He heard time falling like drops of water from the clock on the wall. Time cannot be put back, the book was there, and he had read it, and it could never be unread. But it remained that the deed should never be known, and so he would put the book back on the window-sill whence he had taken it. Holding it at arm’s length, he crossed the room with it, and stiffly set it down. He was turning away when a further initiation into criminality told him that he might have left a crumb in it, or a shred of tobacco. He took hold of it by the covers, and gave it a shake. The action tossed him into bodily fury, and he shook it long and savagely. It was only when the noise of the fluttered pages reminded him of a bird’s wings that he was able to control himself and put it down. The paper jacket had slipped awry. He straightened it, and before he could stop himself he had begun to read the publisher’s note on the inside flap.

Norman Leigh, whose death from poliomyelitis at the age of twenty-six cut short …

It was as if he had heard his whole being utter a shout of triumph.

Slowly, an agony of shame overwhelmed him. He did not know what to do.

At last something stirred in his cavernous discouragement, and was remorse. He turned to the first page, and began to read. There it was, that rather stiff, rather 135defensive opening: the scabbard, with the blade of a purpose lying in it.

The postman, and after him the woman who brought the milk, passing the kitchen window saw Miss Patterson’s old gentleman standing within, reading a book. When they knocked and got no answer, they concluded that Miss Patterson’s old gentleman must be deaf, and left parcels and milk on the doorstep. Later, when his legs began to tremble with fatigue, he went down on his knees to read. By then, however, there were no more daily comers, to conclude that he was praying. When cramp began to eat away his power of concentration, he hauled himself to his feet, drank some cold coffee, and settled down in the armchair.

For a long time after he had finished the book, he sat thinking. One thing still perplexed him: whether the evocations of himself (and a second reading made them unmistakably plain) were deliberate imitation or the expression of a mind like his own and working with a similar intention. He would have liked to know this; but he never would know, and, after all, it was not so very important. It was more significant that Norman Leigh, writing like Matthew Bateman, had written a better book than ever Matthew Bateman had set his name to; and would not write another. He was dead, this young man who had already matched and surpassed him. Matthew Bateman, so long and complacently a man without a match, lived on, a man without an heir. Putting the book down on the table, he laid his cheek against it, and fell asleep.136