Читать книгу The Tower of Oblivion - Oliver Onions - Страница 12

"Oh, nobody much," she chattered. "The Tank Beverleys and the Hobsons, and Connie Fairham and her escapade, and Jock Diver with Mrs Hatchett. Washout of an evening; makes home seem quite nice, especially with George here. Do give me a decent peg; they'd nothing but filthy cup." Then, as Alec busied himself at a tray, she shot another amused glance at me. "Brought the Beautiful Bear, George?"

"I've just left him. I want to talk to you."

"Alec," she said promptly, "go to bed. George and I want to talk."

"Dashed if I do without a tune," Alec grumbled. "Play something."

Madge crossed to the music-stool, set her whisky-and-soda on the sliding rest, and began to play.

I waited in an extreme of impatience. The bus-ride to the Club, getting my bag, coming on to Empress Gate, greeting Alec—I suppose these things had occupied me just sufficiently to put away for half an hour the weight that had been placed upon me; but now, as I frowned at Alec Aird's tiles and cut steel fender, that weight began to reimpose itself. Anxiously I wondered what might be happening at that very moment in that other room with the drawn curtains, the orderly shelves and the disreputable table.

A man who grew younger instead of older! A man who already was ten years younger than he had been a few months ago! He had been quite right in saying, when I had tried to take him down to Haslemere, that that only meant that I had not yet taken it in. I was as far from being able to take it in as ever. More and more it forced itself on me as menacing, inimical, wild. What sane man could believe it? And yet, if it was not to be believed, why could I not shake it off? Why did it lurk, as it were, in the half-lighted corners of Madge's drawing-room, allowing me all the time I wished in which to demonstrate it to be nonsense, and then, when I had left not one aspect of it uncriticised and undenied, reunite and face me again exactly as before?

It happened, he said, while he slept; and he had strictly enjoined on me that if I saw him falling asleep I was to walk straight out of the place. "There are some things I won't ask even a pal to go through." That meant that during his sleep those tufts of his eyebrows disappeared and that terrifying strength descended on him again. But what happened before then? Was the actual and physical change simultaneous with the inner and mental one, or was it merely a confirmation that came afterwards? Had he changed in every respect but form and feature even as I had talked to him? It frightened me to think that he had; but the more I thought of it the more it looked like it.

For there had taken place a struggle within him that had but increased in intensity as the minutes had passed. I remembered the gravity with which he had pondered my suggestion that for the stuff of his novels he had been too directly to heaven, too straight to hell. I don't pretend to know any more about heaven and hell than anybody else, but I have the ordinary man's conception of the difference between good and evil, better and worse, and these principles, it seemed to me, had contended in him. And he had striven to throw the weight of his personal will into the worthier scale. There were things he did not wish to re-do, episodes he did not wish to re-live. He had even wept that he must be dislodged from that rock of his life to which his forty-five years had brought him.... But what had followed? Suddenly a wicked chuckle. Violent expressions had crept into his speech. A glitter had awakened in his eyes, as if, since the thing must be gone through with, devilry and defiance were a more manly part than weeping. "Well, if there's no help for it, let's be thorough one way or the other," I could have imagined him grimly saying....

And if this was so, what did it mean but that he had actually grown younger before my very eyes? I was merely shown, invisibly and a little in advance, what the whole world would realise when his sleep had smoothed out a few more wrinkles, given a newer gloss to his hair and an added brightness to his eyes....

And in that case why had I come to see Madge Aird? What could Madge do? What could anybody do? If the thing was true it was inescapable. He must go back. Not one single stage could be avoided. Beyond these episodes which he dreaded lay others that perhaps he need not dread, and others beyond those, and others beyond those ... until he attained sixteen....

I continued to muse and Madge to play.

At last Alec got contentedly up. He straightened the creases from his dinner-jacket.

