The Figure in the Carpet / Henry James

I had done a few things and earned a few pence--I had perhaps even

had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the

patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a

fidgety habit, for it's none of the longest yet) I count my real

start from the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came

in to ask me a service. He had done more things than I, and earned

more pence, though there were chances for cleverness I thought he

sometimes missed. I could only however that evening declare to him

that he never missed one for kindness. There was almost rapture in

hearing it proposed to me to prepare for The Middle, the organ of

our lucubrations, so called from the position in the week of its

day of appearance, an article for which he had made himself

responsible and of which, tied up with a stout string, he laid on

my table the subject. I pounced upon my opportunity--that is on

the first volume of it--and paid scant attention to my friend's

explanation of his appeal. What explanation could be more to the

point than my obvious fitness for the task? I had written on Hugh

Vereker, but never a word in The Middle, where my dealings were

mainly with the ladies and the minor poets. This was his new

novel, an advance copy, and whatever much or little it should do

for his reputation I was clear on the spot as to what it should do

for mine. Moreover if I always read him as soon as I could get

hold of him I had a particular reason for wishing to read him now:

I had accepted an invitation to Bridges for the following Sunday,

and it had been mentioned in Lady Jane's note that Mr. Vereker was

to be there. I was young enough for a flutter at meeting a man of

his renown, and innocent enough to believe the occasion would

demand the display of an acquaintance with his "last."

Corvick, who had promised a review of it, had not even had time to

read it; he had gone to pieces in consequence of news requiring--as

on precipitate reflexion he judged--that he should catch the night-

mail to Paris. He had had a telegram from Gwendolen Erme in answer

to his letter offering to fly to her aid. I knew already about

Gwendolen Erme; I had never seen her, but I had my ideas, which

were mainly to the effect that Corvick would marry her if her

mother would only die. That lady seemed now in a fair way to

oblige him; after some dreadful mistake about a climate or a "cure"

she had suddenly collapsed on the return from abroad. Her

daughter, unsupported and alarmed, desiring to make a rush for home

but hesitating at the risk, had accepted our friend's assistance,

and it was my secret belief that at sight of him Mrs. Erme would

pull round. His own belief was scarcely to be called secret; it

discernibly at any rate differed from mine. He had showed me

Gwendolen's photograph with the remark that she wasn't pretty but

was awfully interesting; she had published at the age of nineteen a

novel in three volumes, "Deep Down," about which, in The Middle, he

had been really splendid. He appreciated my present eagerness and

undertook that the periodical in question should do no less; then

at the last, with his hand on the door, he said to me: "Of course

you'll be all right, you know." Seeing I was a trifle vague he

added: "I mean you won't be silly."

"Silly--about Vereker! Why what do I ever find him but awfully

clever?"

"Well, what's that but silly? What on earth does 'awfully clever'

mean? For God's sake try to get AT him. Don't let him suffer by

our arrangement. Speak of him, you know, if you can, as _I_ should

have spoken of him."

I wondered an instant. "You mean as far and away the biggest of

the lot--that sort of thing?"

Corvick almost groaned. "Oh you know, I don't put them back to

back that way; it's the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure

so rare; the sense of"--he mused a little--"something or other."

I wondered again. "The sense, pray, of want?"

"My dear man, that's just what I want YOU to say!"

Even before he had banged the door I had begun, book in hand, to

prepare myself to say it. I sat up with Vereker half the night;

Corvick couldn't have done more than that. He was awfully clever--

I stuck to that, but he wasn't a bit the biggest of the lot. I

didn't allude to the lot, however; I flattered myself that I

emerged on this occasion from the infancy of art. "It's all

right," they declared vividly at the office; and when the number

appeared I felt there was a basis on which I could meet the great

man. It gave me confidence for a day or two--then that confidence

dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish, but if Corvick

wasn't satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I reflected indeed

that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the

appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from Paris

a little ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn't

at all said what Vereker gave him the sense of.

CHAPTER II

The effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more

profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so

void of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination

involved in my small precautions. If he was in spirits it wasn't

because he had read my review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt

sure he hadn't read it, though The Middle had been out three days

and bloomed, I assured myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals

which gave one of the ormolu tables the air of a stand at a

station. The impression he made on me personally was such that I

wished him to read it, and I corrected to this end with a

surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless

conspicuity of the sheet. I'm afraid I even watched the result of

my manoeuvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.

When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found

myself for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at

the great man's side, the result of his affability was a still

livelier desire that he shouldn't remain in ignorance of the

peculiar justice I had done him. It wasn't that he seemed to

thirst for justice; on the contrary I hadn't yet caught in his talk

the faintest grunt of a grudge--a note for which my young

experience had already given me an ear. Of late he had had more

recognition, and it was pleasant, as we used to say in The Middle,

to see how it drew him out. He wasn't of course popular, but I

judged one of the sources of his good humour to be precisely that

his success was independent of that. He had none the less become

in a manner the fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt

and caught up with him. We had found out at last how clever he

was, and he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I

was strongly tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how

much of that unveiling was my act; and there was a moment when I

probably should have done so had not one of the ladies of our

party, snatching a place at his other elbow, just then appealed to

him in a spirit comparatively selfish. It was very discouraging:

I almost felt the liberty had been taken with myself.

I had had on my tongue's end, for my own part, a phrase or two

about the right word at the right time; but later on I was glad not

to have spoken, for when on our return we clustered at tea I

perceived Lady Jane, who had not been out with us, brandishing The

Middle with her longest arm. She had taken it up at her leisure;

she was delighted with what she had found, and I saw that, as a

mistake in a man may often be a felicity in a woman, she would

practically do for me what I hadn't been able to do for myself.

"Some sweet little truths that needed to be spoken," I heard her

declare, thrusting the paper at rather a bewildered couple by the

fireplace. She grabbed it away from them again on the reappearance

of Hugh Vereker, who after our walk had been upstairs to change

something. "I know you don't in general look at this kind of

thing, but it's an occasion really for doing so. You HAVEN'T seen

it? Then you must. The man has actually got AT you, at what _I_

always feel, you know." Lady Jane threw into her eyes a look

evidently intended to give an idea of what she always felt; but she

added that she couldn't have expressed it. The man in the paper

expressed it in a striking manner. "Just see there, and there,

where I've dashed it, how he brings it out." She had literally

marked for him the brightest patches of my prose, and if I was a

little amused Vereker himself may well have been. He showed how

much he was when before us all Lady Jane wanted to read something

aloud. I liked at any rate the way he defeated her purpose by

jerking the paper affectionately out of her clutch. He'd take it

upstairs with him and look at it on going to dress. He did this

half an hour later--I saw it in his hand when he repaired to his

room. That was the moment at which, thinking to give her pleasure,

I mentioned to Lady Jane that I was the author of the review. I

did give her pleasure, I judged, but perhaps not quite so much as I

had expected. If the author was "only me" the thing didn't seem

quite so remarkable. Hadn't I had the effect rather of diminishing

the lustre of the article than of adding to my own? Her ladyship

was subject to the most extraordinary drops. It didn't matter; the

only effect I cared about was the one it would have on Vereker up

there by his bedroom fire.

At dinner I watched for the signs of this impression, tried to

fancy some happier light in his eyes; but to my disappointment Lady

Jane gave me no chance to make sure. I had hoped she'd call

triumphantly down the table, publicly demand if she hadn't been

right. The party was large--there were people from outside as

well, but I had never seen a table long enough to deprive Lady Jane

of a triumph. I was just reflecting in truth that this

interminable board would deprive ME of one when the guest next me,

dear woman--she was Miss Poyle, the vicar's sister, a robust

unmodulated person--had the happy inspiration and the unusual

courage to address herself across it to Vereker, who was opposite,

but not directly, so that when he replied they were both leaning

forward. She enquired, artless body, what he thought of Lady

Jane's "panegyric," which she had read--not connecting it however

with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his

reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, his mouth

full of bread: "Oh, it's all right--the usual twaddle!"

