This Was Ivor Trent

A

They won’t listen! If only they would listen! They keep telling me that I collapsed, that I am ill. They argue, talk, give instructions. Yes, all of them! The doctor, the nurse, Mrs. Frazer—endlessly, endlessly!

A thick mist separates me from them. Their voices reach me, but I cannot see them. When I speak, they do not seem to hear. It maddens me. I begin to shout, then hands seize me, force me down on to the bed, and voices—interminable voices—tell me that I must be still, that I must be calm, and that then I shall soon be well.

And I tell them (again and again I tell them) that I was alone in the fog, leaning over the low Embankment wall. The river was invisible: all was drifting desolation. Then I turned and saw—Him. A man from the Future faced me. He stood there with the signature of God across his forehead. I gazed at him as the damned gaze at an angel.

But they will not listen! They keep promising me that, if only I will be calm, I shall soon be well. They are trying to drag me back to my old life. And I tell them (I keep telling them) that when I saw Him my old life ended. At that actual moment when I looked into his eyes, I died—and I was born. Again and again I tell them, but they won’t listen—they won’t listen!

They repeat endlessly that I collapsed when Mrs. Frazer opened the door last Sunday night. Am I to tell them that I fainted because my whole being was rent by Fear and Ecstasy? Am I to tell them that?

I must learn to be silent. I must pretend to agree with them. I must let them think that I want to get well, that I want to become again the man I was. Somehow, I must do this. I must make them believe that I am slowly recovering, then the doctor will come less frequently. The nurse will go. Mrs. Frazer will attend to me. I shall be free. The nights will be mine.

It is useless to tell them of Him. They will only think I am mad. But, having seen him, how shall I live in the world? How shall I endure to look back on my old life? I am like one new-born, but one who is nevertheless fettered by the terrible memories of a dead man. And the name of the dead man is Ivor Trent.

People will come up to this dead man. They will say to him: “So glad you’re well again. You had a bad time, I’m afraid. Well, don’t overdo it. You’re highly-strung, you know. You’ve got to allow for that. Now, take my tip, and go easy for a bit. Have a good time for a few months. Enjoy yourself, and don’t think about anything.”

Who is to answer them—the dead Ivor Trent or the living?

But now—now, at this actual moment—I must pretend to believe all they say. I will not speak of him again. I will tell them nothing about him. They will only believe that he is a possibility if they, too, have a vision of him. Unless and until that happens, they will deny him. They will say that he is madness.

I will learn to be silent.

“My mystery is for me and for the sons of my house.”

B

Already they believe I am better. They no longer use the word “delirious.” They say now that I am “very excited.” How tediously easy it is to deceive people. . . .

Letters and telegrams keep coming for me. I asked Mrs. Frazer how it is that people have discovered I am here. She was very embarrassed, but eventually I learned that her husband told a journalist I was in the house. I have seen the paragraph in the newspaper. It says that I am in a delirious condition. Everyone will learn that I have had these rooms for years, that all my books have been written here. Captain Frazer will reveal all he knows. That is certain. My secret is mine no longer.

Mrs. Frazer also told me that she has a new lodger. It is Rendell, the man who dined with Marsden last Sunday. She was eager to talk about him. Evidently the doctor has told her to encourage “rational” conversation. She said that Rendell came to inquire about me on Monday night, and suddenly decided to take a room. Why has he come? Why is he so interested in a man he does not know? Perhaps the story he told Marsden last Sunday was lies.

Anyway, what does all this matter to me? I will see no one. I will not open any letters. Let them all make what they can of my secret. Yes, all of them! Not one of them has met me. Each mistook a mask for a face.

I will reveal here the mask—and the face.

Where shall I begin? With the conversation between Marsden and Rendell? Yes, that will do. I will begin there—and work backwards.

Marsden told Rendell how I had delivered him from a bully, and how—years later—I stayed with him in his cottage and “brought him back to life.” He added that he believed, on each occasion, I had been concerned only with myself. Rendell did not understand that, so Marsden explained that I had helped him only because I wanted to test the power of my own will. (This idea was Wrayburn’s, not Marsden’s, but that doesn’t matter.)

Well, it is true. In all my relations with others I have been concerned only with myself.

That is what I have to make clear in this manuscript. I have to reveal how I became the mask which people believed was Ivor Trent. I can do this, and I will do it. I have struggled to the summit of the abyss which is myself. I will look down into it and reveal its secrets.

(Was it Richard of St. Victor who defined Humility as self-knowledge? I do not remember, but it is the greatest definition known to me. I found it in an old book which a priest lent me years ago.)

Marsden also told Rendell the story of my first book, Two Lives and a Destiny. He explained that it revealed my life till I was twenty-one. That is partly true, but it does not contain what I dared not face—then. And the account it gives of the quarrel with my father is only the ghost of the actual scene.

I will show everything here. Everything!

When I was seven, they told me my mother was dead. The word had no meaning for me. Then they said I should never see her again. I crept away. I wanted to go to her room. I was certain she would be there. Or, if not that, then her dresses would be in the wardrobe. I would look at them, touch them. They would prove that she was still alive, that soon she would come back, that I should see her again and hear her voice.

But the door of her room was locked.

I began to tremble, for I remembered our last meeting.

One night I had wakened to find her kneeling by my bed, her eyes brimming with tears. She was dressed for a journey. In a whisper she begged me not to speak, but to love her always—whatever anyone said. And then she went away.

At the time this had frightened me, but, when I was told she was dead, it terrified me. It had been her farewell.

I said to my father:

“Do people know when they are going to die?”

“No, of course not.”

“Mother knew.”

“What nonsense is this? What do you mean?”

“She knew,” I repeated. “She said good-bye to me. She was dressed for a journey. Is death a long way off? How do you go there?”

Then he was kind to me. He told me to be brave. He said that only courage mattered—and that I must never show my emotions. No matter how deeply I might suffer, I must never reveal it to the world. He said that was the whole secret of life.

Soon after her death, we moved to London. Till then we had lived in Suffolk, but now my father sold the house and its contents. The new London flat contained nothing that had been hers. She was obliterated. He never mentioned her, and he willed that I should never speak of her. I could feel his will freeze the sentence on my lips when suddenly I longed to share a memory of her with him.

In every other way he was kind to me. In Suffolk he had not bothered much about me, but, now, he did everything to capture my affection. We spent whole days together. Soon, I was terribly proud of him. He was distinguished, cultured, and he spoke to people as if their destiny were to obey him. I promised myself that I would be like him when I was a man. Courage was his god—and so it became mine.

And yet, sometimes when I woke in the night, I saw a vision of my mother. She stood before me, radiantly lovely, although she was dressed in rags. Twice I saw her like that. Then, when I was ten, I woke one night suddenly with a great start. She was standing motionless in the middle of the room. A misty light enveloped her, but her features were clear. She stretched out her arms to me. Then she seemed to dissolve till only the misty light remained.

A few days later I noticed that my father was pale and silent. He said he was ill, and that frightened me. I thought he, too, would die. I asked one of the maids what was the matter with him. She said she did not know, but that, a few days ago, a letter had come for him from abroad—and that since then he had been ill.

Nevertheless, he continued to take me for our daily walk in the Park, though he spoke seldom and his eyes had a fixed, steely expression which I had not seen before. Then, perhaps a week after the letter came from abroad, he stopped a bolting horse in the Row. It was an act of stupendous courage, for the animal was thundering along panic-stricken. Everyone regarded him as a hero, and there was a good deal about it in the papers.

Years later I realised that actually he had attempted suicide, but, at the time, I regarded him as a god. Although I was only ten, I tried to emulate him. I willed to fear nothing, and when that proved impossible—as it often did—I hid every sign of cowardice.

I steeled myself against all childish terrors. When I went to school, I tried to behave as if he were watching me. Actually, therefore, it was my father who rescued Marsden from that bully. Marsden now believes that I used the incident as a test for my will. He is right, but he does not know what my triumph cost me. I was ill for days afterwards. Still, I became Marsden’s hero—in the same way as my father was mine.

Marsden often spent part of the holidays with us, as his people were in India, and he did not exaggerate when he told Rendell that we thought my father was “God Almighty when we were kids.” Every day, every hour, I spent with him widened and deepened his influence over me. He became a unique being, a man raised far above the generality of men. To be like him—that was my creed. And it was a passionate fanatical creed which made each day and every night a living ordeal. To be fearless, distinguished, cultured—to go through the world as if it were one’s own—never to be impressed, never to surrender oneself, never to be inadequate to any situation! To be like him!

But what quickened the roots of my admiration was his silence concerning my mother. For, now, I believed that this silence represented the triumph of his creed. I believed that he remained silent, although her death had stretched him permanently on the rack. He always spoke contemptuously of women, but—to me—that contempt only revealed his overwhelming love for her. As I grew older, I became convinced that his creed of courage had triumphed over the supreme ordeal of his life. Not even to me would he show the suffering which had turned his world into a wilderness. This belief heightened the pedestal on which I had placed him till he inhabited the clouds. When I prayed, it was not to God—but to him.

I stayed at school till I was eighteen, then, a year later, we went abroad and did not return to England till I was nearly twenty-one.

