Jaffery by William J. Locke

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"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."

We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.

"It will take weeks to fix it up."

"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."

In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or
four of such consecutive pages. We were confused, too, by at least a
dozen headed "Chapter I."

"There's another shelf, anyhow," said Jaffery, turning away.

I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation. But the more I
examined the more did my brain reel. I could not find the nucleus of a
coherent story. A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.

"Hooray! At last! I've got it! Here it is!"

He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in
brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.

"There!" he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.

"Thank God!" said I.

He removed his hand. Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet
with a screech like a woman's. For there, staring me in the face, on a
white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written
inscription:

"The Diamond Gate. A Novel--by Thomas Castleton."

"Look!" I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked. And for a second or two
we both stood stock-still.

The writing was Tom Castleton's; and the writing of the script hastily
flung open by Jaffery was Tom Castleton's--Tom Castleton, the one genius
of our boyish brotherhood, who had died on his voyage to Australia.
There was no mistake. The great square virile hand was only too
familiar--as different from Adrian's precise, academical writing as Tom
Castleton from Adrian.

Then our eyes met and we realized the sin that had been committed.

There was the original manuscript of "The Diamond Gate." "The Diamond
Gate" was the work not of Adrian Boldero, but of Tom Castleton. Adrian
had stolen "The Diamond Gate" from a dead man. Not only from a dead man,
but from the dead friend who had loved and trusted in him.

We stared at each other open-mouthed. At last Jaffery threw up his hands
and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we
ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are
times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We
found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The
apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we
examined it. A sickening fear gripped our hearts, and steadily grew into
an awful certainty.

The great epoch-making novel did not exist.

It had never existed. Even if Adrian had lived, it would have had no
possibility of existing.

"What in God's name has he been playing at?" cried Jaffery, in his
great, hoarse bass.

"God knows," said I.

But even as I spoke, I knew.

I looked round the room which Barbara had once called the Condemned
Cell. The ghastly truth of her prescience shook me, and I began to
shudder with the horror of it, and with the hitherto unnoticed cold. I
was chilled to the bone. Jaffery put his arm round my shoulders and
hugged me kindly.

"Go and get warm," said he.

"But this?" I pointed to the litter.

"I'll see to it and join you in a minute."

He pushed me outside the door and I went into the drawing-room, where I
crouched before a blazing fire with chattering teeth and benumbed feet
and hands. I was alone. Doria had taken a faint turn for the better that
morning and Barbara had run down to Northlands for the day. It was just
as well she had gone, I thought. I should have a few hours to compose
some story in mitigation of the tragedy.

Soon Jaffery returned with a glass of brandy, which I drank. He sat down
on a low chair by the fire, his elbows on his knees and his shoulders
hunched up, and the leaping firelight played queer tricks with the
shadows on his bearded face, making him look old and seamed with coarse
and innumerable furrows. But for the blaze the room was filled with the
yellow darkness that was thickening outside; yet we did not think of
turning on the lights.

"What have you done?" I asked.

"Locked the stuff up again," he replied. "This afternoon I'll bring a
portmanteau and take it away."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"Leave that to me," said he.

What was in his mind I did not know, but, for the moment, I was very
glad to leave it to him. In a vague way I comforted myself with the
reflection that Jaffery was a specialist in crises. It was his job, as
he would have said. In the ordinary affairs of life he conducted himself
like an overgrown child. In time of cataclysm he was a professional
demigod. He reassured me further.

"That's where I come in. Don't worry about it any more."

"All right," said I.

And for a while he said nothing and stared at the fire. Presently he
broke the silence.

"What was the poor devil playing at?" he repeated. "What, in God's
name?"

And then I told him. It took a long time. I was still in the cold grip
of the horror of that condemned cell, and my account was none too
consecutive. There was also some argument and darting up side-tracks,
which broke the continuity. It was also difficult to speak of Adrian in
terms that did not tear our hearts. As a despoiler of the dead, his
offence was rank. But we had loved him; and we still loved him, and he
had expiated his crime by a year's unimaginable torture.

Often have I said that I thought I knew my Adrian, but did not. Least of
all did I know my Adrian then, as I sat paralysed by the revelation of
his fraud. Even now, as I write, looking at things more or less in
perspective, I cannot say that I know my Adrian. With all his faults,
his poses, his superficialities, his secrecies, his egotisms, I never
dreamed of him as aught but a loyal and honourable gentleman. When I
think of him, I tremble before the awful isolation of the human soul.
What does one man know of his brother? Yes; the coldest of poets was
right: "We mortal millions live alone." It is only the unconquerable
faith in Humanity by which we live that saves us from standing aghast
with conjecture before those who are so near and dear to us that we feel
them part of our very selves.

