‘Why the hell not? One man’s legs are as good as another’s.’

Without a word and as though for ocular proof of his assertion he thrust those limbs in front of me, half leaning on his back and half supporting himself with his hands. My trousers sagged round his ankles in an imperfect ellipse. Suddenly, as if impelled by an exterior force, I seized the garment and began to draw it off; but he held on to it with one hand from the other end, shouting ‘pull’ and roaring with laughter.

What have I done? I thought, as the trousers, released at last, gave a little spring into my hands. It struck me that they were none the worse for being a bit stretched. The man, who had relapsed into something more than his former gloom, was dressing with swift precision like a play-goer anxious to get away before the National Anthem.

Why had I undertaken to act as this creature’s valet? My recovered garments were infinitely distasteful to me. Just because he would not be at the trouble to remove them himself I, I the injured party, the rightful owner, had stooped to that degrading office. It had been the culmination, the outward visible sign, of my abasement. He had not even asked me to do it. I had nothing to fear. He had withdrawn his foolish condition, he had ‘shown friendly’ after his uncouth manner, as my stinging shoulder still testified. He was just a high-spirited Briton, addicted, perhaps regrettably, to horseplay; and I, incredibly infatuated that I was, had made him a gratuitous offering of my self-respect. Why, I ought to have chucked him into the river and then argued with him from the bank. . . . His voice fell like a sword on the promising infant, my self-esteem.

‘Why don’t you get dressed instead of sitting there like the Light of Nature?’

I made no reply.

He took a step forward to adjust round his knee that traditional, much-affected encumbrance called, I believe, ‘York to London.’ The movement brought his face close to mine.

‘So you did it after all,’ said he.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Why, pulled them——trousers of yours off my legs,’ he explicitly replied, adding, with a preposterous straining after cultured pronunciation, ‘ ’Orace, I shall require my shaving water early to-morrow!’

That, then, was his suppressed condition—and I had complied with it.

WITHELING END

‘For Witheling End?’ asked my porter, his hand hovering over the glue-pot.

It is no longer to the people that one must go for traditional vulgarities of pronunciation. ‘Willing End,’ I commented. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘This line is run for the convenience of intending passengers and boneafied travellers,’ remarked the porter, friendly but ironical. ‘Think it over. You’re not obliged. You needn’t go if you don’t want.’

Under the fierce assault of his brush the captive, peace-loving glue almost foamed in its agony.

‘Ah,’ I sighed, ‘you don’t know.’

Nor for that matter, I thought, as the train drew out of the dusky station, did I. Not yet. Logically, of course, it made no difference whether I stayed or went. It was the fact of the invitation that counted; the fact of its having, so menacingly, so—there was no burking it—disastrously come to hand. Just a week ago Oswald Clayton had been one of my most cherished friends. And now what was he? An enemy? Well, scarcely anything so personal as that. The others hadn’t, as their turns came, regarded him as an enemy. On the contrary, they had no dealings with him, they hardly ever mentioned him. They acquiesced in, they almost connived at, their own ostracism. And one and all, when pressed to give an account of what had passed, they refused—betrayed uneasiness and turned the question off. Or they would hide their hurt behind a show of pride. ‘Of course, a man with so many friends—he must grow tired of them.’ And secure in Oswald’s friendship one had considered, critically, the smarting cast-off, unattractive like all men with a grievance, and thought ‘Oswald knows his own business best.’

It was odd that he should have chosen this particular method of conveying to his friends that their affection had become otiose. In other people’s houses, in one’s own house, he might be met without the slightest risk. Risk! With pleasure always, that rare pleasure that his off-handedness, his plain-speaking, his genius for being amused at one’s expense, never failed to give. With his capacity for enjoyment (call it selfishness, now perhaps) he kindled the host in one as nobody else could. In fact the great privilege he conferred was the privilege of waiting on him hand and foot. He awoke in his friends a quite ravenous desire to please; not a repressive, conscientious self-effacement, but an active response to his needs, captious and exacting as they often were. His needs weren’t material, he wasn’t a common cadger, but he couldn’t escape (I searched for a harsh term) the charge of being an emotional adventurer. Given leave, he would open up for one new fields of consciousness; he was the self-appointed prospector, he held the concession. But it was you who worked the field, did the digging and turned up the lumps of ore. His feeling for a relationship, his view of it to himself, happily stopped short of, didn’t include the crucial fact that it was he who made the wheels go round. He thought or pretended to think, in any encounter, that he had stumbled across a little hive of happiness which had buzzed as gaily before he came as it would after he went away. In reality, both before and after, in as far as it buzzed at all, it buzzed to a very different tune. But while he was there, perching and flitting and settling in his agreeable way, his ingenuousness, his irresponsibility carried all before them. He affected to be amazed at the worldly wisdom of his friends; he declared that they were so many serpents, masquerading as doves, and threw himself on the mercy which they unstintingly provided. He only asked to be excused, permitted, taken care of.

Rather mournfully I made out for myself this inventory of his qualities, for, first-hand at any rate, I was to know them no more. It was to be for me his obituary notice, and I flattered myself that in this sad task I had shown both charity and discrimination; it would be the balsam of his memory, the entelecheia and soul of his subsistence. For I was certainly discarded. Of the half dozen or so who had spent those fatal week-ends at Witheling End, none had survived, none had told the tale. It had become a commonplace among us, the significance of an invitation to Oswald’s home. It was a death warrant, and its probable incidence was the subject of jokes and even bets among the almost decimated battalion of his friends. And now the blow had fallen upon me.

What, after all, I asked myself while the train thundered remorselessly on, could Oswald do to enforce an estrangement? For it was to be an estrangement on both sides. Otherwise my predecessors in exile, granted that they were committed to keeping up appearances, must have made some slips. News would have leaked through of overtures, tentative essays in reconciliation that Oswald had sternly repelled. And they were not men to take a slight lying down. If they hadn’t been proud before, the distinction of Oswald’s friendship had lent them pride, and the inflation was theirs to keep. Oswald’s tardy application of the pin would only have induced a new inflammation, flushed with anger against him and discharging venom. His creatures would have rounded upon him with all the weight of their derived, threatened importances. But—it came back to me again—they had done nothing of the kind. They had been content to watch their power, their glory pass without lifting a finger. They hadn’t even permitted themselves the exquisite revenge, such was their pious resignation, of turning the other cheek. They seemed to have taken counsel of Desdemona’s meekness; they approved of Oswald’s scorn, they wouldn’t hear of having him blamed.