Chapter III: Prologue (3)

“I don’t fancy that many of us will live to see that,” he replied. “Most of us will be drowned in the next tide. It will come in a wall of water many thousand feet high. Don’t you notice a feeling of lightness in your body? The attraction of this great stranger is beginning to drag at us. On the other side of the Earth men are feeling an intolerable heaviness. And our speed increases. We have been drawn out of our orbit. We are rushing now to greet the stranger with a kiss of fire. Our circling about the sun is done for ever. We and the stranger are leaping together like two bubbles in a cup.”

I believe some hours passed before I spoke again. A sense of imminence had grown upon me in the meantime. I was aware of the guards that were fetching me to execution.

“After all,” I cried, “there may still be such a thing as an immortal soul. Though every physical expression is smashed at one blow, that does not prove....”

“There is no such thing as proof possible,” my companion interrupted. “But don’t you know in your heart that it’s no good?”

* * * * *

“No good. It’s no good.” I woke with a start at the repetition of that statement.

My young modeller was rolling a great ball of plasticine, and before I could stop him he had thrown it with deadly accuracy at his effigy of man.

“He wouldn’t come right,” he explained, picked up the shapeless mass of clay, and tossed it carelessly into a corner of the workshop.

“Oh, but you shouldn’t have done that,” I said, with the incurable didacticism of the pedagogue.

THE MIRACLE

“_I’m_ dead.”

She heard the voice, _his_ voice, speaking distinctly, with something of the same fatalism, half-careless, half-resentful, that he had used when he returned to France after their five short days of married life. For one moment she believed that it was actually his voice, that he had come suddenly and wonderfully out of his six weeks’ insensibility, to a doubting interrogation of the darkness. But even as she fumbled impatiently for the switch of the electric light, she knew that the voice had not come from the bed on the further side of the room, but had spoken its horrible message close, very close, to her ear--intimately, confidentially, with a touch of swaggering, careless courage.

And as the light, with an effect of servile obedience, disclosed the room at her touch of the switch, she had no least hope that she would be the witness of the longed-for miracle; that she would see him who had lain so long a lax and useless counterfeit of his vigorous self, half raised and questioning the unfamiliar surroundings with his pitiful assertion.

Nevertheless she got out of bed, a slight pathetic figure in the white light that searched out every corner of the room, and crossed to where he lay inert and flaccid.

No, there was no change in him. The enigma that had baffled all the specialists still persisted. He was still the living dead man who had been ejected with just one little sobbing gasp of air out of the narrow tunnel, the bore of his own body, by the premature explosion of the mine he had spent six weeks’ labour in laying. On the further side that explosion had blown out the flank of a hill, but he who had stoppered the narrow vent on the hither side, like a plug of damp earth in the mouth of a rifle-barrel, had been softly expelled into the presence of his fellow-sappers waiting at the junction of the wider tunnel they had bored, with never a mark of injury on him. Even his hair, which had been so near--a paltry twenty feet or so--to the charge that had lifted goodness knows how many tons of earth and stone sky-high--even his hair had not been singed.

His body, almost incredibly, had come unscathed from its open sight of death, but something--his wife thought of it as his spirit--had been instantly shocked into silence. Since that awful experience he had given no sign of consciousness or of volition. His bodily functions continued their offices with a slow, dull persistence--he was fed artificially now and again to remedy the slight waste of tissue--but his spirit gave no least sign of its occupancy.

The specialists had been greatly interested, but he had given them so little material for actual experiment that they had yielded to his wife’s urgent request, and yesterday he had been transferred to her immediate care in the reasonably convenient Maida Vale flat in which they had spent their too restricted honeymoon....

She leant over him now and stared into his composed impassive face, every feature of which was steady with the challenging quiet of death. Where was he? she wondered. What could she conceivably do to reach him through that unresponsive instrument on the bed--an instrument that appeared as useless now as an unstrung piano?

