The Tower of Oblivion Part 33

"Well, there's no immediate hurry. Everybody'll be away in another week or two. But it _would_ be rather joysome to see Derwent Rose at last where he really belongs! Well, think about Dinard. Any time you like.

'Bye----"

And with a wave of her hand she was off.

Even when you think you are thoroughly accustomed to the idea of a thing it can sometimes come freshly over you; and merely in the professional part of me I had felt an oddly special little pang at Madge's last words. Here, apparently, was a publisher who believed in Derwent Rose and was prepared to back his belief with money; and--it was too late!

Derwent Rose, wanderer, would never write another book. A few travel-sketches, perhaps, a few pen-pictures by the way, a few evening-paper articles; but another book--no. I wished that publisher no ill, but I did wish that he had recognised Derry's struggles, endeavours, faithfulness, strength, a little sooner than a day after the fair. Poor Derry would not have even the cynical consolation that while his real books had been neglected money would be heaped on him for his bad ones. He no longer had a book left in him. A pugilist's manager would be of more use to him than a publisher now.

I pa.s.sed up Queen's Gate and turned into the mews where I had arranged to meet Trenchard.

I had made my appointment with him because I had a question of special importance to ask him. I wanted to know whether Trenchard had seen him immediately before his departure, and, if he had, _how old he now looked_.

For the farther he travelled the more crucial this question became. From forty-five to thirty-five he might still pa.s.s as Derwent Rose, but he could hardly do so from, say, forty-five to twenty. I had not a moment's doubt that it had indeed been he whom Madge had seen and had failed to recognise--nay, had unhesitatingly a.s.sumed to be another man. Also my housekeeper's suspicions that all was not as it should have been had also been thoroughly awakened. "It is Mr Rose, isn't it?" she had asked me with a puzzled look on the Friday midday; but by Sunday morning Julia and he had become "the lady and gentleman" who had had to be fetched in to breakfast. Old Mrs Truscott again had unhesitatingly set him down as years younger than Julia. If Trenchard had seen him before his departure he had probably been the last of us to do so. Trenchard, in short, was to tell me what Derry's diary had completely failed to tell me.

For that little shiny-backed pocket book had merely brought things to a more hideously complicated pa.s.s even than before. I shall return to this diary in a moment; for the present let it suffice that, like the publisher's offer, it seemed to me to have turned up just a few hours too late. I had hoped for a survey wide enough, simplified enough, to help me to his rate of progress. I had so far found nothing of the slightest use whatever. I was without the faintest idea of his present age. He might have been thirty, twenty-five, twenty, younger. He might even be sixteen, at which age he had said he would die.

Trenchard I found to be a black-haired, pleasant-voiced, very much alive fellow of a little under thirty. His rank, I believe, had been that of major, and even the atrocious crippling he had received at La Ba.s.see did not destroy his look of perfect efficiency. He was just able to start up a car, and cars were his livelihood and he lived in them. I introduced myself, and he hobbled cheerfully about among his cups and bread-and-b.u.t.ter and methylated spirits.

"So," I concluded my introduction of myself, "as I'm settling up a few matters for him I wanted to know how you stood."

"Oh, everything's perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned," he laughed, filling the teapot. "Place left like a new pin, Bradburys in an envelope, and a quite unnecessary letter of thanks for what he calls my kindness. I was only too glad to have somebody in the place."

"Do you know what day he left?"

"Let me see. To-day's the ninth. He left on Monday, the fifth."

(Note: he had cleared out of Trenchard's place the day after I had seen him and Julia off at Haslemere Station.)

"He didn't say where he was going?"

He gave me a quick glance. "I say, this _is_ all right, isn't it?" Then, laughing as I smiled, "Sorry, but one has to be careful, you know. No, he didn't say. Here's his note if you care to read it. I don't even know what to do with letters if any come for him."

Already I guessed that it would be useless to put my question; but I asked it none the less.

"You didn't _see_ him before he left, then?"

"No. He simply left that note. It's dated the evening of the fourth, and it says he's off to-morrow.... By the way, what _am_ I to do about letters?"

There wouldn't be any letters. Of that I was sure. But I gave him my address, wound up a pleasant chat rather quickly, and took my leave.

And now for that diary that, instead of helping me, had proved the greatest stumbling-block of all.

I had had not a moment's scruple in reading every word of it, in trying to disentangle every diagram and equation it contained. Any question of ordinary decorum had long since pa.s.sed out of the relation that existed between him, Julia, and myself. And let me repeat once more that a man who has questioned the universe until he has asked one question too many involves in his own fatality all who have to endure the contact of him.

His state is apocalyptic, his existence merely spatial, without zenith of virtue or nadir of disgrace. If my roof had not been abused, neither did I violate his diary. I merely read it without a qualm.

Its oddity began with its very first page. Ordinarily on the first page of a diary you look for the owner's name and address. Here was no address; on the other hand there was a string of names. There were, to be exact, eight of them, with s.p.a.ce for more, the whole written in his small fine hand and disposed in a neat vertical column. This block of names might have been from the everyday-book of any working novelist, part of whose task it is to label his puppets appropriately. I had no reason to suppose that hitherto Derwent Rose had ever gone under any name but his own. It had certainly occurred to me that he might sooner or later have to do so. This appeared to be a preparation for such a contingency. His own name of Derwent Rose, by the way, did not appear.

