book I shall be near it again. And"--he bent the grey-blue eyes solemnly

on mine--"shall I tell you what _would_ completely settle it? If anybody should see that ghost and scream!... I've got a most fearful power, George. A man who can make people scream as I could oughtn't to be at large. Ghosts ought to get where they belong--off the map altogether. My God, if it slipped out one day when I didn't mean it--just these three words--'I'm Derwent Rose'----"

Then suddenly his voice shook pitiably. He spread out his hands.

"George, old fellow, you can't imagine what a joy it was to see you at that place to-night! You haven't realised it yet--you don't know what I went through before I plucked up courage to speak to you. You're the only living creature I used to know that I _can_ know now--the only one--the only one on earth. I know them, but I daren't--daren't--let them know me. It gets very, very, very lonely sometimes----"

Lonely sometimes! My heart ached for him. It seemed to me that that loneliness was a gulf that all the pity in the universe could not fill. No, I had not realised. I had thought I had, but I hadn't. It now came quite home to me that, while he was free to make a new acquaintance at any moment he pleased, that acquaintance could hardly last longer than the moment in which it was made. For say it lasted for three weeks. At the end of those three weeks the hand he had taken would be three weeks older, but his own hand might be a hundred weeks younger. And so it must go on: hail--and farewell. He, beyond measure gifted, was denied this gift. He could not stop by the way to make a single friend. For others the calm and gentle progress to age, the greetings among themselves, the accosting by the loved familiar name; but Derwent Rose had no name. Without a name Daphne Bassett had set a dog on him; what would she have set on him had he said "I'm Derwent Rose"? Lightning was safer to handle than that name of his. It might miss--but it might hit, make mad, kill.

Sooner or later, I supposed, I should have to tell him that Julia Oliphant knew as much about his state as I knew myself. I had had no shadow of right to betray him to her thus. But in the meantime he was resolved that he would not turn that voltage of his identity either on to her or anybody else.

III

In its way, one of the most singular portions of our conversation occurred when I asked him how he was placed as regards money. After all he must have money. Even a man who lives his life backwards must eat and have his boots soled, and pay twenty-five shillings a week for a loft over a garage. At first he seemed reluctant to answer me.

"I'm afraid I ran through rather a lot just at first," he said hesitatingly--his first admission that he had not inhabited Trenchard's garret for the whole of the time since I had last seen him. "But that will be all right. I can make lots of money."

"How?" ("Not by that book of yours," I said emphatically to myself.)

"Oh, you needn't worry about that. I assure you I can. I've thought it all out most carefully."

"I wish you'd tell me."

Then, eagerly, jerkily, he unfolded his maddest idea yet.

"I told you you hadn't grasped it. Nobody grasps it till they've got to live it. You see, it's all a question of time. Now look at it carefully.... I'm not fixed. I'm a constantly moving quantity. For that reason I can't take an ordinary job like anybody else. Oh, I could get one all right. It would be the simplest thing in the world for me to walk into one of these Sandow places, Ince's or Jones's or any of 'em, and say, 'Just pass me a few of those two hundred pound weights,' and scare 'em alive with what I could do. In fact that's the whole situation--I _should_ scare 'em alive. You can't show pupils one man one day and perhaps a different one altogether the next; it isn't decent. Here's a nut for you to crack, George: I'm dead, a ghost. But my appearance is one of the most conspicuous things you ever saw. A man like me can't hide himself. The King or the Prince of Wales might walk down Piccadilly unrecognised, but not an athletic phenomenon like me. So as well as being the loneliest, I'm also one of the most public men living."

"So you propose to make money out of athletics?"

"Steady; let's take it as it comes. I've thought it all out, and I don't see a single flaw in it. Here's the problem: I want a large sum of money, I want to make it honestly, and if possible instantaneously, that is to say while I'm still stationary. Now how am I to do it?"

"You can't do it."

"Well, I say I can."

"How?"

You wouldn't guess in a hundred years what it was he proposed to do.

He intended to fight Carpentier.

"All in the fraction of a second, George," he said, appealing for my approval. "Knock-out punch for one of these mammoth purses, fix yourself up for life, and then disappear. It's absolutely sound reasoning."