I had caught Vereker's glance as he spoke, but Miss Poyle's

surprise was a fortunate cover for my own. "You mean he doesn't do

you justice?" said the excellent woman.

Vereker laughed out, and I was happy to be able to do the same.

"It's a charming article," he tossed us.

Miss Poyle thrust her chin half across the cloth. "Oh, you're so

deep!" she drove home.

"As deep as the ocean! All I pretend is that the author doesn't

see--" But a dish was at this point passed over his shoulder, and

we had to wait while he helped himself.

"Doesn't see what?" my neighbour continued.

"Doesn't see anything."

"Dear me--how very stupid!"

"Not a bit," Vereker laughed main. "Nobody does."

The lady on his further side appealed to him, and Miss Poyle sank

back to myself. "Nobody sees anything!" she cheerfully announced;

to which I replied that I had often thought so too, but had somehow

taken the thought for a proof on my own part of a tremendous eye.

I didn't tell her the article was mine; and I observed that Lady

Jane, occupied at the end of the table, had not caught Vereker's

words.

I rather avoided him after dinner, for I confess he struck me as

cruelly conceited, and the revelation was a pain. "The usual

twaddle"--my acute little study! That one's admiration should have

had a reserve or two could gall him to that point! I had thought

him placid, and he was placid enough; such a surface was the hard

polished glass that encased the bauble of his vanity. I was really

ruffled, and the only comfort was that if nobody saw anything

George Corvick was quite as much out of it as I. This comfort

however was not sufficient, after the ladies had dispersed, to

carry me in the proper manner--I mean in a spotted jacket and

humming an air--into the smoking-room. I took my way in some

dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who

had been up once more to change, coming out of his room. HE was

humming an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw

me his gaiety gave a start.

"My dear young man," he exclaimed, "I'm so glad to lay hands on

you! I'm afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of

mine at dinner to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from

Lady Jane that you're the author of the little notice in The

Middle."

I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my

own door, his hand, on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture;

and on hearing that I had come up to bed he asked leave to cross my

threshold and just tell me in three words what his qualification of

my remarks had represented. It was plain he really feared I was

hurt, and the sense of his solicitude suddenly made all the

difference to me. My cheap review fluttered off into space, and

the best things I had said in it became flat enough beside the

brilliancy of his being there. I can see him there still, on my

rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine clear face

all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth. I don't know

what he had at first meant to say, but I think the sight of my

relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from

far within. It was so these words presently conveyed to me

something that, as I afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any

one. I've always done justice to the generous impulse that made

him speak; it was simply compunction for a snub unconsciously

administered to a man of letters in a position inferior to his own,

a man of letters moreover in the very act of praising him. To make

the thing right he talked to me exactly as an equal and on the

ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the place, the

unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn't have done

anything more intensely effective.

CHAPTER III.

"I don't quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was

the very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of

intelligence, it was just your exceptional sharpness, that produced

the feeling--a very old story with me, I beg you to believe--under

the momentary influence of which I used in speaking to that good

lady the words you so naturally resent. I don't read the things in

the newspapers unless they're thrust upon me as that one was--it's

always one's best friend who does it! But I used to read them

sometimes--ten years ago. I dare say they were in general rather

stupider then; at any rate it always struck me they missed my

little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they

patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins.

Whenever since I've happened to have a glimpse of them they were

still blazing away--still missing it, I mean, deliciously. YOU

miss it, my dear fellow, with inimitable assurance; the fact of

your being awfully clever and your article's being awfully nice

doesn't make a hair's breadth of difference. It's quite with you

rising young men," Vereker laughed, "that I feel most what a

failure I am!"

I listened with keen interest; it grew keener as he talked. "YOU a

failure--heavens! What then may your 'little point' happen to be?"

"Have I got to TELL you, after all these years and labours?" There

was something in the friendly reproach of this--jocosely

exaggerated--that made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth,

blush to the roots of my hair. I'm as much in the dark as ever,

though I've grown used in a sense to my obtuseness; at that moment,

however, Vereker's happy accent made me appear to myself, and

probably to him, a rare dunce. I was on the point of exclaiming

"Ah yes, don't tell me: for my honour, for that of the craft,

don't!" when he went on in a manner that showed he had read my

thought and had his own idea of the probability of our some day

redeeming ourselves. "By my little point I mean--what shall I call

it?--the particular thing I've written my books most FOR. Isn't

there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing

that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to

achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very passion of his

passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of

art burns most intensely? Well, it's THAT!"

I considered a moment--that is I followed at a respectful distance,

rather gasping. I was fascinated--easily, you'll say; but I wasn't

going after all to be put off my guard. "Your description's

certainly beautiful, but it doesn't make what you describe very

distinct."

"I promise you it would be distinct if it should dawn on you at

all." I saw that the charm of our topic overflowed for my

companion into an emotion as lively as my own. "At any rate," he

went on, "I can speak for myself: there's an idea in my work

without which I wouldn't have given a straw for the whole job.

It's the finest fullest intention of the lot, and the application

of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I

ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that nobody does

say it is precisely what we're talking about. It stretches, this

little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else,

comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form,

the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the

initiated a complete representation of it. So it's naturally the

thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me," my visitor

added, smiling, "even as the thing for the critic to find."

This seemed a responsibility indeed. "You call it a little trick?"

"That's only my little modesty. It's really an exquisite scheme."

"And you hold that you've carried the scheme out?"

"The way I've carried it out is the thing in life I think a bit

well of myself for."

I had a pause. "Don't you think you ought--just a trifle--to

assist the critic?"

"Assist him? What else have I done with every stroke of my pen?

I've shouted my intention in his great blank face!" At this,

laughing out again, Vereker laid his hand on my shoulder to show

the allusion wasn't to my personal appearance.

"But you talk about the initiated. There must therefore, you see,

BE initiation."

"What else in heaven's name is criticism supposed to be?" I'm

afraid I coloured at this too; but I took refuge in repeating that

his account of his silver lining was poor in something or other

that a plain man knows things by. "That's only because you've

never had a glimpse of it," he returned. "If you had had one the

element in question would soon have become practically all you'd

see. To me it's exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney.

Besides, the critic just ISN'T a plain man: if he were, pray, what

would he be doing in his neighbour's garden? You're anything but a

plain man yourself, and the very raison d'etre of you all is that

you're little demons of subtlety. If my great affair's a secret,

that's only because it's a secret in spite of itself--the amazing

event has made it one. I not only never took the smallest

precaution to keep it so, but never dreamed of any such accident.

If I had I shouldn't in advance have had the heart to go on. As it

was, I only became aware little by little, and meanwhile I had done

my work."

"And now you quite like it?" I risked.

"My work?"

"Your secret. It's the same thing."

"Your guessing that," Vereker replied, "is a proof that you're as

clever as I say!" I was encouraged by this to remark that he would

clearly be pained to part with it, and he confessed that it was

indeed with him now the great amusement of life. "I live almost to

see if it will ever be detected." He looked at me for a jesting

challenge; something far within his eyes seemed to peep out. "But

I needn't worry--it won't!"

"You fire me as I've never been fired," I declared; "you make me

determined to do or die." Then I asked: "Is it a kind of esoteric

message?"

His countenance fell at this--he put out his hand as if to bid me

good-night. "Ah my dear fellow, it can't be described in cheap

journalese!"

I knew of course he'd be awfully fastidious, but our talk had made

me feel how much his nerves were exposed. I was unsatisfied--I

kept hold of his hand. "I won't make use of the expression then,"

I said, "in the article in which I shall eventually announce my

discovery, though I dare say I shall have hard work to do without

it. But meanwhile, just to hasten that difficult birth, can't you

give a fellow a clue?" I felt much more at my ease.

"My whole lucid effort gives him the clue--every page and line and

letter. The thing's as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait

on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. It's stuck into

every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe. It governs

every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every

comma."

I scratched my head. "Is it something in the style or something in

the thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?"