Opposite the names a diagram had been pasted into the book. It was on squared paper, such as draughtsmen use, of so many squares to the inch; and these squares had been numbered horizontally along the top with the years from 1891 to 1920, that is to say from his own age of sixteen on.

Lower down the page, and still horizontally, red and black lines of various lengths were set in echelon. These were sprinkled over with numbers, which I discovered to refer to the pages that followed. Certain arrows pointed in opposite directions. Over these were written, in one direction, the words "'A' memory," in the other the words "'B' memory."

This completed the horizontal arrangement.

The vertical set-out appeared to have given him much more trouble. It did not appear to have been completed. A heavy black line ruled up through the year 1905 was lettered "true middle," but that appeared to be the only stable term of its kind. The rest was a mere rain of pencil-lines, momentary false middles that apparently he had tried to seize in pa.s.sing. I knew by this time how unseizable they were. Not one of them lay on the right side of the true middle line. All overstepped it and travelled in a gradual procession towards the left of the diagram.

On other pages I found other diagrams. These were merely enlarged details of the foregoing, with days of the month instead of years.

One wild chart was an attempt to combine the whole in a single comprehensive statement. But this had completely beaten him. A serpentine whip-lash of pencil had been flung so viciously across it that one almost heard the crack.

The rest of the book consisted of text.

I was of course prepared at any moment to receive a telegram or letter asking for the book's instant return. If it really contained the key to his speed of retrogression it was probably the most important thing he had in the world. Therefore, lest he should claim it before I had finished with it, it stayed in my breast pocket when it was not actually in my hand.

And so I had three days' madness over the hateful thing. Twenty times I nearly tore it in two as he had once torn a six-shilling novel. Then at the end of the three days I put it down, leaned back exhausted in my chair, and asked myself what it was that I was really in search of.

I wonder whether the answer will startle you as much as it startled me.

True, it came pat enough. There was nothing whatever new about it. It was merely what it had been all along, and I ought to have been familiar with it by this time.... I merely wanted to know his age. Just that and nothing more.

Yet of all the shocks that a man can receive, the shock of the expected and waited-for is sometimes the most profound. You know it is coming; it is therefore pure, fundamental shock, unalleviated by the lighter element we call surprise. When something you have lived with every day, taken for granted, thought you knew all about, have become familiar with to the point of boredom, suddenly so recalls attention to itself that all your habitual notions about it drop clean away, leaving you face to face with a strange thing--a line of verse, an object in your house, a tune, a picture, a wife--when this happens, then you may know that something has been wrong all along, is still wrong, and that if you would set it right you must go back to the very beginning again.

So there I stood, an unhappy, over-confident little scholar, whom the inexorable tutor silently points back to his task.

Humbly I returned to the book that, if it told me anything at all, must at least tell me this.

And now I must ask you to bear your portion of that little shiny-backed book too; for on a point of this importance I cannot allow you to accept my own conclusions on trust. You must know how I arrived at them. Where Derwent Rose was at that moment, what manner of man he was, what he was doing, how long he might continue to do it, whether he was alive at all--these things depended on no off-handed survey of his case, but on the dry figures, dates and details that I had hitherto neglected.

Fortunately we had a roughly-sufficient starting-point. This was the date of June 8th, 1920, the day when I had met him at the Lyonnesse Club. It was not, it must be confessed, his true zero. The true zero was now indiscoverable. But I myself, in good faith and knowing nothing of all this, had judged him to be thirty-five that afternoon; he himself had confirmed my judgment, subsequent changes had sufficiently borne it out, and the diary now re-affirmed it.

So much for June 8th, when, if he had had an age at all, it had presumably been thirty-five. Thereafter he had disappeared for exactly three weeks, and on June 29th, a Tuesday, he had spoken to me in the picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue.

On the following day, Wednesday, June 30th, I had returned to Haslemere, having left Julia waiting for her books in the reading-room of the British Museum.

Then, two days later still, on Friday, July 2nd, they had unexpectedly turned up together at my house.

Now a definite note in the diary, written as a matter of fact in my own house (for he kept it instantly up to date), told me that on that day, July 2nd, he had "felt twenty-nine." True, he had later admitted the vagueness of these mere "feelings" as an index to age, but there it was for what it was worth, and it agreed with the impression I had myself formed, based on his vivid and ecstatic and momentary moods. Except when I had compelled him to speak of his book, Sat.u.r.day had been the counterpart of Friday. That is to say, that during the whole of Friday and Sat.u.r.day he had remained twenty-nine.

Therefore (and omitting the loss of the years forty-five to thirty-five, now untraceable), during the twenty-five days from June 8th to July 3rd he had dropped a total of six years.

So far so good; but that was not quite what I wanted to know. What I was trying to ascertain was a far more important thing--the shortest _actual_ time in which he had lost the great length of _apparent_ time.

It would make the greatest practical difference in the world whether this figure were a high or a low one.

And now groan, as I groaned, when you look at the four days between June 29th and July 3rd--those four days in which, in order that he might be at the very top of his power for the writing of his book, he had vehemently _denied_ his age, had juggled with it, wrestled with it, refused it, ignored it, vowed that a false middle was or should be a true one, and had hung as it were to a strap while the whole momentum of his being had tried to sway him in another direction.

The entry for those four days was a mere question-mark with an open choice. It read:

"Thirty-three--thirty?"

And yet on the fifth day he had been twenty-nine!

Now let us take the queried figures separately and subtract.