"The distinction," I threw in, "which Johannes Lange makes in his study of criminal determinism, his book, Crime and Destiny. The one-cell-originated twins, he contends, have identical motives and personalities. If one is a thief, the other has to be! He sets out to prove - and that pompous a.s.s, Haldane, who wrote the foreword, believes it, too - that there is no free will; that man"s moral course is predetermined, inescapable - a kind of scientific Calvinism."
"Precisely, just that," said Doctor Pelletier. "Anyhow, you understand that distinction."
I looked at him, still somewhat puzzled. "Yes," said I, "but still, I don"t see its application to this nasty business of Brutus h.e.l.lman."
"I was leading up to telling you," said Doctor Pelletier, in his matter-of-fact, forthright fashion of speech, "to telling you, Canevin, that the Thing is undoubtedly the parasitic, "Siamese twin" that I cut away from Brutus h.e.l.lman last Thursday morning, and which disappeared out of the operating-room. Also, from the evidence, I"d be inclined to think it is of the "dizygotic" type. That would not occur, in the case of "attached" twins, more than once in ten million times!"
He paused at this and looked at me. For my part, after that amazing, that utterly incredible statement, so calmly made, so dispa.s.sionately uttered, I could do nothing but sit limply in my chair and gaze woodenly at my gueSt. I was so astounded that I was incapable of uttering a word. But I did not have to say anything. Doctor Pelletier was speaking again, developing his thesis.
"Put together the known facts, Canevin. It is the scientific method, the only satisfactory method, when you are confronted with a situation like this one. You can do so quite easily, almost at random, here. To begin with, you never found the Thing in that little thatched hut after one of its attacks - did you?"
"No," I managed to murmur, out of a strangely dry mouth. Pelletier"s theory held me stultified by its unexpectedness, its utter, weird strangeness. The name "Ca.s.sius" smote my brain. That identical blood - "If the Thing had been, say, a rat," he continued, "as you supposed when it went for your fingers, it would have gone straight from its attacks on Brutus h.e.l.lman to its diggings - the refuge instinct; "holing-up." But it didn"t. You investigated several times and it wasn"t inside the little house, although it ran toward it, as you believed, after seeing it start that way the first night; although the creature that went for your hand was there, inside, before it suspected pursuit. You see? That gives us a lead, a clue. The Thing possesses a much higher level of intelligence than that of a mere rodent. Do you grasp that significant point, Canevin? The Thing, antic.i.p.ating pursuit, avoided capture by instinctively outguessing the pursuer. It went toward its diggings but deferred entrance until the pursuer had investigated and gone away. Do you get it?"
I nodded, not desiring to interrupt. I was following Pelletier"s thesis eagerly now.
He resumed, "Next - consider those wounds, those bites, on Brutus h.e.l.lman. They were never made by any small, ground-dwelling animal, a rodent, like a rat or a mongoose. No; those teeth marks are those of - well, say, a marmoset or any very small monkey; or, Canevin, of an unbelievably small human being!"
Pelletier and I sat and looked at each other. I think that, after an appreciable interval, I was able to nod my head in his direction. Pelletier continued, "The next point we come to - before going on to something a great deal deeper, Canevin - is the color of the Thing. You saw it. It was only a momentary glimpse, as you say, but you secured enough of an impression to seem pretty positive on that question of its color. Didn"t you?"
"Yes," said I slowly. "It was as black as a derby hat, Pelletier."
"There you have one point definitely settled, then." The doctor was speaking with a judicial note in his voice, the scientist in full stride now. "The well-established ethnic rule, the biological certainty in cases of miscegenation between Caucasians or quasi-Caucasians and the Negro or Negroid types is that the offspring is never darker than the darker of the two parents. The "black-baby" tradition, as a "throw-back" being produced by mulatto or nearly Caucasian parents is a bugaboo, Canevin, sheer bosh! It doesn"t happen that way. It cannot happen. It is a biological impossibility, my dear man. Although widely believed, that idea falls into the same category as the ostrich burying its head in the sand and thinking it is concealed! It falls in with the Amazon myth! The "Amazons" were merely long-haired Scythians, those "women-warriors" of antiquity. Why, d.a.m.n it, Canevin, it"s like believing in the Centaur to swallow a thing like that."