He indulgently shook my hand again, and I felt my questions to be

crude and my distinctions pitiful. "Good-night, my dear boy--don't

bother about it. After all, you do like a fellow."

"And a little intelligence might spoil it?" I still detained him.

He hesitated. "Well, you've got a heart in your body. Is that an

element of form or an element of feeling? What I contend that

nobody has ever mentioned in my work is the organ of life."

"I see--it's some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless

it be," I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still

happier, "some kind of game you're up to with your style, something

you're after in the language. Perhaps it's a preference for the

letter P!" I ventured profanely to break out. "Papa, potatoes,

prunes--that sort of thing?" He was suitably indulgent: he only

said I hadn't got the right letter. But his amusement was over; I

could see he was bored. There was nevertheless something else I

had absolutely to learn. "Should you be able, pen in hand, to

state it clearly yourself--to name it, phrase it, formulate it?"

"Oh," he almost passionately sighed, "if I were only, pen in hand,

one of YOU chaps!"

"That would be a great chance for you of course. But why should

you despise us chaps for not doing what you can't do yourself?"

"Can't do?" He opened his eyes. "Haven't I done it in twenty

volumes? I do it in my way," he continued. "Go YOU and don't do

it in yours."

"Ours is so devilish difficult," I weakly observed.

"So's mine. We each choose our own. There's no compulsion. You

won't come down and smoke?"

"No. I want to think this thing out."

"You'll tell me then in the morning that you've laid me bare?"

"I'll see what I can do; I'll sleep on it. But just one word

more," I added. We had left the room--I walked again with him a

few steps along the passage. "This extraordinary 'general

intention,' as you call it--for that's the most vivid description I

can induce you to make of it--is then, generally, a sort of buried

treasure?"

His face lighted. "Yes, call it that, though it's perhaps not for

me to do so."

"Nonsense!" I laughed. "You know you're hugely proud of it."

"Well, I didn't propose to tell you so; but it IS the joy of my

soul!"

"You mean it's a beauty so rare, so great?"

He waited a little again. "The loveliest thing in the world!" We

had stopped, and on these words he left me; but at the end of the

corridor, while I looked after him rather yearningly, he turned and

caught sight of my puzzled face. It made him earnestly, indeed I

thought quite anxiously, shake his head and wave his finger "Give

it up--give it up!"

This wasn't a challenge--it was fatherly advice. If I had had one

of his books at hand I'd have repeated my recent act of faith--I'd

have spent half the night with him. At three o'clock in the

morning, not sleeping, remembering moreover how indispensable he

was to Lady Jane, I stole down to the library with a candle. There

wasn't, so far as I could discover, a line of his writing in the

house.

CHAPTER IV.

Returning to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out

each in its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a

maddening month, in the course of which several things took place.

One of these, the last, I may as well immediately mention, was that

I acted on Vereker's advice: I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I

could really make nothing of the business; it proved a dead loss.

After all I had always, as he had himself noted, liked him; and

what now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain

preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a

general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate

intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain

the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my

search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure

the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was

unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point

of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them.

I HAD no knowledge--nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I

could bear it--they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored

me, and I accounted for my confusion--perversely, I allow--by the

idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a

bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose.

The great point of it all is, however, that I told George Corvick

what had befallen me and that my information had an immense effect

upon him. He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had

Mrs. Erme, and there was as yet, I could see, no question of his

nuptials. He was immensely stirred up by the anecdote I had

brought from Bridges; it fell in so completely with the sense he

had had from the first that there was more in Vereker than met the

eye. When I remarked that the eye seemed what the printed page had

been expressly invented to meet he immediately accused me of being

spiteful because I had been foiled. Our commerce had always that

pleasant latitude. The thing Vereker had mentioned to me was

exactly the thing he, Corvick, had wanted me to speak of in my

review. On my suggesting at last that with the assistance I had

now given him he would doubtless be prepared to speak of it himself

he admitted freely that before doing this there was more he must

understand. What he would have said, had he reviewed the new book,

was that there was evidently in the writer's inmost art something

to BE understood. I hadn't so much as hinted at that: no wonder

the writer hadn't been flattered! I asked Corvick what he really

considered he meant by his own supersubtlety, and, unmistakeably

kindled, he replied: "It isn't for the vulgar--it isn't for the

vulgar!" He had hold of the tail of something; he would pull hard,

pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker's strange

confidence and, pronouncing me the luckiest of mortals, mentioned

half a dozen questions he wished to goodness I had had the gumption

to put. Yet on the other hand he didn't want to be told too much--

it would spoil the fun of seeing what would come. The failure of

MY fun was at the moment of our meeting not complete, but I saw it

ahead, and Corvick saw that I saw it. I, on my side, saw likewise

that one of the first things he would do would be to rush off with

my story to Gwendolen.

On the very day after my talk with him I was surprised by the

receipt of a note from Hugh Vereker, to whom our encounter at

Bridges had been recalled, as he mentioned, by his falling, in a

magazine, on some article to which my signature was attached. "I

read it with great pleasure," he wrote, "and remembered under its

influence our lively conversation by your bedroom fire. The

consequence of this has been that I begin to measure the temerity

of my having saddled you with a knowledge that you may find

something of a burden. Now that the fit's over I can't imagine how

I came to be moved so much beyond my wont. I had never before

mentioned, no matter in what state of expansion, the fact of my

little secret, and I shall never speak of that mystery again. I

was accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever

entered into my game to be, that I find this game--I mean the

pleasure of playing it--suffers considerably. In short, if you can

understand it, I've rather spoiled my sport. I really don't want

to give anybody what I believe you clever young men call the tip.

That's of course a selfish solicitude, and I name it to you for

what it may be worth to you. If you're disposed to humour me don't

repeat my revelation. Think me demented--it's your right; but

don't tell anybody why."

The sequel to this communication was that as early on the morrow as

I dared I drove straight to Mr. Vereker's door. He occupied in

those years one of the honest old houses in Kensington Square. He

received me immediately, and as soon as I came in I saw I hadn't

lost my power to minister to his mirth. He laughed out at sight of

my face, which doubtless expressed my perturbation. I had been

indiscreet--my compunction was great. "I HAVE told somebody," I

panted, "and I'm sure that person will by this time have told

somebody else! It's a woman, into the bargain."

"The person you've told?"

"No, the other person. I'm quite sure he must have told her."

"For all the good it will do her--or do ME! A woman will never

find out."

"No, but she'll talk all over the place: she'll do just what you

don't want."

Vereker thought a moment, but wasn't so disconcerted as I had

feared: he felt that if the harm was done it only served him

right. "It doesn't matter--don't worry."

"I'll do my best, I promise you, that your talk with me shall go no

further."

"Very good; do what you can."

"In the meantime," I pursued, "George Corvick's possession of the

tip may, on his part, really lead to something."

"That will be a brave day."

I told him about Corvick's cleverness, his admiration, the

intensity of his interest in my anecdote; and without making too

much of the divergence of our respective estimates mentioned that

my friend was already of opinion that he saw much further into a

certain affair than most people. He was quite as fired as I had

been at Bridges. He was moreover in love with the young lady:

perhaps the two together would puzzle something out.

Vereker seemed struck with this. "Do you mean they're to be

married?"

"I dare say that's what it will come to."

"That may help them," he conceded, "but we must give them time!"

I spoke of my own renewed assault and confessed my difficulties;

whereupon he repeated his former advice: "Give it up, give it up!"

He evidently didn't think me intellectually equipped for the

adventure. I stayed half an hour, and he was most good-natured,

but I couldn't help pronouncing him a man of unstable moods. He

had been free with me in a mood, he had repented in a mood, and now

in a mood he had turned indifferent. This general levity helped me

to believe that, so far as the subject of the tip went, there

wasn't much in it. I contrived however to make him answer a few

more questions about it, though he did so with visible impatience.

For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so blank about was

vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan,

something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet. He highly

approved of this image when I used it, and he used another himself.