As the weeks passed, I noticed a change in him. Often when we were together, reading, I would look up to find his eyes fixed on me, his book face downwards on his knee. Also, sometimes he would get up suddenly, hesitate as if he were about to say something, then go abruptly out of the room. I noticed, too, that he was extraordinarily pale, and that he would clasp and unclasp his hands in a quick nervous manner, utterly unlike his normal dignified demeanour.

The night before my twenty-first birthday, he suddenly said in a new disconnected manner:

“It’s—well, let me see—it’s your birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Yes, to-morrow.”

“Ah, I see, I see! Well, as a fact—I may as well tell you—you come into a certain amount of money when you’re twenty-one.”

“A certain amount of money! From whom?”

“Well, it’s all quite preposterous, of course, but—as a fact—a distant relative died a few years ago and left you some money. Quite unnecessary! I am a rich man. It was an impertinence, really.”

“But who was this relative?” I asked, astonished at this information.

“I did not even know her—or scarcely. She lived in Australia. She was—well, as a fact—she was a relative of your—mother’s.”

I stared at him. He had mentioned her at last! He stood, ashy-white, looking down at me, leaning heavily on a little table by his side.

Then—swiftly, terribly—I knew there was some mystery concerning my mother.

I leapt to my feet.

“Where was my mother buried?”

He made a curious whistling noise, exactly like the hiss of escaping steam.

“Where was she buried?” I repeated.

“I do not know.”

“You don’t—know!”

“No—or care.”

I went nearer to him.

“So you’ve lied to me. She died fourteen years ago——”

“Eleven!”

“Eleven?”

His arms shot up as if jerked by invisible strings. His face became distorted and his whole body began to writhe.

“Yes—eleven years ago! Eleven! Eleven! Died in rags, a pauper! And serve her right, too—the bitch, the harlot, the whore!”

The words fell like a whip across my eyes.

“But it was fourteen years—fourteen!—since she went off with her rat of an Italian lover. For that’s what she did. A dago was what she wanted. He knew all the bed tricks——”

A series of foul images followed. He pelted her with obscenities. A frenzy of sexual jealousy surged like lava from the depths of him. He stood swaying from side to side, a twisted, leering, humiliated being—ransacking the dung-heaps of his imagination for filth to hurl at her.

As I watched him, two things happened: one mysterious, the other miraculous.

The first was a consciousness of power which gradually possessed me. The dignity he had so abjectly abandoned became mine. The will-power that had deserted him entered into me. He was revealing the depths of himself. I would reveal nothing. I would live up to his creed. I would remain silent, watching him, till the very excess of his fury reduced him to impotence. And then I would go.

The second—and the miraculous—thing which happened was this. I saw a white mistiness behind him, from which emerged a vision of my mother in all the loveliness that had haunted my childhood. She was more real than the frenzied figure between us. I ceased to see or hear it. I felt we were alone, and that she was revealing why she had left him.

At last gestures and snarls were substituted for words. His passion ceased to be articulate. I waited till silence seemed like a third person in the room, then I turned and went to the door. Just as I opened it, he spoke in a voice that was hardly a whisper.

“Ivor!”

I hurried into the hall, flung on an overcoat and seized a hat.

“Ivor!”

I went out, shutting the front door noiselessly behind me.

C

The next morning I instructed a lawyer to ascertain the amount due to me under the will of my mother’s relative. I did not write to my father and he did not know where I was. . . .

I spent whole nights wandering about the streets. My inner world was in ruins. The god I had worshipped had become a gorilla. When I contrasted what I had imagined him to be with what he was, I experienced a terrible interior laughter which frightened me. This fearless, impressive, cultured man, who had kindled the fire of emulation in me, was a mask, a fake, a lie! Just a cheap fraud—a façade with a cesspool behind it. That was what I had worshipped. I had made his creed mine. It was to be my weapon in the world. It had splintered in my hand. I had nothing. I was naked and empty. All I possessed was the deep certainty that to trust another, to believe in another, to admire another was childish romanticism.

Everything seemed to be revealed in a new and a terrible clarity. Where once I had seen faces, I now saw masks. To me—now—courage was inverted fear. Dignity was a pose: culture a sham. The bestial was the real. It was that which was behind everything else. When all else collapsed, it remained. There it stood—writhing and leering and vomiting filth.

Every memory I had of him was tainted. I hated him with a curious cold hatred. He had robbed me of my chance with the world. The lovely had become suspect. He had made a perfume a lie and a stink real. He had fouled my imagination, frozen my emotions, corrupted my thoughts into spies. He had left me with this ghost of a creed—never to believe, through fear of being always deceived. . . .

Somehow the weeks became months—and then came the war.

An immense curiosity gnawed me. Civilisation? We were to fight for civilisation. And what was that? What it seemed? Or was that, too, a façade? Fine words drifted down every wind—Honour, Glory, Patriotism, Honour. Yes, it sounded all right. And youth was going to die for it.

I joined the army in August, 1914.

I was in training for several months, then I had a few days’ leave before going to the front. I stayed in an hotel in London. The first night I talked to a priest. He was going the next day, and for some reason I told him my story. He listened in silence till I had finished, then he said:

“Write to your father, tell him you are going to France, and ask if he wants to see you.”

“All right,” I replied, “if that’s what you think.”

I wrote the letter, there and then, and posted it.

In the morning the priest came to my room to say good-bye. He gave me a book which I read months later in the trenches. Then he went away, and I never saw him again.

The next day I received my father’s answer. It consisted of one word: “No.” So I knew he had patched up the façade and hidden himself behind it again.

My last night in London I got drunk, for the first time. And I slept with a prostitute, also for the first time. Then I went to fight for civilisation.

Before I had been in France a month, my father fell dead in the street. But that was only the death of his body. For me, he had died on the night of our quarrel—and half of me had died with him. He had left me everything, but that did not interest me. I had all the money I wanted.

Three years in France, then I was wounded, but I went back just before the Armistice and stayed in the army till 1920. It was something to do.

Then I travelled for some time, trying to find out what was left of me. I discovered there was nothing. I had seen what civilisation was—behind the façade.

Two worlds had ended for me.

I returned to London and picked up with an artist, who told me of an experiment in communal living which was going to be made at 77, Potiphar Street, Chelsea. A Captain Frazer was financing it. The artist suggested I should join it. So I took the rooms at the top of this house.

I suppose that was somewhere in 1922.

D

You, whoever you are, who read this must realise that it is written under great difficulties. I write only at night, but, even so, it is possible that Mrs. Frazer will appear at any minute to ask if I need anything. Also I am given a sleeping-draught, but this has little effect, for I sleep as much as possible during the day. Then they keep bringing me letters, or telling me the names of people who have called to inquire—and how surprised these visitors are to discover that I have had rooms here for years. Rendell has met several of them—my publisher, my agent, Rosalie, Vera. At least, I am almost certain that one of the women was Rosalie. Mrs. Frazer watched her arrival. She happened to be looking out of the study window and saw a taxi draw up. Nearly a minute elapsed before a woman got out, glanced right and left, then seemed about to re-enter the taxi and drive away. But, finally, she approached the house slowly, hesitated again, then almost ran to the top of the steps. I am certain it was Rosalie.

All this disturbs me. It brings ghosts from my old life thronging round me. Also, something queer is happening to me in a deep interior manner. Moments of intense inner excitement flash up in me, raising me to a new level of consciousness. I feel exalted and afraid. A new surging abundant life possesses me, a life which quickens and annihilates. My body seems to become as huge as the earth. I have to touch myself to become aware of my actual shape.

Nevertheless, somehow I must go on with this manuscript. I must show how I became the Ivor Trent whom the people downstairs are clamouring to see.

It must have been the end of 1922 when I first came to this house. I only came because my artist friend suggested it. Indifference paralysed me. I had no background, no past, no roots. My father had robbed me of everything represented by the words childhood, boyhood, youth. I had no intimate personal life, no memories. Behind me was a void.

But this personal life is not the only one: there is the life of the world surrounding us. Instinctively we believe a number of things concerning it. We hear grand words about it—Justice, Freedom, Honour—and we assume they represent realities. Well, the war revealed that it is a Jungle. The grand words are a façade.

Still, 77 Potiphar Street was interesting. It was full of odd people. Captain Frazer’s experiment was a failure from its inception, but it was something to watch, and that was all I wanted—something to watch. Of course, I was tired of it in a month or two, but then I met Elsa.

I met her through going to the studio of the artist who had induced me to come to Potiphar Street. She was sitting to him and was greatly embarrassed by the fact. Later, I learned that it was the first time she had sat to anyone, but, as she was alone and penniless, necessity had made her an artist’s model.

I began to go to the studio whenever she was there. At first my presence increased her embarrassment, but soon we became friends. We dined together frequently and, after dinner, we walked up and down the Embankment for hours. Eventually she took a tiny room in No. 77.

Except her appearance, there was nothing remarkable about her, as the word is used, but she was one of those strangely complete beings. Most people come to the world with a soul like an empty suitcase, which they gradually fill—usually with rubbish or worse. She came with her suitcase packed. She was therefore the spectator of her own experience. It foamed on the circumference of her being, it did not penetrate to the centre.

There is tranquillity in joy, and it was hers. To be with her brought peace, as dawn over a silent sea brings peace. She knew little that can be taught, and much that can never be learned. Her beauty was that of a youth whom Nature had capriciously turned into a girl. And her hair was stolen from a god.

