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.