And the voice, that had made its immense admission with the desperate gallantry of one who had flung up his arms and acknowledged himself prisoner to the great enemy--whence had come the voice? She could remember no antecedent dream. The sound of his speaking had wakened her, and in the act of waking she had heard his surrender made, as clearly as if he had spoken it with his mouth at her ear. She felt that she could hear it still. That reckless sentence was yet ringing through the room: “_I’m_ dead.” Just so, she thought, might he have said “Kamerad” in face of some overwhelmingly superior force.

“But you’re _not_; you’re not dead,” she pleaded to that insensible figure; “you’re alive if--if you would but come back.”

She might as well have strummed on the keyboard of a wireless piano for all the reaction she could produce from the lax representative that lay before her, but her own verbal image returned to her with another question.

Come back? From where? Where was _he_ now--the individuality she addressed as “you”? Was that essential personality of his buried deep in this spiritless automaton, or was it away somewhere in the void, unaware both of its fleshly anchor and of her? Could she not reach that spirit of his, poised out of time and space, by the powers of her own love and longing, since they, too, surely were able to transcend the limitations of the purely physical? But to do that she must not sit and gaze at this empty replica on the bed; she must think not of his image, but of _him_, not of the representative, but of the spirit.

Nevertheless, when she began to pace the length of the room, she found that when the sight of her husband’s placid face was hidden some stimulus to concentration was removed also. While she stared at him her thought was held and focused, now she was distracted by her vision of the familiar things that were associated with her past life in his company. She was thinking, not of him, but of the things he had done, the man he had been.

Perhaps darkness might help her, she thought, and she laid herself down on the bed and once more quenched the obedient light.

For a time she lay still, staring into the blackness, clenched in a vivid effort of concentration, and then her eyes closed, and even as she protested that she would not sleep, she had a vision of herself lying inert and pale on her own bed, even as he was lying.

Then she seemed to be rising, baffled and half-unwilling, through wreaths of a palpable darkness that clung about her with a dragging, suffocating weight. And then it seemed to her that she was wandering, lost and perplexed, on a gaunt and arid plain that might once have been the bed of a now vanished sea.

She was not alone. Other figures, wraiths of humanity, also wandered here and there. But none noticed her. They moved as if they were searching for something they could never hope to find. They peered vaguely downwards, passing her with bent heads and eyes that sought the ground with a reluctant determination....

She found herself trembling, not with horror, but with a rapture of expectancy. She had become aware that one among these drifting wraiths was moving definitely towards her, drawn by the power of her longing. And she had command of the power, so that it was ecstasy to wield it. Almost she was tempted to withhold her amazing strength in order to taste again the pleasure of its renewed exercise.

Then with a sense of some lost interval she found herself face to face with him. But he looked at her without a sign of recognition. His eyes, too, were full of that aimless intention, as though he was under an eternal command to search for some unknown thing that was hidden he knew not where.

“Paul!” she cried to him.

He made no reply. He did not seem to have heard her. But still she was conscious of her immense power over him.

“Paul,” she said again. “Come back with me.”

He heard her then; but now it was as if he could not see her. He looked about him, half-startled, half-resentful. “There’s no way back from the plains of France,” he said, and a sudden doubt shook her. Her power to hold him was failing. From out of the ground the darkness was rising again like a swelling lake of still, black smoke, clinging about her feet with an awful weight of recall.

She was sinking into the blackness, struggling against its vast strength as it rose, sluggish and irresistible, to her waist, her breast, her neck. She could not fight its immense strength, but her power had returned to her. They might be drowned together in the darkness, but she would compel him to come with her. She could see him no longer, but she was aware of her limitless ability to hold him to her by the power of her longing and her love....

She came slowly out of some remote distance to a realisation of herself lying unaccountably still and dazed on her own bed. She could not move, as yet, but her eyes were open, and she could see the grey outline of the room in the growing daylight.

And then, again, clearly, but more distantly, she heard the sound of Paul’s voice repeating his strange assertion.

