The Tower of Oblivion Part 13

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 ma.s.ses 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 Ba.s.sett'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 Ba.s.sett'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 ent.i.tled 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-gla.s.s 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; d.i.c.ksee'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 antic.i.p.ating? 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 Ba.s.sett 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 pa.s.sed 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 Suss.e.x 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 Ba.s.sett 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, rea.s.semble, 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...o...b..t, and move back to set where it rose.

And all at once there came over me a whelming of pa.s.sionate 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--compa.s.sion 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.