Adrian was dead and could not speak. What was it that in the first place
made him yield to temptation? What kink in the brain warped his moral
sense? God is his judge, poor boy, not I. Tom Castleton had put the
manuscript of "The Diamond Gate" into his hands. Undoubtedly he was to
arrange for its publication. Castleton's appointment to the
professorship in Australia had been a sudden matter, as I well remember,
necessitating a feverish scramble to get his affairs in order before he
sailed. Why did not Adrian in the affectionate glow of parting send the
manuscript straight off to a publisher? At first it was merely a
question of despatching a parcel and writing a covering letter. Why were
not parcel and letter sent? Merely through the sheer indolence that was
characteristic of Adrian. Then came the news of Castleton's death. From
that moment the poison of temptation must have begun to work. For years,
in his easy way, he struggled against it, until, perhaps, desperate for
Doria, he succumbed. What script, type-written or hand-written, he sent
to Wittekind, the publisher of "The Diamond Gate," I did not learn till
later. But why did he not destroy Tom Castleton's original manuscript?
That was what Jaffery could not understand. Yet any one familiar with
morbid psychology will tell you of a hundred analogical instances. Some
queer superstition, some reflex action of conscience, some dim,
relentless force compelling the hair shirt of penitence--that is the
only way in which I, who do not pretend to be a psychologist, can
explain the sustained act of folly.

And when the book blazed into instantaneous success, and he accepted it
gay and debonair, what could have been the state of that man's soul? I
remembered, with a shiver, the look on Adrian's face, at Mr.
Jornicroft's dinner party, as if a hand had swept the joy from it, and
the snapping of the stem of the wineglass. In the light of knowledge I
looked back and recognised the feverishness of a demeanour that had been
merely gay before. Well . . . he had been swept off his feet. If any man
ever loved a woman passionately and devoutly, Adrian loved Doria. For
what it may be worth, put that to his credit: he sinned for love of a
woman. And the rest? The tragic rest? His undertaking to write another
novel? Indomitable self-confidence was the keynote of the man. Careless,
casual lover of ease that he was, everything he had definitely set
himself to do heretofore, he had done.

As I have said, he had got his First Class at Cambridge, to the
stupefaction of his friends. With the exception of a brilliant bar
examination, he had done nothing remarkable afterwards, merely for lack
of incentive. When the incentive came, the writing of a novel to eclipse
"The Diamond Gate," I am absolutely certain that he had no doubt of his
capacity.

When he married, I think his sunny nature dispelled the cloud of guilt.
He looked forward with a gambler's eagerness to the autumn's work, the
beginning of the apotheosis of his real imaginary self, the genius that
was Adrian Boldero. And yet, behind all this light-hearted enthusiasm,
must have run a vein of cunning, invariable symptom of an unbalanced
mind, which prompted secrecy, the secrecy which he had always loved to
practise, and inspired him with the idea of the mysterious, secret
room. The latter originated in his brain as a fantastic plaything, an
intellectual Bluebeard's chamber whose sanctity he knew his awe-stricken
wife would respect. It developed into a bleak prison; and finally into
the condemned cell.

As I said to Jaffery, on that morning of fog and firelight, in the midst
of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like
spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the
mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a
few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a
novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had
never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in
insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction,
but a novel which would outrival a universally proclaimed work of
genius. And he had no imaginative capacity. His mind was essentially
critical; and the critical mind is not creative. He was a clever man.
All critics are clever men; if they were just a little more, or just a
little less than clever, they wouldn't be critics. Perhaps Adrian was,
by a barleycorn, a little more; but he had a blind spot in his brain
which prevented him from seeing that the power to do imaginative work in
a literary medium is as much a special gift as the power to interpret
human life on canvas. It was exactly the same thing as if you or I, who
have not the remotest notion how to draw a man on horseback correctly,
were to try to paint a Velasquez portrait. It did not seem to enter the
poor fellow's head that the novelist, in no matter how humble a way, no
matter how infinitesimal the invisible grain of muse may be, must have
the especial, incommunicable gift, the queer twist of brain, if you
like, but the essential quality of the artist.

And there the man had sat in that stark cell of a room, for all those
months, whipping, in intolerable agony, a static imagination. He had
never begun to get his central incident, his plot, his character scheme,
such as all novelists must do. He had grasped at one elusive vision of
life, after another. His mind had become a medley of tags of the comedy
and tragedy of human things. The more confused, the more universal
became the poor limited vision. The whole of illimitable life, he had
told me in his flogged, crazed exaltation, was to be captured in this
wondrous book. The pity of it!