To be with her became a necessity. I soon tired of the other lodgers. The artists’ jargon, and their incessant quarrels, became very monotonous. The only person besides Elsa who interested me was a young man who believed he was a reincarnation of Nietzsche. He interested me because, after all, that is one way of getting through the world. His monomania was intermittent, however, and when it deserted him he was a highly intelligent rather amusing man. But, after Elsa came to No. 77, I saw much less of him.

Although we spent hours and hours together, I never told her anything about myself. She knew that I did nothing, but she never asked any questions. You could be silent with her, and, often, we were silent. She would lie on the bed in my study and I would stand at the window gazing at the river.

Then one night we became lovers. It just happened. And then, lying in the darkness together, I told her everything about my life. I imagine that took a long time. I know that it was dawn when I had brought my story up to my arrival at Potiphar Street.

I ended by saying something like this:

“That’s my life, more or less. And if I have told it as if it were something that is over, it is because it is over. I shall go on, of course, but I shall never be able to surrender myself wholly to any experience. I didn’t—when you gave yourself to me. Something in me was watching. I know I’ve a certain type of strength, but it’s paralysed. There’s nothing for me to do.”

Then she said:

“Why don’t you write a book?”

“What about?”

“What you’ve just told me.”

“What’s the use of that?”

“Well, an artist I sat to last week was telling a friend that if you give expression to thoughts, or emotions, or memories, you become free of them.”

“I wonder. Well, if I wrote a book, what should I call it?”

She was silent for a minute, then suggested:

“Two Lives and a Third.”

“No! Two Lives and a Destiny.”

That’s how my first novel was conceived. It was written in this room. Often, when I was working, Elsa sat reading, or stood looking out of the window, or rested on the bed. Usually, however, I forgot she was there.

A dæmonic energy surged through me. I was slinging my life at the world. Yet, oddly enough, I ceased to be myself. I discovered that writing is a form of possession. Something drove through me, marshalled the book into parts and chapters, snatched words and phrases out of the air. I ceased to be Ivor Trent. I became as anonymous as a medium in a trance. Although the book was derived wholly from my own experience, that experience ceased to be mine. The events I recorded had not happened to me—they were happening to the man in the book. His father was not my father. I understood his father. I became him. I was each of my characters in turn. And I was all of them simultaneously. I was never Ivor Trent.

This was escape, this was deliverance—to be possessed! To inhabit the psychic realm of thought and emotion! Not to know who one is, or where one is, or what is happening in the actual world! Then, at last, to look at one’s watch and so rediscover oneself! To count the pages, and go to bed—not a man, but a crowd!

This is deliverance—the only deliverance I have ever known.

Two Lives and a Destiny took a year to write and revise. I had not read a line of it to Elsa, but, now, I read all of it to her. When I had finished, she said:

“I never imagined it would be like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not like that. Not as good as that, not nearly as good.”

But I discounted her opinion, for I knew she was in love with me. I decided to find out whether anyone would publish it. That would be the book’s first test.

So I went to see Nietzsche. I knew one or two of his books had been published.

I found him in his room, lying on a sofa, reading.

“Look here,” I burst out, “I’ve written a novel, and——”

“You’ve not got it with you?”

“No.”

“Right! Sit down and tell me what you want.”

“I want to know which publisher to send it to.”

“Don’t send it to any. Send it to my agent, Voyce. If it’s any good, he’ll handle it. If it isn’t, he’ll send it back. But don’t tell him I’m living here, because I owe him money. If he should place the book, then tell him that I recommended you to go to him. But mind you also say that I’m on a walking tour through the Black Forest.”

I sent the book to Voyce. A fortnight later he wrote asking me to see him. A month after, the novel was accepted by Polsons. Four months later it was published.

It was a great and an instantaneous success.

E

This cannot be a connected narrative. I am like a man besieged. Letters and telegrams keep arriving; Marsden is demanding to see me; Captain Frazer has discovered that no one knows that I have had rooms here for years. Every hour someone comes to the house to inquire.

It is Wednesday night. The doctor has just gone. He is suspicious about me, that is evident, but—fortunately—I do not look well, as I spent all last night writing. I wrote page after page in feverish haste.

Still, he has agreed that the nurse is to go. She leaves on Friday, and Mrs. Frazer will attend to me. I had a long talk with her after the doctor had gone. I have arranged everything. She is sending her husband to Ramsgate. Also, she is getting rid of the undesirable lodgers. Someone is to be found to take her place in the house. I gave her a hundred pounds and told her to make these changes as quickly as possible.

Above all, I emphasised that Captain Frazer must have gone by Saturday. That is essential. He has discovered my secret, and now he insists on dealing with visitors. I must get rid of him. There is nothing he would not do to make money.

Marsden does not worry me. He called on Rendell yesterday and found Vera with him. Marsden and Vera! They met once at my flat, and I saw he was attracted by her. Wrayburn, too, was here yesterday. And Rosalie will probably come again.

They are meeting in the labyrinth. But, of them, later. First, I must show here how I became the man they met.

Two Lives and a Destiny was not only a success in England. It had a big sale in America and was translated into several European languages.

As a result, my name acquired a life of its own. I no longer possessed it exclusively. Suddenly, therefore, I had a background.

All sorts of doors opened to me. I was deluged with requests to write articles on this, that, or the other—on anything, on nothing. I was interviewed. I was asked to lecture. The world suddenly became quite a different place. My publisher, Bickenshaw, suddenly became quite a different person. So different, in fact, that I almost waited to be introduced. Agents wrote to me, enclosing little booklets in which were modestly outlined the inestimable advantages conferred by their services. Hundreds of people who had read the book wrote to me. One correspondent accused me of plagiarising an unpublished work of his own. Every photographer in London wrote to me, craving a sitting—at no obligation to myself. Old school fellows I had forgotten wrote to me, saying they weren’t surprised I had written a book because they remembered how jolly good my essays used to be. Scores of people wrote to me saying that their father was exactly like the father in my book. And everyone in the United Kingdom with the name of Trent wrote to me—saying they were distant relatives, and how bad times were with them.

So 77 Potiphar Street was no longer a possible address.

I took a flat. I joined two or three clubs. I went to dinners, parties, country houses. I had a good private income and my appearance was a success. I met all sorts of people—eminent, amusing, influential. And, gradually, I accepted their assumptions about me.

I accepted their assumptions about me. Not one of them was true, not one of them bore any relation to what I was, but I accepted them. How, otherwise, could I meet these people? You lose your background unless you adapt yourself to it. Also, I told myself that all this was temporary. It was amusing to be a celebrity for a year or two. Above all, life had cheated me. Success was a type of revenge. So my real self—the naked, empty Ivor Trent—stood on the bank and watched the successful Ivor Trent swirling round the social vortex.

But although I left Potiphar Street, I kept my rooms there. By now Captain Frazer’s experiment had completely collapsed, so I gave Mrs. Frazer money to save them from bankruptcy. This was not generosity. Instinctively I knew that I could only write in this room overlooking the river. That sounds the merest superstition, but it is nevertheless a fact that I have never been able to work anywhere but here. I have tried again and again—always with the same result.

But there was a deeper reason why I retained these rooms. I knew that I belonged to the nomads who drifted in and out of this house, for I, too, was a rootless person. I, too, had no place in the world. I, too, was a bankrupt—on a very different level, it is true, but a bankrupt none the less.

I did not see Elsa and I did not write to her. When I returned to these rooms (two or three years after the publication of Two Lives and a Destiny) to write my second book, she had gone—and I did not ask Mrs. Frazer if she knew where she was.

I hated her.

That is difficult to explain, but it is essential to explain it.

I had become a man whose external life bore no relation whatever to his interior one. Outwardly, I was a success. Inwardly, I was a failure. I had rebelled against this secret knowledge. I refused to admit this inner emptiness. To do that would be to go into the desert—and wait for a miracle. But I dared not do that.

I rebelled, and the last ten years of my life are the history of that rebellion. My relations with others are incidents in that history. Wrayburn once told me that I had evaded my “spiritual destiny,” and that my relations with others “represented my time-killing activities.” But he did not know how true these statements were, for I deceived even him.

Only I—and Elsa—knew the truth about Ivor Trent. Only she and I knew the real Ivor Trent, the man who was empty and naked—the man who had made a book out of the debris of his life. To others, I was what I appeared to be. So I turned to these others and deserted Elsa.

I turned to them because I was determined to prove to myself that I had power. I would make others acknowledge that power so that it might seem real to me. If they believed in it, I, too, might be able to believe in it.

There was nothing very extraordinary in this decision. How many men are there who, being miserably unhappy at home, devote their finest energies to the creation of a great business in order that outward success shall numb the knowledge of inner failure? Why, what is our civilisation—our pride in “our dominion over Nature”—but one vast conspiracy to escape from the terrible knowledge of our emptiness? More and more we live “outside” ourselves. We blind our eyes with seeing, deafen our ears with hearing. Bigger and bigger grow our buildings, mightier and mightier our cities, in the frenzied hope that outward visible triumphs will so hypnotise us that we shall forget our inward spiritual squalor. Noise, sensation, speed—those are our gods. We, who dare not be silent, dare not think, dare not be still, lest we should see the ghosts we have become.

No, there was nothing extraordinary about my decision to live “outside” myself.

