Jaffery | Page 3

her and read. She was right. Somebody calling himself
Adrian Boldero had written a novel called "The Diamond Gate," which
a usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to be a work of
genius. He sketched the outline of the story, indicated its peculiar
wonder. The review impressed me.
"Barbara, my dear," said I, "this is somebody else--not our Adrian."
"How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?"
"Thousands," said I.
She pished again and tossed her pretty head.
"I'll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all about it."
She departed through the library door into the recesses of the house
where the telephone has its being. I resumed consideration of my
presidential address. But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied my
thoughts. I took up the paper and read the review again; and the more I
read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of "The
Diamond Gate" and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same
person.
You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton
and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner
of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood. We knew one another's
shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were

gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual
capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of
reticence. So it came to pass that we gauged one another pretty
accurately and remained devoted friends. There were other men, of
course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and each of us had our little
separate circle; we did not form a mutual admiration society and
advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and
d'Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a quiet way, we recognised our
quadruple union of hearts, and talked amazing rubbish and committed
unspeakable acts of lunacy and dreamed impossible dreams in a very
delightful, and perhaps unsuspected, intimacy. We were now in our
middle and late thirties--all save poor Tom Castleton, over whom, in an
alien grave, the years of the Lord passed unheeded. Poor old chap! He
was the son of the acting-manager of a well-known theatre and used to
talk to us of the starry theatre-folk, his family intimates, as though they
were haphazard occupants of an omnibus. How we envied him! And he
was forever writing plays which he read to us; which plays, I remember,
were always on the verge of being produced by Irving. We believed in
him firmly. He alone of the little crew had a touch of genius.
Blond, bull-necked Jaffery who rowed in the college boat, and would
certainly have got his blue if he had been amenable to discipline and,
because he was not, got sent down ingloriously from the University at
the beginning of his third year, certainly did not show a sign of it.
Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge
Review, and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran
disastrously to fancy waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his
style was not that of Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I
am a happy nonentity. I have a very mild scholarly taste which
sufficient private means, accruing to me through my late father's
acumen in buying a few founder's shares in a now colossal universal
providing emporium, enable me to gratify. I am a harmless person of
no account. But the other three mattered. They were definite--Jaffery,
blatantly definite; Adrian Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively
definite; Tom Castleton, romantically definite. And poor old Tom was
dead. Dear, impossible, feckless fellow. He took a first class in the
Classical Tripos and we thought his brilliant career was assured--but

somehow circumstances baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen
years or so, taking pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father
having, in the meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune
smiled on him. He secured a professorship at an Australian University.
The three of us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton.
He never reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!
So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my
Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and
then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a
comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something
idiotically desperate somewhere or the other--he was a
war-correspondent by trade (as regular an employment as that of the
maker of hot-cross buns), and a desperado by predilection--I had not
heard from him for a year; and now Adrian--if indeed the Adrian
Boldero of the review was he--had written an epoch-making novel.
But Adrian--the precious, finnikin Adrian--how on earth