Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/494

Rh renunciations cropped up in his mind, and he passed back along the Leas, as I have said. His inconclusive interrogations elicited at the utmost that Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel is singularly like any other hotel of its class. Its windows tell no secrets. And there Melville's narrative ends.

With that my circumstantial record necessarily comes to an end also. There are sources, of course, and glimpses. Parker refuses, unhappily—as I explained. The chief of these sources are, first, Gooch, the valet employed by Chatteris; and, secondly, the hall-porter of Lummidge's Private and Family Hotel.

The valet's evidence is precise, but has an air of being irrelevant. He witnesses that at a quarter past eleven he went up to ask Chatteris if there was anything more to do that night, and found him seated in an arm-chair before the open window, with his chin upon his hands, staring at nothing—which, indeed, as Schopenhauer observes in his crowning passage, is the whole of human life.

"More to do?" said Chatteris.

"Yessir," said the valet.

"Nothing," said Chatteris, "absolutely nothing." And the valet, finding this answer quite satisfactory, wished him good-night and departed.

Probably Chatteris remained in this attitude for a considerable time—half an hour, perhaps, or more. Slowly, it would seem, his mood underwent a change. At some definite moment it must have been that his lethargic meditation gave way to a strange activity, to a sort of hysterical reaction against all his resolves and renunciations. His first action seems to me