Chapter XXIX: The Second Generation 260 (2)

“So the old buffer did go out after all!” he reflected, as he smoothed the tiny trousers in the drawer. “’E’s nothing but a gas-bag, anyway! Close with the coin, too--always was that!” He whistled, spat in the grate, hunted about for a cigarette, and again found relief in speech. My little dawg’s worth two of ’im all the time, and lots to spare. Tim’s _real_ ...!” And other things, too, he said in similar vein. He was utterly oblivious of Sir Timothy’s presence--serenely unconscious that the thin, fading line beneath the sheets _was_ the very individual he was talking about. “Even hides his cigarettes, does he? He’s right, though. Take away what he’s got and there wouldn’t be enough left over to stand upright at a poultry show!” And he guffawed merrily to himself. But what brought the final horror into that vanishing Personality on the bed was the singular fact that the valet made no remark about the absurd and horrible size of those tiny clothes. _This, then, was how others--even a hotel valet--saw him!_

All night long, it seemed, he lay in atrocious pain, the darkness mercifully hiding him, though never from himself, and only towards daylight did he pass off into a condition of unconsciousness. He must have slept very late indeed, too, for he woke to find sunlight in the room, and the housemaid--that tall, dignified girl who had tried to be kind--dusting and sweeping energetically. He screamed to her, but his voice was too feeble to make itself heard above the sweeping. The high-pitched squeak was scarcely audible even to himself. Presently she approached the bed and flung the sheets back. “That’s funny,” she observed, “could’ve sworn I saw something move!” She gave a hurried look, then went on sweeping. But in the process she had tossed his person, now no larger than a starved mouse, out on to the carpet. He cried aloud in his anguish, but the squeak was too faint to be audible. “Ugh!” exclaimed the girl, jumping to one side, “there’s that ’orrid mouse again! Dead, too, I do declare!” And then, without being aware of the fact, she swept him up with the dust and bits of paper into her pan.

Whereupon Sir Timothy awoke with a bad start, and perceived that his train was running somewhat uneasily into King’s Cross, and that he had slept nearly the whole way.

V

THE SECRET

I saw him walking down the floor of the A.B.C. shop where I was lunching. He was gazing about for a vacant seat with that vague stare of puzzled distress he always wore when engaged in practical affairs. Then he saw me and nodded. I pointed to the seat opposite; he sat down. There was a crumb in his brown beard, I noticed. There had been one a year ago, when I saw him last.

“What a long time since we met,” I said, genuinely glad to see him. He was a most lovable fellow, though his vagueness was often perplexing to his friends.

“Yes--er--h’mmm--let me see----”

“Just about a year,” I said.

He looked at me with an expression as though he did not see me. He was delving in his mind for dates and proofs. His fierce eyebrows looked exactly as though they were false--stuck on with paste--and I imagined how puzzled he would be if one of them suddenly dropped off into his soup. The eyes beneath, however, were soft and beaming; the whole face was tender, kind, gentle, and when he smiled he looked thirty instead of fifty.

“A year, is it?” he remarked, and then turned from me to the girl who was waiting to take his order. This ordering was a terrible affair. I marvelled at the patience of that never-to-be-tipped waitress in the dirty black dress. He looked with confusion from me to her, from her to the complicated bill of fare, and from this last to me again.

“Oh, have a cup of coffee and a bit of that lunch-cake,” I said with desperation. He stared at me for a second, one eyebrow moving, the other still as the grave. I felt an irresistible desire to laugh.

“All right,” he murmured to the girl, “coffee and a bit of that lunch-cake.” She went off wearily. “And a pat of butter,” he whispered after her, but looking at the wrong waitress. “And a portion of that strawberry jam,” he added, looking at another waitress.

Then he turned to talk with me.

“Oh no,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the crowd of girls by the counter; “_not_ the jam. I forgot I’d ordered that lunch-cake.”

Again he switched round in his chair--he always perched on the edge like a bird--and made a great show of plunging into a long-deferred chat with me. I knew what would come. He was always writing books and sending them out among publishers and forgetting where they were at the moment.