“I’m dead,” he said, but in the tone there was now, she thought, the first flicker of a doubt, the statement of wonder.

She made a great effort and raised herself.

He was sitting up in bed, propping his weakened body on his tremulous arms.

“You’re not dead, Paul; you’re _not_, you’re _not_,” she screamed. “I’ve brought you back, and I am going to hold you here.”

In a moment she was kneeling by him, supporting, clasping him. Her power had become overwhelming, illimitable.

He looked at her with a grin, that was in some way sheepish, a little ashamed.

“Well, if I’m not, I jolly well ought to be,” he said.

It must have seemed to him so boastful to be alive again.

YOUNG STRICKLAND’S CAREER

No doubt the story of the future is written, so far as the future is an expression of present potentialities. We boast our foreknowledge of planetary history, and can prophesy with fine accuracy the occurrence of every major and minor eclipse or occultation in the solar system. But in the most precise science there remains always at least one element that is undefinable and unknowable. The regular traffic of planets about the sun might one day be upset by the coming of an unknown visitor from the deeps of space. The materials of our knowledge are so limited. And in human affairs we know so little of the materials. Nevertheless, it may be that to the universal consciousness the future is a foretellable expression of our present potentialities.

I remember how my friend Strickland used to harp on that theme eighteen years ago. I was incredulous; a stickler for free-will. I could not bear the thought of anything like a cut-and-dried programme of human development. But my one really convincing retort to all his arguments was to reply, “Oh; on broad lines, perhaps. On the very broadest lines.”

Strickland’s attitude just then was so obviously influenced by his desires. He had married at forty, had one child, a boy, and was oppressed by the fear that he would not live to see his son’s future. Strickland was obsessed with that idea for a time. He even went so far as to consult mediums. And a man of forty-five who will consult professional mediums about the future cannot be quite sane.

His sole excuse for that lapse was the plea that astrology had failed him. He had had two very expensive horoscopes cast, and they had been most grievously at fault concerning the first three years of little Strickland’s life. Both forecasts had been gloomy with regard to those early years, prophesying a delicate constitution, unusual trouble with infantile complaints. And one horoscope shrugged its inspired shoulders at the critical period of teething, and continued with a kind of cynical despair, as if the astrologer were a little ashamed of the way he was earning his ten guineas: “Should he, however, survive....” And the truth was that little Strickland was quite a fatiguingly healthy child. His appetite and his craving for exercise, even at the age of eight weeks, were, admittedly, almost abnormal.

So Strickland lost faith in the pattern of the stars, and tried mediums, who were not so nervous of the magistrates in those days. If he had stuck to one clairvoyante he might have laid his restless enquiry, but, unhappily, the first lady he visited misread her client’s hopes, and mapped out a successful business career for his little son; and Strickland, who had already fulfilled that destiny in his own life, and had ambitions to see his son leading a “really sensible Government,” took another opinion. The second prophetess, pathetically anxious to please, no doubt, saw young Strickland as a Bishop; the third was a shade nearer to the mark with an Admiral; but the fourth--a charming young woman, recently engaged to be married, and collecting a trousseau by her last professional efforts--made the boy a Poet.

After that Strickland bought a crystal, and tried to see the future for himself.

I laughed at him then, of course; and even now I feel inclined to laugh at those first foolish enquiries of his. But his very earnestness should have saved Strickland from anything like ridicule; and I am glad to remember that I did not laugh when he told me of the one and only vision that came to him through the crystal--it was, by the way, an unusually fine specimen, as big as an orange. He picked it up second-hand, somewhere in Soho.

As I see it, one of the most intriguing features of Strickland’s experience is the fact that he had ceased to probe his son’s future when the vision came. The boy was seven years old then, and had a little sister of two and a half who had partly diverted her father’s attention. And Strickland had probably outgrown the fear of his own premature death; though it may be that his passionate longing for assurance as to the glory of his boy’s career had not so much spent itself as been thrust back into his sub-consciousness. Superficially the difference in him was quite obvious. The change of his tone, for example, when he spoke of his son. Even the manner of reference. The tender enunciation of “My little boy” had altered to “That young rascal of mine,” just the proudly modest description of the ordinary father.

