The wonderful reason was that I was NOT a much older man; Guy Brissenden, at any rate, was not a much younger.It was he who was old--it was he who was older--it was he who was oldest.That was so disconcertingly what he had become.It was in short what he would have been had he been as old as he looked.He looked almost anything--he looked quite sixty.I made it out again at dinner, where, from a distance, but opposite, I had him in sight.Nothing could have been stranger than the way that, fatigued, fixed, settled, he seemed to have piled up the years.They were there without having had time to arrive.It was as if he had discovered some miraculous short cut to the common doom.He had grown old, in fine, as people you see after an interval sometimes strike you as having grown rich--too quickly for the honest, or at least for the straight, way.He had cheated or inherited or speculated.It took me but a minute then to add him to my little gallery--the small collection, I mean, represented by his wife and by Gilbert Long, as well as in some degree doubtless also by Lady John: the museum of those who put to me with such intensity the question of what had happened to them.His wife, on the same side, was not out of my range, and now, largely exposed, lighted, jewelled, and enjoying moreover visibly the sense of these things--his wife, upon my honour, as I soon remarked to the lady next me, his wife (it was too prodigious!) looked about twenty.
"Yes--isn't it funny?" said the lady next me.
It was so funny that it set me thinking afresh and that, with the interest of it, which became a positive excitement, I had to keep myself in hand in order not too publicly to explain, not to break out right and left with my reflections.I don't know why--it was a sense instinctive and unreasoned, but I felt from the first that if I was on the scent of something ultimate I had better waste neither my wonder nor my wisdom.I WAS on the scent--that I was sure of; and yet even after I was sure I should still have been at a loss to put my enigma itself into words.I was just conscious, vaguely, of being on the track of a law, a law that would fit, that would strike me as governing the delicate phenomena--delicate though so marked--that my imagination found itself playing with.A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from my exaggerating them--grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a larger "law") than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession.The obsession pays, if one will; but to pay it has to borrow.After dinner, but while the men were still in the room, I had some talk again with Long, of whom I inquired if he had been so placed as to see "poor Briss."He appeared to wonder, and poor Briss, with our shifting of seats, was now at a distance."I think so--but I didn't particularly notice.What's the matter with poor Briss?""That's exactly what I thought you might be able to tell me.But if nothing, in him, strikes you--!" He met my eyes a moment--then glanced about."Where is he?""Behind you; only don't turn round to look, for he knows--" But I dropped, having caught something directed toward me in Brissenden's face.My interlocutor remained blank, simply asking me, after an instant, what it was he knew.
On this I said what I meant."He knows we've noticed."Long wondered again."Ah, but I HAVEN'T!" He spoke with some sharpness.
"He knows," I continued, noting the sharpness too, "what's the matter with him.""Then what the devil is it?"
I waited a little, having for the moment an idea on my hands."Do you see him often?"Long disengaged the ash from his cigarette."No.Why should I?"Distinctly, he was uneasy--though as yet perhaps but vaguely--at what I might be coming to.That was precisely my idea, and if I pitied him a little for my pressure my idea was yet what most possessed me."Do you mean there's nothing in him that strikes you?"On this, unmistakably, he looked at me hard."'Strikes' me--in that boy? Nothing in him, that I know of, ever struck me in my life.He's not an object of the smallest interest to me!"I felt that if I insisted I should really stir up the old Long, the stolid coxcomb, capable of rudeness, with whose redemption, reabsorption, supersession--one scarcely knew what to call it--I had been so happily impressed."Oh, of course, if you haven't noticed, you haven't, and the matter I was going to speak of will have no point.You won't know what I mean." With which I paused long enough to let his curiosity operate if his denial had been sincere.But it hadn't.His curiosity never operated.
He only exclaimed, more indulgently, that he didn't know what I was talking about; and I recognised after a little that if I had made him, without intention, uncomfortable, this was exactly a proof of his being what Mrs.
Briss, at the station, had called cleverer, and what I had so much remarked while, in the garden before dinner, he held our small company.Nobody, nothing could, in the time of his inanity, have made him turn a hair.It was the mark of his aggrandisement.But I spared him--so far as was consistent with my wish for absolute certainty; changed the subject, spoke of other things, took pains to sound disconnectedly, and only after reference to several of the other ladies, the name over which we had just felt friction.
"Mrs.Brissenden's quite fabulous."
He appeared to have strayed, in our interval, far."'Fabulous'?""Why, for the figure that, by candle-light and in cloth-of-silver and diamonds, she is still able to make.""Oh dear, yes!" He showed as relieved to be able to see what I meant.
"She has grown so very much less plain."