“And how are _you_?” he asked. I told him.

“Writing anything these days?” I ventured boldly.

The eyebrows danced. “Well, the fact is, I’ve only just finished a book.”

“Sent it anywhere?”

“It’s gone off, yes. Let me see--it’s gone to--er----” The coffee and lunch-cake arrived without the pat of butter, but with two lots of strawberry jam. “I won’t have jam, thank you. And will you bring a pat of butter?” he muttered to the girl. Then, turning to me again--“Oh, I really forget for the moment. It’s a good story, I think.” His novels were, as a fact, extraordinarily good, which was the strange part of it all.

“It’s about a woman, you see, who----” He proceeded to tell me the story in outline. Once he got beyond the confused openings of talk the man became interesting, but it took so long, and was so difficult to follow, that I remembered former experiences and cut him short with a lucky inspiration.

“Don’t spoil it for me by telling it. I shan’t enjoy it when it comes out.”

He laughed, and both eyebrows dropped and hid his eyes. He busied himself with the cake and butter. A second crumb went to join the first. I thought of balls in golf bunkers, and laughed outright. For a time the conversation flagged. I became aware of a certain air of mystery about him. He was full of something besides the novel--something he wanted to talk about but had probably forgotten “for the moment.” I got the impression he was casting about in the upper confusion of his mind for the cue.

“You’re writing something else now?” I ventured.

The question hit the bull’s-eye. Both eyebrows shot up, as though they would vanish next minute on wires and fly up into the wings. The cake in his hand would follow; and last of all he himself would go. The children’s pantomime came vividly before me. Surely he was a made-up figure on his way to rehearsal.

“I am,” he said; “but it’s a _great_ secret. I’ve got a _magnificent_ idea!”

“I promise not to tell. I’m safe as the grave. Tell me.”

He fixed his kindly, beaming eyes on my face and smiled charmingly.

“It’s a play,” he murmured, and then paused for effect, hunting about on his plate for cake, where cake there was none.

“Another piece of that lunch-cake, please,” he said in a sudden loud voice, addressed to the waitresses at large. “It came to me the other day in the London Library--er--very fine idea----”

“Something really original?”

“Well, I think so, perhaps.” The cake came with a clatter of plates, but he pushed it aside as though he had forgotten about it, and leaned forward across the table. “I’ll tell you. Of course you won’t say anything. I don’t want the idea to get about. There’s money in a good play--and people do steal so, don’t they?”

I made a gesture, as much as to say, “Do I look like a man who would repeat?” and he plunged into it with enthusiasm.

Oh! The story of that play! And those dancing eyebrows! And the bits of the plot he forgot and went back for! And the awful, wild confusion of names and scenes and curtains! And the way his voice rose and fell like a sound carried to and fro by a gusty wind! And the feeling that something was coming which would make it all clear--but which never came!

“The woman, you see,”--all his stories began that way,--“is one of those modern women who ... and when she dies she tells on her death-bed how she knew all the time that Anna----”

“That’s the heroine, I think?” I asked keenly, after ten minutes’ exposition, hoping to Heaven my guess was right.

“No, no, she’s the widow, don’t you remember, of the clergyman who went over to the Church of Rome to avoid marrying her sister--in the first act--or didn’t I mention that?”

“You mentioned it, I think, but the explanation----”

“Oh, well, you see, the Anglican clergyman--he’s Anglican in the first act--always suspected that Miriam had not died by her own hand, but had been poisoned. In fact, he finds the incriminating letter in the gas-pipe, and recognises the handwriting----”

“Oh, _he_ finds the letter?”

“Rather. _He_ finds the letter, don’t you see? and compares it with the others, and makes up his mind who wrote it, and goes straight to Colonel Middleton with his discovery.”

