolded his maddest idea yet.

"I told you you hadn't grasped it. Nobody grasps it till they've got to live it. You see, it's all a question of time. Now look at it carefully.... I'm not fixed. I'm a constantly moving quantity. For that reason I can't take an ordinary job like anybody else. Oh, I could get one all right. It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to walk into one of these Sandow places, Ince's or Jones's or any of 'em, and say, 'Just pass me a few of those two hundred pound weights,' and scare 'em alive with what I could do. In fact that's the whole situation—I should scare 'em alive. You can't show pupils one man one day and perhaps a different one altogether the next; it isn't decent. Here's a nut for you to crack, George: I'm dead, a ghost. But my appearance is one of the most conspicuous things you ever saw. A man like me can't hide himself. The King or the Prince of Wales might walk down Piccadilly unrecognised, but not an athletic phenomenon like me. So as well as being the loneliest, I'm also one of the most public men living."

"So you propose to make money out of athletics?"

"Steady; let's take it as it comes. I've thought it all out, and I don't see a single flaw in it. Here's the problem: I want a large sum of money, I want to make it honestly, and if possible instantaneously, that is to say while I'm still stationary. Now how am I to do it?"

"You can't do it."

"Well, I say I can."

"How?"

You wouldn't guess in a hundred years what it was he proposed to do.

He intended to fight Carpentier.

"All in the fraction of a second, George," he said, appealing for my approval. "Knock-out punch for one of these mammoth purses, fix yourself up for life, and then disappear. It's absolutely sound reasoning."

"It's the craziest thing I ever heard."

"Why?" he asked, his eyes innocently on mine. "It's perfectly feasible."

"How would you get the match? Do you suppose any promoter would look at you? Would any champion? Would his manager let him? Remember that championship's a business. Champions make money as long as they're champions and no longer. They take no risks. And part of their business is to sidestep dangerous matches."

But he had an answer to that that evidently seemed to him conclusive. His eyes sparkled.

"Exactly! That's the very reason I picked Carpentier. Carpentier, man, Georges Carpentier! He isn't a sidestepper! He's the most thoroughgoing sportsman alive! Look at the way he gave that Yorkshire lad his match! Sidestep, that Frenchman? Look here. You know I speak French like a native. Well, I shouldn't in the least mind going straight up to him and putting the whole proposition before him."

"That you were out after his championship and incidentally his living?"

"Yes, and I jolly well know what he'd do."

"So do I. He'd turn you over to Descamps and the negotiations would last a couple of years. That isn't instantaneous."

"He'd do nothing of the sort. That great fellow?... Kiss me. He'd kiss me on both cheeks, shout 'C'est ça!' and tell Descamps to fix it up straight away. Of course I wouldn't hurt him."

I stared. "Could you put Carpentier out?"

He laughed. A laugh was his reply.

"But suppose—an accident can always happen—suppose he put you out?"

This time I had not even a laugh for a reply.

He was fast asleep.

Asleep, dead off, and in that moment of time! The instant before his eyes had kindled at the thought of what a lark it would be to take on that peerless Frenchman and put him out; now, between a question and an answer, those eyes were closed and he slept profoundly.

With immense profundity. I bent over him and spoke his name in his ear. I shook him by the shoulder. He was unconscious of either action. His colour was blooming, his breathing deep and easy; else his sleep seemed to have the immensity of death itself. Under the glaring incandescent mantle he was theatrical in his beauty, superb in the relaxation of his strength. I could not take my eyes off him. It was almost frightening to see that complete annihilation of so much physical and mental power.

To write that book—and to fight Carpentier! He had worked it coolly and impudently out. The analytical faculties he would have brought to the one task he had merely applied to the other, and he had arrived at the perfectly logical answer that the way to make the maximum of money as nearly instantaneously as possible was to knock out Carpentier.

I could only gaze spellbound at him as he slept.

What to do now?

I was aware that this question had been waiting for an answer ever since we had left that picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue. I had now found him, or he me; but what next? Let him go again? But apparently he did not want to go; he clung to me pathetically, as to the single companion he had in the world. Take him away somewhere? But he had refused to come, had urged that monstrous book. Was I to stay here with him, to stay all night, to stay till Trenchard's return? That was, to say the least, inconvenient. Should I put him to bed? Somehow I hesitated to disturb that vast unconsciousness. Poor fellow, he richly earned all the rest he got.