The doctor had become quite excited over his expression of biological orthodoxy. He glared at me, or appeared to, and lighted a fresh cigarette. Then, considering for a moment, while he inhaled a few preliminary puffs, he resumed. "You see what that proves, don"t you, Canevin?" he inquired, somewhat more calmly now.
"It seems to show," I answered, "since Brutus is very "clear-colored," as the Negroes would say, that one of his parents was a black; the other very considerably lighter, perhaps even a pure Caucasian."
"Right, so far," acquiesced the doctor. "And the other inference, in the case of twins - what?"
"That the twins were dizygotic, even though attached," said I slowly, as the conclusion came clear in my mind after Pelletier"s preparatory speech. "Otherwise, of course, if they were the other kind, the monocellular or monozygotic, they would have the same coloration, derived from either the dark or the light-skinned parent."
"Precisely," exclaimed Doctor Pelletier. "Now -"
"You mentioned certain other facts," I interrupted, ""more deep-seated," I think you said. What -"
"I was just coming to those, Canevin. There are, actually, two such considerations which occur to me. First - why did the Thing degenerate, undoubtedly after birth, of course, if there were no prenatal process of degeneration? They would have been nearly of a size, anyway, when born, I"d suppose. Why did It shrink up into a withered, apparently lifeless little homunculus, while its fellow twin, Brutus h.e.l.lman, attained to a normal manhood? There are some pretty deep matters involved in those queries, Canevin. It was comatose, shrunken, virtually dead while attached."
"Let"s see if we can"t make a guess at them," I threw in.
"What would you say?" countered Doctor Pelletier.
I nodded, and sat silently for several minutes trying to put what was in my mind together in some coherent form so as to express it adequately. Then: "A couple of possibilities occur to me," I began. "One or both of them might account for the divergence. First, the failure of one or more of the ductless glands, very early in the Thing"s life after birth. It"s the pituitary gland, isn"t it, that regulates the physical growth of an infant - that makes him grow normally. If that fails before it has done its full work, about the end of the child"s second year, you get a midget. If, on the other hand, it keeps on too long - does not dry up as it should, and cease functioning, its normal task finished - the result is a giant; the child simply goes on growing, bigger and bigger! Am I right, so far? And, I suppose, the cutting process released it from its coma."
"Score one!" said Doctor Pelletier, wagging his head at me. "Go on - what else? There are many cases, of course, of blood-letting ending a coma."
"The second guess is that Brutus had the stronger const.i.tution, and outstripped the other one. It doesn"t sound especially scientific, but that sort of thing does happen as I understand it. Beyond those two possible explanations I shouldn"t care to risk any more guesses."
"I think both those causes have been operative in this case," said Doctor Pelletier reflectively. "And, having performed that operation, you see, I think I might add a third, Canevin. It is purely conjectural. I"ll admit that frankly, but one outstanding circ.u.mstance supports it. I"ll come back to that shortly. In short, Canevin, I imagine - my instinct tells me - that almost from the beginning, quite unconsciously, of course, and in the automatic processes of outstripping his twin in physical growth, Brutus absorbed the other"s share of nutriments.
"I can figure that out, in fact, from several possible angles. The early nursing, for instance! The mother - she was, undoubtedly, the black parent - proud of her "clear" child, would favor it, nurse it first. There is, besides, always some more or less obscure interplay, some balanced adjustment, between physically attached twins. In this case, G.o.d knows how, that invariable "balance" became disadjusted - the adjustment became unbalanced, if you prefer it that way. The mother, too, from whose side the dark twin probably derived its const.i.tution, may very well have been a small, weakly woman. The fair-skinned other parent was probably robust, physically. But, whatever the underlying causes, we know that Brutus grew up to be normal and fully mature, and I know, from that operation, that the Thing I cut away from him was his twin brother, degenerated into an apparently lifeless homunculus, a mere appendage of Brutus, something which, apparently, had quite lost nearly everything of its basic humanity; even most of its appearance, Canevin - a Thing to be removed surgically, like a wen."