And when the vision came, neither he nor I related it in any way to his ancient search....

He came to my rooms one evening after dinner, produced the crystal from his pocket, and tossed it over to me.

“A present for a sceptic,” he said. “I’ve finished with it.”

I might have thought that he was clearing up the lumber of his old fancies if it had not been for his manner; but the garment of his initiation still clung to him and affected me with the strangeness of its mystery.

I shuddered.

“What did you see?” I asked.

“Oh! don’t say you believe in it,” he said; “after all your jeers at me.”

“Did you see anything?” I insisted, nursing the crystal in the cave of my two hands. I stared into it and saw the faint pink of my magnified palm. No vision came to me; yet I was aware of some potency in the thing.

“Perhaps some reflection, some translation of one’s sub-consciousness....” I ventured.

Strickland sneered. “By God, I hope not,” he said.

“What were you--looking for?” I asked.

“For nothing. I wasn’t looking for anything,” he said. “I picked the thing up by the merest accident. I was going to give it to the little girl--as a plaything.”

“And then....” I prompted him.

“I saw a picture in it. It snatched my attention. I wasn’t thinking....”

“And the picture?”

“Hell. Just hell. The real thing; none of your picturesque flames and torture. It came out at me, as it were, and it was--well, the abomination of desolation, nothing more nor less than that.”

“But....” I began.

He interrupted me. His eyes were fixed on the vision of a future that had become a fragment of his past. “A waste,” he said, in a low, thoughtful voice. “A dead, horrible waste ... all black and pitted and furrowed ... it looked as if there had been some awful, blasting eruption ... or as if the whole earth had been scorched and blighted by some unimaginably vast fire. But, oh! the terrible gauntness and death of it all.”

He paused and threw his head back with a queer laugh before he continued in a new tone, “It was just a silly nightmare, that’s all. And it had its inevitable element of the grotesque. In the middle of that waste there was a scarecrow, a live scarecrow--digging. Digging turnips, if you please. Oh! it was bosh, of course, absolute bosh. I shall have forgotten all about it next week. But I couldn’t give the crystal to the little girl after that. You can keep it. Tell me if you get anything....”

So I kept the crystal, and sometimes stared into it. But no vision came to me.

* * * * *

It was in the late autumn of 1919 that Strickland got permission to go out to France. The war had made an old man of him, although he was little over sixty; and he begged me to go with him. “I should like you to help me,” he said. “I have a feeling that we might, perhaps, hear something about that young rascal of mine. ‘Wounded and missing,’ you know, always leaves one with just a hope.”

The first beautiful release of peace was passing then into that restless craving for immense action which affected us all so strongly at that time; and the feeling was aggravated in my case by the realisation of impotence. I was too old to help.

I accepted Strickland’s offer, eagerly....

I do not believe that he remembered his vision when, after a week’s fruitless enquiry, we came one afternoon to the historic desert that had once been beautiful France. Certainly, he made no reference to his old experience; but he was almost senile. I noticed a difference in him, even in that one week.

But _I_ remembered; and I had a fit of cold shivering that I could not control when we came out on to the awful plain that they now call The Plain of the Dead, and saw the figure of that one demented peasant, dressed in the grotesque relics of two nations’ uniforms.

He was digging feverishly with his pointed spade, and I heard the ring of it as it struck.

It was not a turnip that he wrenched up.

The thing rolled towards us....

Young Strickland’s head had always been a queer shape.

A DIFFERENCE OF TEMPERAMENT

The differences between “young” Royce and “old” Bunnett had a dramatic quality that stirred even the wearied indifference of Stamp and Co.’s counting-house to simple efforts in psychological analysis.

