"What have you been doing since you left Cambridge Circus?" I demanded.
My plan looked like working. He confronted me.
"And what's that got to do with you?" he said.
"I think I could tell you what you've been doing. Naturally I shan't."
He looked coldly down on me. "No," he said slowly, "I don't think I would if I were you.... And if you've seen me, I've seen you too," he added menacingly.
There was contempt in his tone. "Oh, nowhere discreditable. You're too magnificently steady for that."
I cannot tell you why we were standing together in one corner of the room, body to body, with all the rest of the room empty. I only know that I was not afraid of him, and that my intention to provoke him was now fixed. Quite apart from those inhuman figures and graphs, this book that he was contemplating approached--I will risk saying it--the impious.
His eyes were unwinkingly on mine. "You were coming out of my place, if you must know. And I imagine my place is still mine. Since we're friends, I haven't asked you what you were doing there."
"Then I'll tell you without asking. I've been staying there, on the chance of your coming back for something you'd forgotten. I've got your key in my pocket now, and I'm going back there to-night."
He muttered, his eyes now removed from mine. "Damned good guess. I did come back. But I saw you across the road and turned away again."
"That Gland book. But I got a copy somewhere else."
Then, all in a moment, the thing for which I was longing happened. He broke down completely. Instead of a man trying to maintain an insane tight-rope-balance on an indeterminable moment of time, there pitched against me, crushing me against the wall and bringing down a shower of Trenchard's photographs, a man who could be met on common ground of normal experience. His arms were folded over his face. I heard his groan within them.
"Lord have mercy upon me!... I oughtn't to have talked--I oughtn't to have talked ... all unsettled again ... but I _can't_ let sixteen go ... perhaps it won't let me go...."
"For heaven's sake forget that nightmare!"
But he mumbled despairingly on. "Shall have to be thirty ... no way out of it ... why did I let myself talk!... Give us a hand, there's a good fellow----"