Philip Van Doren Stern (ed) (58 page)

slightly
too,
another
"advanced
intellectual"
whose
experiments
with glands,
hypnotism,
yoga,
and
other
adventures
into
difficult
fields brought
him
more
than
once
into
conflict
with
the
Law.
Vronski
I
saw
rarely,
he
never
favoured
me
with
special
talks,
but
he
treated
i
nc
with
a
certain
courtesy,
almost
a
touch
of
deference
in
his manner
somewhere,
as
though
I
interested
him
as
a
specimen,
or
as someone
with
possibilities
that
must
be
watched,
at
any
rate,
not damaged,
this
attitude
due,
I
felt
sure,
to
things
my
cousin
had
said about
me.
I
was,
naturally,
in
the
confidence
of
neither.
I
mention
I
his
strange
Dr.
Vronski
because
of
the
role
he
inevitably
played. Another
odd
thing
I
must
mention
too
at
this
point—the
astonishing lact
that
Mantravers,
already
over
sixy,
looked
even
younger
than Vronski,
who
was
forty
perhaps.
My
cousin's
youthful
air,
indeed,
was
a
standing
joke
almost.
Not
looked
merely—he
was
young.
He
had not
aged
for
years;
for
a
quarter
of
a
century,
the
story
ran,
he
had not
changed.
Yet,
when
I
caught
up
with
the
tale
and
its
undeniable evidence,
I
had
the
convinced
intuition
that
this
amazing
preservation had
its
mysterious
roots,
not
in
any
experiment
with
glands,
but
in some
secret
adventure
or
discovery
that
had
been
undertaken
by
this amazing
pair,
had
failed
in
Vronski's
case,
yet
succeeded
with
my cousin.
Sydney
Mantravers,
to
put
it
ridiculously,
had
arrested
decay,
I
hat
gradual
decay
which
we
call
growing
older,
for
something
like a
score
of
years.

This
was
uppermost
in
my
mind,
even
a
rather
dreadful
barrier between
us,
each
time
we
met
and
talked.
Owing
to
my
age,
much of
the
evidence,
of
course,
was
hearsay.
Yet
his
curious
youthfulness at
sixty
never
failed
to
rise
in
my
mind,
often
to
strike
me
in
the lace
with
its
uncanniness.
He
had
somehow
escaped
a
good
twenty-live
years
of
life.
It
was
present
in
my
mind
when
the
Ultimatum came.

In
the
club,
then,
that
night
of
strain
and
tension,
I
chanced
to he
sitting
with
him
when
the
news
we
had
all
been
waiting
for
came
in—
that
war
had
been
declared.
We
were
all
"worked
up"
and
above ourselves.
Mantravers,
too,
was
all
worked
up—but,
as
I
suddenly discovered
with
a
shock,
not
about
the
declaration
of
war.
He
was stirred
and
excited
about
quite
another
matter,
a
wholly
personal matter.

It
was
this
difference
of
key
that
isolated
him
oddly
from
what all
were
feeling
at
the
moment.
While
my
mind
was
occupied
entirely with
questions
about
England,
the
Empire,
our
army
and
navy,
with my
own
immediate
prospects
as
a
soldier
as
well,
he
kept
asking
me questions
about
some
trivial
personal
matter.
It
got
on
my
nerves
a bit.
Too
excited
to
be
puzzled,
I
felt
first
exasperated,
then
angry. He
kept
asking
me
if
I
remembered
someone
called
Defrayne.
But the
name
conveyed
nothing
to
me.
I
had
never
heard
it,
and
in
any case
what
could
it
matter
at
such
a
time—unless,
perhaps,
this
Defrayne
had
something
to
do
with
the
war.