"It's the very string," he said, "that my pearls are strung on!"

The reason of his note to me had been that he really didn't want to

give us a grain of succour--our density was a thing too perfect in

its way to touch. He had formed the habit of depending on it, and

if the spell was to break it must break by some force of its own.

He comes back to me from that last occasion--for I was never to

speak to him again--as a man with some safe preserve for sport. I

wondered as I walked away where he had got HIS tip.

CHAPTER V.

When I spoke to George Corvick of the caution I had received he

made me feel that any doubt of his delicacy would be almost an

insult. He had instantly told Gwendolen, but Gwendolen's ardent

response was in itself a pledge of discretion. The question would

now absorb them and would offer them a pastime too precious to be

shared with the crowd. They appeared to have caught instinctively

at Vereker's high idea of enjoyment. Their intellectual pride,

however, was not such as to make them indifferent to any further

light I might throw on the affair they had in hand. They were

indeed of the "artistic temperament," and I was freshly struck with

my colleague's power to excite himself over a question of art.

He'd call it letters, he'd call it life, but it was all one thing.

In what he said I now seemed to understand that he spoke equally

for Gwendolen, to whom, as soon as Mrs. Erme was sufficiently

better to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of

introducing me. I remember our going together one Sunday in August

to a huddled house in Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's

possession of a friend who had some light to mingle with his own.

He could say things to her that I could never say to him. She had

indeed no sense of humour and, with her pretty way of holding her

head on one side, was one of those persons whom you want, as the

phrase is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian by themselves.

She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had remarkably

little English for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me that I

had chilled her by my apparent indisposition to oblige them with

the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I allowed that I felt I

had given thought enough to that indication: hadn't I even made up

my mind that it was vain and would lead nowhere? The importance

they attached to it was irritating and quite envenomed my doubts.

That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that

I felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an

experiment that had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold

while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase

for which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done,

only more deliberately and sociably--they went over their author

from the beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said the future

was before them and the fascination could only grow; they would

take him page by page, as they would take one of the classics,

inhale him in slow draughts and let him sink all the way in. They

would scarce have got so wound up, I think, if they hadn't been in

love: poor Vereker's inner meaning gave them endless occasion to

put and to keep their young heads together. None the less it

represented the kind of problem for which Corvick had a special

aptitude, drew out the particular pointed patience of which, had he

lived, he would have given more striking and, it is to be hoped,

more fruitful examples. He at least was, in Vereker's words, a

little demon of subtlety. We had begun by disputing, but I soon

saw that without my stirring a finger his infatuation would have

its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents as I had done--

he would clap his hands over new lights and see them blown out by

the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told him, but

the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic

character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had

Shakespeare's own word for his being cryptic he would at once have

accepted it. The case there was altogether different--we had

nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks. I returned that I was

stupefied to see him attach such importance even to the word of Mr.

Vereker. He wanted thereupon to know if I treated Mr. Vereker's

word as a lie. I wasn't perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound,

to go so far as that, but I insisted that till the contrary was

proved I should view it as too fond an imagination. I didn't, I

confess, say--I didn't at that time quite know--all I felt. Deep

down, as Miss Erme would have said, I was uneasy, I was expectant.

At the core of my disconcerted state--for my wonted curiosity lived

in its ashes--was the sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at

last probably come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his

credulity, a great point of the fact that from of old, in his study

of this genius, he had caught whiffs and hints of he didn't know

what, faint wandering notes of a hidden music. That was just the

rarity, that was the charm: it fitted so perfectly into what I

reported.

If I returned on several occasions to the little house in Chelsea I

dare say it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss

Erme's ailing parent. The hours spent there by Corvick were

present to my fancy as those of a chessplayer bent with a silent

scowl, all the lamplit winter, over his board and his moves. As my

imagination filled it out the picture held me fast. On the other

side of the table was a ghostlier form, the faint figure of an

antagonist good-humouredly but a little wearily secure--an

antagonist who leaned back in his chair with his hands in his

pockets and a smile on his fine clear face. Close to Corvick,

behind him, was a girl who had begun to strike me as pale and

wasted and even, on more familiar view, as rather handsome, and who

rested on his shoulder and hung on his moves. He would take up a

chessman and hold it poised a while over one of the little squares,

and then would put it back in its place with a long sigh of

disappointment. The young lady, at this, would slightly but

uneasily shift her position and look across, very hard, very long,

very strangely, at their dim participant. I had asked them at an

early stage of the business if it mightn't contribute to their

success to have some closer communication with him. The special

circumstances would surely be held to have given me a right to

introduce them. Corvick immediately replied that he had no wish to

approach the altar before he had prepared the sacrifice. He quite

agreed with our friend both as to the delight and as to the honour

of the chase--he would bring down the animal with his own rifle.

When I asked him if Miss Erme were as keen a shot he said after

thinking: "No, I'm ashamed to say she wants to set a trap. She'd

give anything to see him; she says she requires another tip. She's

really quite morbid about it. But she must play fair--she SHAN'T

see him!" he emphatically added. I wondered if they hadn't even

quarrelled a little on the subject--a suspicion not corrected by

the way he more than once exclaimed to me: "She's quite incredibly

literary, you know--quite fantastically!" I remember his saying of

her that she felt in italics and thought in capitals. "Oh when

I've run him to earth," he also said, "then, you know, I shall

knock at his door. Rather--I beg you to believe. I'll have it

from his own lips: 'Right you are, my boy; you've done it this

time!' He shall crown me victor--with the critical laurel."

Meanwhile he really avoided the chances London life might have

given him of meeting the distinguished novelist; a danger, however,

that disappeared with Vereker's leaving England for an indefinite

absence, as the newspapers announced--going to the south for

motives connected with the health of his wife, which had long kept

her in retirement. A year--more than a year--had elapsed since the

incident at Bridges, but I had had no further sight of him. I

think I was at bottom rather ashamed--I hated to remind him that,

though I had irremediably missed his point, a reputation for

acuteness was rapidly overtaking me. This scruple led me a dance;

kept me out of Lady Jane's house, made me even decline, when in

spite of my bad manners she was a second time so good as to make me

a sign, an invitation to her beautiful seat. I once became aware

of her under Vereker's escort at a concert, and was sure I was seen

by them, but I slipped out without being caught. I felt, as on

that occasion I splashed along in the rain, that I couldn't have

done anything else; and yet I remember saying to myself that it was

hard, was even cruel. Not only had I lost the books, but I had

lost the man himself: they and their author had been alike spoiled

for me. I knew too which was the loss I most regretted. I had

taken to the man still more than I had ever taken to the books.

CHAPTER VI.

Six months after our friend had left England George Corvick, who

made his living by his pen, contracted for a piece of work which

imposed on him an absence of some length and a journey of some

difficulty, and his undertaking of which was much of a surprise to

me. His brother-in-law had become editor of a great provincial

paper, and the great provincial paper, in a fine flight of fancy,

had conceived the idea of sending a "special commissioner" to

India. Special commissioners had begun, in the "metropolitan

press," to be the fashion, and the journal in question must have

felt it had passed too long for a mere country cousin. Corvick had

no hand, I knew, for the big brush of the correspondent, but that

was his brother-in-law's affair, and the fact that a particular

task was not in his line was apt to be with himself exactly a

reason for accepting it. He was prepared to out-Herod the

metropolitan press; he took solemn precautions against

priggishness, he exquisitely outraged taste. Nobody ever knew it--

that offended principle was all his own. In addition to his

expenses he was to be conveniently paid, and I found myself able to

help him, for the usual fat book, to a plausible arrangement with

the usual fat publisher. I naturally inferred that his obvious

desire to make a little money was not unconnected with the prospect

of a union with Gwendolen Erme. I was aware that her mother's

opposition was largely addressed to his want of means and of

lucrative abilities, but it so happened that, on my saying the last

time I saw him something that bore on the question of his

separation from our young lady, he brought out with an emphasis

that startled me: "Ah I'm not a bit engaged to her, you know!"

