The Figure in the Carpet | Page 9

soon as Mrs. Erme was
sufficiently better to allow her a little leisure, he made a point of
introducing me. I remember our going together one Sunday in August
to a huddled house in Chelsea, and my renewed envy of Corvick's
possession of a friend who had some light to mingle with his own. He
could say things to her that I could never say to him. She had indeed no
sense of humour and, with her pretty way of holding her head on one
side, was one of those persons whom you want, as the phrase is, to
shake, but who have learnt Hungarian by themselves. She conversed
perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had remarkably little English
for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me that I had chilled her by my
apparent indisposition to oblige them with the detail of what Vereker
had said to me. I allowed that I felt I had given thought enough to that
indication: hadn't I even made up my mind that it was vain and would

lead nowhere? The importance they attached to it was irritating and
quite envenomed my doubts.
That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that
I felt humiliated at seeing other persons deeply beguiled by an
experiment that had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold
while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase for
which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done, only
more deliberately and sociably--they went over their author from the
beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said the future was before
them and the fascination could only grow; they would take him page by
page, as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow
draughts and let him sink all the way in. They would scarce have got so
wound up, I think, if they hadn't been in love: poor Vereker's inner
meaning gave them endless occasion to put and to keep their young
heads together. None the less it represented the kind of problem for
which Corvick had a special aptitude, drew out the particular pointed
patience of which, had he lived, he would have given more striking and,
it is to be hoped, more fruitful examples. He at least was, in Vereker's
words, a little demon of subtlety. We had begun by disputing, but I
soon saw that without my stirring a finger his infatuation would have
its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents as I had done-- he
would clap his hands over new lights and see them blown out by the
wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told him, but the
maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character
of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had Shakespeare's
own word for his being cryptic he would at once have accepted it. The
case there was altogether different--we had nothing but the word of Mr.
Snooks. I returned that I was stupefied to see him attach such
importance even to the word of Mr. Vereker. He wanted thereupon to
know if I treated Mr. Vereker's word as a lie. I wasn't perhaps prepared,
in my unhappy rebound, to go so far as that, but I insisted that till the
contrary was proved I should view it as too fond an imagination. I
didn't, I confess, say--I didn't at that time quite know--all I felt. Deep
down, as Miss Erme would have said, I was uneasy, I was expectant. At
the core of my disconcerted state--for my wonted curiosity lived in its
ashes--was the sharpness of a sense that Corvick would at last probably
come out somewhere. He made, in defence of his credulity, a great

point of the fact that from of old, in his study of this genius, he had
caught whiffs and hints of he didn't know what, faint wandering notes
of a hidden music. That was just the rarity, that was the charm: it fitted
so perfectly into what I reported.
If I returned on several occasions to the little house in Chelsea I dare
say it was as much for news of Vereker as for news of Miss Erme's
ailing parent. The hours spent there by Corvick were present to my
fancy as those of a chessplayer bent with a silent scowl, all the lamplit
winter, over his board and his moves. As my imagination filled it out
the picture held me fast. On the other side of the table was a ghostlier
form, the faint figure of an antagonist good-humouredly but a little
wearily secure--an antagonist who leaned back in his chair with his
hands in his pockets and a smile on his fine clear face. Close to Corvick,