"Thanks, old girl," he said. "Well, I'm going to turn in, and you two can sit up and yarn about your royalties if you like. You look after him, Madge, and see he doesn't get hold of The Times before I do in the morning. Night, George. You know where everything is——"

And, refilling his pipe as he went, he was off. Madge drew up a small table between us, untied the ribbons of her cothurnes, rubbed the creases from her ankles, and worked her toes inside their sheath of silk.

"Well?" she said; and then with a little rapturous gush, "I can't get the creature's beauty out of my head! That skin—that hair—and those wonderful books! It isn't fair. It's too many gifts for one person. He ought to be nationalised or something—turned over to the public like a park."

"I want you to tell me who Mrs Bassett is," I said.

She bargained. "It's a swap, mind. If I tell you about her you tell me about him."

"Tell me about her first."

"Well"—she settled herself comfortably—"I'm sorry to see you come down to my own scandalmongering level. Do you want to put her into Nonentities I Have Known? If so, I'll Who's-Who her for you. Here goes. Bassett, Daphne, née Daphne Wade. O.D. (only daughter, George) of Horatio Wade, rector of somewhere in Sussex, I forget where, but Julia Oliphant will tell you. He, the rector, M. (married) 1, Daphne's mother, and was M.B. (married by) 2, the child's governess. He died in the year of his Lord I forget exactly when, leaving Daphne a little money, otherwise I can hardly see Bassett marrying her. But Hugo pulled it off all right. My broker knows him. He's in the Oil Crush now, but he was playing margins on a capital of twenty pounds when Daphne (excuse my vulgarity) caught the last bus home."

"She's a friend of Miss Oliphant's, is she?"

"She was. She and Julia and Rose were children together. But I'm not sure Julia speaks to her since The Parthian Arrow. She meant it for him all right, whether he meant his for her or not. Life's full of quiet humour, isn't it?"

I will abridge a little of my friend's liveliness. Indeed as she caught as it were out of the air something of my own mood, she dropped much of it herself. This was the substance of what she told me:

Derwent Rose had written a book called An Ape in Hell. I don't know, Derry never knew, I don't think anybody knows to this day, the real origin of the expression that formed its title; and if I were a syndic of one of these New Dictionaries I think I should frankly confess as much, instead of merely quoting other books as saying that "A woman who dies without bearing a child is said to lead an Ape in Hell." Had I written that book, and in my own way, I think the four corners of the earth would have heard of it; as Derwent Rose had written it, in his way, he had merely achieved a masterpiece for the reading of generations to come. Our contemporary agglomeration (if Mr Goddard is right) of ten and twelve years old intelligences had practically passed it over. Briefly, the book had to do with the merciless economic pressure that already, in 1910, made it difficult for people to marry in the freshness of their youth, and practically suicidal to have children. I cannot delay to say more of the book. I saw in it nothing but pity and beauty and tenderness and a savage and generous anger, and how anybody could have taken it in any other sense I could not imagine.

Yet one person had done so—a friend of his childhood, the author of The Parthian Arrow.

"One moment," I said when Madge arrived at this point. "There's one thing that isn't quite clear. His book came out in 1910. Hers only appeared quite lately."

"That's so," she admitted.

"But nobody brings out a rejoinder ten years after the event."

"Well—she did. Read the book. Another thing: she started her book immediately his appeared, in 1910."

"How do you know that?"

"Those sleeves her heroine wears went out in 1910," was her characteristic reply. "She never even took the trouble to bring them up to date."

So that the rancour, if there was any, was not only persistent, but seemed to have a curiously desultory quality as well.

"Well—go on," I said.

But here she broke out suddenly: "But surely, George, even you can see where the Ape must have hurt her!"

"As I've neither seen the lady nor read her book——"

"But you know what his book's all about.... It was in her childlessness that she felt it."