"It's the craziest thing I ever heard."

"Why?" he asked, his eyes innocently on mine. "It's perfectly feasible."

"How would you get the match? Do you suppose any promoter would look at you? Would any champion? Would his manager let him? Remember that championship's a business. Champions make money as long as they're champions and no longer. They take no risks. And part of their business is to sidestep dangerous matches."

But he had an answer to that that evidently seemed to him conclusive. His eyes sparkled.

"Exactly! That's the very reason I picked Carpentier. Carpentier, man, Georges Carpentier! _He_ isn't a sidestepper! He's the most thoroughgoing sportsman alive! Look at the way he gave that Yorkshire lad his match! Sidestep, that Frenchman? Look here. You know I speak French like a native. Well, I shouldn't in the least mind going straight up to him and putting the whole proposition before him."

"That you were out after his championship and incidentally his living?"

"Yes, and I jolly well know what he'd do."

"So do I. He'd turn you over to Descamps and the negotiations would last a couple of years. That isn't instantaneous."

"He'd do nothing of the sort. _That_ great fellow?... Kiss me. He'd kiss me on both cheeks, shout '_C'est ca!_' and tell Descamps to fix it up straight away. Of course I wouldn't hurt him."

I stared. "_Could_ you put Carpentier out?"

He laughed. A laugh was his reply.

"But suppose--an accident can always happen--suppose he put _you_ out?"

This time I had not even a laugh for a reply.

He was fast asleep.

Asleep, dead off, and in that moment of time! The instant before his eyes had kindled at the thought of what a lark it would be to take on that peerless Frenchman and put him out; now, between a question and an answer, those eyes were closed and he slept profoundly.

With immense profundity. I bent over him and spoke his name in his ear. I shook him by the shoulder. He was unconscious of either action. His colour was blooming, his breathing deep and easy; else his sleep seemed to have the immensity of death itself. Under the glaring incandescent mantle he was theatrical in his beauty, superb in the relaxation of his strength. I could not take my eyes off him. It was almost frightening to see that complete annihilation of so much physical and mental power.

To write that book--and to fight Carpentier! He had worked it coolly and impudently out. The analytical faculties he would have brought to the one task he had merely applied to the other, and he had arrived at the perfectly logical answer that the way to make the maximum of money as nearly instantaneously as possible was to knock out Carpentier.

I could only gaze spellbound at him as he slept.

What to do now?

I was aware that this question had been waiting for an answer ever since we had left that picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue. I had now found him, or he me; but what next? Let him go again? But apparently he did not want to go; he clung to me pathetically, as to the single companion he had in the world. Take him away somewhere? But he had refused to come, had urged that monstrous book. Was I to stay here with him, to stay all night, to stay till Trenchard's return? That was, to say the least, inconvenient. Should I put him to bed? Somehow I hesitated to disturb that vast unconsciousness. Poor fellow, he richly earned all the rest he got.

I went into the bedroom, brought out Trenchard's quilt, and spread it over him. I moved his head gently to the padded portion of the wicker chair. I made him as comfortable as I could. Then once more I stood irresolute.

It was now after one o'clock, and that powerful sleep had cut us clean off in the middle of things. I had much, much more to ask him. I wanted to know his intentions about his rooms in Cambridge Circus, whether he thought of returning there, whether he wanted his furniture stored or sold. If to myself and Trenchard and possibly a few others he was still known as Derwent Rose, I wanted to know what his name was to the rest of mankind. Merely as a means of communication with people he did not wish to meet face to face, I wanted to know whether his handwriting had changed, whether he used a typewriter, what his signature was like.

And above all I wanted to know what steps I must now take with regard to Julia Oliphant.

Of course I intended to tell her everything, and to tell him that I had done so. The worst I should risk would be his momentary anger that I had betrayed him. He had wished to spare her a meeting with himself, but he had not known that she was unsparable. More than that, she was indissuadable. I should not be able to keep her from him. And, if he clung so touchingly to me, found me so "magnificently steady," what comfort would he not find in that unvarying constancy of hers? He might break out on me for the moment, but he would bless me for it by and by.