I went into the bedroom, brought out Trenchard's quilt, and spread it over him. I moved his head gently to the padded portion of the wicker chair. I made him as comfortable as I could. Then once more I stood irresolute.

It was now after one o'clock, and that powerful sleep had cut us clean off in the middle of things. I had much, much more to ask him. I wanted to know his intentions about his rooms in Cambridge Circus, whether he thought of returning there, whether he wanted his furniture stored or sold. If to myself and Trenchard and possibly a few others he was still known as Derwent Rose, I wanted to know what his name was to the rest of mankind. Merely as a means of communication with people he did not wish to meet face to face, I wanted to know whether his handwriting had changed, whether he used a typewriter, what his signature was like.

And above all I wanted to know what steps I must now take with regard to Julia Oliphant.

Of course I intended to tell her everything, and to tell him that I had done so. The worst I should risk would be his momentary anger that I had betrayed him. He had wished to spare her a meeting with himself, but he had not known that she was unsparable. More than that, she was indissuadable. I should not be able to keep her from him. And, if he clung so touchingly to me, found me so "magnificently steady," what comfort would he not find in that unvarying constancy of hers? He might break out on me for the moment, but he would bless me for it by and by.

I sat down in the other chair. I was very tired. I dozed.

In perhaps a quarter of an hour I opened my eyes again. He had not moved. It was a mild night, the deep chair was not uncomfortable, and I dozed again and again woke. Still he slept. I muttered a "Good night, poor old chap." I was too drowsy even to get up and turn down the incandescent light.

This time I slept as soundly as he.

Afterwards he blamed himself that he had not sent me away; but that sleep had dropped on him like a falling beam. All his sleep, he explained, was like that. Immeasurable chasms of time seemed to have passed away between his closing his eyes and his opening them again.

So this is what came next:

A light creaking of his chair brought me suddenly wide awake and sitting up. A peep of grey daylight showed in the upper portion of the window-frame, but the incandescent mantle still glared yellowly above his head. He had moved, but without waking. He turned his head and slumbered on.

But the turn of his head had brought his face into the light....

He only shaved once a day, in the morning; and on the following morning he shaved again. But it was his whole beard that he thus shaved off daily, thirty days' growth in a night. He had had no set intention of growing that beard that I had seen in the hansom. A few days before coming to Trenchard's place he had woke up one morning, stroked his face, and found it there.

There he slept—in his golden beard.

IV

"Most certainly he shall write his book," Julia declared.

"Not if I can prevent it," I replied.

"We'll see about that. You don't think he'll give us the slip again?"

"I don't think so—I mean he doesn't seem to want to at present."

"And he was all right when you left him? Is he comfortable there? Had he a good breakfast? Was his bed made? Does anybody go in and clear up for him? Had he any flowers?"

"He's quite all right there. He wants to see me as much as he can. He'd ask me to stay with him, but he's determined to get ahead with that book."

I did not tell her of any other reason why he might wish to be alone when he woke up in the morning. I assumed that a man's shaving operations could have no interest for her. But this is what had taken place:

On seeing his first signs of stirring I had slipped quietly into his bedroom. There, lying on his bed, I had pretended to be asleep. I had heard his tiptoe approach, the slight creaking of the door as he had peeped in, his stealthy crossing to the dressing-table, where his razors were. Then he had stolen out again, and I had heard a kettle filled and other preparations. A quarter of an hour later he had (as he supposed) woke me. He stood there by the bedside with a cup of tea in his hand. His chin was smooth. I wondered about that other morning when, passing his hand over his face, he had first found the beard there. And I wondered what his companion, if he had had one, had thought of it.

"But he shall write his book, poor darling," Julia repeated.

This was at half-past ten in the morning, in her studio, whither I had walked straight from Derry's loft over the mews.

"He ought to be locked up for life if he does," I answered.

But she was very obstinate. Derry (she said) should do whatever he had a mind to do. More than that (and a crafty light stole into her dark eyes as she said it), she intended to help him.

"To write his book? And what do you know about writing books?"

"I didn't say to write his book. You say he's—what d'you call it?—sharpening his tools, getting himself fit. Well, I can help him to do that."

"How?"

"I'll leave the door open so you can hear."

She ran out of the studio to the little cabinet where her telephone was. I heard the following, her side of the conversation that ensued.

"Is that 9199? Miss Oliphant would like to speak to Mrs Aird, please.... Is that you, Madge? Yes, this is my dinner-call.... Oh, like a top, and I know your phone's by your bed. Madge, my dear, I want to know who that learned person was I was talking to last night: yes, the bibliomaniac person.... Who?" Then, with a jump of her voice, "What, he's staying with you? He's in the house now? Do send for him immediately.... Of course not, you goose, but you have an extension, haven't you?..."

