Page:Possession (1926).pdf/337

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Wigmore Street, when so much had hung in the balance. He was always alone.

During the second summer she set out with Rebecca to visit Vienna and exploit Aunt Lina and her friends, and to play in Salzburg; but they never arrived, for on the day they left Paris the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Serajevo.

On the same day Fergus sailed for London.

46

IT was Fergus who first called Gramp The Everlasting. The name was not original; he found it in one of the seed catalogues which his father brought into the apartment; for Charles Tolliver, shut up all day in a government office and all night in a city flat, led vicariously a life which in happier times had been a reality. The living room was cluttered with the catalogues of gardening houses and journals which dealt with agriculture, stock breeding and horses. The outward life of the gentle man was scarcely more than an illusion; a man with Charles Tolliver's face and dressed in Charles Tolliver's clothes lived at an address in the east Seventies of New York City; the same man worked at the Customs House, eating his lunch modestly in one of the little restaurants where Clarence and Mr. Wyck had once taken their gloomy meals. But the real Charles Tolliver was not to be found in any of these places. He lived perpetually among the farms of a county in the Midlands, or in the hotel bars and parlors of the Town, talking endlessly of the Grand Circuit races. And sometimes he was to be found seated with a fishing rod on the banks of a clear stream a thousand miles from the greasy current of the North River. When he was not in such places, he could be found among the catalogues which displayed gay colored pictures of gigantic beets and ears of sweet corn, or in the pages of journals which had splendid pictures of prize cows and great