The Figure in the Carpet | Page 7

course of which several things took place. One of these, the last, I
may as well immediately mention, was that I acted on Vereker's advice:
I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I could really make nothing of the
business; it proved a dead loss. After all I had always, as he had himself

noted, liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my new
intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only
failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the
subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even
remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of
my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure
the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was
unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour
not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I HAD no
knowledge--nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear
it--they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I
accounted for my confusion--perversely, I allow--by the idea that
Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the
general intention a monstrous pose.
The great point of it all is, however, that I told George Corvick what
had befallen me and that my information had an immense effect upon
him. He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had Mrs. Erme,
and there was as yet, I could see, no question of his nuptials. He was
immensely stirred up by the anecdote I had brought from Bridges; it
fell in so completely with the sense he had had from the first that there
was more in Vereker than met the eye. When I remarked that the eye
seemed what the printed page had been expressly invented to meet he
immediately accused me of being spiteful because I had been foiled.
Our commerce had always that pleasant latitude. The thing Vereker had
mentioned to me was exactly the thing he, Corvick, had wanted me to
speak of in my review. On my suggesting at last that with the assistance
I had now given him he would doubtless be prepared to speak of it
himself he admitted freely that before doing this there was more he
must understand. What he would have said, had he reviewed the new
book, was that there was evidently in the writer's inmost art something
to BE understood. I hadn't so much as hinted at that: no wonder the
writer hadn't been flattered! I asked Corvick what he really considered
he meant by his own supersubtlety, and, unmistakeably kindled, he
replied: "It isn't for the vulgar--it isn't for the vulgar!" He had hold of
the tail of something; he would pull hard, pull it right out. He pumped
me dry on Vereker's strange confidence and, pronouncing me the
luckiest of mortals, mentioned half a dozen questions he wished to

goodness I had had the gumption to put. Yet on the other hand he didn't
want to be told too much-- it would spoil the fun of seeing what would
come. The failure of MY fun was at the moment of our meeting not
complete, but I saw it ahead, and Corvick saw that I saw it. I, on my
side, saw likewise that one of the first things he would do would be to
rush off with my story to Gwendolen.
On the very day after my talk with him I was surprised by the receipt of
a note from Hugh Vereker, to whom our encounter at Bridges had been
recalled, as he mentioned, by his falling, in a magazine, on some article
to which my signature was attached. "I read it with great pleasure," he
wrote, "and remembered under its influence our lively conversation by
your bedroom fire. The consequence of this has been that I begin to
measure the temerity of my having saddled you with a knowledge that
you may find something of a burden. Now that the fit's over I can't
imagine how I came to be moved so much beyond my wont. I had
never before mentioned, no matter in what state of expansion, the fact
of my little secret, and I shall never speak of that mystery again. I was
accidentally so much more explicit with you than it had ever entered
into my game to be, that I find this game--I mean the pleasure of
playing it--suffers considerably. In short, if you can understand it, I've
rather spoiled my sport. I really don't want to give anybody what I
believe you clever young men call the tip. That's of course a selfish
solicitude, and I name