"Not overtly," I answered, "because her mother doesn't like you.

But I've always taken for granted a private understanding."

"Well, there WAS one. But there isn't now." That was all he said

save something about Mrs. Erme's having got on her feet again in

the most extraordinary way--a remark pointing, as I supposed, the

moral that private understandings were of little use when the

doctor didn't share them. What I took the liberty of more closely

inferring was that the girl might in some way have estranged him.

Well, if he had taken the turn of jealousy for instance it could

scarcely be jealousy of me. In that case--over and above the

absurdity of it--he wouldn't have gone away just to leave us

together. For some time before his going we had indulged in no

allusion to the buried treasure, and from his silence, which my

reserve simply emulated, I had drawn a sharp conclusion. His

courage had dropped, his ardour had gone the way of mine--this

appearance at least he left me to scan. More than that he couldn't

do; he couldn't face the triumph with which I might have greeted an

explicit admission. He needn't have been afraid, poor dear, for I

had by this time lost all need to triumph. In fact I considered I

showed magnanimity in not reproaching him with his collapse, for

the sense of his having thrown up the game made me feel more than

ever how much I at last depended on him. If Corvick had broken

down I should never know; no one would be of any use if HE wasn't.

It wasn't a bit true I had ceased to care for knowledge; little by

little my curiosity not only had begun to ache again, but had

become the familiar torment of my days and my nights. There are

doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly

more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don't after all

know why I should in this connexion so much as mention them. For

the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my

anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill

meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion,

meant life. The stake on the table was of a special substance and

our roulette the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board

as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme,

for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the

very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance.

I recognised in Corvick's absence that she made this analogy vivid.

It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the

pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt

almost tepid. I got hold of "Deep Down" again: it was a desert in

which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a

wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still

more remarkably pulled her.

Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I

repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to

me was: "He has got it, he has got it!"

She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean

the great thing. "Vereker's idea?"

"His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay."

She had the missive open there; it was emphatic though concise.

"Eureka. Immense." That was all--he had saved the cost of the

signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. "He

doesn't say what it is."

"How could he--in a telegram? He'll write it."

"But how does he know?"

"Know it's the real thing? Oh I'm sure that when you see it you do

know. Vera incessu patuit dea!"

"It's you, Miss Erme, who are a 'dear' for bringing me such news!"-

-I went all lengths in my high spirits. "But fancy finding our

goddess in the temple of Vishnu! How strange of George to have

been able to go into the thing again in the midst of such different

and such powerful solicitations!"

"He hasn't gone into it, I know; it's the thing itself, let

severely alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him

like a tigress out of the jungle. He didn't take a book with him--

on purpose; indeed he wouldn't have needed to--he knows every page,

as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day

somewhere, when he wasn't thinking, they fell, in all their superb

intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the

carpet came out. That's the way he knew it would come and the real

reason--you didn't in the least understand, but I suppose I may

tell you now--why he went and why I consented to his going. We

knew the change would do it--that the difference of thought, of

scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had

perfectly, we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in

his mind, and in the secousse of a new and intense experience they

just struck light." She positively struck light herself--she was

literally, facially luminous. I stammered something about

unconscious cerebration, and she continued: "He'll come right

home--this will bring him."

"To see Vereker, you mean?"

"To see Vereker--and to see ME. Think what he'll have to tell me!"

I hesitated. "About India?"

"About fiddlesticks! About Vereker--about the figure in the

carpet."

"But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter."

She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had

told me long before that her face was interesting. "Perhaps it

can't be got into a letter if it's 'immense.'"

"Perhaps not if it's immense bosh. If he has hold of something

that can't be got into a letter he hasn't hold of THE thing.

Vereker's own statement to me was exactly that the 'figure' WOULD

fit into a letter."

"Well, I cabled to George an hour ago--two words," said Gwendolen.

"Is it indiscreet of me to ask what they were?"

She hung fire, but at last brought them out. "'Angel, write.'"

"Good!" I exclaimed. "I'll make it sure--I'll send him the same."

CHAPTER VII.

My words however were not absolutely the same--I put something

instead of "angel"; and in the sequel my epithet seemed the more

apt, for when eventually we heard from our traveller it was merely,

it was thoroughly to be tantalised. He was magnificent in his

triumph, he described his discovery as stupendous; but his ecstasy

only obscured it--there were to be no particulars till he should

have submitted his conception to the supreme authority. He had

thrown up his commission, he had thrown up his book, he had thrown

up everything but the instant need to hurry to Rapallo, on the

Genoese shore, where Vereker was making a stay. I wrote him a

letter which was to await him at Aden--I besought him to relieve my

suspense. That he had found my letter was indicated by a telegram

which, reaching me after weary days and in the absence of any

answer to my laconic dispatch to him at Bombay, was evidently

intended as a reply to both communications. Those few words were

in familiar French, the French of the day, which Covick often made

use of to show he wasn't a prig. It had for some persons the

opposite effect, but his message may fairly be paraphrased. "Have

patience; I want to see, as it breaks on you, the face you'll

make!" "Tellement envie de voir ta tete!"--that was what I had to

sit down with. I can certainly not be said to have sat down, for I

seem to remember myself at this time as rattling constantly between

the little house in Chelsea and my own. Our impatience,

Gwendolen's and mine, was equal, but I kept hoping her light would

be greater. We all spent during this episode, for people of our

means, a great deal of money in telegrams and cabs, and I counted

on the receipt of news from Rapallo immediately after the junction

of the discoverer with the discovered. The interval seemed an age,

but late one day I heard a hansom precipitated to my door with the

crash engendered by a hint of liberality. I lived with my heart in

my mouth and accordingly bounded to the window--a movement which

gave me a view of a young lady erect on the footboard of the

vehicle and eagerly looking up at my house. At sight of me she

flourished a paper with a movement that brought me straight down,

the movement with which, in melodramas, handkerchiefs and reprieves

are flourished at the foot of the scaffold.

"Just seen Vereker--not a note wrong. Pressed me to bosom--keeps

me a month." So much I read on her paper while the cabby dropped a

grin from his perch. In my excitement I paid him profusely and in

hers she suffered it; then as he drove away we started to walk

about and talk. We had talked, heaven knows, enough before, but

this was a wondrous lift. We pictured the whole scene at Rapallo,

where he would have written, mentioning my name, for permission to

call; that is _I_ pictured it, having more material than my

companion, whom I felt hang on my lips as we stopped on purpose

before shop-windows we didn't look into. About one thing we were

clear: if he was staying on for fuller communication we should at

least have a letter from him that would help us through the dregs

of delay. We understood his staying on, and yet each of us saw, I

think, that the other hated it. The letter we were clear about

arrived; it was for Gwendolen, and I called on her in time to save

her the trouble of bringing it to me. She didn't read it out, as

was natural enough; but she repeated to me what it chiefly

embodied. This consisted of the remarkable statement that he'd

tell her after they were married exactly what she wanted to know.

"Only THEN, when I'm his wife--not before," she explained. "It's

tantamount to saying--isn't it?--that I must marry him straight

off!" She smiled at me while I flushed with disappointment, a

vision of fresh delay that made me at first unconscious of my

surprise. It seemed more than a hint that on me as well he would

impose some tiresome condition. Suddenly, while she reported

several more things from his letter, I remembered what he had told

me before going away. He had found Mr. Vereker deliriously

interesting and his own possession of the secret a real

intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that

it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him; it would have

been, through all time and taking all tongues, one of the most

wonderful flowers of literary art. Nothing, in especial, once you

were face to face with it, could show for more consummately DONE.

