"Oh, hang the Major! I don't care about him, I want to know about you," I cried.
"About me?" said Derrick doubtfully. "Oh, I'm right enough."
"What do you do with yourself? How on earth do you kill time?" I asked. "Come, give me a full, true, and particular account of it all."
"We have tried three other servants," said Derrick; "but the plan doesn't answer. They either won't stand it, or else they are bribed into smuggling brandy into the house. I find I can do most things for my father, and in the morning he has an attendant from the hospital who is trustworthy, and who does what is necessary for him.
At ten we breakfast together, then there are the morning papers, which he likes to have read to him. After that I go round to the Pump Room with him--odd contrast now to what it must have been when Bath was the rage. Then we have lunch. In the afternoon, if he is well enough, we drive; if not he sleeps, and I get a walk. Later on an old Indian friend of his will sometimes drop in; if not he likes to be read to until dinner. After dinner we play chess--he is a first-rate player. At ten I help him to bed; from eleven to twelve I smoke and study Socialism and all the rest of it that Lynwood is at present floundering in."
"Why don't you write, then?"
"I tried it, but it didn't answer. I couldn't sleep after it, and was, in fact, too tired; seems absurd to be tired after such a day as that, but somehow it takes it out of one more than the hardest reading; I don't know why."
"Why," I said angrily, "it's because it is work to which you are quite unsuited--work for a thick-skinned, hard-hearted, uncultivated and well-paid attendant, not for the novelist who is to be the chief light of our generation."
He laughed at this estimate of his powers.
"Novelists, like other cattle, have to obey their owner," he said lightly.
I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different. It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do certain things. Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in my heart I believe this was the cause of his success.
"Then you are not writing at all?" I asked.
"Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast," he said.
And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next four chapters of 'Lynwood.' He had rather a dismal lodging-house bedroom, with faded wall-paper and a prosaic snuff-coloured carpet.
On a rickety table in the window was his desk, and a portfolio full of blue foolscap, but he had done what he could to make the place habitable; his Oxford pictures were on the walls--Hoffman's 'Christ speaking to the Woman taken in Adultery,' hanging over the mantelpiece--it had always been a favourite of his. I remember that, as he read the description of Lynwood and his wife, I kept looking from him to the Christ in the picture till I could almost have fancied that each face bore the same expression. Had this strange monotonous life with that old brute of a Major brought him some new perception of those words, "Neither do I condemn thee"?
But when he stopped reading, I, true to my character, forgot his affairs in my own, as we sat talking far into the night--talking of that luckless month at Mondisfield, of all the problems it had opened up, and of my wretchedness.
"You were in town all September?" he asked; "you gave up Blachington?"
"Yes," I replied. "What did I care for country houses in such a mood as that."
He acquiesced, and I went on talking of my grievances, and it was not till I was in the train on my way back to London that I remembered how a look of disappointment had passed over his face just at the moment. Evidently he had counted on learning something about Freda from me, and I--well, I had clean forgotten both her existence and his passionate love.
Something, probably self-interest, the desire for my friend's company, and so forth, took me down to Bath pretty frequently in those days; luckily the Major had a sort of liking for me, and was always polite enough; and dear old Derrick--well, I believe my visits really helped to brighten him up. At any rate he said he couldn't have borne his life without them, and for a sceptical, dismal, cynical fellow like me to hear that was somehow flattering.
The mere force of contrast did me good. I used to come back on the Monday wondering that Derrick didn't cut his throat, and realising that, after all, it was something to be a free agent, and to have comfortable rooms in Montague Street, with no old bear of a drunkard to disturb my peace. And then a sort of admiration sprang up in my heart, and the cynicism bred of melancholy broodings over solitary pipes was less rampant than usual.
It was, I think, early in the new year that I met Lawrence Vaughan in Bath. He was not staying at Gay Street, so I could still have the vacant room next to Derrick's. Lawrence put up at the York House Hotel.
"For you know," he informed me, "I really can't stand the governor for more than an hour or two at a time."
"Derrick manages to do it," I said.
"Oh, Derrick, yes," he replied, "it's his metier, and he is well accustomed to the life. Besides, you know, he is such a dreamy, quiet sort of fellow; he lives all the time in a world of his own creation, and bears the discomforts of this world with great philosophy. Actually he has turned teetotaller! It would kill me in a week."
I make a point of never arguing with a fellow like that, but I think I had a vindictive longing, as I looked at him, to shut him up with the Major for a month, and see what would happen.
