The Tower of Oblivion Part 15

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 rus.h.i.+ng 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! G.o.d, 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 gla.s.ses 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 a.s.suming 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 ... G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 dispa.s.sionately 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. "d.a.m.ned 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."