Before the publication of Two Lives and a Destiny, I had no choice. I could have gone into the world, of course, but it is one thing to be “a Mr. Trent” and quite another to be Ivor Trent.

I capitalised my background and went into the world. My novel was dramatised and the play had a considerable success in London and New York. Money surrounded me like an incoming tide. I played the part of a successful person, but, underneath, I knew I had run away from myself. I knew that my activities had no centre: they were mechanical, not organic. I was a ghost in fancy dress.

Still, I went into the world. That is, I became involved in chaos. I knew that the structure of society had collapsed. I knew that only a spiritual miracle could deliver the world from its deepening darkness—just as I knew that only a spiritual miracle could quicken life in me. A façade would not save either of us.

So, by a masterpiece of irony, I did exactly what my father had done. I presented a façade to the world, behind which shivered my empty and naked self.

Everyone accepted this façade as being the man. Everyone believed that I was what I seemed—that I had a forceful, dominating personality, and all the rest of it. I became reckless in my relations with others. I wanted to prove to myself that I had power, and I was determined to prove it.

But there was one person who knew the truth—Elsa. It was why I hated her. She was a nobody, an artist’s model, tramping from studio to studio, but she knew the real Ivor Trent whom I was denying. I never wrote to her and she did not write to me. But she knew. I had told her everything. And the fact that I had deserted her, without a word or a line, was proof conclusive that I dare not seek to justify my present type of existence to her.

She knew—and the knowledge that she knew was agony. While she lived, I should know that my mask was a mask. Her very existence was a subtle form of blackmail.

The better I became known, the greater my “triumphs’’ in the world, or with women, the more intolerable the knowledge became that Elsa was not deceived. She knew that the great Ivor Trent was a ghost; a coward who had abandoned himself and her; a fake, like his father, who deceived others with a façade. She knew—this tuppeny-ha’penny starving model in Chelsea knew my secret. And the fact that she was negligible, in the world’s eyes, only lacerated my pride more deeply. Had she been my “equal” in any way, I could have endured it. But this nobody, in her squalid room!

While I was at Potiphar Street, writing my second book, Mrs. Frazer volunteered certain information about Elsa. I learned that her life was a pretty impossible affair. Sittings became progressively scarce and she had not literally a penny outside her earnings. Mrs. Frazer was guarded in her account, but nevertheless I realised that Elsa had had to sell herself in order not to starve. I knew the types she encountered, and could guess the rest.

I had no pity for her. On the contrary, I was glad. She had remained “complete,” she was everything I was not, everything I needed to be—but the world fêted me and kicked her into the gutter. That fact gave me perverse satisfaction, for it seemed to establish my superiority.

Sometimes I saw her in the street, but, whenever possible, I avoided her. Usually, that was simple, as I only went out at night. Twice, however, we came face to face. We only exchanged commonplace remarks, but, standing before her, I endured terrible humiliation. She was wretchedly dressed, but, although the talons of necessity had gripped and tautened her features, they had not extinguished the light which illuminated them.

I did not see her again after the second of these meetings, and I never referred to her when talking to Mrs. Frazer. Gradually she became a shadow on the circumference of my memory. If I thought of her, it was only to hope that she had gone away, or married, or that she was dead.

Soon, however, my life became so complicated, owing to the relations I deliberately established with others, that I had no time to think of Elsa. . . .

I am going to reveal the truth of those relationships here. I shall hide nothing. But, first, I must make clear the motive which dominated my actions in every case.

Only a summary can do that.

The discovery that my father’s “strength” was weakness—then the inferno of the war—had deprived me of every value I had ever possessed. I was empty and naked. But I rebelled against this inner impotence. The success of my first book made that rebellion possible. I denied the truth about myself and went into the world. I created a personality. I invented Ivor Trent.

But it was imperative that others should believe in him. It was essential they should believe that this Ivor Trent had power. That was essential, for, if he seemed real to them, he might seem real to me.

To dominate others, therefore, was my aim. To make them convinced that I had power. Power for good, or power for evil—power for this, that, or the other—but Power!

To make them accept this ghost in armour as a man! To dominate them, on some level or other, till my personality was more real to them than their own! To tower above them till they mistook a shadow for strength! To hypnotise them with a mask——

This was Ivor Trent.

F

Mrs. Frazer has just left me.

I asked her how long I had been here. She told me that it is ten days. A week ago last Sunday I collapsed at the top of the steps and was carried to this room.

Then she went on to tell me that the changes I wanted had been made. Captain Frazer had gone to Ramsgate, and so on. This wearied me, and I think she noticed it, for she changed the subject abruptly and gave me an account of a scene which happened last Saturday, and one which greatly embarrassed her.

It appears that soon after two o’clock Marsden, Vera, Wrayburn, Mrs. Frazer and her husband were having a violent discussion in Rendell’s room. Rendell arrived in the middle of it, but his appearance in no way abated it. On the contrary, it became more unrestrained till, finally, when everyone was shouting and no one was listening, the door opened and the servant announced that a lady had called to see Mr. Rendell.

Mrs. Frazer described the visitor minutely. It was Rosalie. And she was in mourning.

“In she came, Mr. Trent, in the middle of that hubbub! I never felt so ashamed in my life. She looked startled, I can tell you, and I’m not surprised. She was frail-looking, but very beautiful. What she must have thought—and what Mr. Rendell must have thought—I tremble to think. I do, indeed.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Mrs. Frazer,” I replied. “It was your husband’s. Anyway, there won’t be any more scenes now he’s gone.”

I passed my hand across my forehead.

“There!” she exclaimed. “Now I’ve tired you, telling you all my troubles! I shall leave you now and you must have a rest.”

“I quite agree, but there’s one thing I want first.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“I want copies of The Times for the last week. Could you send out for them?”

“Mr. Rendell takes The Times, sir, and as it happens I haven’t used the old copies yet. I’ll bring them up. It’s good to hear you asking for a newspaper. I’m sure I’d never have believed it a week ago.”

A few minutes later she returned with the papers. Directly I was alone, I scanned the “Deaths” announcements.

“Vivian . . . after a short illness . . .”

He was dead! Paul Vivian was dead! . . .

I remember every circumstance relating to my first meeting with Rosalie. I had finished a book and had just returned to my flat. Then one evening a Mrs. Laidlaw rang me up and begged me to dine at her house on the Thursday, explaining that her husband had asked a Mr. and Mrs. Vivian to dinner—people they had met on a trip abroad—and now, unexpectedly, her husband had had to go away.

“Do come, Ivor, although it will be dull.”

“Why will it be dull?” I asked.

“Because he’s a Dreary, but she’s rather a darling. Enigmatic—odd! Can’t quite make her out. But she’s a Lovely—definitely. Do come.”

“Very well. I’ll come.”

I cannot imagine why I said I’d go. I was in no need of distraction, for, two days before, a woman called Vera Thornton had descended on me, who seemed to think I was God and that therefore I could shape her destiny. As I had taken her into the flat, instead of putting her outside it, I did not lack company. Nevertheless, I went to the Laidlaws.

I was in the hall when the Vivians arrived. We stood gazing at each other while her husband took off his overcoat. Her lips were parted, giving expectancy to the beautifully modelled features and this contrasted strangely with the frightened expression of the large very blue eyes.

Then she disappeared, and I glanced at her husband.

I put him down at forty-five, but I was far from certain. He was the type that becomes defined at thirty and changes little thereafter. He was heavy, solid, capable. His appearance told you most things about him. You knew what his parents were like, the kind of life he lived, his opinions, his prejudices, and his virtues. I decided that he was a pendulum, rather than a man, and wondered why that “other-world” woman had married him.

I had one minute with Mrs. Laidlaw before they joined us.

“Well? You’ve seen them?”

“Yes, I was in the hall when they arrived.”

“He’s rather like the National Debt, don’t you think? But she’s joyous, isn’t she?”

“I suppose he knows she’s going to be very ill very soon.”

“Don’t be absurd, Ivor! She’s been ill. That’s why they went for that trip. She’s had two nervous breakdowns—and the second one was serious.”

She tapped her forehead significantly.

“I see. Well——”

“They’re coming! I’m counting on you to talk. I can’t say one word to him. Whatever subject you mention, he always says ‘the situation is serious.’ Once I asked him if he had a hobby, and he said he was a Numismatist. What’s that, Ivor? It sounds indecent.”

I shall not forget that dinner. I hardly spoke to her, and I do not believe she looked at me once, but I was aware only of her—and the wordless dialogue between us. She sat motionless and silent, rather like a solitary child at a grown-up party, telling me about herself in a language more subtle than speech.

When she said good-bye, she did not look at me.

The next afternoon I rang her up. I recognised her voice, and said:

“Is that you, Rosalie?’’

“But—who is it?”

“Ivor.”

I heard an odd little sound like a gasp.

“Ivor,” I repeated. “I want you to come to my flat—now.”

“But-but——”

“Now!”

I gave her the address, then added:

“I am waiting for you.”

Half an hour later she arrived.

She made no excuse for coming and gave no explanations. It was some moments before she spoke. On entering the sitting-room, she paused and looked round as if to convince herself that it was real.

I made her rest on a sofa, then she began to talk—rather as if she were continuing an interrupted conversation—and I learned about her parents and the circumstances in which she had married Vivian. Also she told me that she had had two nervous collapses.

