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.