The Tower of Oblivion Part 3

That's just the devil of it."

"Suppose you begin at the beginning," I suggested.

"There you are!" was his swift reply. He was sitting up on the sofa now, and was facing it, whatever "it" was, with a calmer courage. "I _can't_ begin at the beginning. All I really _know_ yet's the end, and of course that hasn't come.... It's a d.a.m.n-all of a problem. Get yourself a drink if you want one. No, I won't have one; I--I daren't. And you might draw the curtains. When I hear the buses and taxis it makes me want to go out."

I drew his curtains for him, but did not take the drink. He sat on the sofa leaning a little forward, his great hands clasped between his knees and working slightly and powerfully, as if he cracked walnuts in the palms of them. The grey-blue eyes avoided mine. I have seen that same avoiding glance in the eyes of a man who had something perfectly true to tell, but so utterly improbable that he was self-convicted of lying even in speaking of it.

"About what you were saying this afternoon in that Club place--my age,"

he began in a constrained voice. "You--you meant it, I suppose?"

"That you'd live to be a hundred and be world-famous? Yes, I meant it in a way. I didn't mean you to take me too literally, of course."

"And you thought"--he hesitated for a moment and s.h.i.+vered slightly--"it was something to be congratulated about?"

"Well--isn't it? Professionally you've staked out a magnificent course for yourself in which time means practically everything, and so, if you live long enough, as you look like doing----"

Yet I cannot tell you what premonition of calamity seemed already to flow like an induced current from him to me. Ordinarily I am not specially sensitised to receive impressions of this kind. I am just a man who had had the luck to think as most other people think and to be able to express their thoughts for them. The greater therefore must have been that current's projecting force. Certainly the greater was my shock when it did come.

"I shan't live to be a hundred," he said in a low voice.

I cannot remember what I said, or whether I said anything at all. All that I do remember is his own next words, the swift and agonising collapse of the whole man as he said them, and the feeling of my own nape and spine.

"No, not a hundred. You're counting the wrong way. You got my age quite right this afternoon. I'm thirty-five. And I shall live till I'm sixteen."

III

Among the things that have contributed to the wordly success of Sir George Coverham, Knight, has been that author's rigid exclusion from his books of everything that does not commend itself to the average common sense of his fellow-beings. The most he seeks in his modest writings--I speak of him in the third person because, as Derry's head dropped over his knees, it seemed impossible that this Sir George Coverham and I could be one and the same person--the most he seeks is a line somewhere between ordinary experience and the most, rather than the least, attractive presentation of it. In a word, his books are polite, debonair, and deliberately planned so as not to shock anybody.

Therefore in some ways he may be quite the wrong person to be writing this story of Derwent Rose. For example: he had known Rose for some fifteen years, and, not to mince matters, there had been many highly impolite things in Rose's life during that time. More than once it had seemed a very good thing indeed that he had had to work hard for his money. The great mental concentration necessary for the writing of some of his books must have kept him out of a good deal of mischief.

So I (I am allowing myself the man and Sir George Coverham the novelist gradually to reunite, as they gradually reunited that evening)--I, his friend, had already done what we all do when we are completely bowled over. I had instinctively sought refuge from his lunatic announcement in trifles--any trifle that lay nearest to hand. Suddenly I found myself wondering why he was afraid to take a drink, and why I had had to draw his curtains lest the sound of the buses and taxis should call him out into the streets.

But presently he had recovered a little. He was even able to look at me with the faint shadow of a smile.

"Well, that's the lot," he said. "I've given you the whole thing in a nutsh.e.l.l. You heard that lecture and you know me. You can fill in the rest for yourself."

Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was not yet half-past nine. I got on to my feet.

"You'd better get your hat and come down to Haslemere with me," I said.

"We can catch the ten-ten. You're all on edge about something and you want a change. Leave word here that you'll be back in a week, and come along."

But he did not move, except to shake his head.

"I expected you'd say that. It's what anybody would say. It simply means that you haven't taken it in yet. No, since we've started we'll go on--unless you'd rather not. I warn you there's a good deal to be said for not going on."

"Why not talk about it down at Haslemere?"

Once more there was the hint of irascibility.

"Do you want to hear or don't you?"

Slowly I sat down again, and he resumed his former att.i.tude of cracking nuts with his palms for nutcrackers.

