The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan Read Free Book Online Page B

Boland, but unsuitable for a newspaper summary. The business seemed more ridiculous than ever. I was simply chewing the cud of memories—very vague, inexact memories.
    The professor received me in Sally’s boudoir. Now, the odd thing was that in his presence I had no self-consciousness. If anyone had told me that I should have been unburdening my mind in a ridiculous game to a queer foreigner, with the freedom of a novice in the confessional, I should have declared it impossible. But there it was. He sat before me with his gaunt face and bottomless pits of eyes, very grave and gentle, and without being asked I told him what I had been doing.
    â€œThat is a beginning,” he said, “only a beginning. But your mind is too active as yet to
perceive
. You are still in the bonds of ratiocination. Your past knowledge is only the jumping-off stage from which your mind must leap. Suffer yourself to be more quiescent, my friend. Do not torture your memory. It is a deep well from which the reason can only draw little buckets of water.”
    I told him that I had been making notes, and he approved. “But do not shape them as you would shape a logical argument. Let them be raw material out of which a picture builds itself. Your business is perception, not conception, and perception comes in flashes.” And then he quoted what Napoleon had once said, how after long pondering he had his vision of a battle plan in a blinding flash of white light.
    He said a great deal more which I do not remember very clearly. But one thing I have firm in my recollection—the compelling personality of the man. There must have been some strange hypnotic force about him, for as he spoke I experienced suddenly a new confidence and an odd excitement. He seemed to wake unexpected powers in me, and I felt my mind to be less a machine clamped to a solid concrete base, than an aeroplane which might rise and soar into space. Another queer thing—I felt slightly giddy as I left him. Unquestionably he was going to make good his promise and supplement our efforts, for an influence radiated from him, more masterful than any I have ever known in a fellow mortal. It was only after we had parted that the reaction came, and I felt a faint sense of antagonism, almost of fear.
    In my last effort before dinner I struggled to follow his advice. I tried to picture next day’s
Times
. The judgement, from its importance, would occupy a column at least; I saw that column and its heading, and it seemed to me to be split up into three paragraphs. I saw some of the phrases out of my notes, and one or two new ones. There was one especially, quite in Boland’s manner, which seemed to be repeated more than once—something like this: “It is a legal commonplace that a contract of insurance is one
uberrimae fidei
, which is vitiated by any nondisclosure, however innocent, of material facts.” I scribbled this down, and found, when I re-read it, that I had written
uberrimi
, and deplored my declining scholarship.
    At dinner our group were as glum as owls. I did not know how the professor had handled the others, but I assumed that his methods had been the same as with me, and certainly he had produced an effect. We all seemed to have something on our minds, and came in for a good deal of chaff, the more as we refrained from so many dishes. Reggie Daker escaped, for he was a convalescent, but Evelyn had a good deal to say about Goodeve’s abstinence.
    Goodeve was supposed to be entering for a tennis contest which the young people had got up, while George Lamington started the legend that I was reducing my weight for the next Bar point-to-point. Happily this interest in our diet diverted their attention from our manners, which must have been strange. All seven of us were stricken with aphasia, and for myself I felt that I was looking on at a movie-show.
    The professor gathered us together in my sitting room a little before midnight. As I