“So Middleton, of course, refuses to believe----”

“Refuses to believe that the second wife--oh, I forgot to mention that the clergyman had married again in his own Church; married a woman who turns out to be Anna’s--no, I mean Miriam’s--half-sister, who had been educated abroad in a convent,--refuses to believe, you see, that _his_ wife had anything to do with it. Then Middleton has a splendid scene. He and the clergyman have the stage to themselves. Wyndham’s the man for Middleton, of course. Well, he declares that he has the proof--proof that must convince everybody, and just as he waves it in the air in comes Miriam, who is walking in her sleep, from her sick-bed. They listen. She is talking in her sleep. By Jove, man, don’t you see it? She is talking about the crime! She practically confesses it before their very eyes.”

“Splendid!”

“And she never wakes up--I mean, not in that scene. She goes back to bed and has no idea next day what she has said and done.”

“And the clergyman’s honour is saved?” I hazarded, amazed at my rashness.

“No. _Anna_ is saved. You see, I forgot to tell you that in the second act Miriam’s brother, Sir John, had----”

The waitress brought the little paper checks.

“Let’s go outside and finish. It’s getting frightfully stuffy here,” I suggested desperately, picking up the bills.

We walked out together, he still talking against time with the most terrible confusion of names and acts and scenes imaginable. He bumped into everybody who came in his way. His beard was full of crumbs. His eyebrows danced with excitement--I knew then positively they were false--and his voice ran up and down the scale like a buzz-saw at work on a tough board.

“By Jove, old man, that _is_ a play!”

He turned to me with absolute happiness in his face.

“But for Heaven’s sake, don’t let out a word of it. I must have a copyright performance first before it’s really safe.”

“Not a word, I promise.”

“It’s a dead secret--till I’ve finished it, I mean--then I’ll come and tell you the _dénouement_. The last curtain is simply magnificent. You see, Middleton never hears----”

“I won’t tell a living soul,” I cried, running to catch a bus. “It’s a secret--yours and mine!”

And the omnibus carried me away Westwards.

Meanwhile the play remains to this day a “dead secret,” known only to the man who thinks he told it, and to the other man who knows he heard it told.

VI

THE LEASE

The other day I came across my vague friend again. Last time it was in an A.B.C. shop; this time it was in a bus. We always meet in humble places.

He was vaguer than ever, fuddled and distrait; but delightfully engaging. He had evidently not yet lunched, for he wore no crumb; but I had a shrewd suspicion that beneath his green Alpine hat there lurked a straw or two in his untidy hair. It would hardly have surprised me to see him turn with his childlike smile and say, “Would you mind _very much_ taking them out for me? You know they _do_ tickle so!”--half mumbled, half shouted.

Instead, he tried to shake hands, and his black eyebrows danced. He looked as loosely put together as a careless parcel. I imagined large bits of him tumbling out.

“You’re off somewhere or other, I suppose?” he said; and the question was so characteristic it was impossible not to laugh.

I mentioned the City.

“I’m going that way too,” he said cheerfully. He had come to the conclusion that he could not shake hands with safety; there were too many odds and ends about him--gloves, newspapers, half-open umbrella, parcels. Evidently he had left the house uncertain as to where he was going, and had brought all these things in case, like the White Knight, he might find a use for them on the way. His overcoat was wrongly buttoned, too, so that on one side the collar reached almost to his ear. From the pockets protruded large envelopes, white and blue. I marvelled again how he ever concentrated his mind enough to write plays and novels; for in both the action was quick and dramatic; the dialogue crisp, forcible, often witty.

“Going to the City!” I exclaimed. “_You?_” Museums, libraries, second-hand book-shops were his usual haunts--places where he could be vague and absent-minded without danger to anyone. I felt genuinely curious. “Copy of some kind? Local colour for something, eh?” I laughed, hoping to draw him out.

A considerable pause followed, during which he rearranged several of his parcels, and his eyebrows shot up and down like two black-beetles dancing a hornpipe.

“I’m helping a chap with his lease,” he replied suddenly, in such a very loud voice that everybody in the bus heard and became interested.

He had this way of alternately mumbling and talking very loud--absurdly loud; picking out unimportant words with terrific emphasis. He also had this way of helping others. Indeed, it was difficult to meet him without suspecting an errand of kindness--rarely mentioned, however.

“Chap with his lease,” he repeated in a kind of roar, as though he feared someone had not heard him--the driver, possibly!