"It is a terrible idea," said I slowly, and after an interval. "But, it seems to be the only way to explain, er - the facts! Now tell me, if you please, what is that "outstanding circ.u.mstance" you mentioned which corroborates this, er - theory of yours."
"It is the Thing"s motive, Canevin," said Doctor Pelletier, very gravely, "allowing, of course, that we are right - that I am right - in a.s.suming for lack of a better hypothesis that what I cut away from h.e.l.lman had life in it; that it escaped; that it is now - well, trying to get at a thing like that, under the circ.u.mstances, I"d be inclined to say, we touch bottom!"
"Good G.o.d - the motive!" I almost whispered. "Why, it"s horrible, Pelletier; it"s positively uncanny. The Thing becomes, quite definitely, a horror. The motive - in that Thing! You"re right, old man. Psychologically speaking, it "touches bottom," as you say."
"And humanly speaking," added Doctor Pelletier in a very quiet voice.
Stephen came out and announced "breakfast." It was one o"clock. We went in and ate rather silently. As Stephen was serving the dessert Doctor Pelletier spoke to him. "Was h.e.l.lman"s father a white man, do you happen to know, Stephen?"
"De man was an engineer on board an English trading-vessel, sar."
"What about his mother?" probed the doctor.
"Her a resident of Antigua, sar," replied Stephen promptly, "and is yet alive. I am acquainted with her. h.e.l.lman ahlways send her some portion of his earnings, sar, very regularly. At de time h.e.l.lman born, her a "ooman which do washing for ships" crews, an" make an excellent living. Nowadays, de poor soul liddle more than a piteous invalid, sar. Her ahlways a small liddle "ooman, not too strong."
"I take it she is a dark woman?" remarked the doctor, smiling at Stephen.
Stephen, who is a medium-brown young man, a "zambo," as they say in the English Islands like St. Kitts and Montserrat and Antigua, grinned broadly at this, displaying a set of magnificent, glistening teeth.
"Sar," he replied, "h.e.l.lman"s mother de precisely identical hue of dis fella," and Stephen touched with his index finger the neat black bow tie which set off the snowy whiteness of his immaculate drill houseman"s jacket. Pelletier and I exchanged glances as we smiled at Stephen"s little joke.
On the gallery immediately after lunch, over coffee, we came back to that bizarre topic which Doctor Pelletier had called the "motive." Considered quite apart from the weird aspect of attributing a motive to a quasi-human creature of the size of a rat, the matter was clear enough. The Thing had relentlessly attacked Brutus h.e.l.lman again and again, with an implacable fiendishness; its brutal, single-minded efforts being limited in their disastrous effects only by its diminutive size and relative deficiency of strength. Even so, it had succeeded in driving a full-grown man, its victim, into a condition not very far removed from imbecility.
What obscure processes had gone on piling up c.u.mulatively to a fixed purpose of pure destruction in that primitive, degenerated organ that served the Thing for a brain! What dreadful weeks and months and years of semiconscious brooding, of existence endured parasitically as an appendage upon the instinctively loathed body of the normal brother! What savage hatred had burned itself into that minute, distorted personality! What incalculable instincts, deep buried in the backgrounds of the black heredity through the mother, had come into play - as evidenced by the Thing"s construction of the typical African hut as its habitation - once it had come, after the separation, into active consciousness, the newborn, freshly realized freedom to exercise and release all that acrid, seething hatred upon him who had usurped its powers of self-expression, its very life itself! What manifold thwarted instincts had, by the processes of subst.i.tution, crystallized themselves into one overwhelming, driving desire - the consuming instinct for revenge!
I shuddered as all this clarified itself in my mind, as I formed, vaguely, some kind of mental image of that personality. Doctor Pelletier was speaking again. I forced my engrossed mind to listen to him. He seemed very grave and determined, I noticed.
"We must put an end to all this, Canevin," he was saying. "Yes, we must put an end to it."