I watched rather than listened. Her history was in her appearance—just as her husband’s was in his. The difference between those histories was the gulf which separated them. He was unaware of that gulf. She was poised precariously on the brink of it.

Her gifts were those of an emotional genius. She responded to every nuance of feeling, every vibration in the atmosphere, every fleeting mood. It was because she had the potentiality of a great artist that she utterly failed to be a minor one. But she lacked one quality essential to a great creative synthesis—that of Will. For her to attempt an orthodox life was equivalent to a butterfly attempting the work of a bee.

She had lightning transitions from hysteria to inertia; an amazing gift for surrendering to each emotion that welled up in her. In recounting her history, she isolated with unerring flair the one significant detail which made a scene flash into life. Her descriptions were not catalogues of facts. They were impressionistic evocations. You did not hear them. You saw them.

Her beauty was that of a fey child, mysteriously become a woman. The spirit that inhabited her body seemed remote from it. When she was absent, it was her smile, or a gesture, or her rippling laugh which stabbed your memory—never the line of her figure.

After she had been with me for an hour, she suddenly leaped to her feet.

“I must go!”

“Why?”

“He will be back soon.”

“You will come to-morrow?”

“Yes.”

She came the next day, and the next, and the next.

Within a week we were lovers. Nevertheless, when she was not with me, it was her smile, or a gesture, or her rippling laugh which stabbed my memory—never the white beauty of her body.

Again and again she would lie in my arms sobbing. She clung to me like a child who, till now, had been too frightened to cry.

Endlessly, however, her ever-active imagination tortured her.

Once, when she was dressing, she paused suddenly and pointed to her clothes.

“He paid for these! He’s at his office now—working—getting money for me!”

Instantly she identified herself with him. She saw our relations as he would see them. She became hysterical.

“Ivor! Ivor! Him—think of him! I shall kill myself! I can’t sleep by him, night after night, knowing——”

“Listen to me!”

She stared at me with terrified eyes, her breasts rising and falling as if she had just run a race.

“Our being lovers has saved your marriage. You know that is true.”

“Yes, but—him!”

“It doesn’t matter about him. It matters about you.”

“But if—if I tell him!”

“You won’t tell him.”

“But I may! I may, Ivor! Suddenly—without being able to help it. I shall scream—and tell him!”

“You won’t tell him.”

She came nearer me.

“How can you know?—how can you be so certain?”

“I’ll lend you my will.”

“Can you do that?” she asked, quite seriously, her voice a child-like blend of surprise and curiosity.

“Yes. If, suddenly, you feel you must tell him, you will say to yourself—I will see Ivor to-morrow and then both of us will tell him. That’s what you’ll say.”

She accepted this as a heaven-sent solution. A moment later she had forgotten Vivian’s existence and was laughing at her reflection in the mirror.

But that night at ten o’clock my telephone bell rang.

“Ivor!”

“Yes.”

(I had to be monosyllabic, for Vera Thornton was in the room.)

“I’m in a public telephone-box. He had to go out. It was inevitable about us, wasn’t it? You said it was inevitable.”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain?”

“Yes.”

“I knew you were, but I had to hear you say it. I’m certain, too—now. To-morrow?”

“To-morrow.”

What Vivian would suffer if he knew! That was the rock round which her imagination seethed. She made his values hers; saw the situation with his eyes. This was her rack, and again and again she stretched herself upon it.

She would devise the most fantastic solutions in order to ease her suffering.

“Ivor! Listen! Perhaps, if he knew, he wouldn’t mind. Yes, yes! Wait! If he knew that you had saved our marriage, he—might—don’t you think?”

I would calm her with a word. It was only necessary to make an entirely definite statement in a tone of authority for her to accept it as if God had spoken.

“If only you would teach me to be strong, like you! Do you know, last night, I laughed in my sleep. He told me so this morning.”

“Well, don’t let it go any further,” I began, but she clutched my arm.

“Ivor!”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I’ve told everything in my sleep! And perhaps he heard—and doesn’t mind. Is that possible, do you think?”

Every other day she imagined a new solution. It was curious how, having no consciousness of guilt herself, she suffered agonies of remorse through accepting his standards. Nevertheless, despite this vicarious suffering, the improvement in her health was astonishing. She looked years younger than the woman I had met at the Laidlaws.

One afternoon, when we had been lovers for some months, she made a new suggestion—and a startling one.

“I want you to meet him, Ivor. I want you to come to the flat—often!”

“Why?”

“It—it will seem more—more regular.”

She was looking at me with great, serious eyes.

“You will do that for me?” she added.

“Yes, if you like.”

She seized my hands impulsively.

“Why do you love me, Ivor?”

“Because you give me a sense of power.”

She laughed and began to talk about something else, but—a week later—I was asked to dine at the Vivians.

Vivian knew I had met Rosalie since the night at the Laidlaws. She had told him that she had run into me somewhere else, and that we had become friends. Consequently the suggestion that I should dine with them was more likely to allay suspicion than to provoke it.

The flat was an extension of Vivian. He had lived in it as a bachelor and, with one exception, it was now what it had been then. Rosalie had merely been imported into it. The exception was her own intimate room which, before Vivian married, had not been used, the flat being a large one. To cross the threshold was to leave one world and enter another.

Vivian’s furniture was solid, handsome, heavy. It regarded you with the dull pride of immutability. You were transitory: it was permanent. Each piece had its place and would remain in it. There it stood—a symbol of its owner’s virtues.

Vivian regarded other people, not as individuals, but as types. To discover to which type a man belonged, all that was necessary was to know what he did. I was a writer. Very well, then! I was the “artist” type.

Now, with Vivian and his friends, art would have been dismissed as a piece of foolishness had it not been for the fact that certain pictures sold for stupendous sums of money, and certain writers made incomes which were not to be denied. Also, eccentric members of the aristocracy were genuinely interested in art and showed clearly that they did not regard it as ingenious tomfoolery. Vivian, therefore, feigned respect for it while privately regarding it as super-nonsense.

My opinion of him was wholly at variance with Rosalie’s, though I did not tell her so. She regarded him as kind, indulgent, unselfish. To me, he possessed none of those qualities. He was a man who was quite certain that certain things could never happen to him. They happened to others, of course—but not to him.

What convinced me of this was the manner in which he referred to Rosalie’s illnesses. His attitude implied that his wife ought not to have had nervous collapses. (He always referred to her as “my wife.”) He could find no explanation of these breakdowns. She had every comfort, every attention. They went away frequently and she did not lack amusement. Why, then, nervous collapses?

It was plain that he regarded them as disturbances in an otherwise satisfactory and well-organised life. They were the only contact he had ever had with Failure.

“On the second occasion, it was very painful, very painful indeed.” He paused and looked round in order to make certain that we were alone. “She used to scream—although she was in a first-class nursing home. The one in which Lady Mavers is interested, you probably know of it. I used to say to her—gently, of course—‘My dear, you really must control yourself.’ It was a most difficult time for me. And once—would you believe it?—when I went to see her in the home, she did not recognise me.”

I pointed out that she was a sensitive—but I got no further.

“Yes, yes! I know that argument, but it’s based on a fallacy. She’s deceptively frail-looking. I use the word ‘deceptively’ advisedly. You may not believe me, but, actually, she’s strongly built. Lithe—but strong. She looks far more frail in her clothes than she does—than she actually is.”

There he sat at the head of the table, a square, solid figure in old-fashioned evening clothes. He had a ponderous head, shrewd eyes, broad, capable hands. To see him was to know his friends. Everything I learned about Vivian only confirmed what I already knew. I never made a discovery.

Clockwork-regularity was his god. On Wednesday nights they dined at a restaurant, because the servants went out on Wednesday nights. Never did they enter a restaurant on any other night. On Saturday they went to the play, because Vivian did not mind being late on Saturdays as he did not have to go to the office the next day. On Saturday afternoons he had a Turkish bath, because the office was shut on Saturday afternoons. On Sunday from three to five he contemplated his coins. He had a remarkable collection and was very proud of it. He took the same house in the country every summer and went to it every week-end. His wife could stay there from May till September, if she chose. If not, she accompanied him every week-end. Every other year they went abroad for a month. Every morning he left the house at nine-thirty and returned at six o’clock. Every winter he suffered from bronchial trouble.

Rosalie was a prisoner among the prosaic.

On one occasion I referred to the amazing improvement in her health, adding that I took some credit for it as it coincided with our friendship.

“Oh yes, yes! She’s quite normal, really. All women have fads. But I always knew that a regular life must have an effect on her. One young fool of a doctor told me that she needed an outlet.”

He looked at me with heavy indignation.

“My wife needed an outlet! Did you ever hear such nonsense? Here she is, perfectly well again, and what outlet has she now which she had not then?”

I agreed that a regular life had had its effect on her.

My friendship with Rosalie did not disturb him in the least. In fact, in the winter, when his bronchial trouble asserted itself, he welcomed my presence, and frequently asked me to take Rosalie to the theatre on Saturday nights.

As to the question of possible infidelity, I am convinced it never crossed his mind. To him, she was not Rosalie. She was—his wife. Somebody else’s wife might be unfaithful to her husband, of course, but not his wife. Things like that did not happen to him.

I half believe that he thought it was my admiration for him which made me such a frequent visitor.

