The Tower of Oblivion Part 10

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 bra.s.s-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 a.s.sociated 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 circ.u.mstances 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed along with the stream.

Unmistakably he--and yet, mingled with the perfect familiarity, there was a change that I could not immediately a.n.a.lyse. 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, Gla.s.shouse 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--d.a.m.n 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 rea.s.suring. 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 d.i.c.kens 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 s.h.i.+rking of the whole question.