Ever since that first Sunday evening when the attacks began, as I look back over that hectic period, it seems to me that I had had in mind primarily the idea of capture and destruction of what had crystallized in my mind as "The Thing." Now a new and totally bizarre idea came in to cause some mental conflict with the destruction element in that vague plan. This was the almost inescapable conviction that the Thing had been originally - whatever it might be properly named now - a human being. As such, knowing well, as I did, the habits of the blacks of our Lesser Antilles, it had, unquestionably, been received into the church by the initial process of baptism. That indescribable creature which had been an appendage on Brutus h.e.l.lman"s body, had been, was now, according to the teaching of the church, a Christian. The idea popped into my mind along with various other sidelights on the situation, stimulated into being by the discussion with Doctor Pelletier which I have just recorded.
The idea itself was distressing enough, to one who, like myself, has always kept up the teachings of my own childhood, who has never found it necessary, in these days of mental unrest, to doubt, still less to abandon, his religion. One of the concomitants of this idea was that the destruction of the Thing after its problematical capture, would be an awkward affair upon my conscience, for, however far departed the Thing had got from its original status as "A child of G.o.d - an Inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven," it must retain, in some obscure fashion, its human, indeed its Christian, standing. There are those, doubtless, who might well, as I did, the habits of the blacks of our Lesser Antilles, who would lay all the stress on the plain necessity of stopping the Thing"s destructive malignancy without reference to any such apparently farfetched and artificial consideration. Nevertheless this aspect of our immediate problem, Pelletier"s gravely enunciated dictum: "We must put an end to all this," weighed heavily on my burdened mind. It must be remembered that I had put in a dreadful week over the affair.
I mention this scruple of mine because it throws up into relief, in a sense, those events which followed very shortly after Doctor Pelletier had summed up what necessarily lay before us, in that phrase of his.
We sat on the gallery and cogitated ways and means, and it was in the midst of this discussion that the scruple alluded to occurred to me. I did not mention it to Pelletier. I mentally conceded, of course, the necessity of capture. The subsequent disposal of the Thing could wait on that We had pretty well decided, on the evidence, that the Thing had been lying low during the day in the little hut-like arrangement which it appeared to have built for itself. Its attacks so far had occurred only at night. If we were correct, the capture would be a comparatively simple affair. There was, as part of the equipment in my house, a small bait net, of the circular closing-in-from-the-bottom kind, used occasionally when I took guests on a deep-sea fishing-excursion out to Congo or Levango Bays. This I unearthed, and looked over. It was intact, recently mended, without any holes in the tightly meshed netting designed to capture and retain small fish to be used later as live bait.
Armed with this, our simple plan readily in mind, we proceeded together to the alleyway about half-past two that afternoon, or, to be more precise, we were just at that moment starting down the gallery steps leading into my yard, when our ears were a.s.sailed by a succession of piercing, childish screams from the vicinity of the house"s rear.
I rushed down the steps, four at a tune, the more unwieldy Pelletier following me as closely as his propulsive apparatus would allow. I was in time to see, when I reached the corner of the house, nearly everything that was happening, almost from its beginning. It was a scene which, reproduced in a drawing accurately limned, would appear wholly comic. Little Aesculapius, the washer"s small, black child, his eyes popping nearly from his head, his diminutive black legs twinkling under his single flying garment, his voice uttering blood-curdling yowls of pure terror, raced diagonally across the yard in the direction of his mother"s washtub near the kitchen door, the very embodiment of crude, ungovernable fright, a veritable caricature, a figure of fun.
And behind him, coming on implacably, for all the world like a misshapen black frog, bounded the Thing, in hot pursuit, Its red tongue out of Its gash of a mouth, Its diminutive blubbery lips drawn back in a wide snarl through which a murderous row of teeth flashed viciously in the pouring afternoon sunlight. Little Aesculapius was making good the promise of his relatively long, thin legs - panic driving him. He outdistanced the Thing hopelessly, yet It forged ahead in a rolling, leaping series of bounds, using hands and arms, froglike, as well as Its strange, withered, yet strangely powerful bandied legs.