What would he do if he discovered? That was the only question relating to Vivian which I could not answer. Would he merely insist that she was never to see me again—then punish her in secret till the day one of them died? That would avoid scandal. Or would he divorce her, and bang the gates of his memory on her for ever? Would he commit suicide? Murder? It was impossible even to have an opinion. To discover that his wife had a lover would be a calamity so outside Vivian’s experience that his reaction to it was not to be imagined.

Rosalie believed that he loved her. I believed that he loved her as part of himself. I do not think he loved Rosalie. But I am quite certain he loved his wife.

I did not care whether he discovered or not. Danger has always fascinated me. It delivers me from that terrible interior weariness. It robs the days and nights of that fearful flat monotony in which everything is steeped in the leaden hue of mediocrity. Danger is the subtlest form of intoxication. It makes the most worthless life suddenly worth the living. It gives meaning to the meaningless. Boredom lies awake in a nightcap, but Danger sleeps with a sword by its side.

At any moment Rosalie might have told Vivian. She lived, moved, and had her being in a state of emotional tension. She had the irresistible impulses of a child. She had, too, a child’s craving to share its happiness. Her imagination tortured her by compelling her to regard that happiness as he would regard it. Above all, she had the dream that it was possible for Vivian to know we were lovers—and to share the innocence she felt in that relationship. And, for her, this was not only a dream, it was an objective. It was her belief in this fantasy which enabled her to continue to deceive him. This was why she wanted me to visit their flat. To be there together, the three of us, in a room—seemed to her to be prophetic of the fulfilment of her dream. The three of us—in physical proximity! To Rosalie, that fact foreshadowed a future intimacy in which all barriers would be down.

She was so far removed from Vivian that she could believe that about him! She was such worlds away from him that she could not believe he was what he seemed.

Whenever my telephone bell rang, whenever a wire came for me, or a ring at the door, my mind became a question mark. Often, I was certain she would tell him. I have seen the sentence quiver on her lips a dozen times.

Once she impulsively took his arm and mine simultaneously. I could see that her romanticism was regarding herself as a link between us. I burst out laughing, and thereby jarred her back to actuality.

To dominate her so that she would not tell him! That was my task, and success almost convinced me that I possessed the power in which she so wholly believed. To steel her with my will! To possess her psychic being! To still her remorse with a word! To rule her ever-active imagination!

And—simultaneously—not to care if she did tell him. Her confession would force me into action. If he divorced her, I would marry her. If he killed her, I would kill him. To be forced to act, to do something—anything! At times I thought that this would be deliverance.

What did it matter to me whether she told him or not? I was living so “outside” myself, so divorced from my centre, that all my actions were unreal to me. What gave them a ghostly appearance of reality was Rosalie’s belief in my strength. That belief almost enabled me to believe in the Ivor Trent whom she loved. And, every day, my desire to believe in him deepened, for—every day—the alternative became clearer and clearer.

The alternative was to enter a desert—not unlike the one which surrounded Denis Wrayburn. But of him—later.

Did I love Rosalie? The question is meaningless. When a man is desperately at odds with himself, others do not exist. He is a battlefield of principalities and powers. His relations with others are a caricature of that conflict. He is alone. And the more people he knows, and the more famous he is, the greater is that solitude.

To me, Rosalie was something rare, something unexpected in the modern world—a work of art in a factory. Sometimes I forgot my falsity, my emptiness, in watching her. (Usually, I watched her. I seldom listened to what she said.) At times I felt that she was my childhood—the childhood of which I had been robbed. But, had she guessed that the only link between us was weakness, she would have turned to ice in my arms. For she needed strength, and she believed that I was strong. She needed two types of strength: Vivian’s—and what she believed was mine. Vivian’s, because the actual world was so shadowy to her that she needed the companionship of one to whom it was overwhelmingly real. And she needed the strength she believed was mine—that is, psychic strength—in order to stabilise her imagination.

She needed the physical proximity of Vivian—and the psychic proximity of the type she imagined me to be. It was because she realised this unconsciously that she longed for Vivian to share our secret.

It never occurred to her that she was separated from me by a gulf as wide and as deep as that which divided her from Vivian.

She did not know that Ivor Trent was a ghost. She thought he was a giant.

G

During the three years we were lovers, Rosalie believed she was the only woman with whom I was intimate. Actually, during the first year, Vera Thornton visited me frequently. . . .

One afternoon—a few days before my first meeting with Rosalie at the Laidlaws’—I was alone in my flat, reading, when I was disturbed by a long peal from the bell.

I went to the door and found myself confronted by a woman of about twenty-one, who was trembling with excitement. She stood, speechless, staring at me with dark fanatical eyes, as if I were an idol in a shrine. She held a bulging bag which was clearly very heavy, for she stood obliquely, so that the pull of her body balanced its weight.

“I’m Vera Thornton,” she announced at last, in a voice resembling a gasp.

The name was vaguely familiar, but I failed to place her.

“I wrote to you, if you remember, and—and you answered my letter.”

For some reason these simple statements made her blush crimson.

“I remember,” I replied. “You wrote telling me about your family. Won’t you come in?”

We went to the sitting-room. I was about to suggest she should sit down, when I noticed the absence of the bag.

“Where’s your bag?” I asked.

“I—I left it outside.”

“Do you mean—outside the front door?”

She nodded, so I went to fetch it, half convinced that I had a lunatic on hand, and half interested.

I struggled back with the bag—which must have been filled with lead to its uttermost capacity—and had scarcely entered the room when she began to speak in a nervous staccato manner, but with great rapidity.

In broken, intense sentences, she literally hurled her history at my head. She told me about her home: her father’s promiscuity: the pleasure-frenzied lives of her brothers and sisters: hinted darkly at infamies: described the pandemonium which raged perpetually in the house. Then, with the briefest of pauses, she raced on to detail her scholastic achievements, her sufferings, and the shame she had endured at being connected with such a family.

Exclamations, blushes, angry gestures, served as punctuation in this passionate recital. She emphasised her isolation from this family of hers with ever-increasing intensity. She went on and on. She related her conflicts with her brothers and sisters; their contempt for her standards; her loathing of theirs; and the coarse jokes with which her father had countered her protests.

Finally, she explained that for the last year she had read only my books, knew whole passages by heart, and that they had inspired her to leave her family and come to London.

During the whole of this explosion she did not look at me. When its echoes had trembled into silence, I asked her what she proposed to do in London.

A long tortuous explanation followed, during which she writhed with embarrassment to such an extent that she maintained only a precarious balance on her chair. Nevertheless, I gathered from hints, innuendoes, and side-long glances that she regarded me as a god who would provide her with a destiny—of a highly-spiritual order.

I lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down the room, interested by the knowledge that if all this had occurred when I was about to write a book, I should have got rid of her instantly. But I had just finished one, and so had nothing to do. Also, I had long since tired of meeting herds of people. For some years I had concentrated on individuals. Curiosity therefore suggested exploration.

As I paced up and down I glanced at her repeatedly, noting her powerful regular features, her jet-black hair, her strong over-developed figure. She was leaning forward, her hands clasping her knees, staring into futurity with fanatical eyes. She looked rather like a prophetess who had got the sack and was plotting revenge.

Then, with a view to testing the validity of a theory I had already formed, I began to question her regarding certain parts of her story. Not one of these questions related to her achievements, or her spiritual claims, or her fantastic conception of me. They concerned the members of her family. I pressed for further details about them—especially her sisters. I made her describe their appearance, their clothes and—above all—the types of life they led. Vera had only hinted darkly at enormities, but now I insisted on details.

I got them—obscured by a veil of prudery—but more or less complete. They were not in the least interesting, being merely commonplace examples of the pleasures of dull people with the modern conception of freedom. What was interesting, however, were certain facts which Vera made plain without intending to do so.

Briefly summarised, these were: that her sisters were pretty, attractive, and in great demand; that they ridiculed her pretensions; patronised her; and generally regarded her as a freak.

In fact, her account of them was an astonishing example of unconscious self-revelation. She made it very clear that it was her pride which was in flaming revolt against her family, not her soul. She hated them, not because of their sensuality, but because they refused to acknowledge her superiority. Her leaving them and coming to London was not the initial deed of a spiritual crusade. It was a melodramatic attempt to convince them of her originality. Her governing motive was to impress them, and so to be revenged for the humiliations they had inflicted.

Secretly, she feared that their estimate of her was the true one. She was terribly afraid that, underneath, she was like them. She was haunted by the fear that what separated her from them was not spirituality, but lack of courage. Her hatred was a secret fear of kinship. Consequently she was determined to prove that she did not belong to them.

And she expected me to accept her at her own valuation! I regarded her with the contempt that a great swindler feels for a pickpocket.

Nevertheless, I gave her tea and, later, I told the servants some lie about a cousin, so that Vera could spend the night in the flat.

For some days she talked and I listened. I listened to such fantastic nonsense about myself that, more than once, nothing less than murder seemed an adequate punishment. She grovelled before me. I was to be the means by which she would convince herself of her spiritual superiority to her family.

Things could not go on like this. That was definite. By now, I had met Rosalie, and so Vera had to leave the flat. I got her a room and then I told her, in the plainest possible terms, that her Christmas-card conception of me bore no relation to the facts, and that if we were to meet in the future it must be on that basis.

