“Eh?...  Well, man alive, where do you expect me to begin?  You insinuate yourself into a Government commission to go to America to lecture with your ‘Sketchbook on the Western Front’, and I write you about six letters to every one I get out of you, and you come back and expect me to give you a complete social and political and military record of everything that’s happened in your absence.  Can’t you read?...

“Well, have it your own way.  I’ve told you in my letters how he went on after that collapse, that brain hemorrhage.  I told you we got Ormond Clive on to him.  I told you we got him up here eventually to Clive’s own nursing home in Welbeck Place.  Clive was a friend of that Lady Tybar.  She was with Sabre all the time he was in Queer Street—­and it was queer, I give you my word.  Pretty well every day I’d look in.  Every day she’d be there.  Every day Ormond Clive would come.  Time and again we’d stand around the bed, we three,—­watching.  Impenetrable and extraordinary business!  There was his body, alive, breathing.  His mind, his consciousness, his ego, his self, his whatever you like to call it—­not there.  Away.  Absent.  Not in that place.  Departed into, and occupied in that mysterious valley where those cases go.  What was he doing there?  What was he seeing there?  What was he thinking there?  Was he in touch with this that belonged to him here?  Was he sitting in some fastness, dark and infinitely remote, and trying to rid himself of this that belonged to him here?  Was he trying to get back to it, to resume habitation and possession and command?  It was rummy.  It was eerie.  It was creepy.  It was like staring down into a dark pit and hearing little tinkling sounds of some one moving there, and wondering what the devil he was up to.  Yes, it was creepy....

“Process of time he began to come back.  He’d struck a light down there, as you might say, and you could see the dim, mysterious glimmer of it, moving about, imperceptibly coming up the side.  Now brighter, now fainter; now here, now there.  Rummy, I can tell you.  But he was coming up.  He was climbing up out of that place where he had been.  What would he remember?  Yes, and what was he coming up to?

“What was he coming up to?  That was what began to worry me.  This divorce suit of his wife’s was climbing up its place in the list.  He was climbing up out of the place where he had been and this case was climbing up towards hearing.  Do you get me?  Do you get my trouble?  Soon as his head emerged up out of the pit, was he going to be bludgeoned down into it again by going through in the Divorce Court precisely that which had bludgeoned him down at the inquest?  Was I going to get the case held up so as to keep him for that?  Or what was I going to do?  I hadn’t been instructed to prepare his defence.  At Brighton, when I’d suggested it, he’d told me, politely, to go to hell.  I hadn’t been instructed; no one had been instructed.  And there was no defence