“Then I had to sit down and wait—we hadn’t intended, of course, that I should have so long to wait—that was due to the mistake about the Viva. The arrangement was that at about half-past one I should be somewhere near the disused boathouse; the canoe, we calculated, ought to be somewhere near there by then. I left Derek to arrange that as he thought best; he was to give the impression, as best he could, that he’d fallen into the river with a heart-attack, that the canoe had been swamped, and so on.
“Well, I did the agitated part all right, and took a man from here with me so as to have a witness when I found the canoe. It came up to time splendidly, and the man got it in to shore, then started diving to see if he could find Derek anywhere. While he was doing that, I found a beastly hole in the bottom of the canoe, as I was trying to right it. That annoyed me, because I assumed that Derek had done it as the simplest way of swamping the boat, forgetting, the silly chump, that people would ask questions about it afterwards. That was the first thing that went wrong about the plan.
“But the next thing was much worse. We had agreed that he was to send a letter to me as soon as he got home to White Bracton—that would be about ten o’clock in the morning, and it ought to arrive the same night. I was to write to him from my digs just to confirm the fact that everything had gone off all right. Afterwards, there was to be no correspondence, for fear my letters should be watched. Now, when I got home that night, there was no letter waiting for me. So I thought out a cipher, and wrote it off to ‘H. Anderton,’ thinking that it might be easier for him to send messages that way, through the papers if necessary. But next morning there was still no letter from White Bracton. I began to get alarmed, and yet I could do nothing without attracting suspicion. And so it went on from one day to the next; no message from Derek, and no prescriptions about what I should do.
“You don’t know, probably, what the end of term’s like at Oxford—the end of one’s last term, I mean. There’s a sickening feeling of being at a loose end that makes you want to go away and die somewhere. All that ridiculous aesthetic business looks so empty and pointless when you’ve got to go down; it felt like being in a theatre when you’ve lost your hat at the end of a play, and they’re all turning down the lights. Its effect on me was that I wanted to cut adrift from the whole business and start again on a fresh tack; I suppose it was a kind of conversion. … If Derek was going out to the Colonies, why shouldn’t I? And then in a flash the thought occurred to me: If Derek was going to disappear, why shouldn’t I?
“I didn’t know then that my own movements had aroused any suspicion. I wanted to keep near the scene of action, but staying in Oxford, with all that mockery of a past behind me, was too much. Why shouldn’t I fade off into the surrounding country somewhere, and become a fresh person for a bit? There was no need to disguise myself; I had only to drop a disguise. It might be safer, perhaps, to pose as an American; I’ve lived so much in the States that the impersonation was hardly any effort to me. I thought of this pub, which had seemed rather comfortable; I was sure they wouldn’t recognize me with my hair cut short and all the rest of it. I determined to do it. Fortunately I’d lots of cash in hand, because I’d been meaning to travel on the Continent, and hadn’t yet booked my passage. I would let my luggage go up to London without me, and disappear into the blue by the next train, a few minutes later. It all seemed to work without a hitch. At the last moment I got the impression that somebody was watching me; so I was very careful to skip off while he wasn’t looking.
“The train journey was a simple one—I expect you’ve worked it out for yourselves. Change platforms at Swindon, then double back by a slow train to Faringdon, and you’re within a bus ride from here. On my way I called at White Bracton, and was really appalled to find my letter to ‘H. Anderton’ still in the rack. Then for the first time I realized that something had gone very wrong indeed. I hung about for nearly an hour, waiting till the passage should be empty and I could get hold of the letter, but they never gave me a chance; so I got tired of it and came on here.
“I had hoped to find the inn empty; and it was annoying when a strange lady came up and talked to me. But I remembered that I was an American, and it was therefore my duty to introduce myself by name; I picked it at random from a book I’d been looking at. Then I found I’d put my foot in it, because suddenly you walked in, and I had to be presented to you. But you seemed to have no suspicion at all. You must be a far better actor than I am, because until yesterday evening I hadn’t the faintest idea that you suspected who I was. I got reckless, and determined to see the thing through. Among other things, I