We were in a white Putney bus, going East. The policeman just then held it up at Wellington Street.

“It’s jolly stopping like this,” he cried; “one can chat a bit without having to shout.”

My curiosity about the lease, or rather about his part in it, prevented an immediate reply. How he could possibly help in such a complicated matter puzzled me exceedingly.

“Horrible things, leases!” I said at length. “Confusing, I mean, with their endless repetitions and absence of commas. Legal language seems so needlessly----”

“Oh, but this one is right enough,” he interrupted. “You see, my pal hasn’t signed it yet. He’s in rather a muddle about it, to tell the truth, and I’m going to get it straightened out by my solicitor.”

The bus started on with a lurch, and he rolled against me.

“It’s a three-year lease,” he roared, “with an option to renew, you know--oh no, I’m wrong there, by the bye,” and he tapped my knee and dropped a glove, and, when it was picked up and handed to him, tried to stuff it up his sleeve as though it was a handkerchief--“I’m wrong there--that’s the house he’s in at present, and his wife wants to break _that_ lease because she doesn’t like it, and they’ve got more children than they expected (these words whispered), and there’s no bathroom, and the kitchen stairs are absurdly narrow----”

“But the lease--you were just saying----?”

“Quite so; I was,” and both eyebrows dropped so that the eyes were almost completely hidden, “but _that_ lease _is_ all right. It’s the other one I was talking about just then----”

“The house he’s in now, you mean, or----?” My head already swam. The attention of the people opposite had begun to wander.

My friend pulled himself together and clutched several parcels.

“No, no, no,” he explained, smiling gently; “he likes _this_ one. It’s the other I meant--the one his wife doesn’t approve of--the one with the narrow bathroom stairs and no kitchen--I mean the narrow kitchen stairs and no bathroom. It has so few cupboards, too, and the nursery chimneys smoke every time the wind’s in the east. (Poor man! How devotedly he must have listened while it was being drummed into his good-natured ears!) So you see, Henry, my pal, thought of giving it up when the lease fell in and taking this other house--the one I was just talking about--and putting in a bathroom at his own expense, provided the landlord----”

A man opposite who had been listening intently got up to leave the bus with such a disappointed look that my friend thought it was the conductor asking for another fare, and fumbled for coppers. Seeing his mistake in time, he drew out instead a large blue envelope. Two other papers, feeling neglected, came out at the same time and dropped upon the floor. My friend and a working-man beside him stooped to pick them up and knocked their heads violently in the process.

“I _beg_ your pardon,” exclaimed the vague one, very loud, with a tremendous emphasis on the “beg.”

“Oh, that’s all right, guv’nor,” said the working-man, handing over the papers. “Might ’appen to anybody, that!”

“I beg your pardon?” repeated my friend, not hearing him quite.

“I said a thing like that might ’appen to anyone,” repeated the other, louder.

He turned to me with his happy smile. “I suppose it might, yes,” he said, very low. Then he opened the blue envelope and began to hunt.

“Oh no, that’s the wrong envelope. It’s the other,” he observed vaguely. “What a bore, isn’t it? This is merely a copy of his letters to--er--to----”

He looked distressingly about him through the windows, as though he hoped to find his words in the shop-letterings or among the advertisements.

“Where are we, I wonder? Oh yes; there’s St. Paul’s. Good!” His mind returned to the subject in hand. Several people got out, and swept the papers from his knee to the ground; and the next few minutes he spent gathering them up, stooping, clutching his coat, stuffing envelopes into his pockets, and exclaiming “I _beg_ your pardon!” to the various folk he collided with in the process.

At last some sort of order was restored.

“----merely the letters,” he resumed where he had left off, and in a voice that might suitably have addressed a public meeting, “the letters to his tenant. There’s a tenant in the other house. I forgot to mention _that_, I think----”

“I think you did. But, I say, look here, my dear chap,” I burst out, at length, in sheer self-preservation, “why in the world don’t you let the fellow manage his own leases? It’s giving you a dreadful lot of trouble. It’s the most muddled-up thing I ever heard.”