The sight, grotesque as it would have been to anyone unfamiliar with the Thing"s history and ident.i.ty, positively sickened me. My impulse was to cover my face with my hands, in the realization of its underlying horror. I could feel a faint nausea creeping over me, beginning to dim my senses. My washerwoman"s screams had added to the confusion within a second or two after those of the child had begun, and now, as I hesitated in my course toward the scene of confusion, those of the cook and scullery maid were added to the cacophonous din in my back yard. Little Aesculapius, his garment stiff against the breeze of his own progress, disappeared around the rearmost corner of the house to comparative safety through the open kitchen door. He had, as I learned sometime afterward, been playing about the yard and had happened upon the little hut in its obscure and seldom-visited alleyway. He had stooped, and picked it up. "The Thing" - the child used that precise term to describe It - lay, curled up, asleep within. It had leaped to Its splayed feet with a snarl of rage, and gone straight for the little Negro"s foot.
Thereafter the primitive instinct for self-preservation and Aesculapius"s excellent footwork had solved his problem. He reached the kitchen door, around the corner and out of our sight, plunged within, and took immediate refuge atop the shelf of a kitchen cabinet well out of reach of that malignant, unheard-of demon like a big black frog which was pursuing him and which, doubtless, would haunt his dreams for the rest of his existence. So much for little Aesculapius, who thus happily pa.s.ses out of the affair.
My halting was, of course, only momentary. I paused, as I have mentioned, but for so brief a period as not to allow Doctor Pelletier to catch up with me. I ran, then, with the net open in my hands, diagonally across the straight course being pursued by the Thing. My mind was made up to intercept It, entangle It in the meshes. This should not be difficult considering its smallness and the comparative shortness of Its arms and legs; and, having rendered It helpless, to face the ultimate problem of Its later disposal.
But this plan of mine was abruptly interfered with. Precisely as the flying body of the pursued pick"ny disappeared around the corner of the house, my cook"s cat, a ratter with a neighborhood reputation and now, although for the moment I failed to realize it, quite clearly an instrument of that Providence responsible for my scruple, came upon the scene with violence, precision, and that uncanny accuracy which actuates the feline in all its physical manifestations.
This avatar, which, according to a long-established custom, had been sunning itself demurely on the edge of the rain-water piping which ran along the low eaves of the three yard cabins, aroused by the discordant yells of the child and the three women in four distinct keys, had arisen, taken a brief, preliminary stretch, and condescended to turn its head toward the scene below - The momentum of the cat"s leap arrested instantaneously the Thing"s course of pursuit, bore it, sprawled out and flattened, to the ground, and twenty sharp powerful retractile claws sank simultaneously into the p.r.o.ne little body.
The Thing never moved again. A more merciful snuffing out would be difficult to imagine.
It was a matter of no difficulty to drive Junius, the cat, away from his kill. I am on terms of pleasant intimacy with Junius. He allowed me to take the now limp and flaccid little body away from him quite without protest, and sat down where he was, licking his paws and readjusting his rumpled fur.
And thus, unexpectedly, without intervention on our part, Pelletier and I saw brought to its sudden end, the tragical denouement of what seems to me to be one of the most outlandish and most distressing affairs which could ever have been evolved out of the mad mentality of Satan, who dwells in his own place to distress the children of men.
And that night, under a flagstone in the alleyway, quite near where the Thing"s strange habitation had been taken up, I buried the mangled leathery little body of that unspeakably grotesque homunculus which had once been the twin brother of my houseman, Brutus h.e.l.lman. In consideration of my own scruple which I have mentioned, and because, in all probability, this handful of strange material which I lowered gently into its last resting place had once been a Christian, I repeated the Prayer of Committal from the Book of Common Prayer. It may have been - doubtless was, in one sense - a grotesque act on my part. But I cherish the conviction that I did what was right.
HUGH WALPOLE.
THE TARN.
Foster moved unconsciously across the room, bent, toward the bookcase, and stood leaning forward a little, choosing now one book, now another, with his eyes. His host, seeing the muscles of the back of his thin, scraggy neck stand out above his low flannel collar, thought of the ease with which he could squeeze that throat, and the pleasure, the triumphant, l.u.s.tful pleasure that such an action would give him.
