“And that was all?”
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” Mr. Fawkes ran a hand through his cockscomb of white hair, turning it into an aigrette, and making him look very like a plump bird. Then suddenly he clicked a thumb and finger. “Shearsby did make some other remark. I’d forgotten. But I’m afraid I missed it too. I remember I said, ‘What?’ and he laughed, and said it reminded him of some poet. And he quoted a couple of lines of verse.”
“Do you remember them?”
“Ah, there you have me again. I don’t. I know they didn’t strike any chord at the time. There was something about owing . . .” The Vicar shook his aigrette, smiling apologetically. Suddenly his bright eyes gleamed. He clicked his fingers again. “Wait a minute! Would you believe it? It was on the tip of my tongue then. Extraordinary how things come back. . . . ” Frowning ferociously, he began to mutter to himself. “/Owe’, ‘woe’ . . . ‘and then I’ . . . No, that wasn’t it. ‘And while I . . . and while I . . . tum-tum-tum . . . and feel’. . . . It’s coming! ‘And while I comprehend’ . . . No. ‘Understand’. That’s it. I’ve got it!” He bounced on his chair, his blue eyes twinkling at Mr. Tuke with excitement and pride. “There it was, all the time!
‘And while I understand and feel
How much to them I owe . . .’
Remarkable thing, the memory. I paid no attention. . . . But I must have come across those lines before, after all. They seem familiar now.”
Mr. Tuke, taking from his pocket a notebook and pencil, was repeating the couplet as he wrote it down.
“‘And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe’. Just those two lines?”
“That was all. I’m sure that was all.”
“You still can’t remember what led up to them, that made Shearsby laugh and quote them?”
Mr. Fawkes frowned again. “No,” he said, after further thought. “That’s gone completely. I don’t think I really heard it.”
“But he was definitely referring to his new-found cousin?”
“Yes, I feel sure of that.”
Harvey studied the lines he had copied in his notebook.
“I can’t say they convey anything to me,” he said. “They are not even familiar. It is a long time since I read any verse. Isn’t there a smack of Wordsworth about them?—in one of his pedestrian moods?”
“The ‘old, half-witted sheep’?” quoted the Vicar with a chuckle. “Yes, they suggest him, as you say. Lines of prose cut up to scan. Well, I have a Wordsworth here. Somewhere.”
He looked dubiously at the untidy ranks of books in some low shelves beside the fireplace. Mrs. Fawkes got up and unerringly picked out a fat green volume.
“Wordsworth was a very prolific writer,” she remarked with a smile, weighing the book in her hand.
“And obviously they are not first lines,” her husband added.
Mr. Tuke looked at the volume with apprehension.
“I think this is a piece of research to be deputed,” he said. “I will get someone to spend a day or two with Wordsworth. A chastening experience. If the lines are not Wordsworth’s, of course, all English verse lies open to us. A life’s task.”
“You attach some importance to this quotation?” Mr. Fawkes queried curiously.
“If we knew the context, it might conceivably help us to identify the resurrected cousin. On the other hand, it might not. It is a faint hope. But the fellow is a mere shade at present, without a local habitation or a trade. A name only. By the way,” Mr. Tuke added, “the name is Dresser. Did Shearsby ever mention it, in any connection?”
“I have never heard it before, except in connection with the kitchen and the theatre,” the Vicar replied.
“Well, I am very grateful to you,” Mr. Tuke went on, as he rose to take his leave. “You have confirmed our belief that Mr. Dresser really is extant. It only remains to find him. One could wish that Raymond Shearsby had not been such a solitary young man. Of course he had been out of England. But one would have expected him to have a friend or two—here, apart from yourself, or elsewhere.”
“He’d been buried here ever since he left France, you know,” the Vicar said. “He was not gregarious, and, if I may say so without conceit, there is no one in our village, bar myself, with whom he had any interests in common.”
“He had a friend in Cambridge,” Mrs. Fawkes put in in her quiet way.
“Bless me, so he had. I’d forgotten. Yes, Mr. Tuke, as my wife says, Shearsby used to see some fellow at Cambridge occasionally. I speak colloquially. I don’t think the man is a don.”
“Do you know his name, or anything about him?”
“His name, no. Did Shearsby ever mention it, Alice?”
“If he did, I’m afraid I don’t remember it.”
“But I believe he wrote. Sorry to be so vague. But Shearsby was extremely vague himself. He would refer to ‘that man ’, or ‘that woman ’, as if you knew intuitively whom he meant. He had no memory for names. He used to say everybody ought to have a mnemonic name, like mine. Anyway,” the Vicar went on, as they moved towards the door, “I hope at least you discover your Mr. Dresser. Another mnemonic. I’m afraid I have only been able to provide a very tenuous clue, but perhaps,” he quoted with a chuckle, “‘a verse may find him who a sermon flies.’”
CHAPTER XV
THE laboratories of Imperial Sansil are situated on the eastern fringe of Bedford, and Mr. Tuke approached
