I packed my bag, and then went to help him. He was cramming all his possessions into portmanteaux and boxes; the Hoffman was already packed, and the wall looked curiously bare without it. Clearly this was no visit to London--he was leaving Bath for good, and who could wonder at it?
"I have arranged for the attendant from the hospital to come in at night as well as in the morning," he said, as he locked a portmanteau that was stuffed almost to bursting. "What's the time?
We must make haste or we shall lose the train. Do, like a good fellow, cram that heap of things into the carpet-bag while I speak to the landlady."
At last we were off, rattling through the quiet streets of Bath, and reaching the station barely in time to rush up the long flight of stairs and spring into an empty carriage. Never shall I forget that journey. The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes in between; we were five mortal hours on the road, and more than once I thought Derrick would have fainted. However, he was not of the fainting order, he only grew more and more ghastly in colour and rigid in expression.
I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge even a less sensitive nature. 'At Strife' was the novel which had, I firmly believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben Rhydding, and I began to fear that the Major's fit of drunken malice might prove the destruction of the author as well as of the book.
Everything had, as it were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I don't know that he fared worse than other people in this respect.
Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and for one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow.
Men seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare's time, and to have observed that one woe trod on another's heels, to have battled not with a single wave, but with a 'sea of troubles,' and to have remarked that 'sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.'
However, owing I believe chiefly to his own self-command, and to his untiring faculty for taking infinite pains over his work, Derrick did not break down, but pleasantly cheated my expectations. I was not called on to nurse him through a fever, and consumption did not mark him for her own. In fact, in the matter of illness, he was always a most prosaic, unromantic fellow, and never indulged in any of the euphonious and interesting ailments. In all his life, I believe, he never went in for anything but the mumps--of all complaints the least interesting--and, may be, an occasional headache.
However, all this is a digression. We at length reached London, and Derrick took a room above mine, now and then disturbing me with nocturnal pacings over the creaking boards, but, on the whole, proving himself the best of companions.
If I wrote till Doomsday, I could never make you understand how the burning of his novel affected him--to this day it is a subject I instinctively avoid with him--though the re-written 'At Strife' has been such a grand success. For he did re-write the story, and that at once. He said little; but the very next morning, in one of the windows of our quiet sitting-room, often enough looking despairingly at the grey monotony of Montague Street, he began at 'Page I, Chapter I,' and so worked patiently on for many months to re-make as far as he could what his drunken father had maliciously destroyed.
Beyond the unburnt paragraph about the attack on Mondisfield, he had nothing except a few hastily scribbled ideas in his note-book, and of course the very elaborate and careful historical notes which he had made on the Civil War during many years of reading and research--for this period had always been a favourite study with him.
But, as any author will understand, the effort of re-writing was immense, and this, combined with all the other troubles, tried Derrick to the utmost. However, he toiled on, and I have always thought that his resolute, unyielding conduct with regard to that book proved what a man he was.
