Page:The Collector by May Sinclair.djvu/4

324 I couldn't at first detach him from his contemplation of the square garden. He said he liked It; it was "so jolly bosky." "And, oh, Simpson, the peace, the blessed peace of it!" He had his fountain-pen and writing-pad in bed with him, but he hadn't written a line. He said he was too happy.

I inquired about his appendicitis. He shook his head gravely, and said that an operation was not considered necessary at present; but that he would have to stay in the nursing home for five or six weeks to make sure.

"Five or six weeks, Simpson; longer, perhaps. In fact, I don't know when I shall be out."

I told him he'd be bored to death and that he could n't stand it. But he said no; he was happier in that nursing home than he had been for years. They didn't treat him a bit like a celebrity, and all he wanted was to lie there and have his hair brushed.

He lay there three weeks, and I suppose he had his chair brushed, for it lay flatter, which gave him a look of extraordinary well-being and peace. And at the end of three weeks he came to me in my studio by night. Grevill Burton and Furnival were there, and he simply threw himself on our mercy. He said he was still supposed to be in the nursing home. Yes, I was right. He hadn't been able to stand it. It was all very well at first. He'd liked having his hair brushed,—the little nurse who brushed it was distinctly pretty, —but he 'd got tired of it in a week. He'd squared the sister and the nurses and the doctor—squared 'em all round, and if anybody inquired for him at the home, they'd hear that Mr. Watt Gunn's condition was about the same, and that he was not allowed to see anybody. If Furny liked to put a paragraph in that rag of his about his condition being the same, he might.

Thus, with a delicious, childlike joy in his own ingenuity, he spun the first threads of the tangle that afterward immeshed him.

He went down into the country to write a book. Nobody but Burton and I (we couldn't trust Furny) knew where he was. Officially, he was in the nursing home. Mrs. Folyat-Raikes called there every day, and brought back the bulletin, and published it all round. He'd reckoned on that.

Well, he kept it up for weeks, months. Burton and I went down to see him in September. We found him chuckling over the success of his plot. He admitted it had been a bit expensive. His three weeks in the home, at fifteen guineas a week, had come to forty-five pounds. With doctors and one thing and another the game had cost him over seventy. But it was, he said, money well invested. It would mean hundreds and thousands of pounds in his pocket—a hundred pounds, he'd calculated, for every week he was supposed to be still there. He'd finished his book, and if he could keep it up only a few months longer, he thought he could easily do another. He was so fit, he said, he could do 'em on his head.

It struck me there was something ominous in his elation. For the thing presently began to leak out. I swear it wasn't through me or Burton or even Furny; but, you see, the entire staff of the nursing home was in the secret, and the nurses may have talked to patients; you don't have Watt Gunn in a nursing home for nothing. Anyhow, I was rung up one day by Mrs. Folyat-Raikes. I heard her uncanny telephone voice saying, "Do you know what has become of Mr. Watt Gunn?" I answered as coolly as I could that I didn't.

And then the voice squeaked in my ear, "I hear he's broken down completely and gone away, leaving no address."

I called a taxi then and there, and went round to Cadogan Gardens, I found the poor lady wilder and more haggard than ever. You may imagine what it meant to her.

She dropped her voice to tell me that her information was authentic. Mr. Watt Gunn was not in the nursing home. He never had been in a nursing home at all. She had not written to him because she understood that letters were not allowed in the institution.

That was where Watt Gunn's ingenuity had landed him. The story was all over London in three days. She was bound to spread it to account for his non-appearance at her parties. You couldn't stop it. It had got into the papers. And though Watt Gunn's publisher, in view of his forthcoming novel, published emphatic