When once it came out it came out, was there with a splendour that

made you ashamed; and there hadn't been, save in the bottomless

vulgarity of the age, with every one tasteless and tainted, every

sense stopped, the smallest reason why it should have been

overlooked. It was great, yet so simple, was simple, yet so great,

and the final knowledge of it was an experience quite apart. He

intimated that the charm of such an experience, the desire to drain

it, in its freshness, to the last drop, was what kept him there

close to the source. Gwendolen, frankly radiant as she tossed me

these fragments, showed the elation of a prospect more assured than

my own. That brought me back to the question of her marriage,

prompted me to ask if what she meant by what she had just surprised

me with was that she was under an engagement.

"Of course I am!" she answered. "Didn't you know it?" She seemed

astonished, but I was still more so, for Corvick had told me the

exact contrary. I didn't mention this, however; I only reminded

her how little I had been on that score in her confidence, or even

in Corvick's, and that, moreover I wasn't in ignorance of her

mother's interdict. At bottom I was troubled by the disparity of

the two accounts; but after a little I felt Corvick's to be the one

I least doubted. This simply reduced me to asking myself if the

girl had on the spot improvised an engagement--vamped up an old one

or dashed off a new--in order to arrive at the satisfaction she

desired. She must have had resources of which I was destitute, but

she made her case slightly more intelligible by returning

presently: "What the state of things has been is that we felt of

course bound to do nothing in mamma's lifetime."

"But now you think you'll just dispense with mamma's consent?"

"Ah it mayn't come to that!" I wondered what it might come to, and

she went on: "Poor dear, she may swallow the dose. In fact, you

know," she added with a laugh, "she really MUST!"--a proposition of

which, on behalf of every one concerned, I fully acknowledged the

force.

CHAPTER VIII.

Nothing more vexatious had ever happened to me than to become aware

before Corvick's arrival in England that I shouldn't be there to

put him through. I found myself abruptly called to Germany by the

alarming illness of my younger brother, who, against my advice, had

gone to Munich to study, at the feet indeed of a great master, the

art of portraiture in oils. The near relative who made him an

allowance had threatened to withdraw it if he should, under

specious pretexts, turn for superior truth to Paris--Paris being

somehow, for a Cheltenham aunt, the school of evil, the abyss. I

deplored this prejudice at the time, and the deep injury of it was

now visible--first in the fact that it hadn't saved the poor boy,

who was clever, frail and foolish, from congestion of the lungs,

and second in the greater break with London to which the event

condemned me. I'm afraid that what was uppermost in my mind during

several anxious weeks was the sense that if we had only been in

Paris I might have run over to see Corvick. This was actually out

of the question from every point of view: my brother, whose

recovery gave us both plenty to do, was ill for three months,

during which I never left him and at the end of which we had to

face the absolute prohibition of a return to England. The

consideration of climate imposed itself, and he was in no state to

meet it alone. I took him to Meran and there spent the summer with

him, trying to show him by example how to get back to work and

nursing a rage of another sort that I tried NOT to show him.

The whole business proved the first of a series of phenomena so

strangely interlaced that, taken together--which was how I had to

take them--they form as good an illustration as I can recall of the

manner in which, for the good of his soul doubtless, fate sometimes

deals with a man's avidity. These incidents certainly had larger

bearings than the comparatively meagre consequence we are here

concerned with--though I feel that consequence also a thing to

speak of with some respect. It's mainly in such a light, I

confess, at any rate, that the ugly fruit of my exile is at this

hour present to me. Even at first indeed the spirit in which my

avidity, as I have called it, made me regard that term owed no

element of ease to the fact that before coming back from Rapallo

George Corvick addressed me in a way I objected to. His letter had

none of the sedative action I must to-day profess myself sure he

had wished to give it, and the march of occurrences was not so

ordered as to make up for what it lacked. He had begun on the

spot, for one of the quarterlies, a great last word on Vereker's

writings, and this exhaustive study, the only one that would have

counted, have existed, was to turn on the new light, to utter--oh,

so quietly!--the unimagined truth. It was in other words to trace

the figure in the carpet through every convolution, to reproduce it

in every tint. The result, according to my friend, would be the

greatest literary portrait ever painted, and what he asked of me

was just to be so good as not to trouble him with questions till he

should hang up his masterpiece before me. He did me the honour to

declare that, putting aside the great sitter himself, all aloft in

his indifference, I was individually the connoisseur he was most

working for. I was therefore to be a good boy and not try to peep

under the curtain before the show was ready: I should enjoy it all

the more if I sat very still.

I did my best to sit very still, but I couldn't help giving a jump

on seeing in The Times, after I had been a week or two in Munich

and before, as I knew, Corvick had reached London, the announcement

of the sudden death of poor Mrs. Erme. I instantly, by letter,

appealed to Gwendolen for particulars, and she wrote me that her

mother had yielded to long-threatened failure of the heart. She

didn't say, but I took the liberty of reading into her words, that

from the point of view of her marriage and also of her eagerness,

which was quite a match for mine, this was a solution more prompt

than could have been expected and more radical than waiting for the

old lady to swallow the dose. I candidly admit indeed that at the

time--for I heard from her repeatedly--I read some singular things

into Gwendolen's words and some still more extraordinary ones into

her silences. Pen in hand, this way, I live the time over, and it

brings back the oddest sense of my having been, both for months and

in spite of myself, a kind of coerced spectator. All my life had

taken refuge in my eyes, which the procession of events appeared to

have committed itself to keep astare. There were days when I

thought of writing to Hugh Vereker and simply throwing myself on

his charity. But I felt more deeply that I hadn't fallen quite so

low--besides which, quite properly, he would send me about my

business. Mrs. Erme's death brought Corvick straight home, and

within the month he was united "very quietly"--as quietly, I seemed

to make out, as he meant in his article to bring out his

trouvaille--to the young lady he had loved and quitted. I use this

last term, I may parenthetically say, because I subsequently grew

sure that at the time he went to India, at the time of his great

news from Bombay, there had been no positive pledge between them

whatever. There had been none at the moment she was affirming to

me the very opposite. On the other hand he had certainly become

engaged the day he returned. The happy pair went down to Torquay

for their honeymoon, and there, in a reckless hour, it occurred to

poor Corvick to take his young bride a drive. He had no command of

that business: this had been brought home to me of old in a little

tour we had once made together in a dogcart. In a dogcart he

perched his companion for a rattle over Devonshire hills, on one of

the likeliest of which he brought his horse, who, it was true, had

bolted, down with such violence that the occupants of the cart were

hurled forward and that he fell horribly on his head. He was

killed on the spot; Gwendolen escaped unhurt.

I pass rapidly over the question of this unmitigated tragedy, of

what the loss of my best friend meant for me, and I complete my

little history of my patience and my pain by the frank statement of

my having, in a postscript to my very first letter to her after the

receipt of the hideous news, asked Mrs. Corvick whether her husband

mightn't at least have finished the great article on Vereker. Her

answer was as prompt as my question: the article, which had been

barely begun, was a mere heartbreaking scrap. She explained that

our friend, abroad, had just settled down to it when interrupted by

her mother's death, and that then, on his return, he had been kept

from work by the engrossments into which that calamity was to

plunge them. The opening pages were all that existed; they were

striking, they were promising, but they didn't unveil the idol.

That great intellectual feat was obviously to have formed his

climax. She said nothing more, nothing to enlighten me as to the

state of her own knowledge--the knowledge for the acquisition of

which I had fancied her prodigiously acting. This was above all

what I wanted to know: had SHE seen the idol unveiled? Had there

been a private ceremony for a palpitating audience of one? For

what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place? I didn't

like as yet to press her, though when I thought of what had passed

between us on the subject in Corvick's absence her reticence

surprised me. It was therefore not till much later, from Meran,

that I risked another appeal, risked it in some trepidation, for

she continued to tell me nothing. "Did you hear in those few days

of your blighted bliss," I wrote, "what we desired so to hear?" I

said, "we," as a little hint and she showed me she could take a

little hint; "I heard everything," she replied, "and I mean to keep

it to myself!"

CHAPTER IX.