She gave me a superior smile—the kind of smile that is exchanged by members of a tiny community which meets in a basement once a week, and is dogmatically certain that it—and only it—possesses the Key to the Riddle of the Universe. Despite this smile, however, I told her that in no circumstances was she to come to the flat unless I asked her. Then, having repeated that her conception of me was wholly fictitious, I got rid of her.

But that did not stop her writing. My God, those letters! Vera’s letters! Someone once said that the spiritual life must be a fulfilment, not a substitute. If ever truth were written, it is there. Those letters—what she believed them to be, and what they were! I began to hate her. I wrote her a line asking her not to write to me. I received three thousand words by return of post, mainly to the effect that I did not know what I really was, and that what I really was—was what the world really wanted.

I had had enough. And I had arrived at a decision. I sent her a note asking her to come to the flat the next night, stressing—for the third time—that if she came she must not expect to find the man she imagined me to be.

She came the next night. I tested the extent of my dominion over her, only to discover that it had no limits. Then I told her she would come to the flat twice a week, and oftener if I sent for her.

For a year she visited me regularly.

During that period I proved a number of things to her in such a manner that even she could retain no illusions about me or herself. Not only did I descend from the pedestal on which she had placed me, but I also forced her to vacate hers.

I humiliated her, physically and psychologically, till no trace of her former conception of me remained. I proved to her that she did belong to that family which she so despised. I proved to her that their estimate of her was the true one, and that her pretensions were a façade erected by her pride.

Again and again—breathless, crimson, infuriated—she announced that she hated me and would never see me again—never! And whenever I sent her a note, she arrived at the flat precisely at the hour I had stated.

Her surrender, on every level, was complete and abject. She had no will in my presence—only a genius for obedience. Soon, she had one fear, and only one—that in some mysterious manner her family would learn of her degradation. This fear was so rooted that it was not removed by the statement that they would learn of it only if she told them.

Those are the facts about my relations with Vera. They are not pretty ones, but I am not concerned with prettiness.

To be worshipped for everything I was not—everything from which I had run away—was intolerable. It woke a cold anger in me, an icy determination to destroy. She should learn what she was—as I had been forced to know what I was. She should know what she was running away from—even as I knew. If she wanted to present a façade to the world, it was better to realise what was behind it. It was better to know that it hid a naked empty Vera Thornton, than to believe that it shielded a saint in the making.

So, in the space of a few weeks, I ceased to be a Spiritual Superman for Vera and became a Monster of Vice. (The latter designation was as fantastic as the former. I was, in fact, consistently a ghost throughout.) Originally, she gazed at my Radiance in the clouds, and now she peered at my Dark Shadow in the pit. She melodramatised everything.

But she believed I had Power. Her façade had not deceived me—but mine had deceived her. She was so convinced of the power of my Dark Malignity that at times I too almost believed in it. Almost—but not quite. It threw no shadow on the floor, so I knew it was a ghost.

At the end of a year she said she must have a job. I managed to get her a position in the foreign department of a bank. She left her room and took a small flat in Bloomsbury.

She still came to see me whenever I asked her, but I began to ask her less and less frequently. And, finally, not at all.

H

The brutality of my relations with Vera temporarily eased the tension created by my association with Rosalie. Or so I deluded myself. Actually, of course, it increased that tension till a collapse was inevitable.

Apart from the ever-present possibility that Vivian would discover our secret, constant companionship with Rosalie was in the nature of an ordeal, for her world was not this one. It was a world of psychic extremity. To meet her was to enter it. To enter it, was to experience its intensity.

Often, when I left her, I was in a state of inner irritability which was intolerable. It was on these occasions that I rang up Vera and told her to come to the flat.

Or, if I did not telephone Vera, I would talk to someone—anyone—and learn all about his or her life till I could steep myself in his or her activities.

There was a girl they called Rummy, who served in the long bar of the Cosmopolitan. I often talked to her, till I had learned everything about her. Then I identified myself imaginatively with her activities till I almost became her. I knew every detail of her life in the bar and at home. I knew her hopes, her fears, her pleasures. I could become her at will—and so be delivered from the heavy chain of my own personality. She was a drug which I used again and again.

But there was another reason why I clung to the madness represented by Rosalie and Vera. That reason was Denis Wrayburn.

I spoke to him for the first time in the station restaurant at Basle. I had arrived at about dawn and had an hour or two to fill in before getting the train to Italy. I went and looked at the Rhine, then returned to the station for rolls and coffee.

I ordered these and was studying the mural decorations, when I heard a polar voice behind me refusing to pay the price asked for the excellent jam provided.

I turned and saw a remarkable-looking individual. I spoke to him and we spent an hour together. Among other things, I learned that he was acting as courier to a rich American family.

I doubt if I saw Wrayburn more than once during the next two years, then—soon after Rosalie and I had become lovers—he turned up at my flat and we met regularly.

I have known hosts of people, but no one remotely resembling Wrayburn. He was disembodied intelligence. He looked like a ghost who had genius—and that is precisely what he was. Only a dying civilisation could have produced him—and he regarded it with the eyes of an undertaker. He was the one man I have met who had to be what he was. No disguise was possible for him. He could present no façade to the world. He was an absolute being.

He frightened me. That is difficult to explain, but it must be explained. He frightened me because I saw an aspect of myself in him. Wrayburn was what I might become. He was what I should become, if my gift for writing deserted me. I should enter his wilderness. I should become a ghost with a brain.

Wrayburn was born an emotional outcast: I was becoming one. Elsa represented my real emotional self. I had abandoned her, and I was dying as a result of that desertion. Only by returning to her could I regain the possibility of life. But where was she? And how could I return to her?

No, I should become what Wrayburn had always been. I should enter his spectral solitude. I should haunt the world—a thinking shadow.

I knew this would be my destiny, if my gift for writing deserted me. And I knew that, soon, it would desert me. Two Lives and a Destiny had been born of vital experience, for Failure is vital experience. The books which followed it had been born of Loneliness—the Loneliness that wears a mask. That, too, for a time, is vital experience. But, soon, I should be incapable of experience. The very roots of my inner life would rot? And then? I knew the worthlessness of books that are born of Observation. They are note-books, masquerading as creative literature.

So, to me, Wrayburn was a prophetic figure.

The fear of becoming like him goaded me to continue my madness with Rosalie and Vera. The fact that such relations would have been impossible for Wrayburn made me plunge deeper into them. By so doing I proved to myself that I was not like him. I was desperately anxious to prove that.

Wrayburn usually came to my flat. I visited him several times in a room he had in Bloomsbury, but—later—he moved to a lugubrious house in Fulham, and I only went there once. It had the atmosphere of a crypt.

He met Rosalie fairly frequently at my flat, but Vera only once.

“What do you think of Rosalie?” I asked him once, just after she had left us.

“If you could take that woman and Mr. Denis Wrayburn—and amalgamate them into one human being—and bring their different qualities into perfect polarity, you would produce a rough model of a New Race.”

After a pause he went on:

“But Rosalie—not amalgamated with Mr. Denis Wrayburn—is quite an interesting person. To be her lover would be a notable experience.”

He spoke, as ever, in the abstract. Rosalie might have been something in a test-tube.

“And what do you think of Vera?” I asked.

“In regard to the bulging Vera, it would give me a particular and a peculiar pleasure to watch her being tortured every afternoon, from two till four. I may add that the period from two till four in the afternoon is responsible for crime, drug-taking, and the indulgence of every secret vice. God abdicates during those two hours—and slowly re-ascends his throne as tea-time approaches.”

The only thing Wrayburn attempted to conceal was his eagerness to meet me—and that was a failure. He never referred directly to his isolation, but his very appearance was a commentary on it. He was so outside life as it is lived that it had no interest for him. He was only interested in possibilities.

He was widely read in occult literature and he believed that I was. As a fact, the only book of the kind I had deeply studied was the one lent me by a priest, which I read in the trenches. Still, I was familiar with the belief that man contained in himself the potentiality of a New Being—and that, by devotion, dedication, and discipline, man could rise to a new order of consciousness.

But this belief in the possibility of a New Race was Wrayburn’s eternal theme. He held that, although the mass of mankind was in the kindergarten stage of evolution, every generation produced men and women capable of serving this idea of a New Race. They were prophecies of a new order of spiritual consciousness. They were God’s collaborators.

“The New Man is only a few civilisations distant,” he would say. “He must arise eventually. He will possess a Cosmic Consciousness. In him, Thought, Will, and Feeling will be fused into unity. That unity will be the Cosmic Consciousness. Compared with it, our present-day consciousness is like the flame of a night-light flickering in a draught.”

We met frequently and at last, to my stupefaction, I discovered he believed that I was one of those who are capable of serving the idea of a New Race. He made this staggering statement as if he were enunciating a truism.

Even now I do not know which is the more fantastic—this belief, or the reasons on which it was based.

Wrayburn imagined that I, unlike himself, was at home in the world, adequate to it, and above all that I had real relations with others. He was certain, therefore, that I had Power.

“They can walk down the street with you,” he announced, “but they only find me if they go mountaineering.”

He saw in me a “great spiritual potentiality.” I could be “a link joining the old consciousness to the new.”

“You’re not half a man, like the rest of us,” he once said. “You’re a real person. There’s Being in you. That’s why you can meet all sorts of people—even the bulging Vera.”

