The Tower of Oblivion Part 29

"Oh, I meant part of the way," he evaded, fidgeting. "Guildford or Weybridge or somewhere."

"And is Julia going to walk to Guildford or Weybridge too? Don't be absurd. Come along to breakfast."

Reluctantly he turned his face towards the house.

I say I acted as well as I could; but it was acting. I had to act because I was afraid to face the reality. His haste to be off seemed to make that reality a twofold possibility. In the highly peculiar circ.u.mstances it was not for me, his host, to inquire whether he scrupled to breakfast or sit down in my house; but it was for me, technically still his friend, to wonder why he had tried to put me off with some tale about wanting to get on with his book and, in his eagerness to be gone, proposed to walk to London. It might have been decency and delicacy. On the other hand, he now experienced everything with the greatest intensity, and this sudden and imperious urge to walk might have been the first faint thrilling of that communicating nerve that, traced back, led to his Wanderjahre.

At Julia I had not yet dared to look.

I made him eat whether he wished it or not; oh, I was not above using my advantage. For he was entirely unaware that the cracking of a fir-cone under his foot had brought me out of my bed and to the door of my study.

It was because he supposed me to have been soundly asleep all night that I was able to compel him to swallow his punctiliousness at the same time that he swallowed his trout, coffee and marmalade. If either or all of them stuck in his throat there was no remedy for that.... At least so at first I thought. But as breakfast proceeded, I began to be strangely aware of my complete helplessness. Much as I might wish it, I could not wash my hands of him. Once more, the choice was not mine, but his.

For what could I do with him? Nothing--nothing at all. I was bound hand and foot. You cannot turn a two-memoried man out of your house as you can another. You don't get rid of him if you do. He has his own--ubiquity. There is only one of him, and you never know where he isn't. It was not now a question of whether he should marry Julia Oliphant, but whether he was to be suffered to vanish, to be swallowed up in the world of men, a drop in the human ocean that did not merge but still remained a drop, a grain on humanity's sh.o.r.e yet numbered too, an anomaly, a contradiction in nature, a ghost in the flesh, a man among ghosts. For if he was a ghost to us we must be ghosts to him. And ghost does not bring ghost to book for reasons of the flesh. No, he was still Derry, on whom this enormous destiny had alighted. He was not to be judged.

Nevertheless he must settle his soul's affairs and eat his breakfast like anybody else.

We got through that meal somehow. Julia talked to Derry, and I suppose I also was included, but I have no memory of what it was all about. One vivid little incident, however, I do remember. I learned why the heavy roller on the tennis court had been moved. She had asked Derry whether he could lift it, and for answer he had picked it up and held it above his head, as once he had held her sewing-machine. So she had gloried in him.... But of the rest of the conversation I remember nothing.

Breakfast over, I excused myself and left them at the table together. It had occurred to me that I was still as I had returned from the Devil's Punch Bowl, and that I had neither shaved nor bathed.

But on my way to my room Mrs Moxon again met me. She was replacing flowers, and she carried a pail of withered ones in her hand.

"I beg pardon, sir, but may I ask if you got up in the night?" she asked.

"Yes," I answered. "Why?"

"Only that I fancied I heard somebody moving about," she said.

"Yes. I went into Mr Rose's room. Then I went out for a walk. I'm not sleeping very well, Mrs Moxon. To-night I shall take a draught."

She knows my tone. I hope she was satisfied. I pa.s.sed on to my dressing-room.

Three quarters of an hour later I came down again. I found Julia at one of the drawing-room windows, alone and gazing out over the pond. She started at the sound of my voice behind her.

"Where's Derry?" I had asked.

"Over there by the punt," she replied.

I had not noticed him as he had stooped behind the little shelter to untie it.

"Is he leaving to-day?"

"I don't know."

"Are you trying to keep him?"

She had turned her back on me again and was once more looking out of the window. "Of course I'm trying to keep him--so far as I may in somebody else's house."

"Oh.... Why 'of course?'"

"Of course it's of course. Do you think I'm going to take my eyes off him for a single moment? You heard what he said before breakfast."

"About walking to London as the quickest way of getting back to that book of his?"

She did not answer. Derry had moved, and her eyes had instantly moved with him.

"Why is he putting out by himself? Why aren't you with him?" I asked.

"Oh--as long as I know where he is----"

"Didn't he ask you to join him?"

"No."

"The first time for two days?"

No reply.

"I wonder why he didn't ask you?"

"I wonder," she repeated.

"Have you no idea?"

With that she suddenly confronted me. She stood with her hands on either side of the window-frame, dark against the morning light. She looked straight into my eyes.

"Isn't this rather a catechism, George?" she said. "Your tone too. I want you to tell me something. It's this; Are these _really_ the questions you're wanting to ask me?"

She said it with the proudest calm; but whatever it was that existed between us made me for some moments longer as calm as herself.

"I do want to know those things. Otherwise I shouldn't have asked you."

"Oh, I'm afraid I said it badly. That's not what I meant. I mean are those the _only_ questions you want to ask me?"

The moment she said it I was much less certain that they were not. Her next words plunged me still deeper into doubt. She spoke as it were direct from the heart of some uttermost complexity.

"What _is_ the relation between you and me, George?" she demanded.

I considered, my eyes downcast. I felt hers steadily on my face all the time. I spoke in a low voice.

"I'm beginning to know less than ever."

"You'd hardly call it ordinary, would you--conventional and so on?"

"That's quite the last word I should use."

"It's not ordinary because of an extraordinary element that's at the very root of it. You know what that is; it's"--her eyes went towards the punt--"it's all him. He's got us all on the run. Give him his head and he could have the whole world on the run. There's no reason about it; as many people as knew about him would simply be bewitched. So I've taken it for granted that we don't quite come under everyday rules. We have to break and make rules as we go along.... About those questions. They really _are_ all that you want to know--just what he'll do next and so on?" she challenged me.

I think I should have broken in on the spot with a "Yes--I want to know _nothing_ else--nothing at all!" But she gave me no time. Her eyes called my own downcast ones peremptorily up from the floor.