Young Royce was dark, square, and determined; a reasoned boaster, who verified his boasts by action. When he made what sounded like a very rash assertion, it was bad policy to contradict, and quite fatal to bet against him.

Old Bunnett was tall and thin, fair, drooping, and despondent. He seldom committed himself to a confident statement of opinion, but gravely, almost voluptuously, hoped for the worst on every possible occasion. He was, by the office’s classification, of the same breed as “old Robinson,” who had come into the firm as a boy of fourteen and had now served his employers faithfully for fifty-one years.

Royce found a delight in marking that likeness. “Bunny, my boy,” he used to say, “you’ve come here to stop. When I come back here in twenty years’ time I shall find you still at the same old grind. You’ll never get out of it.”

“Not so sure as I want to,” was Bunny’s single form of defence against this impeachment of his powers of initiative--that and a sniff. The sniff was his characteristic comment on life; a long and thoughtful substitute for speech. He was not more than ordinarily susceptible to colds in the head; and his sniff was less a physical function than a vehicle of mental expression.

Young Royce, however, wanted and meant to leave the firm “directly he could see his way,” as he put it. He had a vein of prudence, or it may have been merely shrewdness, that was sometimes overlooked by those who had come a little to dread the threat of his boasting. The one consolation afforded to those who suffered under his implication of their feebleness was the reflection that he would almost certainly “go to the bad one of these days.” Bunny, alone, was pessimist enough to admit that Royce would “get on.” He had been known to add, “Sure to; he’s the sort that gets on.”

The office as a whole jealously disagreed with him; and in their vehement denouncement of Bunny’s pessimism failed to recognise that underlying all the violent and obvious contrasts between Royce and Bunnett there was at least one point of likeness, inasmuch as they both believed in Royce. (The only likeness conceded by the office was the coincidence that both men were born in the same month of the same year, and had come into the firm of Stamp and Company on the same day.)

Royce had actually left the firm on the Saturday afternoon that first introduced him to Bunnett’s mother on Hampstead Heath. He had “seen his way” as far as a job at Capetown--a very risky and uncertain affair, in the office’s opinion.

He had a streak of romantic sentiment hidden away somewhere, and he had come up to the Spaniards’ Road to “take a last look at London.” He was leaning over the railings looking down across the Vale of Health, when he became aware of an arrested Bunnett sniffing profoundly at the back of a bath-chair.

“My mother,” Bunnett said, by way of introduction, and then in a half-aside, “she’s a bit of an invalid, but she’s been a little better lately, ain’t you, mother? This is the Mr. Royce I was telling you about. Just going out to South Africa.”

Mrs. Bunnett pinched her mouth into a line of sympathetic disapproval. “It’s a long way to go,” she remarked--and sniffed thoughtfully.

She and her son were, Royce thought, as exactly alike as a couple of old sheep.

The job in Capetown proved even more uncertain than the office had hopefully predicted, and Royce presently migrated to Melbourne. Thence he drifted across to Hobart. A year later he had found a temporary post in Ceylon, then worked his way up the Bay of Bengal to Calcutta, and stayed there a month before he took ship to Tientsin. It was in 1909, seven years after he had left London, that he first put foot in America, landing at San Francisco, after crossing the Pacific from Yokohama by way of Hawaii.

In those seven years he had suffered and learnt many things, but if the staff of Stamp and Co.’s counting-house had met “young Royce” on his landing in California they would have found no difference in him. He came ashore with the boast that he meant to make money in America.

And, indeed, his apparent failure to win any financial success during those years of wandering was due rather to that streak of imaginative romance in him than to any weakness of character. It had been necessary for him to satisfy some lust for adventure and experience before he could settle down to achieve a worldly ambition. He knew himself well enough to recognise his own quality. He had a perfect confidence in his ability to make money eventually. And just as he had made good his boasts in the old days, so now he made good his determination to seek another form of romance in America.