I said nothing. That Wrayburn, with his almost terrible insight, could believe that the ghost facing him was a potential Superman, amazed and frightened me. Wrayburn, whom nothing deceived, believed that!

He believed that the ghost called Ivor Trent had being and . . . . . . . . . . . .

I

Something extraordinary has just happened. It is the reason why the last section is unfinished.

I was writing it at my desk in my study, during the late afternoon. I looked up, in search of a phrase, and noticed that the door communicating with the bedroom was open. I was thinking of shutting it when I heard someone moving about.

“Is that you, Mrs. Frazer?”

There was no reply.

“Who’s there?” I shouted, more irritably.

The door opened wider and—Elsa appeared.

I rose slowly, staring at her.

“You! What are you doing here?”

“I took Mrs. Frazer’s place, when she became your nurse.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

“She probably didn’t think it would interest you. She knew nothing about us.”

“How long is it since I came here?”

“Nearly seven weeks.”

She crossed to the window, parted the curtains, and stood looking down at the river.

I do not know how long it was before I said:

“Come here. I can’t see you.”

She came over to me, then half sat on the edge of the writing-desk. I stood looking down at her.

“Is Rendell still here?”

“Yes, but he is going in just over a week.”

“Where? Do you know?”

“To Italy.”

Then, after a pause, she added:

“Rosalie Vivian is in Italy.”

“Has Rendell met her often?”

“Yes, nearly every day for a month. Mrs. Frazer thinks he will marry her.”

Again, there was a long silence.

“And Marsden?”

“He is still here. Hasn’t Mrs. Frazer told you all this?”

“No. I haven’t spoken to her about the house for a long time. Has Vera Thornton been here?”

“No, but Marsden has met her frequently.”

Although I asked these questions, and although Elsa answered them, they had no relation whatever to the real question I was asking—and which she was answering.

“And Wrayburn?”

She did not reply.

“Well?”

“He’s dead.”

I went nearer to her.

“When?”

“He was buried yesterday. He committed suicide.”

“Wrayburn?”

“Yes.”

I felt her hand on my arm.

“How?”

“Do you think you’d better——”

“How?” I repeated. “A newspaper—the inquest! Get me the newspaper.”

I did not hear her go or return. I found a newspaper in my hand, and flattened it on the desk—but I could not read it.

“You read it,” I said to her.

A gas-filled room . . . even the cracks in the floor plugged. . . . Rendell.

“Read again what Rendell said.”

Elsa read slowly.

“‘I blame myself bitterly for not seeing him more often. I knew he was lonely, but I failed him. As I said earlier, Wrayburn, apparently, had no relatives, but I shall, of course, make myself responsible for the funeral.’”

I do not know how long the silence continued after she stopped reading, but at last I heard her say:

“I must go now.”

“Have you talked to Rendell?”

“No.”

“See him—tell him about us.”

“Very well, and now I must go.”

She turned and walked towards the door.

Just as she reached it, I said:

“So you will come with me when I leave here?”

“Yes.”

“You will tell no one, and come with me?”

“Yes, whenever you like.”

She went out, closing the door noiselessly.

J

Next Sunday, I leave here with Elsa.

It will be eight weeks next Sunday since I came to this house: since I collapsed when Mrs. Frazer opened the front door: since I saw Him loom out of the fog on the Embankment.

I remember every detail of that Sunday—eight weeks ago.

I left my flat soon after six o’clock. For an hour I had stood by the window in the sitting-room, looking down at the fog-shrouded street. No one was to be seen. Every sound was muffled. The city had become its own ghost.

I stood motionless, watching my thoughts.

I had told everyone I was going abroad for a year to write a book. Rosalie had begged me not to leave her. She was certain she would tell Vivian, if I went. Her fear made her almost hysterical, but I scarcely heard what she said.

For over a year a theme for a novel had challenged my imagination. For months, the bee-hive of my subconscious mind had been at work on it. The period of inner elaboration was over. Now I must write it.

I was excited, eager to escape to solitude, but, nevertheless, I was afraid. I knew that, unless a miracle happened, it would be my last book. I had reached a final frontier. I stood at the end of a cul-de-sac.

Also, I had been ill recently. The tension of my nerves had become unendurable. I could feel the foundation of my will trembling.

These were some of the thoughts I watched—as I stood motionless, looking down into the fog.

But they were followed by other thoughts—fantastic projects which flashed across my mind, each offering a final intoxication before I went to Potiphar Street and to solitude.

One suggested I should ring up Vera and tell her to come to the flat. I had not seen her for months. I should hear her gasp of astonishment when she recognised my voice on the telephone. She would indignantly refuse to come—and half an hour later she would arrive.

Or I would ring Rosalie, see her once more, and tell her how wholly I had deceived her. Or I would make Rosalie and Vera both come to the flat, and then I would tell them everything. I would telephone Vivian—and Wrayburn. I would make them all come. Or I would ring up people I had not seen for years, who had reason to remember me.

These were some of the projects which flashed and faded in my mind as I stood by that window—eight weeks ago.

But, deeper than all, was the knowledge that I had reached the end of a road—the beginning of which had been my desertion of Elsa.

But the remnant of my will rebelled against this knowledge. My plans were made and I was determined to execute them. My luggage was piled in the hall. I was to leave at about six o’clock.

I remember the church bells beginning to ring out over the spectral city.

Suddenly someone said the taxi was waiting. I started violently, for I had not heard the servant enter the room.

I went into the hall, put on my overcoat, then looked round the flat for the last time. Just as I was going the telephone bell rang. I told the servant to say I was away, then I went down to the street.

I told the driver to take the luggage to 77 Potiphar Street, and to tell Mrs. Frazer that I should arrive at about nine o’clock.

I watched the taxi disappear, then groped through the fog to Piccadilly. Soon after I reached Leicester Square I lost myself in a desert of drifting desolation.

At last, I found myself in the Strand, and, some minutes later, I reached that tavern.

It was empty, but before long two men entered.

Marsden . . . Rendell . . . the sound of my own name . . . the story of Two Lives and a Destiny.

I overheard every word they said, as I sat huddled in my corner, too weak to move. Then, directly I could, I stumbled out into the fog and groped my way to Chelsea.

Sentences from the conversation I had overheard drifted through my mind, but they seemed to relate to someone else—some stranger who had stolen my name.

A new consciousness seemed to possess me, a strange terrible clarity which lit mysterious horizons.

And then, at last, I stopped outside the street leading to the Frazers’ house.

I leaned over the low Embankment wall and gazed into the vapoury void below, listening to the life of the swiftly-flowing invisible river. In the near distance, the blast of a siren suddenly gave desolation a voice. A moment later, a ruby-coloured light slowly emerged, glowed for a second, and vanished. Then all was still and dark again.

Gradually, a trance-like stupor possessed me. Then slowly, ceaselessly, a sentence began to circle in my mind. It was Marsden’s final statement to Rendell.

“He’s convinced that man contains the potentiality of a new being.”

And then I turned and saw—You!

Your figure was shrouded, but your face was fully revealed. It was the countenance of a new order of Being. I knew that a man from the Future stood before me.

Terror overwhelmed me—then. But I do not fear you—now.

I stretch out my arms and invoke you:—

Come!

I do not know whether you stand on the threshold, or whether unnumbered ages separate us from you. I only know that you must be: that you are the spiritual consciousness made flesh: that you are the risen man and that we are the dead men. Yet, in us, is the possibility of you.

We are the Old—the dying—Consciousness. You are the New—the living—Consciousness. We have violated earth. You will redeem it. We descend the darkening valley of knowledge. You stand on the uplands of wisdom. We are an end. You are a beginning.

If you are a dream, all else is a nightmare. But I have seen God’s signature across your forehead.

Come!

More and more fiercely we deny our need of you. We say you are a fantasy, a lie, an illusion. We madden ourselves with sensation; drug ourselves with work, pleasure, speed; herd in the vast sepulchres of our cities; blind our eyes; deaden our ears; cling to our creed of comfort (Comfort! the last of the creeds!) sink day by day in deeper servitude to our inventions—hoping to numb the knowledge of our emptiness; striving to ease the ache of separation; trying to evade your challenge; seeking to deny our destiny.

Come!

The martyred earth waits for you. Daily, our darkness deepens. Secretly, all are afraid. None knows what to do. To underpin, to patch up, to whitewash sepulchres—these are the substitutes for action. To shout, to boast, to nickname bankruptcy, Prosperity—this is the substitute for leadership. We have glorified ourselves, magnified ourselves, made gods of ourselves. We have served Hate, Greed, Lust. And now darkness deepens round us. And we are afraid.

Come!

Lacking you, there is no solution to any one of our problems. Possessing you, no problems exist. If it be madness to believe in you, the sanity which denies you is a greater madness.

But we who have lived on substitutes; we who have plumbed the abyss of ourselves; we who have glimpsed the magnitude of man’s misery—we do not deny you.

From the midnight of madness we stretch out our arms to you.

Come!

A shadow seems to fall across the page I am writing. You are here, in this room! I am certain you are here.

I turn, but I cannot see you. I call, but you do not answer.

I rise, grope round the room seeking you, till at last I stand before a mirror.

But the countenance reflected in that mirror is not mine. It is yours. A man from the Future confronts me. His eyes transmit a secret wisdom. His forehead is crested with serenity.