And then this:

"Oh, good morning! Miss Oliphant speaking.... Ah, you've forgotten!... Most frightfully excited about our conversation last night. Will you tell me again the title of that book and whether I can see it in the British Museum? Wait a minute, I want to write it down...."

Then, carefully and as it were a letter at a time:

"Manuel—du—Répertoire—Bibliographique—Universel.... Yes, I've got that.... Paris, 44, Rue de Rennes.... Now the other book, please.... Decimal Classification and Relative Index.... Yes.... Melvil Dewey.... Is that enough to identify them?"

Then a rapid perfunctory gush, a "Thank you so much," the receiver clapped on again, and re-enter Julia, her face ashine with triumph.

"Well, did you hear all that?" she said. "You can take me along to the British Museum as soon as you like. You'll have to get me into the reading-room, because I haven't a ticket. Then if I were you I should trot away off to Haslemere."

"Who's that you were talking to?"

"A most fearful bore I met at the Airds' at dinner last night. At least I thought he was a bore then. Now he's a duck and an angel and I could kiss him all over his bald old head. Goodness is always rewarded, George, but not often the next morning like this." She clapped her hands.

"You're less comprehensible than ever I knew you, which is saying a good deal."

"Dear old George! When you're bald I'll kiss you too. And Derry shall write his book."

"And fight Carpentier?"

"Poodledoodle!"

And she flitted out again, unfastening her painting-blouse at the back as she went.

I knew enough of Miss Oliphant by this time to treat her apparent irresponsibilities with respect. I had never heard of either of the books of which she had spoken over the telephone, but I risked a guess at their nature—Bibliographique Universel—Decimal Classification—evidently the subject was indexing, and she had met somebody at dinner the night before who had led her into these arid fields. Naturally she had been bored. But now she was in a rapture of plotting and machination. She intended to assist and encourage Derry in that inordinate plan of his. She came in again, dressed for walking, humming a blithe tune.

"Dear, dear Providence! There was I ready to snap Madge's head off for seizing quite a nice man herself and giving me old Drybones, but now I'm going to send her some flowers. See the idea, George?"

"What are these books?"

"The very latest thing in the way of indexing. It lasted nearly the whole of dinner. Oh, I love myself for being so good! He drooled along, and I said 'How thrilling' and things like that, thinking of something else all the time, and now this gorgeous piece of luck!"

"A Universal Index?"

"Yes, of the whole of human knowledge. It's all done with decimals—or do they call them semicolons? Dots anyway. You can turn up anything from the solar system to a packet of pins at a moment's notice. If Derry doesn't know about it he'll dance with joy.... But come along. I must see those books. Let's go by bus. You can get me a reader's ticket, can't you?"

She pushed me out in front of her and closed the door with a reckless bang. All the way to the bus she talked as delightedly as if it had been her birthday.

"So I shall mug up those decimals and things and then go and be his secretary. I know more or less how he wrote his Vicarage. He used to stride up and down my room, thinking aloud about it. And this will be the same, only enormous! He says he wants to make it as Moses made his Decalogue? He shall, bless his heart. Why shouldn't he? I don't see your stuffy old objections, George."

"One of them is that Moses didn't 'make' the Decalogue. He went up into Sinai for it."

"Well, leave Moses out then. Any other reason?"

"I've told you. If it isn't exactly blasphemous, it's getting on that way."

"Why?" she said with heat. "Was the Vicarage blasphemous? He's simply going to do the Vicarage again, but on a huger scale. If he can write a gigantic book why should you say to him 'No, you mustn't write that—write a littler one instead'? He's perfectly entitled to write the biggest book he can. He's just as much entitled to it as you or any other writer. You only call it those names because it's bigger than yours."

She glowed with jealousy for his fame. He was her demi-god, and she would have had all the world bow down before him. She would not have him second to Homer—she would not have him second to Shakespeare. At least so it struck me, and I could only shake my head again and again and repeat that in my opinion it was not a legitimate ambition.

We had mounted to the top of a motor-bus, where we occupied a back seat. For some minutes she did not speak. Then, as she still continued silent, I looked at her face. At the same moment her face turned to mine.