It was impossible not to be moved with the strongest sympathy for

her, and on my return to England I showed her every kindness in my

power. Her mother's death had made her means sufficient, and she

had gone to live in a more convenient quarter. But her loss had

been great and her visitation cruel; it never would have occurred

to me moreover to suppose she could come to feel the possession of

a technical tip, of a piece of literary experience, a counterpoise

to her grief. Strange to say, none the less, I couldn't help

believing after I had seen her a few times that I caught a glimpse

of some such oddity. I hasten to add that there had been other

things I couldn't help believing, or at least imagining; and as I

never felt I was really clear about these, so, as to the point I

here touch on, I give her memory the benefit of the doubt.

Stricken and solitary, highly accomplished and now, in her deep

mourning, her maturer grace and her uncomplaining sorrow,

incontestably handsome, she presented herself as leading a life of

singular dignity and beauty. I had at first found a way to

persuade myself that I should soon get the better of the reserve

formulated, the week after the catastrophe in her reply to an

appeal as to which I was not unconscious that it might strike her

as mistimed. Certainly that reserve was something of a shock to

me--certainly it puzzled me the more I thought of it and even

though I tried to explain it (with moments of success) by an

imputation of exalted sentiments, of superstitious scruples, of a

refinement of loyalty. Certainly it added at the same time hugely

to the price of Vereker's secret, precious as this mystery already

appeared. I may as well confess abjectly that Mrs. Corvick's

unexpected attitude was the final tap on the nail that was to fix

fast my luckless idea, convert it into the obsession of which I'm

for ever conscious.

But this only helped me the more to be artful, to be adroit, to

allow time to elapse before renewing my suit. There were plenty of

speculations for the interval, and one of them was deeply

absorbing. Corvick had kept his information from his young friend

till after the removal of the last barrier to their intimacy--then

only had he let the cat out of the bag. Was it Gwendolen's idea,

taking a hint from him, to liberate this animal only on the basis

of the renewal of such a relation? Was the figure in the carpet

traceable or describable only for husbands and wives--for lovers

supremely united? It came back to me in a mystifying manner that

in Kensington Square, when I mentioned that Corvick would have told

the girl he loved, some word had dropped from Vereker that gave

colour to this possibility. There might be little in it, but there

was enough to make me wonder if I should have to marry Mrs. Corvick

to get what I wanted. Was I prepared to offer her this price for

the blessing of her knowledge? Ah that way madness lay!--so I at

least said to myself in bewildered hours. I could see meanwhile

the torch she refused to pass on flame away in her chamber of

memory--pour through her eyes a light that shone in her lonely

house. At the end of six months I was fully sure of what this warm

presence made up to her for. We had talked again and again of the

man who had brought us together--of his talent, his character, his

personal charm, his certain career, his dreadful doom, and even of

his clear purpose in that great study which was to have been a

supreme literary portrait, a kind of critical Vandyke or Velasquez.

She had conveyed to me in abundance that she was tongue-tied by her

perversity, by her piety, that she would never break the silence it

had not been given to the "right person," as she said, to break.

The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I had been

sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her

arm. "Now at last what IS it?"

She had been expecting me and was ready. She gave a long slow

soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This

mercy didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest finest coldest

"Never!" I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials,

had to take full in the face. I took it and was aware that with

the hard blow the tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we

sat and looked at each other; after which I slowly rose, I was

wondering if some day she would accept me; but this was not what I

brought out. I said as I smoothed down my hat: "I know what to

think then. It's nothing!"

A remote disdainful pity for me gathered in her dim smile; then she

spoke in a voice that I hear at this hour: "It's my LIFE!" As I

stood at the door she added: "You've insulted him!"

"Do you mean Vereker?"

"I mean the Dead!"

I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge.

Yes, it was her life--I recognised that too; but her life none the

less made room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year

and a half after Corvick's death she published in a single volume

her second novel, "Overmastered," which I pounced on in the hope of

finding in it some tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I

found was a much better book than her younger performance, showing

I thought the better company she had kept. As a tissue tolerably

intricate it was a carpet with a figure of its own; but the figure

was not the figure I was looking for. On sending a review of it to

The Middle I was surprised to learn from the office that a notice

was already in type. When the paper came out I had no hesitation

in attributing this article, which I thought rather vulgarly

overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been something

of a friend of Corvick's, yet had only within a few weeks made the

acquaintance of his widow. I had had an early copy of the book,

but Deane had evidently had an earlier. He lacked all the same the

light hand with which Corvick had gilded the gingerbread--he laid

on the tinsel in splotches.

CHAPTER X.

Six months later appeared "The Right of Way," the last chance,

though we didn't know it, that we were to have to redeem ourselves.

Written wholly during Vereker's sojourn abroad, the book had been

heralded, in a hundred paragraphs, by the usual ineptitudes. I

carried it, as early a copy as any, I this time flattered myself,

straightway to Mrs. Corvick. This was the only use I had for it; I

left the inevitable tribute of The Middle to some more ingenious

mind and some less irritated temper. "But I already have it,"

Gwendolen said. "Drayton Deane was so good as to bring it to me

yesterday, and I've just finished it."

"Yesterday? How did he get it so soon?"

"He gets everything so soon! He's to review it in The Middle."

"He--Drayton Deane--review Vereker?" I couldn't believe my ears.

"'Why not? One fine ignorance is as good as another."

I winced but I presently said: "You ought to review him yourself!"

"I don't 'review,'" she laughed. "I'm reviewed!"

Just then the door was thrown open. "Ah yes, here's your

reviewer!" Drayton Deane was there with his long legs and his tall

forehead: he had come to see what she thought of "The Right of

Way," and to bring news that was singularly relevant. The evening

papers were just out with a telegram on the author of that work,

who, in Rome, had been ill for some days with an attack of malarial

fever. It had at first not been thought grave, but had taken, in

consequence of complications, a turn that might give rise to

anxiety. Anxiety had indeed at the latest hour begun to be felt.

I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental

detachment that Mrs. Corvick's overt concern quite failed to hide:

it gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That

independence rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing

now could destroy and which nothing could make different. The

figure in the carpet might take on another twist or two, but the

sentence had virtually been written. The writer might go down to

his grave: she was the person in the world to whom--as if she had

been his favoured heir--his continued existence was least of a

need. This reminded me how I had observed at a particular moment--

after Corvick's death--the drop of her desire to see him face to

face. She had got what she wanted without that. I had been sure

that if she hadn't got it she wouldn't have been restrained from

the endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflexions,

more conceivable on a man's part than on a woman's, which in my

case had served an a deterrent. It wasn't however, I hasten to

add, that my case, in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn't

ambiguous enough. At the thought that Vereker was perhaps at that

moment dying there rolled over me a wave of anguish--a poignant

sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him. A delicacy

that it was my one compensation to suffer to rule me had left the

Alps and the Apennines between us, but the sense of the waning

occasion suggested that I might in my despair at last have gone to

him. Of course I should really have done nothing of the sort. I

remained five minutes, while my companions talked of the new book,

and when Drayton Deane appealed to me for my opinion of it I made

answer, getting up, that I detested Hugh Vereker and simply

couldn't read him. I departed with the moral certainty that as the

door closed behind me Deane would brand me for awfully superficial.

His hostess wouldn't contradict THAT at least.

