The Tower of Oblivion Part 11

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 n.o.ble 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 friends.h.i.+p.

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. Friends.h.i.+p or no friends.h.i.+p, 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 ab.u.t.ted 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ver.

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 sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d 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 antic.i.p.ated, but these I had intended to deal with as they arose. In a word, I had a.s.sumed 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:

The Derwent Rose who _or_ The Derwent Rose who might have had said, when I had replied, "Whisky? Well, it has offered him the whisky, interesting effects sometimes.

"No, no--blast it, Somebody once called it a short no--water!" cut to a psychic experience. If a psychic experience is what you are after, why take the roundabout way? Let's try it."

The Derwent Rose who _or_ The Derwent Rose who might have had torn off his collar, growled, "Well, what is there but who had also cried, extraordinary about that?

"Good G.o.d, man, I'm Perhaps it isn't anything to not bragging of my make a song about, but don't conquests--don't think pretend you've never heard of I'm not ashamed!" such a thing before. It happens every night, you know."

The Derwent Rose who had _or_ The Derwent Rose who might sat in a hansom with a have said, "Men are men and white satin slipper as women are women. This is also openly and innocently as Piccadilly Circus. Look round.

I might have sat to Can't _you_ find anything Julia Oliphant for my better to do than to hunt for portrait. a man who is--not at home to anybody this evening?"

The Derwent Rose who _or_ The Derwent Rose who cared loved beauty and hated nothing for the name of ugliness. anything, destroyed stale and outworn canons of beauty with a laugh, and sought a fresher loveliness in a world where nothing is common or unclean.

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 a.s.signation. He might be in a drinking-h.e.l.l--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, n.o.bility 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sing from experience to innocence, through the murk of his former sins to the perfection of his own maximum and the unimpaired G.o.dhead 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-a-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 s.h.i.+ning, 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 Ba.s.sett's flat this afternoon."

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

The kindling eyes were steadily on mine.