"What!" I cried. "Is anybody so stupid as to suppose that a man like Derwent Rose would——"

"Wait a bit. Look at it as she sees it. She married at twenty-nine. She's forty-one now. And nothing's happened, and nothing's likely to. They were boy and girl together. Now suppose I'd had an affair with somebody in my young days, and had married somebody else, and then he'd gone and—rubbed it in. I don't think I should have written a Parthian Arrow even then, but I'm not going to drop dead when I hear that another woman did."

"But—ten years!"

"Doesn't that just prove it?" she cried triumphantly. "If she'd had a baby the first year she'd probably have forgotten all about her book. But when the second year came, and the third, and the fourth—well, thank God I've got my Jennie at school; but I can guess. These things get worse for a woman instead of better as time goes on. And now she's forty-one. I can't say I see very much mystery about those ten years."

"But," I said, "all this rests on the assumption that at one time they were lovers. He certainly didn't speak as if that had been so."

"Ah, then he has spoken of her! What did he say?"

"Just what you'd expect him to say, of course—that he's awfully sick he's upset her without intending to, and wants to explain."

She mused. Then, with the most disconcerting promptitude, she laughed and threw her whole castle down to the ground.

"Well, I suppose I'm wrong. If that was really the colour of the Bear's hide I don't suppose he'd be a friend of yours, and I certainly shouldn't want to meet him. It's because I'm probably wrong that it's so fascinating. I don't want to be right just yet. No, George, all I said this afternoon was that it was an interesting situation, and I defy you to say it isn't. Now tell me lots and lots about him."

But that was impossible. Once more every sane particle in me was beginning to doubt whether I had been in Cambridge Circus that evening at all. Moreover, one other thing had struck me with something of a shock. This was those ten years during which Mrs Bassett had nursed her anger against him. Those ten years, for him, did not exist, or existed only with the most amazing qualifications. As mere time they did not exist, but as experience they did. For him the Arrow and the Ape were both contemporaneous and not. In one sense ten years separated them, but in another her retort had come back to him as it were by return of post. Desperately I tried to envisage a situation so utterly beyond reason. I tried to set it out in my mind in parallel columns:

He was thirty-five when he wrote his Ape.	She was thirty-one when she read it and began her rejoinder.
He was forty-five when he read the Arrow.	She was forty-one at the time that he read it.
But he was thirty-five again.	She was still forty-one.
He was going on getting younger.	She would get no younger.
He was convinced he would die at sixteen.	She——

But I had to give it up. It made my head ache. It shocked my sense of the unities. And then fortunately there came a revulsion.

After all (I thought testily) Rose might consider himself a confoundedly lucky fellow. What, after all, was he grumbling at? Because he was going to have his precious, precious youth all over again? His health and vigour and strength all over again, so that he could tear a book in two as I might have torn a piece of paper? His clear skin and glossy hair and the keen sight of his eyes once more? He was luckier than poor Madge and myself! And what, if that American was right, was he risking? Nothing that I could see, unless he should go beyond that age of the maximum of his faculties, which he was persuaded he would not do. And in addition to the approaching brilliance of his youth it was not impossible that he would keep the whole of his accumulated experience as well. Not for him that old and bitter cry that has so often been wrung from the rest of us: "Oh for my life over again, knowing what I know now!" So far, at any rate, he was having his life again, knowing all he knew at the turning-point. And the fellow was grumbling!

"Now tell me about him," said Madge.

But she could not suppress a yawn as she said it. I knew that she, like myself, was longing to slip out of her clothes and to get into bed.

"Another time," I said, wearily rising. "Which room are you putting me in?"

As she rose I did not notice what it was that she caught up from a side-table and put under her wrap. She preceded me upstairs. The room into which she showed me was one I had occupied before, and only a minor change or two had since been made. One of these caught my eye. It was a leather-framed photograph of Miss Oliphant that stood with the reading-lamp on the bedside table.

"Well, good night," Madge yawned. "They'll bring you tea up. Don't read too long—bad for the eyes and the electric-light bill——"

Then it was that I noticed the book she had quietly slipped on to the table. It was Mrs Bassett's book, The Parthian Arrow.