I continue to trace with a briefer touch our intensely odd

successions. Three weeks after this came Vereker's death, and

before the year was out the death of his wife. That poor lady I

had never seen, but I had had a futile theory that, should she

survive him long enough to be decorously accessible, I might

approach her with the feeble flicker of my plea. Did she know and

if she knew would she speak? It was much to be presumed that for

more reasons than one she would have nothing to say; but when she

passed out of all reach I felt renannouncement indeed my appointed

lot. I was shut up in my obsession for ever--my gaolers had gone

off with the key. I find myself quite as vague as a captive in a

dungeon about the tinge that further elapsed before Mrs. Corvick

became the wife of Drayton Deane. I had foreseen, through my bars,

this end of the business, though there was no indecent haste and

our friendship had fallen rather off. They were both so "awfully

intellectual" that it struck people as a suitable match, but I had

measured better than any one the wealth of understanding the bride

would contribute to the union. Never, for a marriage in literary

circles--so the newspapers described the alliance--had a lady been

so bravely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the

fruit of the affair--that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory

symptoms would be peculiarly visible in the husband. Taking for

granted the splendour of the other party's nuptial gift, I expected

to see him make a show commensurate with his increase of means. I

knew what his means had been--his article on "The Right of Way" had

distinctly given one the figure. As he was now exactly in the

position in which still more exactly I was not I watched from month

to month, in the likely periodicals, for the heavy message poor

Corvick had been unable to deliver and the responsibility of which

would have fallen on his successor. The widow and wife would have

broken by the rekindled hearth the silence that only a widow and

wife might break, and Deane would be as aflame with the knowledge

as Corvick in his own hour, as Gwendolen in hers, had been. Well,

he was aflame doubtless, but the fire was apparently not to become

a public blaze. I scanned the periodicals in vain: Drayton Deane

filled them with exuberant pages, but he withheld the page I most

feverishly sought. He wrote on a thousand subjects, but never on

the subject of Vereker. His special line was to tell truths that

other people either "funked," as he said, or overlooked, but he

never told the only truth that seemed to me in these days to

signify. I met the couple in those literary circles referred to in

the papers: I have sufficiently intimated that it was only in such

circles we were all constructed to revolve. Gwendolen was more

than ever committed to them by the publication of her third novel,

and I myself definitely classed by holding the opinion that this

work was inferior to its immediate predecessor. Was it worse

because she had been keeping worse company? If her secret was, as

she had told me, her life--a fact discernible in her increasing

bloom, an air of conscious privilege that, cleverly corrected by

pretty charities, gave distinction to her appearance--it had yet

not a direct influence on her work. That only made one--everything

only made one--yearn the more for it; only rounded it off with a

mystery finer and subtler.

CHAPTER XI.

It was therefore from her husband I could never remove my eyes: I

beset him in a manner that might have made him uneasy. I went even

so far as to engage him in conversation. Didn't he know, hadn't he

come into it as a matter of course?--that question hummed in my

brain. Of course he knew; otherwise he wouldn't return my stare so

queerly. His wife had told him what I wanted and he was amiably

amused at my impotence. He didn't laugh--he wasn't a laugher: his

system was to present to my irritation, so that I should crudely

expose myself, a conversational blank as vast as his big bare brow.

It always happened that I turned away with a settled conviction

from these unpeopled expanses, which seemed to complete each other

geographically and to symbolise together Drayton Deane's want of

voice, want of form. He simply hadn't the art to use what he knew;

he literally was incompetent to take up the duty where Corvick had

left it. I went still further--it was the only glimpse of

happiness I had. I made up my mind that the duty didn't appeal to

him. He wasn't interested, he didn't care. Yes, it quite

comforted me to believe him too stupid to have joy of the thing I

lacked. He was as stupid after as he had been before, and that

deepened for me the golden glory in which the mystery was wrapped.

I had of course none the less to recollect that his wife might have

imposed her conditions and exactions. I had above all to remind

myself that with Vereker's death the major incentive dropped. He

was still there to be honoured by what might be done--he was no

longer there to give it his sanction. Who alas but he had the

authority?

Two children were born to the pair, but the second cost the mother

her life. After this stroke I seemed to see another ghost of a

chance. I jumped at it in thought, but I waited a certain time for

manners, and at last my opportunity arrived in a remunerative way.

His wife had been dead a year when I met Drayton Deane in the

smoking-room of a small club of which we both were members, but

where for months--perhaps because I rarely entered it--I hadn't

seen him. The room was empty and the occasion propitious. I

deliberately offered him, to have done with the matter for ever,

that advantage for which I felt he had long been looking.

"As an older acquaintance of your late wife's than even you were,"

I began, "you must let me say to you something I have on my mind.

I shall be glad to make any terms with you that you see fit to name

for the information she must have had from George Corvick--the

information you know, that had come to him, poor chap, in one of

the happiest hours of his life, straight from Hugh Vereker."

He looked at me like a dim phrenological bust. "The information--

?"

"Vereker's secret, my dear man--the general intention of his books:

the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the

figure in the carpet."

He began to flush--the numbers on his bumps to come out.

"Vereker's books had a general intention?"

I stared in my turn. "You don't mean to say you don't know it?" I

thought for a moment he was playing with me. "Mrs. Deane knew it;

she had it, as I say, straight from Corvick, who had, after

infinite search and to Vereker's own delight, found the very mouth

of the cave. Where IS the mouth? He told after their marriage--

and told alone--the person who, when the circumstances were

reproduced, must have told you. Have I been wrong in taking for

granted that she admitted you, as one of the highest privileges of

the relation in which you stood to her, to the knowledge of which

she was after Corvick's death the sole depositary? All I know is

that that knowledge is infinitely precious, and what I want you to

understand is that if you'll in your turn admit me to it you'll do

me a kindness for which I shall be lastingly grateful."

He had turned at last very red; I dare say he had begun by thinking

I had lost my wits. Little by little he followed me; on my own

side I stared with a livelier surprise. Then he spoke. "I don't

know what you're talking about."

He wasn't acting--it was the absurd truth.

"She DIDN'T tell you--?"

"Nothing about Hugh Vereker."

I was stupefied; the room went round. It had been too good even

for that! "Upon your honour?"

"Upon my honour. What the devil's the matter with you?" he

growled.

"I'm astounded--I'm disappointed. I wanted to get it out of you."

"It isn't in me!" he awkwardly laughed. "And even if it were--"

"If it were you'd let me have it--oh yes, in common humanity. But

I believe you. I see--I see!" I went on, conscious, with the full

turn of the wheel, of my great delusion, my false view of the poor

man's attitude. What I saw, though I couldn't say it, was that his

wife hadn't thought him worth enlightening. This struck me as

strange for a woman who had thought him worth marrying. At last I

explained it by the reflexion that she couldn't possibly have

married him for his understanding. She had married him for

something else.

He was to some extent enlightened now, but he was even more

astonished, more disconcerted: he took a moment to compare my

story with his quickened memories. The result of his meditation

was his presently saying with a good deal of rather feeble form:

"This is the first I hear of what you allude to. I think you must

be mistaken as to Mrs. Drayton Deane's having had any unmentioned,

and still less any unmentionable, knowledge of Hugh Vereker. She'd

certainly have wished it--should it have borne on his literary

character--to be used."

"It was used. She used it herself. She told me with her own lips

that she 'lived' on it."

I had no sooner spoken than I repented of my words; he grew so pale

that I felt as if I had struck him. "Ah, 'lived'-- !" he murmured,

turning short away from me.

My compunction was real; I laid my hand on his shoulder. "I beg

you to forgive me--I've made a mistake. You don't know what I

thought you knew. You could, if I had been right, have rendered me

a service; and I had my reasons for assuming that you'd be in a

position to meet me."

"Your reasons?" he asked. "What were your reasons?"

I looked at him well; I hesitated; I considered. "Come and sit

down with me here, and I'll tell you." I drew him to a sofa, I

lighted another cigar and, beginning with the anecdote of Vereker's

one descent from the clouds, I recited to him the extraordinary

chain of accidents that had, in spite of the original gleam, kept

me till that hour in the dark. I told him in a word just what I've

written out here. He listened with deepening attention, and I

became aware, to my surprise, by his ejaculations, by his

questions, that he would have been after all not unworthy to be

trusted by his wife. So abrupt an experience of her want of trust

had now a disturbing effect on him; but I saw the immediate shock

throb away little by little and then gather again into waves of

wonder and curiosity--waves that promised, I could perfectly judge,

to break in the end with the fury of my own highest tides. I may

say that to-day as victims of unappeased desire there isn't a pin

to choose between us. The poor man's state is almost my

consolation; there are really moments when I feel it to be quite my

revenge.