“That’s because you’ve got no head for business,” he whispered sweetly. “Besides, it’s really a pleasure to me to help him. That’s the best part of life, after all--helping people who get into muddles.” He looked at me with his kindly smile. Then he turned and smiled at everybody in the bus--vaguely, happily, his black eyebrows very fierce. Several people, I fancied, smiled back at him.

“Let’s see,” he said, after a pause; “where was I?”

“You were saying something about a lease,” I told him; “but, honestly, old man, I’m afraid I haven’t quite followed it.”

“That’s my fault,” he said; “all my fault. I feel a bit stupid to-day. I’ve got the ’flue, you know, and a touch of fever with it. But I promised Henry I would see to it for him, because he’s awfully busy----”

“Is he really!” I wished I knew Henry. I felt a strong desire to say something to him.

“----packing up for a trip to Mexico, you know, or something; so, of course, he finds it difficult to--er--to----” He looked gently about him. “Where the deuce am I?” he asked in a very loud voice indeed.

Several people, myself among them, mentioned the Mansion House.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed, gathering up parcels, envelopes, and various loose parts of his body--his aching body, “I’m afraid--I must be getting out. I’m in the wrong bus. I wanted Essex Street--up there by the Law Courts, you know.”

But I really couldn’t stand it any longer. I took him by the arm and planted him, parcels, papers, and all, by my side in a taxi. We whizzed back along Queen Victoria Street, and on the way I sorted him out, buttoned his overcoat so that it no longer tickled his ear, rolled up his umbrella so that the points no longer got caught, and made him put on both gloves, so that he could not drop them any more. And I kept tight hold of him until we reached Essex Street. He talked leases the whole way.

“Thanks awfully,” he said at the end, smiling; “you’re always kind--if a little rough. But I’ll keep on the taxi, I think, now. The fact is, I find I’ve left the right lease at home after all--you know, the one about the house without the----”

I heard the rest, alternately mumbled and shouted at me, as the taxi whirred off into the Strand, bound for some unknown destination in Chelsea. It was impossible to help him more. But I should like to have heard what he said to (_a_) the chauffeur at the end of his journey, (_b_) to the solicitor. I should also like to swear that when he got back to his rooms he found the right lease had been in his pocket all the time.

I met him again the following day, but I had not the courage to ask him anything.

VII

UP AND DOWN

His vagueness, apparently, is only on the surface of his mind; down at the centre the pulses of life throb with unusual vigour and decision. And I think the explanation of his puzzled expression and dazed manner--to say nothing of his idiotic replies--when addressed upon ordinary topics is due to the fact that he prefers to live in that hot and very active centre. He dislikes being called out of it.

Down there his creative imagination is for ever at work: he sees clearly, thinks hard, acts even splendidly. But the moment you speak to him about trivial things the mists gather about his eyes, his voice hesitates, his hands make futile gestures, and he screws up his face into an expression of puzzled alarm. Up he comes to the best of his ability, but it is clear he is vexed at being disturbed.

“Oh yes, I think so--very,” he replied the other day as we met on our way to the Club and I asked if he had enjoyed his holiday.

“Awful amount of rain, though, wasn’t there?”

“Was there, now? Yes, there must have been, of course. It _was_ a wet summer.”

He looked at me as though I were a comparative stranger, although our intimacy is of years’ standing, and our talks on life, literature, and all the rest are a chief pleasure to each of us. We had not met for some months. I wanted to pierce through to that hot centre where the real man lived, and to find out what the real man had been doing during the interval. He came up but slowly, however.

“You went to the mountains as usual, I suppose?” he asked, with his mind obviously elsewhere. He hopped along the pavement with his quick, bird-like motion.

“Mountains, yes. And you?”

He made no reply. From his face I could tell he had come about half-way up, but was already on the way down again. Once he got back to that centre of his I should get nothing out of him at all.

“And you?” I repeated louder. “Abroad, I suppose, somewhere?”