It would be superfluous to trace the means of his ascent. He was so obviously the successful type that readily finds employment and opportunity in the United States. He had determination combined with initiative and imagination. It is doubtful if even the deliberate, conservative methods of Stamp and Co. could have overlooked his ability if he had elected to stay in the employ of that stately English concern.

He became an American citizen in 1913, but he did not revisit London until the autumn of 1917, when he came over on business as a representative of the Steel Trust. Arthur H. Royce had become a person of considerable importance and influence. He stayed at the Carlton Hotel during the progress of his negotiations with the English Government Department, the methods of which he ridiculed as being founded on the same principles as those familiar to him in the counting-house of Messrs. Stamp and Co.

But the old streak of romance showed itself again on the last Saturday of his stay in England. He had not called on the partners or employees of his old office. He had come to boast in action now, and the boast of language had become futile and unnecessary. He went up to the Spaniards’ Road solely to satisfy some need for self-approval that he hoped to find in the contrast between his present condition and that in which he had last looked down over the hazy prospect of London, fifteen years before.

He was leaning over the rail in much the same place and attitude when he saw, with a strange thrill, the once familiar figure of old Bunnett coming towards him, pushing his invalid mother in what was surely the same bath-chair.

Royce straightened himself, and turned to meet them. He wondered if they would recognise him. There was something of the old self-conscious boast in his attitude as he held out his hand and said;

“Hullo! Bunny. Still here, then?”

Bunnett and his mother sniffed in concert, a deep and melancholy comment on life.

“Still here,” agreed Bunnett, and his mother added, “So you’re back in London, Mr. Royce?”

“For a few days,” Royce admitted.

“South African job turn out all right?” Bunnett asked.

Royce hesitated. In one swift flash of retrospect he looked back on those full and varied adventures that had begun for him with the voyage to Capetown, and knew that though he stood there talking and boasting for a week, he could not convey to old Bunnett and his mother one-hundredth part of the romance and wonder that had glorified his existence for fifteen years.

“Oh! yes; all right,” he said; “and you? Still with Stamps?”

And Bunnett, too, hesitated as if there were something he also lacked power to describe before he answered “Yes, still there.”

The conversation seemed to offer no further possibilities. For a moment they stood awkwardly, and then Bunnett said, “My mother’s a bit of an invalid, but she’s been a little better lately.” He sniffed thoughtfully.

As Royce made his way back to his hotel he modestly thanked God that he was not as some other men.

He had, however, missed one small observation. He had been standing on Bunnett’s right side as they talked, and had not noticed that he had lost his left arm.

REFERENCE WANTED!

As usual, the compartment was nearly empty after we left Rickmansworth, and I anticipated that my one other fellow-passenger would probably get out at the next station and leave me to finish the dull journey alone. I did not, in any case, expect much entertainment from his society. He had a narrow forehead, and a preoccupied, rather scared, expression. It crossed my mind that he might have been a sufferer from shell-shock. I had seen that look in the eyes of one such case, a look at once timid, defensive, and suspicious. I was surprised when he came across the compartment to the seat opposite to me and began to talk.

We opened in the usual way by abusing the line, but he broke off in the middle to comment on the book I had been reading, Dostoievsky’s _The Possessed_.

“Fine stuff, that,” he commented, looked at me suspiciously for a moment, and then added, “What’s that other book of his, Anna--something?”

“Anna Karenin?” I suggested.

He nodded.

“But that’s Tolstoi,” I said.

“Very likely,” he replied; “I’ve no memory for some things. No memory at all. But I’ve read more than you might expect. To be quite honest, when I was a bit younger I read too much.”

I pricked up my ears. I saw the promise of getting him to talk about himself. And I can listen to anything a man has to tell me of his own history; it is only men’s opinions that I find so boring. Why will people have opinions?

“And overstrained your memory?” I asked.

He shook his head and pursed his mouth. “It wasn’t that that ruined my prospects,” he said.

“No?” I commented, as provocatively as I could.