How he had retained his sanity I cannot to this day understand--that is
to say, if he had retained it. The hypothesis of madness comforted. I
would give much to feel that he had really believed in his progress with
the work, that his assurance of having come to the end was genuine. If
he had deceived himself, God had been merciful. But if not, if he had
sat down day after day, with the appalling consciousness of his
impotence, there have been few of the sons of men to whom God had meted
out, in this world, greater punishment for sin. It is incredible that he
should have lasted so long alive. No wonder he could not sleep. No
wonder he drank in secret. Barbara, who had gone through the household
accounts, had already been staggered by the wine-merchant's bills for
whisky. Had he stupefied himself day after day, night after night for
the last few months? I cannot but hope that he did. At any rate God was
merciful at last. He killed him.

Jaffery threw a couple of logs on the fire--the ship-logs that Adrian
loved, and the sea-salts, barium, strontium and what-not, gave green and
crimson and lavender flames.

"I've seen as much suffering in my time as any man living," he said. "A
war-correspondent does. He sees samples of every conceivable sort of
hell. But this sample I haven't struck before and it's the worst of the
lot. My God! and only the day before yesterday I took him to be
married."

"It was fifteen months ago, Jaff, and since then you've plucked hairs
out of Prester John's beard, or been entertained by a Viceroy of China,
which comes to the same thing. I was right in saying you had no idea of
time or space."

He paid no attention to my poor, watery jest.

"It was the day before yesterday. And now he's dead and the child
stillborn--"

I uttered a short cry which interrupted him. A memory had smitten me;
that of his words in September, and of the queer slanting look in his
eyes: "They'll both be born together."

I told Jaffery. "Was there ever such a ghastly prophecy?" I said. "Both
stillborn together. The more one goes into the matter, the more
shudderingly awful it is."

Jaffery nodded and stared into the fire.

"And she at the point of death--to complete the tragedy," he said below
his breath.

Then suddenly he shook himself like a great dog.

"I would give the soul out of my body to save her," he cried with a
startling quaver in his deep voice.

"I know you love her dearly, old man," said I, "but is life the best
thing you can wish for her?"

"Why not?"

"Isn't it obvious? She recovers--she will, most probably, recover;
Jephson said so this morning--she comes back to life to find what? The
shattering of her idol. That will kill her. My dear old Jaff, it's
better that she should die now."

Rugged lines that I had never seen before came into his brow, and his
eyes blazed.

"What do you mean--shattering of idols?"

"She is bound to learn the truth."

He darted forward in his chair and gripped my knee in his mighty grasp,
so that I winced with pain.

"She's not going to learn the truth. She's not going to have any dim
suspicion of the truth. By God! I'd kill anybody, even you, who told
her. She's not to know. She must never know." In his sudden fit of
passion he sprang to his feet and towered over me with clenched
fists,--the sputtering flames casting a weird Brocken shadow on wall and
ceiling of the fog-darkened room--I shrank into my chair, for he seemed
not a man but one of the primal forces of nature. He shouted in the same
deep, shaken voice.

"Adrian is dead. The child is dead. But the book lives. You understand."
His great fist touched my face. "The book lives. You have seen it."

"Very well," said I, "I've seen it."

"You swear you've seen it?"

"Yes," said I, in some bewilderment.

He turned away, passed his hand over his forehead and through his hair,
and walked for a little about the room.

"I'm sorry, Hilary, old chap, to have lost control of myself. It's a
matter of life and death. I'm all right now. But you understand clearly
what I mean?"

"Certainly. I'm to swear that I saw the manuscript. I'm to lend myself
to a pious fraud. That's all right for the present. But it can't last
forever."

Jaffery thrust both hands in his pockets and bent and fixed the steel of
his eyes on me. I should not like to be Jaffery's enemy.

"It can. And it's going to. I'll see to that."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "There's no book. We can't conjure
something out of nothing."

"There is a book, damn you," he roared fiercely, "and you've seen it,
and I've got it. And I'm responsible for it. And what the hell does it
matter to you what becomes of it?"

"Very well," said I. "If you insist, I can wash my hands of the whole
matter. I saw a completed manuscript. You are my co-executor and
trustee. You took it away. That's all I know. Will that do for you?"

"Yes. And I'll give you a receipt. Whatever happens, you're not
responsible. I can burn the damned thing if I like. Do anything I
choose. But you've seen the outside of it."

He went to the writing table by the gloomy window and scribbled a
memorandum and duplicate, which we both signed. Each pocketed a copy.
Then he turned on me.

"I needn't mention that you're not going to give a hint to a human soul
of what you have seen this day?"

I faced him and looked into his eyes. "What do you take me for? But
you're forgetting. . . . There is one human soul who must know."

He was silent for a minute or two. Then, with his great-hearted smile:

"You and Barbara are one," said he.

Presently, after a little desultory talk, he took a folded paper from
his pocket and shook it out before me. I recognized the top sheet of the
blotting-pad on which Adrian had written thrice: "God: A Novel: By
Adrian Boldero."

"We had better burn this," said he; and he threw it into the fire.