“Well--er--not exactly,” he mumbled. “That is to say--I--er--went to Switzerland somewhere--Austria, I mean--down there on the way towards Italy _beyond Bozen, you know_.” He ended the sentence very loud indeed, with quite absurd emphasis, as his way is when he knows he hasn’t been listening. “I found a quiet inn out of the tourist track and did a rare lot of work there too.” His face cleared and the brown eyes began to glow a little. It was like seeing the sun through opening mists. “Come in, and I’ll tell you about it,” he added, in an eager whisper, as we reached the Club doors.

At the same moment, however, the porter came down the steps and touched his hat, and my vague friend, recognising a face he felt he ought to know, stopped to ask him how he was, and whether So-and-so was back yet; and while the porter replied briefly and respectfully I saw to my dismay the mists settle down again upon the other’s face. A moment later the porter touched his hat again and moved off down the street. My friend looked round at me as though I had but just arrived upon the scene.

“Here we are,” he observed gently, “at the Club. I think I shall go in. What are you going to do?”

“I’m coming in too,” I said.

“Good,” he murmured; “let’s go in together, then,” his thoughts working away busily at something deep within him.

On our way to the hat-racks, and all up the winding stairs, he mumbled away about the wet summer, and tourists, and his little mountain inn, but never a word of the work I was so anxious to hear about, and he so anxious really to tell. In the reading-room I manœuvred to get two arm-chairs side by side before he could seize the heap of papers he smothered his lap with, but never read.

“And where have _you_ been all the summer?” he asked, crossing his little legs and speaking in a voice loud enough to have been heard in the street. “Somewhere in the mountains, I suppose, as usual?”

“You were going to tell me about the work you got through up in your lonely inn,” I insisted sharply. “Was it a play, or a novel, or criticism, or what?” He looked so small and lost in the big arm-chair that I felt quite ashamed of myself for speaking so violently. He turned round on the slippery leather and offered me a cigarette. The glow came back to his face.

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact it was both. That is, I was preparing a stage version of my new novel.” All the mist had gone now; he was alive at the centre, and thoroughly awake. He snapped his case to and put it away before I had taken my cigarette. But, of course, he did not notice that, and held out a lighted match to my lips as though there was something there to light.

“No, thanks,” I said quickly, fearful that if I asked again for the cigarette the mists would instantly gather once more and the real man disappear.

“Won’t you _really_, though?” he said, blowing the match out and forgetting to light his own cigarette at the same time. “I did the whole scenario, and most of the first act. There was nothing else to do. It rained all the time, and the place was quiet as the grave----”

A waiter brought him several letters on a tray. He took them automatically. The face clouded a bit.

“What’ll you have?” he asked absent-mindedly, acting automatically upon the presence of the waiter.

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Nor will I, then. Oh yes, I will, though--I’ll have some dry ginger ale. Here, waiter! Bring me a small dry ginger ale.”

The waiter, with the force of habit, bent his head questioningly for my order too.

“_You_ said----?” asked my exasperating friend. He was right down in the mists now, and I knew I should never get him up again this side of lunch.

“I said nothing, thanks.”

“Nothing, then, for this gentleman,” he continued, gazing up at the waiter as though he were some monster seen for the first time, “and for me--a dry ginger ale, please.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, moving off.

“Small,” the other called after him.

“Yessir--small.”

“And a slice of lemon in it.”

The waiter inclined his head respectfully from the door. The other turned to me, searching in his perturbed mind--I could tell it by the way his eyes worked--for the trail of his vanished conversation. Before he got it, however, he slithered round again on the leather seat towards the door.

“A bit of ice too, don’t forget!”

The waiter’s head peeped round the corner, and from the movement of his lips I gathered he repeated the remark about the bit of ice.

“I _did_ say ‘dry’?” my friend asked, looking anxiously at me; “didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“And a bit of lemon?”

“And a slice of lemon.”

“And what are _you_ going to have, then? Upon my word, old man, I forgot to ask you.” He looked so distressed that it was impossible to show impatience.

“Nothing, thanks. You asked me, you know.”