I sat down in the other chair. I was very tired. I dozed.

In perhaps a quarter of an hour I opened my eyes again. He had not moved. It was a mild night, the deep chair was not uncomfortable, and I dozed again and again woke. Still he slept. I muttered a "Good night, poor old chap." I was too drowsy even to get up and turn down the incandescent light.

This time I slept as soundly as he.

Afterwards he blamed himself that he had not sent me away; but that sleep had dropped on him like a falling beam. All his sleep, he explained, was like that. Immeasurable chasms of time seemed to have passed away between his closing his eyes and his opening them again.

So this is what came next:

A light creaking of his chair brought me suddenly wide awake and sitting up. A peep of grey daylight showed in the upper portion of the window-frame, but the incandescent mantle still glared yellowly above his head. He had moved, but without waking. He turned his head and slumbered on.

But the turn of his head had brought his face into the light....

He only shaved once a day, in the morning; and on the following morning he shaved again. But it was his whole beard that he thus shaved off daily, thirty days' growth in a night. He had had no set intention of growing that beard that I had seen in the hansom. A few days before coming to Trenchard's place he had woke up one morning, stroked his face, and found it there.

There he slept--in his golden beard.

IV

"Most certainly he shall write his book," Julia declared.

"Not if I can prevent it," I replied.

"We'll see about that. You don't think he'll give us the slip again?"

"I don't think so--I mean he doesn't seem to want to at present."

"And he was all right when you left him? Is he comfortable there? Had he a good breakfast? Was his bed made? Does anybody go in and clear up for him? Had he any flowers?"

"He's quite all right there. He wants to see me as much as he can. He'd ask me to stay with him, but he's determined to get ahead with that book."

I did not tell her of any other reason why he might wish to be alone when he woke up in the morning. I assumed that a man's shaving operations could have no interest for her. But this is what had taken place:

On seeing his first signs of stirring I had slipped quietly into his bedroom. There, lying on his bed, I had pretended to be asleep. I had heard his tiptoe approach, the slight creaking of the door as he had peeped in, his stealthy crossing to the dressing-table, where his razors were. Then he had stolen out again, and I had heard a kettle filled and other preparations. A quarter of an hour later he had (as he supposed) woke me. He stood there by the bedside with a cup of tea in his hand. His chin was smooth. I wondered about that other morning when, passing his hand over his face, he had first found the beard there. And I wondered what his companion, if he had had one, had thought of it.

"But he shall write his book, poor darling," Julia repeated.

This was at half-past ten in the morning, in her studio, whither I had walked straight from Derry's loft over the mews.

"He ought to be locked up for life if he does," I answered.

But she was very obstinate. Derry (she said) should do whatever he had a mind to do. More than that (and a crafty light stole into her dark eyes as she said it), she intended to help him.

"To write his book? And what do you know about writing books?"

"I didn't say to write his book. You say he's--what d'you call it?--sharpening his tools, getting himself fit. Well, I can help him to do that."

"How?"

"I'll leave the door open so you can hear."

She ran out of the studio to the little cabinet where her telephone was. I heard the following, her side of the conversation that ensued.

"Is that 9199? Miss Oliphant would like to speak to Mrs Aird, please.... Is that you, Madge? Yes, this is my dinner-call.... Oh, like a top, and I know your phone's by your bed. Madge, my dear, I want to know who that learned person was I was talking to last night: yes, the bibliomaniac person.... Who?" Then, with a jump of her voice, "What, he's staying with you? He's in the house _now_? Do send for him immediately.... Of course not, you goose, but you have an extension, haven't you?..."

And then this:

"Oh, good morning! Miss Oliphant speaking.... Ah, you've forgotten!... Most frightfully excited about our conversation last night. Will you tell me again the title of that book and whether I can see it in the British Museum? Wait a minute, I want to write it down...."

Then, carefully and as it were a letter at a time:

"_Manuel--du--Repertoire--Bibliographique--Universel...._ Yes, I've got that.... _Paris, 44, Rue de Rennes...._ Now the other book, please.... _Decimal Classification and Relative Index...._ Yes.... _Melvil Dewey...._ Is that enough to identify them?"