"There's not an atom of doubt about what I'm going to tell you," he began. "Not an atom. Unless I'm mistaken you saw for yourself this afternoon--though of course you didn't know what you were seeing. You simply thought I looked younger, didn't you?"

I waited in silence.

"And I fancy my manner got a bit on your nerves--does a bit now for that matter?"

This also I let pa.s.s without remark.

"Well, let's start from that point. You said I looked thirty-five. Well, it's just that that's getting on your nerves--the less amiable side of my character when I was thirty-five, and--and--well, when you go you might take that bottle of whisky with you and make me sign the pledge or something. I'm trying--I'm honestly trying--to hang on, you see."

I sighed. "I wish you could make it a bit plainer," I said.

"I'm making it as plain as I can. Is _this_ plain--that something's happened to me, I don't know what, and _I'm getting younger instead of older?_"

"Derry----" I began, half rising; but he held up one heroically-moulded hand.

"Let me finish. And if I happen to go to sleep suddenly you just walk straight out, do you hear? Walk right out and shut the door. You're to promise that. There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through.... So there it is. Instead of getting older like everybody else I'm simply getting younger. I'm perfectly sober--I haven't had a drink for five days--and I tell you I shall go on till I'm thirty, and then twenty-five, and then twenty, and then, at sixteen or thereabouts--that fellow wasn't very sound on his ages to-night--I shall die. _Now_ have you got it?"

Even about human nature there are some things that you have to accept as it were mathematically. I am no mathematician, but I do know (for example) that the common phrase "mathematically certain" is a misnomer.

The whole essence of mathematics lies, not in its certainties, but in its a.s.sumptions, its power to embrace any concept whatever and pin it down in the form of a symbol. Once you have adopted the symbol you don't trouble about what lies behind it. You merely proceed to reason on it.

It can only have been in some such way that I accepted Derwent Rose's mad statement and was willing to see what superstructure he was prepared to raise upon it. I was even able to speak in an almost calm and ordinary voice.

"Tell me how you know all this," I said.

He was logical and prompt.

"By my knowledge of myself, and also by my memory. I know what I was at thirty-five, and I know what I did; well, I simply know that I'm that man again, and that I shall go on and re-do more or less what he's already done. At some point in my life I must have got turned round, and now I'm living it backwards again. And put multiple personality quite out of your head. That's the whole point. I'm not anybody else, and I shan't be anybody else. At this moment I'm Derwent Rose, as he always was and always will be, but simply back at the mental and physical stage when he wrote _An Ape in h.e.l.l_."

To-day, looking back, it gives me an indescribable ache at my heart to remember the sudden and immense sense of relief his words gave me. I breathed again, as if a window had been opened and a draught of cool fresh air let in.

For if he only meant memory, then the thing wasn't so bad. The maniacal idea that had sent that cold s.h.i.+ver up my spine was capable of an ordinary explanation after all. For what else is memory but the illusion that one is living backwards again in this sense? How many ancient loves, hates, angers, can we not re-experience in any idle hour we choose to give over to reverie? Beyond a doubt Rose had in some way been abusing this mysterious faculty, and Surrey and the pine-woods was the place for him.

"I see," I said at last. "I confess you frightened me for a moment.

Anyway that's all right. You only have what we all have more or less.

You merely bring greater powers than the rest of us to bear on an ordinary phenomenon. I don't want to talk about your work, but it always did seem to me that you went to rather appalling heights and fearsome depths for the stuff of it. Personally I don't think either heaven or h.e.l.l is the safest place to go to for 'copy.' Too terrifying altogether."

He seemed to consider this deeply. He was almost quiet again now. Again he cracked invisible nuts, and his heels and toes rose and fell gently and alternately on the carpet.

"That's rather a new idea you've given me, George," he said at last. "I admit I hadn't thought of that. It might explain the beginning anyway--the turn-round. I suppose you mean I've been too close to the flames or the balm, and have got singed or the other thing, whatever you call it. I see. Yes.... It's probably nothing to do with the thyroid after all. I've been reading the wrong books. I never thought of the writings of the Saints. Or the Devils.... By the way, some of the Saints induced the stigmata on themselves by a sort of spiritual process, didn't they?"

I frowned and moved uneasily in my chair. I wasn't anxious to hear Derwent Rose either on ecstasy or blasphemy. But he went on.

"So that's useful as far as it goes. But--you'd hardly call _this_ spiritual, would you?"