II

Davis showed his visitor out and returned to his study. For a time he stood on his hearth–rug staring at nothing. Then with a certain deliberation he unlocked various drawers and took out a number of folders. He arranged these carefully on his writing–desk and contemplated the accumulation. He opened one or two and read passages. He grimaced, pushed his chair back a foot or so, turned aside from his work, and fell into a profound meditation.

The great book was dead.

It was stillborn—an abortion. He would never publish any of it.

'And I wrote that stuff,' he reflected. 'I wrote that. Only a few months ago….

'I've done with it.'

He repeated Query's words aloud. He mimicked his manner. 'It would have sold like hot cakes … A great success. A certainty….'

He discovered a new streak in his own composition. What was it in him that had turned now against successfulness? he asked himself. What was it in him that was making him thrust himself contrariwise to his own reasonable disposition to go with the swim? What had divided him against himself? He realized quite vividly that people were eager beyond measure to be told that all was right with the world. Never had the market for reassurance, for brave optimism, been so promising as in these frightened years. It was true as Query had said that the piled MSS before him represented a sure success. His phrase–making mind struck out: 'I've done with lullabies. Let them wake up as I am doing….

'Wake up to what?' he asked and started another train of thought.

Suddenly he felt very small and feeble and lonely, and it seemed to him that his universe, his immense bare modern universe, said to him: ‘Well?'

He felt that for a moment, he must leave that challenge unanswered. A desire to go to his wife and talk to her arose in him.

He found her waiting to give him his tea. She smiled a silent welcome. 'So you saw Query?' she said.

'I told him the great book was off.'

'I thought you might do that.'

'I haven't touched it for ages.'

'I know.'

He sat down on the sofa and found there a book she had put down on his entry. He picked up the slender volume. It was one of his earliest successes in the heroic style, Alexander, or Youth the Conqueror.

'You don't often read me, Mary,' he said.

‘I've been reading a lot of you lately.'

'Why?'

'Because—I'm no good at talking, dear, and I want more and more to understand you.'

'Latterly I've been trying to understand myself.'

'I know that,' she said, and poured out his tea.

He turned over the pages of the book. 'I wonder what you make of this….

'If you were really a properly cultivated woman, Mary, instead of being a wild, natural, poetic thing out of Lewis and Glasgow, you'd reel off a yard of trite criticism straightaway. But you, being you, sit there, too wise to chatter. Because for you, you of all people, it would be an incredibly difficult thing to say, truly and gently, what you think of me. But that book puzzles you. Well, it puzzles me too now….

'Mary, I want to talk to you. I'm frightfully troubled—in my mind.'

'I've known that. I know. It is something about these Martians. I don't understand. But I feel it there.'

'Tremendous things, Mary, are happening to the world—incredible things. It is time I said something. These so–called Martians—you have seen foolish and inexact things in the papers. You do not realize how close it comes to us, how nearly it touches us. It means something new in the world is being born again, Mary. And strangely…. I cannot tell you everything. But I have been drifting all my life, and all the time I have drifted, this tremendous thing I speak of has been happening to the world. The world has swung round with a sort of smooth swiftness into a new course. How can I tell you? I was deaf and blind…. Now I see….'

He felt his great explanation was impossible, for the present at any rate.

'I want to rest for a time. I want to think.'

'I have known your work was worrying you,' she said. 'Dear, I've known that. I have felt you wanted a rest…. Whatever I can do to help you….'

'Bear with me,' he whispered and felt he could tell no more.

'I must rest, dear,' he repeated. 'I must think things over. I must get things clearer in my head. I must make new plans.'