For now he could write no longer.  His whole being revolted against the labour of capturing ideas, of setting words in their right order.  The least effort produced some horrible sensation.  Now it was of a plunging heart that suddenly reversed engines while his brain shivered with the shock; now of a little white wave that swamped his brain with one pulse of oblivion; now it was a sudden giving way of the floor of consciousness, through which his thoughts dropped downwards headlong into the abyss.  He had great agony and distress in following their flight.  At night as he lay in bed, watching the feeble, automatic procession of ideas, he noticed that they arrived in an order that was not the order of sanity, that if he took note of the language they clothed themselves in, he found he was listening as it were to the gabble of idiocy or aphasia.  At such moments he trembled for his reason.

At first these horrors would vanish in the brief brilliance that followed the act of eating; but before long, in the next stage of exhaustion, food induced nothing but a drunken drowsiness.  He had once said as an excuse for refusing wine that he could get drunk on anything else as well.  In these days he got dead drunk on oatmeal porridge, while he produced a perishing ecstasy on bread and milk.  But of genuine intoxication the pennyworth of gin and water that sustained the immortal Elegy was his last excess.

He sent the poem to Hanson.  Hanson made no sign.  But about the middle of January Rankin of all people broke the silence that had bound them for a year and a half.  Rankin did not know his address, even Hanson had forgotten it.  The letter had been forwarded by one of Hanson’s clerks.

“My dear Rickman,” it said, “where are you?  And what are you doing?  I dined with Hanson the other night, and he showed me your Elegy.  It’s too long for The Courier, and he’s sending it back to you with a string of compliments.  If you have no other designs, can you let us have it for The Planet?  For Paterson’s sake it ought to appear at once.  My dear fellow, I should like to tell you what I think of it, but I will only state my profound conviction that you have given poor Paterson the fame he should have had and couldn’t get, anymore than we could get it for him; and I, as his friend, thank you for this magnificent tribute to his genius.  Will you do me the honour of dining with me on Sunday if you have nothing better to do?  There are many things I should like to talk over with you, and my wife is anxious to make your acquaintance.

     “Sincerely yours,

     “Herbert Rankin.

“PS.—­Maddox is out of town at present, but you’ll meet him if you come on Sunday.  By the way, I saw your friend Jewdwine the other day.  He explained at my request a certain matter which I own with great regret should never have required explanation.”

So Jewdwine had explained.  And why had not Rankin asked for the explanation sooner?  Why had he had to ask for it at all?  Still, it was decent of him to admit that he ought not to have required it.