Well, I was not so easily to be set aside. If Oswald meant to jettison me, he should have his work cut out. What, I wondered, would be his line of action? And when I considered the almost unlimited power to bore, embarrass and terrify which any host has at his command, I quailed. But, in justice to Oswald, I had to admit that his arsenal wouldn’t be stocked with ordinary instruments of torture. He wouldn’t spring upon me, my first evening, an obligatory charade which I should have to attend in some improvised costume—as a tinker perhaps, tricked out in domestic utensils, hung with saucepans, scoured, polished and sound beyond hope of dint or flaw. It was unlikely that I should be called upon to conceal my identity or exhibit a false one, with the implication that I was only tolerable in the likeness of somebody else. But there were other disguises, I pondered, less palpable and at first blush less disconcerting; but not less obligatory and far more exacting. False impressions, for instance. Oswald wouldn’t launch me as a renowned arctic explorer, but he might convey, by a mere inflection of the voice, that I was something other than I really was, something I might love or loathe to be, it made no difference. I should be committed. Or he might put me to a severer test—the crucible of the haunted room. The reticence shown by his friends, indeed, argued some exposure of this kind. Coaxed, beguiled, flattered, browbeaten, perhaps bribed, they had undergone an experience which, for its very horror, they must for ever keep to themselves. And it needn’t be a horror, I thought, that disclosed itself locally, that was charted, so to speak, and set and timed. That was the snare that was laid vainly in the sight of any bird. But supposing it was something strange in the character of my host, some baseness of fibre, some odious moral lapse or relaxation which he awaited in seclusion and the secret of which he imparted to his friends? Suppose my arrival were to chime with a (to him) calculable outbreak in some awful periodicity, whose convenient punctual eruptions he had cynically harnessed to his own ends—the incineration of spare acquaintances? Picking my way and holding my nose against the unsavoury conditions of my inquiry, I went a step farther. Lycanthropy lifted its head. Oswald might break the thread of conversation by becoming a wolf, furry on the outside, or, more horribly and incurably (for the malady had two forms) furry on the inside. Before such an object the most established affection might pardonably falter. By the time I reached the main-line station which boasted, as the least of its importances, that of being the junction for Witheling End, I had given up expecting to find in Oswald even the scarred outline of a human trait. He loomed before me the hero of some Near Eastern legend—marauding, predatory, fatal.
But the necessity to alight and pace the platform, to stand sentinel, unchallenged and ignored, by the luggage van, to stow away my things in the dirty branch-line carriage, to go through the routine, the mill, one might say, of ‘changing’, this prosaic occupation brought my thoughts to earth. Sadness succeeded terror. Of course, Oswald wouldn’t need to call upon the resources of demonology for my eviction; he could dismiss me without that, as he had dismissed the others. If anyone practised black magic it would be I the following Monday, the day after to-morrow, the first day of my registered recognized exile. I might be excused if, to beguile my disconsolate homecoming, I stuck imaginary pins into his wasting receding image. However flattering the portent to my self-esteem, I needn’t fear that merely out of sympathy with my eclipse the sun would turn into darkness, and the moon into blood. It wouldn’t be necessary to mount me on a horse to reveal my poverty in deportment to the gaping ‘county’. I could display unorthodoxy without being exposed by an archbishop; self-consciousness without the stimulus of a game of forfeits. What shortcoming was there, what social inadequacy or private self-sufficiency, I thought, with melancholy candour, that I couldn’t show, and that without the least external help—without malicious arrangements of background, or predicaments contrived for my downfall? I had no aptitude for ‘social surf-riding’. Oswald’s victory over me, if it consisted in a demonstration of my unfitness and unworthiness, needn’t be costly, needn’t be in the least Pyrrhic. I was shy-flowering, not all hardy or perennial; a hot-house plant, I told myself, with a flamboyant impulse, that would thrive only in a tepid air. It would be enough to turn off the heat and shut out the sun. And that would be his line. A perfunctory welcome would be followed by an evening’s bridge—that game which, however listlessly played, throws over everyone the chill of its formality or brings out the surly side. Then, next morning, a dyspeptic and disorderly application to the Sunday papers, the interchange of spare sheets over a strewn untidy floor, the interchange too, of promiscuous tit-bits, scandalous items, in lieu of conversation. Then the bleak three-quarters of an hour before luncheon. . . . Why, that was the very entertainment I had given Oswald himself at our last meeting. I had been too preoccupied to let his careless good spirits have their way with me. Well, he would get his own back. And what plea could I urge, what declaration could I make to compound for my bad manners? There was nothing left me but my determination, under however many affronts and provocations, never on my side to let go, but be torn, protesting faithfulness, from the very horns of Friendship’s altar.
An hour later there came a tap on my bedroom door. It was Oswald again. He peeped in furtively, as though fearful of committing a trespass on my absolute occupation.
‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’
‘What?’
‘Changing for dinner. I was afraid you might think it silly and pretentious when we’re just to ourselves.’
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘I expected to. Look at all my finery. It would have broken my heart not to wear it.’
Still as if on sufferance, he sidled appreciably farther into the warm, light, admirably appointed room.
‘Oh, so he has put them out for you. Then that’s all right. And it suits you, dining at eight?’
That had been the object of his first visit, to obtain my sanction for the hour of dinner.
‘Eight o’clock is quite my favourite time,’ I assured him.
‘Good,’ he said, and discreetly withdrew.
Ever since he had greeted me on the steps of that solid red-brick house, voluble explaining and regretting his failure to meet me at the station, he had been—he had ‘gone on’, I felt inclined to say—like that. Apologetic, conciliatory, concerned, he had raised point after point, problem after problem, neglect of which, he seemed to think, would jeopardize my happiness. And though I had tried to meet his misgivings half-way with contra-assertions and confirmations, I couldn’t convince him that I was satisfied, that I had made up my mind, as it were, to stay. He seemed to think that at the smallest domestic rub or breakdown, failure of the bell to ring or of the bath water to boil, I should stalk out of the house. The utmost he seemed to expect of me, his guest, was that I should consent to remain, that, like a captious newly-engaged servant, I should waive my prerogative of impermanence and ‘settle’.
At first I was flattered. It hardly seemed necessary to congratulate myself on my success, it had come so easily. I even planned, in the interval before dinner, to write to my unluckier friends and tell them how deeply I had struck my roots. They, no doubt, had had to clean their own boots and wash at the pump in the stable-yard; whereas I was met at every turn by gratifying traces of the slaughter of the fatted calf. For them Oswald had been at his most casual—indifferent, irresponsible, careless of their creature comforts. For me, how different. In compliment to me he had put off his ordinary manner, the genial feckleness that sat on him so light, and assumed the air of an anxious housewife bristling (so far as his sobered attenuated demeanour allowed him to bristle) with petits soins. They were even embarrassing, these attentions, in their insistence, in their hydra-like quality of springing up double where one had been scotched. And so I went on, multiplying the instances, deepening the contrast, until the sound of a bell, hastily smothered like a rising indiscretion, invited me to dinner.