Not George Washington — an Autobiographical Novel by Westbrook and Wodehouse (thriller books to read txt) 📗

It is all very, very queer. I do not understand it at all. It makes me sleepy to think about it.

A month ago I hated Eva. Tomorrow I marry her by special licence.

Now, what about this?

My brain is not working properly. I am becoming jerky.

I tried to work the thing out algebraically. I wrote it down as an equation, thus:—

From which we get:—

And if anybody can tell me what that means (if it means anything—which I doubt) I shall be grateful. As I said before, my brain is not working properly.

There is no doubt that my temperament has changed, and in a very short space of time. A month ago I was soured, cynical, I didn't brush my hair, and I slept too much. I talked a good deal about Life. Now I am blithe and optimistic. I use pomade, part in the middle, and sleep eight hours and no more. I have not made an epigram for days. It is all very queer.

I took a new attitude towards life at about a quarter to three on the morning after the Gunton-Cresswells's dance. I had waited for James in his rooms. He had been to the dance.

Examine me for a moment as I wait there.

I had been James' friend for more than two years and a half. I had watched his career from the start. I knew him before he had located exactly the short cut to Fortune. Our friendship embraced the whole period of his sudden, extraordinary success.

Had not envy by that time been dead in me, it might have been pain to me to watch him accomplish unswervingly with his effortless genius the things I had once dreamt I, too, would laboriously achieve.

But I grudged him nothing. Rather, I had pleasure in those triumphs of my friend.

There was no confidence we had withheld from one another.

When he told me of his relations with Margaret Goodwin he had counted on my sympathy as naturally as he had requested and received my advice.

To no living soul, save James, would I have confessed my own tragedy—my hopeless love for Eva.

It is inconceivable that I should have misjudged a man so utterly as I misjudged James.

That is the latent factor at the root of my problem. The innate rottenness, the cardiac villainy of James Orlebar Cloyster.

In a measure it was my own hand that laid the train which eventually blew James' hidden smoulder of fire into the blazing beacon of wickedness, in which my friend's Satanic soul is visible in all its lurid nakedness.

I remember well that evening, mild with the prelude of spring, when I evolved for James' benefit the System. It was a device which was to preserve my friend's liberty and, at the same time, to preserve my friend's honour. How perfect in its irony!

Margaret Goodwin, mark you, was not to know he could afford to marry her, and my system was an instrument to hide from her the truth.

He employed that system. It gave him the holiday he asked for. He went into Society.

Among his acquaintances were the Gunton-Cresswells, and at their house he met Eva. Whether his determination to treat Eva as he had treated Margaret came to him instantly, or by degrees I do not know. Inwardly he may have had his scheme matured in embryo, but outwardly he was still the accomplished hypocrite. He was the soul of honour—outwardly. He was the essence of sympathetic tact as far as his specious exterior went. Then came the 27th of May. On that date the first of James Orlebar Cloyster's masks was removed.

I had breakfasted earlier than usual, so that by the time I had walked from Rupert Court to Walpole Street it was not yet four o'clock.

James was out. I thought I would wait for him. I stood at his window. Then I saw Margaret Goodwin. What features! What a complexion! "And James," I murmured, "is actually giving this the miss in baulk!" I discovered, at that instant, that I did not know James. He was a fool.

In a few hours I was to discover he was a villain, too.

She came in and I introduced myself to her. I almost forget what pretext I manufactured, but I remember I persuaded her to go back to Guernsey that very day. I think I said that James was spending Friday till Monday in the country, and had left no address. I was determined that they should not meet. She was far too good for a man who obviously did not appreciate her in the least.

We had a very pleasant chat. She was charming. At first she was apt to touch on James a shade too frequently, but before long I succeeded in diverting our conversation into less uninteresting topics.

She talked of Guernsey, I of London. I said I felt I had known her all my life. She said that one had, undeniably, one's affinities.