The Tower of Oblivion Part 6

"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 _Nonent.i.ties I Have Known_? If so, I'll Who's-Who her for you. Here goes. Ba.s.sett, Daphne, _nee_ Daphne Wade. O.D. (only daughter, George) of Horatio Wade, rector of somewhere in Suss.e.x, 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 Ba.s.sett 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 h.e.l.l_. 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 t.i.tle; 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 h.e.l.l_." 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 G.o.ddard is right) of ten and twelve years old intelligences had practically pa.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumption 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 prompt.i.tude, 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 Ba.s.sett 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 She was thirty-one when she read his _Ape_. it and began her rejoinder.

He was forty-five when he read She was forty-one at the time the _Arrow_. 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 She---- sixteen.

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 acc.u.mulated 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 Ba.s.sett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_.

VI

Part of the fuss my numerous friends made about my Knighthood was this desire of theirs that my portrait should be painted and hung up in the Lyonnesse Club. Whether in fact I shall ever look down from those buff-washed walls I am at present unable to say. That rests with Miss Julia Oliphant. I myself merely have the feeling that if she doesn't paint me I hardly wish to be painted.

Her name was not among those originally chosen by the Portrait Committee and submitted to me. It was Madge who, by half-past twelve the following day, had decided to include her. We were walking along together to Gloucester Road Station. Madge was going out to lunch.

"Well, go and see her," she said.... "But they ought to have let you sleep on, George. I wish I hadn't left you that book."

"Oh, I'm perfectly fit and fresh. The Boltons, you said? I shall go and see her this afternoon."

"You say you don't know her well?"