Page:The Altar of the Dead, The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (London, Macmillan, 1922).djvu/21

 one adored could ever have contrived, what domestic commerce the subtlety that was its prime ornament and the world's wonder have enjoyed, under what shelter the obscurity that was its luckless drawback and the world's despair have flourished. The whole aspect and allure of the fresh sane man, illustrious and undistinguished—no "sensitive poor gentleman" he!—was mystifying; they made the question of who then had written the immortal things such a puzzle.

So at least one could but take the case—though one's need for rehef depended, no doubt, on what one (so to speak) suffered. The writer of these lines, at any rate, suffered so much—I mean of course but by the unanswered question—that light had at last to break under pressure of the whimsical theory of two distinct and alternate presences, the assertion of either of which on any occasion directly involved the entire extinction of the other. This explained to the imagination the mystery: our delightful inconceivable celebrity was double, constructed in two quite distinct and "water-tight" compartments—one of these figured by the gentleman who sat at a table all alone, silent and unseen, and wrote admirably deep and brave and intricate things; while the gentleman who regularly came forth to sit at a quite different table and substantially and promiscuously and multitudinously dine stood for its companion. They had nothing to do, the so dissimilar twins, with each other; the diner could exist but by the cessation of the writer, whose emergence, on his side, depended on his—and our!—ignoring the diner. Thus it was amusing to think of the real great man as a presence known, in the late London days, all and only to himself—unseen of other human eye and converted into his perfectly positive, but quite secondary, alter ego by any approach to a social contact. To the same tune was the social personage known all and only to society, xv