Embarrassments | Page 9

my apparent indisposition
to oblige her with the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I admitted
that I felt I had given thought enough to this exposure: hadn't I even
made up my mind that it was hollow, wouldn't stand the test? The
importance they attached to it was irritating--it rather envenomed my
dissent.
That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that
I felt humiliated at seeing other persons derive a daily joy from an

experiment which 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 deep in. I doubt whether they would have got
so wound up if they had not been in love: poor Vereker's secret gave
them endless occasion to put 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 immediately have accepted it. The case there was altogether
different--we had nothing but the word of Mr. Snooks. I rejoined that I
was stupefied to see him attach such importance even to the word of Mr.
Vereker. He inquired thereupon whether I treated Mr. Vereker's word
as a lie. I wasn't perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound, to go as
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 personal confusion--for
my 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
daresay it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss Erme's
mamma. 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 upon his moves. He would take up a chessman
and hold it poised a while over one of the little squares, and then he
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