Then a rapid perfunctory gush, a "Thank you _so_ much," the receiver clapped on again, and re-enter Julia, her face ashine with triumph.

"Well, did you hear all that?" she said. "You can take me along to the British Museum as soon as you like. You'll have to get me into the reading-room, because I haven't a ticket. Then if I were you I should trot away off to Haslemere."

"Who's that you were talking to?"

"A most fearful bore I met at the Airds' at dinner last night. At least I thought he was a bore then. Now he's a duck and an angel and I could kiss him all over his bald old head. Goodness is _always_ rewarded, George, but not often the next morning like this." She clapped her hands.

"You're less comprehensible than ever I knew you, which is saying a good deal."

"Dear old George! When you're bald I'll kiss you too. And Derry _shall_ write his book."

"And fight Carpentier?"

"Poodledoodle!"

And she flitted out again, unfastening her painting-blouse at the back as she went.

I knew enough of Miss Oliphant by this time to treat her apparent irresponsibilities with respect. I had never heard of either of the books of which she had spoken over the telephone, but I risked a guess at their nature--_Bibliographique Universel_--_Decimal Classification_--evidently the subject was indexing, and she had met somebody at dinner the night before who had led her into these arid fields. Naturally she had been bored. But now she was in a rapture of plotting and machination. She intended to assist and encourage Derry in that inordinate plan of his. She came in again, dressed for walking, humming a blithe tune.

"Dear, dear Providence! There was I ready to snap Madge's head off for seizing quite a nice man herself and giving me old Drybones, but now I'm going to send her some flowers. See the idea, George?"

"What are these books?"

"The very latest thing in the way of indexing. It lasted nearly the whole of dinner. Oh, I _love_ myself for being so good! He drooled along, and I said 'How thrilling' and things like that, thinking of something else all the time, and now _this_ gorgeous piece of luck!"

"A Universal Index?"

"Yes, of the whole of human knowledge. It's all done with decimals--or do they call them semicolons? Dots anyway. You can turn up anything from the solar system to a packet of pins at a moment's notice. If Derry doesn't know about it he'll dance with joy.... But come along. I must see those books. Let's go by bus. You can get me a reader's ticket, can't you?"

She pushed me out in front of her and closed the door with a reckless bang. All the way to the bus she talked as delightedly as if it had been her birthday.

"So I shall mug up those decimals and things and then go and be his secretary. I know more or less how he wrote his _Vicarage_. He used to stride up and down my room, thinking aloud about it. And this will be the same, only enormous! He says he wants to make it as Moses made his Decalogue? He shall, bless his heart. Why shouldn't he? I don't see your stuffy old objections, George."

"One of them is that Moses didn't 'make' the Decalogue. He went up into Sinai for it."

"Well, leave Moses out then. Any other reason?"

"I've told you. If it isn't exactly blasphemous, it's getting on that way."

"Why?" she said with heat. "Was the _Vicarage_ blasphemous? He's simply going to do the _Vicarage_ again, but on a huger scale. If he can write a gigantic book why should you say to him 'No, you mustn't write that--write a littler one instead'? He's perfectly entitled to write the biggest book he can. He's just as much entitled to it as you or any other writer. You only call it those names because it's bigger than yours."

She glowed with jealousy for his fame. He was her demi-god, and she would have had all the world bow down before him. She would _not_ have him second to Homer--she would _not_ have him second to Shakespeare. At least so it struck me, and I could only shake my head again and again and repeat that in my opinion it was not a legitimate ambition.

We had mounted to the top of a motor-bus, where we occupied a back seat. For some minutes she did not speak. Then, as she still continued silent, I looked at her face. At the same moment her face turned to mine.

What worlds away from the truth I was that clear look told me. His fame? She didn't care twopence for his fame, except that it might amuse him. His book? She didn't care whether he wrote his book or whether he didn't. To her, fame and books were the vanities with which men so incomprehensibly amuse themselves when they might be thinking of something that mattered. It was enormously more than that that her eyes told me on the top of that east-bound bus that morning.

