The Gap in the Curtain

of myself. He's as good for me as oxygen.'

When I asked about his plans he said he had none. He meant to be a good deal in the North, and see as much of Chatto as possible. Chatto was a bachelor with a country-house in Dumbartonshire, and Goodeve was in treaty for a shooting nearby. I could see the motive of that: it was vital for him to pretend to himself that the coming tenth of June meant nothing, and to arrange for shooting grouse two months later.

I entered my sleeping-berth fairly well satisfied. It was right that Goodeve should keep in close touch with the man whom destiny had joined to him, and it was the mercy of Providence that this man should be an embodiment of careless, exuberant life.

7

Chapter

May was of course occupied with the General Election, and for the better part of it I had no time to think of anything beyond the small change of political controversy. I saw that Goodeve was not standing again for the Marton division, and I wondered casually if the florid Chatto had spent the May-fly season on the limpid and intricate waters which I knew so well. I pigeonholed a resolution to hunt up Goodeve as soon as I got a moment to turn round.

Oddly enough, the first news I got of him was from Chatto, whom I met at a Scottish junction.

'Ugh, ay!' said that worthy. 'I've been sojourning in the stately homes of England. Did you ever see such a place as yon? I hadn't a notion that Bob was such a big man in his own countryside? Ay, I caught some trout, but I worked hard for them. Yon's too expert a job for me, but, by God, Bob's the fine hand at it.'

I asked him about Goodeve's health and whereabouts. 'He's in London,' was the answer. 'I had a line from him yesterday. He was thinking of going on a wee cruise in a week or two. One of those yachting trips that the big steamship companies run—to Norway or some place like that. His health, you say? 'Deed, I don't quite know how to answer that.

He wants toning up, I think. Him and me had a week at Macrihanish and, instead of coming on, his game went back every day. There were times when he seemed to have no pith in him. Down at Goodeve he was much the same. There's not much exertion in dry-fly fishing, but every now and then he would lie on his back and appear as tired as if he had been wrestling with a sixteen-foot salmon rod on the Awe. And yet he looks as healthy as a deep-sea sailor. As I say, he wants toning up, and maybe the sea-air is the thing for him.'

The consequence of this talk was that I wired to Goodeve, and found that he was still in London on some matter of business. Next day—I think it was May thirty-first—we dined together at his club. This time I was genuinely scared by his looks, for in the past five or six weeks he had gone rapidly downhill. His colour was still high, but now it was definitely unwholesome, and his thinness had become emaciation. His clothes hung on him loosely and there were ugly hollows at his temples.

Also—and this was what alarmed me—his eyes had the gaunt, hungry, foreboding look that I remembered in Moe's.

Of course I said nothing about his health, but his first enquiry was about Chatto's, when he heard that I had seen him. I told him that I had never seen such an example of bodily well-being, and he murmured something which sounded like 'Thank God!'

It was no good beating about the bush, for the time for any pretence between us had long passed.

'In another fortnight,' I said, 'you will be rid of this nightmare. Now, what is the best way of putting in the time? I'm thinking of your comfort, for, as you know, I don't believe there is the slightest substance in all that nonsense. But it is real to you, and we must make our book for that.'

'I agree,' he said. 'I thought of going for a cruise in the North Sea. The boat's called the Runeberg, I think—a Norwegian steamer chartered by a British firm. I fancy it's the kind of thing for me, for these cruises are always crowded—a sort of floating Blackpool. There's certain to be nobody I know on board, and the discomfort of a rackety company will keep me from brooding. If we get bad weather, so much the better, for I'm a rotten sailor. I've booked my cabin, and we sail from Leith on the sixth.'

I told him that I warmly approved. 'That's the common sense of the thing,' I said. 'You must bluff your confounded premonitions. On June tenth you'll be sitting on deck inside the Skerrygard, forgetting that there's such a thing as a newspaper. What's Chatto doing?'

'Going on as usual. Business four days a week and golf the rest. He has no foreboding to worry him. I get frequent news of his health, you know. I have a friend in a Glasgow lawyer's office, who knows both him and his doctor, and he sends me reports. I wonder what he thinks of it all. A David and Jonathan friendship, I hope; but these Glasgow lawyers never let you see what is inside their mind.'

On the whole I was better pleased with the situation. Goodeve was facing it bravely and philosophically, and Chatto was a sheet-anchor. In a fortnight it would be all over, and he could laugh at his tremors. He was due back in Town from the cruise on the twentieth, and we arranged to dine together. I could see that he was playing up well to his plan, and filling up his time with engagements beyond the tenth.

I asked him what he proposed to do before he sailed. There was a weekend with Chatto, he said, and then he must go back to Goodeve for a day or two on estate business. I had to return to the House for a division, and, being suddenly struck afresh by Goodeve's air of fragility, I urged him, as we parted, to go straight to bed.

He shook his head. 'I'm going for a long walk,' he said. 'I walk half the night, for I sleep badly. My only chance is to tire out my body.'

'You can't stand much more of that,' I told him. 'What does your doctor say?'

'I don't know. It isn't a case for doctors. I'm fighting, you see, and it's taking a lot out of me. The fight is not with the arm of flesh, but the flesh must pay.'

'You're as certain to win as that the sun will rise tomorrow.' These were my last words to him, and I put my hand on his shoulder. He started at the touch, but his eyes looked me steadily in the face. God knows what was in them—suffering in the extreme, fear to the uttermost, courage, too, of the starkest. But one thing I realised—they were like Moe's eyes; and I left the club with a pain at my heart.

8

Chapter

I never saw Goodeve again. But the following are the facts which I learned afterwards.

He went to Prestwick with Chatto and played vile golf. Chatto, who was on the top of his game and in high spirits, lost his temper with his pupil, and then began in his kindly way to fuss about his health. He asked a doctor friend in the club-house to have a look at him, but Goodeve refused his attentions, declaring that he was perfectly fit. Then, after arranging to lunch with Chatto in Glasgow on the sixth before sail-ing from Leith, Goodeve went south.

It was miserable weather in that first week of June, wet and raw, with a searching east wind. Chatto went to Loch Leven to fish, and got soaked to the skin. He came home with a feverish cold which developed into pleurisy, and on the fifth was taken into a nursing-home. Early on the sixth he developed pneumonia, and before noon on that day Goodeve's Glasgow lawyer friend had sent him this news.

Goodeve should have been in Glasgow that morning, since he was to sail in the Runeberg in the late afternoon. But he had already cancelled his passage—I think on the fifth. Why he did that I do not know. It could have had nothing to do with Chatto's illness, of which he had not yet heard. He may have felt that a sea-voyage was giving an unnecessary hostage to destiny. Or he may have felt that his own bodily strength was unequal to the effort. Or some overpowering sense of fatality may have come down like a shutter on his mind. I do not know, and I shall never know.

What is clear is that at Goodeve before the sixth his health had gravely worsened. He could not lie in bed, and he refused to have a doctor, so he sat in a dressing-gown in his shadowy library, or pottered weakly about the ground-floor rooms. His old butler grew very anxious, for his meals were left almost untasted. Several times he tried to rally his spirits, and he drank a little champagne, and once he had up a bottle of the famous port. He had a book always with him, the collected works of Sir Thomas Browne, but according to the butler, it was generally lying unread on his knee. When he got the telegram about Chatto's illness, his valet told me, he read it several times, let it drop on the floor, and sat for a minute or two looking fixedly before him. Then he seemed to make an effort to pull himself together. He ordered fires to be lit in the long gallery upstairs, and said that henceforth that should be his sitting-room.