"Derry!" I choked. "For the love of God turn up that light!"
"Eh? Certainly. Then I can show you my diagrams. This is all elementary stuff, but I thought it would give you a faint idea of the problem. Now the most important factor of all----"
But I didn't want to see the hideous thing in diagram form. It even added to my horror that he didn't seem to see it as hideous at all. He was perplexed, impatient, angry even, but for the rest he had approached his problem as methodically and dispassionately as if he had merely been taking the reading of his gas-meter. Just so in the past he had approached that sufficiently-enormous work, _The Vicarage of Bray_--and in the intervals had taken Julia Oliphant to Chalfont, jumped five-barred gates, and had posed for her, stripped to the waist with her sewing-machine held above his head.
He had turned up the gas again, and was hunting in a corner--for his diagrams, I supposed. Suddenly I rose, crossed over to him, and put my hand on his shoulder.
"Leave it alone, old man," I said in a shocked voice. "I don't want to see them. I won't look at them. I'm too afraid. Give that book up now. We aren't meant to write books of that kind. Give it up, clear out of here, and let's go away together somewhere."
I don't think I altered his resolution in the least. He merely patted my shoulder, humouring me.
"Oh, we'll start it anyway, George. Once I get fairly going I don't mind taking a day or two or a week off with you. I always enjoyed stealing a few days when I was busiest. No, the thing's got hold of me, and it will have to run its course, like measles. I may possibly be able to split the difference between thirty and thirty-three. I'm doing my very utmost."
It seemed to me that he became evasive. "Oh--just little dodges----"
He became still more evasive. "If I hadn't spoken to you to-night you'd never have seen me, you know," he reproached me.
"I've been looking for you though. And I did see you once."
He winced. "Don't, George," he begged me.
"George--I say, George--you see how I'm trying to keep steady. Must you throw me all over the shop again like this?"
But somehow I was no longer afraid of him. It seemed to me that it might be no ill thing to anger him. Anger was at least a more human feeling than those hideous speculations of his.