For if he wished to remain thirty-three, she too as intensely wished and willed it. He should write any book he wanted, do anything on earth he liked, so long as that loft in a South Kensington mews became an upper room in Cremorne Road all over again. She would flutter about, pretending to be indexing the whole mass of human knowledge for him, clipping and pasting and filing within sound of his voice; but what she would really be doing would be to cut Patum Peperium sandwiches for him, to see that he fed himself properly, opened his windows, made his bed, had his washing and mending properly done. That former _Vicarage_ period had been the summer of her life; she would now thrust herself in the way of it once more. That she might do so with some sort of countenance she was on her way to read those thorny books in the British Museum. The latest thing in indexing was the bait with which she set the trap of her adoration. She would humour, encourage, wheedle, praise. But she too would have her summer twice.

We did not speak again until we descended in Tottenham Court Road and walked along Great Russell Street. Then as we approached the Museum railings she turned abruptly to me. She wanted her final confirmation of the facts.

"You've told me all that he said about me?"

"Yes." (This was untrue. I had suppressed one thing. I had not told her that he had sometimes stayed away from Cremorne Road because she bought things for him she could not afford.)

"And he's no idea at all that I know anything whatever about it?"

"None whatever."

"Tell me again about his having sometimes thought of me lately."

I did so. "For all I know he might even have come to see you but for the fear of giving you that shock."

"Well, you didn't die of the shock, so why should I? Come and get me my ticket."

We passed through the glazed doors and along the Roman Gallery. I rang at the closed door where the temporary tickets are obtained. There was no difficulty, and slowly we walked past the double row of Caesars and Emperors again. I had taken her arm. Somehow I suddenly felt as though I were about to lose her, perhaps for a long time, perhaps for an even longer one. I spoke in a low voice.

"Do you think it will be--safe? Just to walk in on him, I mean. Wouldn't it be better to prepare him first?"

"No, no--that's the one thing I _am_ sure of."

"Are you sure you can trust yourself?"

"I don't know. If I can't there's an end of everything, so I must."

"What about our going together?"

"No, nor that either." She flushed a little as she said it.

I think, though I am not sure, that there was jealousy in that flush. In that unspeakable solitude of his Derry had so far only a single friend--myself. She was prepared, if she could, to steal my share of him, to have him all to herself.

"But I've got to see him to-day; I promised it," I said.

"Then off you go now, while I'm here. But you're not to say a word about my coming. Then if I were you I should get off to Haslemere."

She meant I had better get out of the way altogether. I sighed.... "Well, come and get your books."

We sought the reading-room, and I put her into a seat and passed to the catalogue counter. I took her slips to her for signature, dropped them into the basket, and then returned to her. It was early, and few readers had yet arrived. We were in the "N" bay, which we had to ourselves. I saw her look up at the million books, dingy and misty in the pale light of the high rotunda. I saw her dark eyes travel along the frieze of names in tarnished gold--Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning. In the past I have spent a good deal of time in the reading-room; now it is a place I get out of as quickly as I can. It crushes me, annihilates my spirit with the weight of the vanity of vanities. Of the makers, as well as of the making of books, there is no end. They are born, they lisp, they spell, they write; and then they die. The eager heart, the busy brain, are a few tarnished letters on a frieze, a strip of paper gummed into the casualty-list of a catalogue. We think, write, and to-morrow we die. Only one man was not going to think, write, and die to-morrow. He was going to be different from all men who had gone before him. Because of something that had happened to him, he was going to blazon his name, not in that circular cemetery of dead books, but across the whole width of the heavens outside.

And this tired woman trifling with the tips of her long fingers against the book-rest as she waited for her books was going to be his accomplice. She was going, by means of something called love, to keep him at that acme of his powers where innocence and wisdom met and in the past he had thrown her a friendly word from time to time. She was going, single-handed, to arrest that backward drift of his life. Whatever had caused it should be thwarted in her. He should _not_ be thirty. He _should_ remain, if she could compass it, thirty-three for as long as he wanted--for the rest of his life and hers.

I wondered the dome did not fall on her.

Presently she turned her head and smiled in my eyes.

"Well, don't you wait, George. Thanks so much. Good-bye."

I left her sitting there, in that vast and brown-hued well, still waiting for her books.