CHAPTER XII

The slow weeks passed. Fog gave way to long rain and rain to a touch of
frost and timid spring sunshine; and it was only then that Doria emerged
from the Valley of the Shadow. The first time they allowed me to visit
her, I stood for a fraction of a second, almost in search of a human
occupant of the room. Lying in the bed she looked such a pitiful scrap,
all hair and eyes. She smiled and held droopingly out to me the most
fragile thing in hands I have ever seen.

"I'm going to live, after all, they tell me."

"Of course you are," I answered cheerily. "It's the season for things to
find they're going to live. The crocuses and aconite have already made
the discovery."

She sighed. "The garden at Northlands will soon be beautiful. I love it
in the spring. The dancing daffodils--"

"We'll have you down to dance with them," said I.

"It's strange that I want to live," she remarked after a pause. "At
first I longed to die--that was why my recovery was so slow. But
now--odd, isn't it?"

"Life means infinitely more than one's own sorrow, no matter how great
it is," I replied gently.

"Yes," she assented. "I can live now for Adrian's memory."

I suppose most women in Doria's position would have said much the same.
In ordinary circumstances one approves the pious aspiration. If it gives
them temporary comfort, why, in Heaven's name, shouldn't they have it?
But in Doria's case, its utterance gave me a kind of stab in the heart.
By way of reply I patted her poor little wrist sympathetically.

"When will the book be out?" she asked.

"I'm afraid I don't quite know," said I.

"I suppose they're busy printing it."

"Jaffery's in charge," I replied, according to instructions.

"He must get it out at once. The early spring's the best time. It won't
do to wait too long. Will you tell him?"

"I will," said I.

I don't think I have ever loathed a thing so wholly as that confounded
ghost of a book. Naturally it was the dominant thought in the poor
child's mind. She had already worried Barbara about it. It formed the
subject of nearly her first question to me. I foresaw trouble. I could
not plead bland ignorance forever; though for the present I did not know
the nature of Jaffery's scheme. Anyhow I redeemed my promise and gave
him Doria's message. He received it with a grumpy nod and said nothing.
He had become somewhat grumpy of late, even when I did not broach the
disastrous topic, and made excuses for not coming down to Northlands.

I attributed the unusual moroseness to London in vile weather. At the
best of times Jaffery grew impatient of the narrow conditions of town;
yet there he was week after week, staying in a poky set of furnished
chambers in Victoria Street, and doing nothing in particular, as far as
I could make out, save riding on the tops of motor-omnibuses without an
overcoat.

After his silent acknowledgment of the message, he stuffed his pipe
thoughtfully--we were in the smoking-room of a club (not the Athenaeum)
to which we both belonged--and then he roared out:

"Do you think she could bear the sight of me?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well"--he grinned a little--"I'm not exactly a kind of sick-room
flower."

"I think you ought to see her--you're as much trustee and executor as I
am. You might also save Barbara and myself from nerve-racking
questions."

"All right, I'll go," he said.

The interview was only fairly successful. He told her that the book
would be published as soon as possible.

"When will that be?" she asked.

Jaffery seemed to be as vague as myself.

"Is it in the printer's hands?"

"Not yet."

"Why?"

He explained that Adrian had practically finished the novel; but here
and there it needed the little trimming and tacking together, which
Adrian would have done had he lived to revise the manuscript. He himself
was engaged on this necessary though purely mechanical task of revision.

"I quite agree," said Doria to this, "that Adrian's work could not be
given out in an imperfect state. But there can't be very much to do, so
why are you taking all this time over it?"

"I'm afraid I've been rather busy," said he.

Which tactless, though I admit unavoidable, reply did not greatly please
Doria. When she saw Barbara, to whom she related this conversation, she
complained of Jaffery's unfeeling conduct. He had no right to hang up
Adrian's great novel on account of his own wretched business. Letting
the latter slide would have been a tribute to his dead friend. Barbara
did her best to soothe her; but we agreed that Jaffery had made a bad
start.

A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came
across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known
for some years--originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer
of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss
our common friend.

"I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while.

"Have you noticed any difference?" I was startled.

"Yes. Can't make him out."

"Poor Adrian Boldero's death was a great shock."

"Quite so," Arbuthnot assented. "But Jaff Chayne, when he gets a shock,
is the sort of fellow that goes into the middle of a wilderness and
roars. Yet here he is in London and won't be persuaded to leave it."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"We wanted to send him out to Persia, and he refused to go. We had to
send young Brodie instead, who won't do the work half as well."

"All this is news to me," said I.

"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans, wild
tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways,
finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal
conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is butter and honey to
Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up
with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!"

At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I could
not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate
vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till
three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot
seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it
was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the
meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.
The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission,
the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model
special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the
ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task
after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest
political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and
honourable position on the paper.

"If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,"
said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't
tell him that we wouldn't."

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