The low, white-walled, white-ceilinged room was flooded with the mellow, kindly Lakeland sun. October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes - golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches, in long weblike patterns of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and gray. The clouds pa.s.s in galleons across the mountains, now veiling, now revealing, now descending with ghostlike armies to the very breast of the plains, suddenly rising to the softest of blue skies and lying thin in lazy languorous color.
Fenwick"s cottage looked across to Low Fells; on his right, seen through side windows, sprawled the hills above Ullswater.
Fenwick looked at Foster"s back and felt suddenly sick, so that he sat down, veiling his eyes for a moment with his hand. Foster had come up there, come all the way from London, to explain. It was so like Foster to want to explain, to want to put things right. For how many years had he known Foster? Why, for twenty at least, and during all those years Foster had been forever determined to put things right with everybody. He could never bear to be disliked; he hated that anyone should think ill of him; he wanted everyone to be his friend. That was one reason, perhaps, why Foster had got on so well, had prospered so in his career; one reason, too, why Fenwick had not.
For Fenwick was the opposite of Foster in this. He did not want friends, he certainly did not care that people should like him - that is, people for whom, for one reason or another, he had contempt - and he had contempt for quite a number of people.
Fenwick looked at that long, thin, bending back and felt his knees tremble. Soon Foster would turn round and that high, reedy voice would pipe out something about the books. What jolly books you have, Fenwick! How many, many times in the long watches of the night, when Fenwick could not sleep, had he heard that pipe sounding close there - yes, in the very shadows of his bed! And how many times had Fenwick replied to it, I hate you! You are the cause of my failure in life! You have been in my way always. Always, always, always! Patronizing and pretending, and in truth showing others what a poor thing you thought me, how great a failure, how conceited a fool! I know. You can hide nothing from me! I can hear you!
For twenty years now Foster had been persistently in Fenwick"s way. There had been that affair, so long ago now, when Robins had wanted a sub-editor for his wonderful review the Parthenon, and Fenwick had gone to see him and they had had a splendid talk. How magnificently Fenwick had talked that day; with what enthusiasm he had shown Robins (who was blinded by his own conceit, anyway) the kind of paper the Parthenon might be; how Robins had caught his own enthusiasm, how he had pushed his fat body about the room, crying, "Yes, yes, Fenwick - that"s fine! That"s fine indeed!" - and then how, after all, Foster had got that job.
The paper had only lived for a year or so, it is true, but the connection with it had brought Foster into prominence just as it might have brought Fenwick!
Then, five years later, there was Fenwick"s novel, The Bitter Aloe - the novel upon which he had spent three years of blood-and-tears endeavor - and then, in the very same week of publication, Foster brought out The Circus, the novel that made his name; although, heaven knows, the thing was poor-enough sentimental trash. You may say that one novel cannot kill another - but can it not? Had not The Circus appeared would not that group of London know-alls - that conceited, limited, ignorant, self-satisfied crowd, who nevertheless can do, by their talk, so much to affect a book"s good or evil fortunes - have talked about The Bitter Aloe and so forced it into prominence? As it was, the book was stillborn and The Circus went on its prancing, triumphant way.
After that there had been many occasions - some small, some big - and always in one way or another that thin scraggy body of Foster"s was interfering with Fenwick"s happiness.
The thing had become, of course, an obsession with Fenwick. Hiding up there in the heart of the Lakes, with no friends, almost no company, and very little money, he was given too much to brooding over his failure. He was a failure and it was not his own fault. How could it be his own fault with his talents and his brilliance? It was the fault of modern life and its lack of culture, the fault of the stupid material mess that made up the intelligence of human beings - and the fault of Foster.
Always Fenwick hoped that Foster would keep away from him. He did not know what he would not do did he see the man. And then one day, to his amazement, he received a telegram: Pa.s.sing through this way. May I stop with you Monday and Tuesday? - Giles Foster.
Fenwick could scarcely believe his eyes, and then - from curiosity, from cynical contempt, from some deeper, more mysterious motive that he dared not a.n.a.lyze - he had telegraphed - Come.
And here the man was. And he had come - would you believe it? - to "put things right." He had heard from Hamlin Eddis that Fenwick was hurt with him, had some kind of grievance.