A pause fell between us. I gave it up. He would talk when he wanted to, but there was no forcing him. It struck me suddenly that he had a rather fagged and weary look for a man who had been spending several weeks at a mountain inn with work he loved. The pity and affection his presence always wakes in me ran a neck-and-neck race. At that “centre” of his, I knew full well, he was ever devising plans for the helping of others, quite as much as creating those remarkable things that issued periodically, illunderstood by a sensation-loving public, from the press. A sharp telepathic suspicion flashed through my mind, but before there was time to give it expression in words, up came the waiter with a long glass of ginger ale fizzing on a tray.

He handed it to my vague friend, and my vague friend took it and handed it to me.

“But it’s yours, my dear chap,” I suggested.

He looked puzzled for a second, and then his face cleared. “I forget what _you_ ordered,” he observed softly, looking interrogatively at the waiter and at me. We informed him simultaneously, “Nothing,” and the waiter respectfully mentioned the price of the drink. My friend’s left hand plunged into his trousers pocket, while his right carried the glass to his lips. Perhaps his left hand did not know what his right was about, or perhaps his mind was too far away to direct the motions of either with safety. Anyhow, the result was deplorable. He swallowed an uncomfortable gulp of air-bubbles and ginger--and choked--over me, over the waiter and tray, over his beard and clothes. The floating lump of ice bobbed up and hit his nose. I never saw a man look so surprised and distressed in my life. I took the glass from him, and when his left hand finally emerged with money he handed it first vaguely to me as though I were the waiter--for which there was no real excuse, since we were not in evening dress.

When, at length, order was restored and he was sipping quietly at the remains of the fizzing liquid, he looked up at me over the brim of his glass and remarked, with more concentration on the actual present than he had yet shown:

“By the way, you know, I’m going away to-morrow--going abroad for my holiday. Taking a lot of work with me, too----”

“But you’ve only just come back!” I expostulated, with a feeling very like anger in my heart.

He shook his head with decision. Evidently that choking had choked him into the living present. He was really “up” this time, and not likely to go down again.

“No, no,” he replied; “I’ve been here all the summer in town looking after old Podger----”

“Old Podger!” I remembered a dirty, down-at-heel old man I once met at my friend’s rooms--a poet who had “smothered his splendid talent” in drink, and who was always at starvation’s door. “What in the world was the matter with Podger?”

“D.T. I’ve been nursing him through it. The poor devil nearly went under this time. I’ve got him into a home down in the country at last, but all August he was--well, we thought he was gone.”

_All August!_ So that was how my friend’s summer had been spent. With never a word of thanks probably at that!

“But your mountain inn beyond Bozen! You said----”

“Did I? I must be wool-gathering,” he laughed, with that beautifully tender smile that comes sometimes to his delicate, dreamy face. “That was _last_ year. I spent my holidays last year up there. How stupid of me to get so absurdly muddled!” He plunged his nose into the empty glass, waiting for the last drop to trickle out, with his neck at an angle that betrayed the collar to be undone and the tie sadly frayed at the edges.

“But--all the work you said you did up there--the scenario and the first act and--and----”

He turned upon me with such sudden energy that I fairly jumped. Then, in a voice that mumbled the first half of his sentence, but shouted the end like a German officer giving instructions involving life or death, I heard:

“But, my dear good fellow, you don’t half listen to what I say! All that work, as I told you just now, is what I expect and mean to do when I get up there. _Now_--have you got it clear at last?”

He looked me up and down with great energy. By biting the inner side of my lip I kept my face grave. Later we went down to lunch together, and I heard details of the weeks of unselfish devotion he had lavished upon “old Podger.” I would give a great deal to possess some of the driving power for good that throbs and thrills at the real centre of my old friend with the vague manner and the absent-minded surface. But he is a singular contradiction, and almost always misunderstood. I should like to know, too, what Podger thinks.

VIII

FAITH CURE ON THE CHANNEL

A letter from my vague friend was always a source of difficulty: it allowed of so many interpretations--contradictory often. But this one was comparatively plain sailing:--

“You said you were going abroad about this time. So am I. Let’s go
as far as Paris together. Send me a line to above address at once.
Thursday or Friday would suit me.--Yours,