What worlds away from the truth I was that clear look told me. His fame? She didn't care twopence for his fame, except that it might amuse him. His book? She didn't care whether he wrote his book or whether he didn't. To her, fame and books were the vanities with which men so incomprehensibly amuse themselves when they might be thinking of something that mattered. It was enormously more than that that her eyes told me on the top of that east-bound bus that morning.

For if he wished to remain thirty-three, she too as intensely wished and willed it. He should write any book he wanted, do anything on earth he liked, so long as that loft in a South Kensington mews became an upper room in Cremorne Road all over again. She would flutter about, pretending to be indexing the whole mass of human knowledge for him, clipping and pasting and filing within sound of his voice; but what she would really be doing would be to cut Patum Peperium sandwiches for him, to see that he fed himself properly, opened his windows, made his bed, had his washing and mending properly done. That former Vicarage period had been the summer of her life; she would now thrust herself in the way of it once more. That she might do so with some sort of countenance she was on her way to read those thorny books in the British Museum. The latest thing in indexing was the bait with which she set the trap of her adoration. She would humour, encourage, wheedle, praise. But she too would have her summer twice.

We did not speak again until we descended in Tottenham Court Road and walked along Great Russell Street. Then as we approached the Museum railings she turned abruptly to me. She wanted her final confirmation of the facts.

"You've told me all that he said about me?"

"Yes." (This was untrue. I had suppressed one thing. I had not told her that he had sometimes stayed away from Cremorne Road because she bought things for him she could not afford.)

"And he's no idea at all that I know anything whatever about it?"

"None whatever."

"Tell me again about his having sometimes thought of me lately."

I did so. "For all I know he might even have come to see you but for the fear of giving you that shock."

"Well, you didn't die of the shock, so why should I? Come and get me my ticket."

We passed through the glazed doors and along the Roman Gallery. I rang at the closed door where the temporary tickets are obtained. There was no difficulty, and slowly we walked past the double row of Cæsars and Emperors again. I had taken her arm. Somehow I suddenly felt as though I were about to lose her, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for an even longer one. I spoke in a low voice.

"Do you think it will be—safe? Just to walk in on him, I mean. Wouldn't it be better to prepare him first?"

"No, no—that's the one thing I am sure of."

"Are you sure you can trust yourself?"

"I don't know. If I can't there's an end of everything, so I must."

"What about our going together?"

"No, nor that either." She flushed a little as she said it.

I think, though I am not sure, that there was jealousy in that flush. In that unspeakable solitude of his Derry had so far only a single friend—myself. She was prepared, if she could, to steal my share of him, to have him all to herself.

"But I've got to see him to-day; I promised it," I said.

"Then off you go now, while I'm here. But you're not to say a word about my coming. Then if I were you I should get off to Haslemere."

She meant I had better get out of the way altogether. I sighed.... "Well, come and get your books."

We sought the reading-room, and I put her into a seat and passed to the catalogue counter. I took her slips to her for signature, dropped them into the basket, and then returned to her. It was early, and few readers had yet arrived. We were in the "N" bay, which we had to ourselves. I saw her look up at the million books, dingy and misty in the pale light of the high rotunda. I saw her dark eyes travel along the frieze of names in tarnished gold—Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning. In the past I have spent a good deal of time in the reading-room; now it is a place I get out of as quickly as I can. It crushes me, annihilates my spirit with the weight of the vanity of vanities. Of the makers, as well as of the making of books, there is no end. They are born, they lisp, they spell, they write; and then they die. The eager heart, the busy brain, are a few tarnished letters on a frieze, a strip of paper gummed into the casualty-list of a catalogue. We think, write, and to-morrow we die. Only one man was not going to think, write, and die to-morrow. He was going to be different from all men who had gone before him. Because of something that had happened to him, he was going to blazon his name, not in that circular cemetery of dead books, but across the whole width of the heavens outside.

And this tired woman trifling with the tips of her long fingers against the book-rest as she waited for her books was going to be his accomplice. She was going, by means of something called love, to keep him at that acme of his powers where innocence and wisdom met and in the past he had thrown her a friendly word from time to time. She was going, single-handed, to arrest that backward drift of his life. Whatever had caused it should be thwarted in her. He should not be thirty. He should remain, if she could compass it, thirty-three for as long as he wanted—for the rest of his life and hers.

I wondered the dome did not fall on her.

Presently she turned her head and smiled in my eyes.

"Well, don't you wait, George. Thanks so much. Good-bye."

I left her sitting there, in that vast and brown-hued well, still waiting for her books.

PART IV

THE DOUBLE CROSS