"I didn"t like to feel that, old man, and so I thought I"d just stop by and have it out with you, see what the matter was, and put it right."
Last night after supper Foster had tried to put it right. Eagerly, his eyes like a good dog"s who is asking for a bone that he knows he thoroughly deserves, he had held out his hand and asked Fenwick to "say what was up."
Fenwick had simply said that nothing was up; Hamlin Eddis was a d.a.m.ned fool.
"Oh, I"m glad to hear that!" Foster had cried, springing up out of his chair and putting his hand on Fenwick"s shoulder. "I"m glad of that, old man. I couldn"t bear for us not to be friends. We"ve been friends so long."
Lord! How Fenwick hated him at that moment.
"What a jolly lot of books you have!" Foster turned round and looked at Fenwick with eager, gratified eyes. "Every book here is interesting! I like your arrangement of them, too, and those open bookshelves - it always seems to me a shame to shut up books behind gla.s.s!"
Foster came forward and sat down quite close to his host. He even reached forward and laid his hand on his host"s knee. "Look here! I"m mentioning it for the last time - positively! But I do want to make quite certain. There is nothing wrong between us, is there, old man? I know you a.s.sured me last night, but I just want -"
Fenwick looked at him and, surveying him, felt suddenly an exquisite pleasure of hatred. He liked the touch of the man"s hand on his knee; he himself bent forward a little and, thinking how agreeable it would be to push Foster"s eyes in, deep, deep into his head, crunching them, smashing them to purple, leaving the empty, staring, b.l.o.o.d.y sockets, said, "Why, no. Of course not. I told you last night. What could there be?"
The hand gripped the knee a little more tightly.
"I am so glad! That"s splendid! Splendid! I hope you won"t think me ridiculous, but I"ve always had an affection for you ever since I can remember. I"ve always wanted to know you better. I"ve admired your talent so greatly. That novel of yours - the - the - the one about the aloe -"
"The Bitter Aloe?"
"Ah, yes, that was it. That was a splendid book. Pessimistic, of course, but still fine. It ought to have done better. I remember thinking so at the time."
"Yes, it ought to have done better."
"Your time will come, though. What I say is that good work always tells in the end."
"Yes, my time will come."
The thin, piping voice went on. "Now, I"ve had more success than I deserved. Oh, yes, I have. You can"t deny it. I"m not falsely modest. I mean it. I"ve got some talent, of course, but not as much as people say. And you! Why, you"ve got so much more than they acknowledge. You have, old man. You have indeed. Only - I do hope you"ll forgive my saying this - perhaps you haven"t advanced quite as you might have done. Living up here, shut away here, closed in by all these mountains, in this wet climate - always raining - why, you"re out of things! You don"t see people, don"t talk and discover what"s really going on. Why, look at me!"
Fenwick turned round and looked at him.
"Now, I have half the year in London, where one gets the best of everything, best talk, best music, best plays; and then I"m three months abroad, Italy or Greece or somewhere, and then three months in the country. Now, that"s an ideal arrangement. You have everything that way."
Italy or Greece or somewhere!
Something turned in Fenwick"s breast, grinding, grinding, grinding. How he had longed, oh, how pa.s.sionately, for just one week in Greece, two days in Sicily! Sometimes he had thought that he might run to it, but when it had come to the actual counting of the pennies - And how this fool, this fathead, this self-satisfied, conceited, patronizing - He got up, looking out at the golden sun.
"What do you say to a walk?" he suggested. "The sun will last for a good hour yet."
As soon as the words were out of his lips he felt as though someone else had said them for him. He even turned half round to see whether anyone else were there. Ever since Foster"s arrival on the evening before he had been conscious of this sensation. A walk? Why should he take Foster for a walk, show him his beloved country, point out those curves and lines and hollows, the broad silver shield of Ullswater, the cloudy purple hills hunched like blankets about the knees of some rec.u.mbent giant? Why? It was as though he had turned round to someone behind him and had said, "You have some further design in this."
They started out. The road sank abruptly to the lake, then the path ran between trees at the water"s edge. Across the lake tones of bright-yellow light, crocus-hued, rode upon the blue. The hills were dark.