He leaned a little forward and frowned with an effect of thoughtful concentration as he said, “You see, in some ways I’ve got too good a memory; the trouble with me is that I can’t remember what I’ve remembered.”

I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. I could see that he was warm, now, with the craving to confess himself.

“You aren’t a writer, yourself, by any chance?” he asked.

“I’ve done a certain amount,” I admitted.

“Thought you had rather that look,” he said; and went on quickly as if he were afraid that I might, in the circumstances, be tempted to detail my own achievements; “and that being so, my case might interest you, professionally, as you might say.”

“It certainly would, if you care to....” I began, but I saw that he was not listening. Those queer-looking eyes of his had taken on the expression of one who is engaged in some immense effort of memory.

“As a young man,” he said--I guessed him to be, then, about thirty-five--“I had a great ambition to become a writer; but although my mind was full of ideas, I had no gift for putting them into language. At first, I tried in the ordinary way, just as all beginners do, to write stories for the magazines; but they none of them got accepted. Which wasn’t to be wondered at. I knew myself how bad they were, and I used to console myself a little with that knowledge. I may have read somewhere that so long as you kept a cool head about your own writing, there was hope for you.

“Anyway, I left off writing for a time--I wasn’t twenty then--and took to studying. I read all the best authors--carefully, trying to see how the thing was done. I had a lot of spare time one way and another, and in the next five years I got through a wonderful lot of reading. I didn’t confine myself to English authors, either; I read a heap of translations from Russian, French, and German. And all that time I never once tried to write again, myself. I was just getting to learn my trade, I thought.

“Then I lost my job in the city, and while I was looking about for another one I had another shot at writing a magazine story. Well, it was certainly the nearest I’d got up to then of being the right thing. It was a lot better written than any of my other shots, but the plot was too weak. And I found that in learning to write I had lost all my ideas. I’d forgotten all the old ones, and no new ones came to me. At least, not at first.”

He paused a moment and looked out of the window before he continued, rather abruptly: “An idea came to me, though, in the train one day--the best I’d ever had. And I not only saw the whole story clear in my mind, but I saw just how it ought to be written. I went home and began it at once. I had it finished in two days. A little masterpiece I thought it was. I submitted it to one of the reviews, and it was accepted within a week.

“A fortnight later I’d written another. It was very different from the first--done in another mood, as you might say, and lighter altogether. But that one came, too, as an inspiration, and was accepted by one of the magazines. And, after that, I used to get inspirations every other day almost--all sorts of inspirations. I saw myself as the most versatile and gifted writer of the day. I fancied that when my stories were collected and published in book form they would cause a lot of attention. By the time my second story appeared in the magazine--that was the first to get into print--I had written about eight altogether, and they’d all been taken by some editor or another--except one.”

He paused again, and remained silent for so long that I prompted him by saying: “What was the matter with that one exception?”

He looked at me and sighed. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the story, as you might say,” he said; “but there was a note from the editor in which he said that my story appeared to be a translation from some French writer, I’ve forgotten the name, and should not have been submitted as an original contribution. Rather a nasty note it was.

“And about a week later my first story came out in the review, and then there was the devil to pay. It seems that that was a translation, too, from the Russian, and had been printed in English, in a collection of the fellow’s works. His name began with a T, too, I fancy, but it wasn’t Tolstoi.”

“Turgenev?” I suggested.

“Very likely,” he said wearily. “_I_ can’t remember. All I know is that every one of my stories were cribs. I’d remembered them all, and didn’t remember that I’d remembered. Well, I got back all the stories that hadn’t been published, but there was the very deuce of a row.”

The train was drawing into Aylesbury, and my companion got up and collected his things from the rack. Before he got out, however, he paused to say, “Well, there you are. It was a dreadful experience for me, but if you can make any use of it, professionally, so to speak, you’re welcome to it. Good-day to you.”

I had still four more stations to go, and I sat on, turning over that strange confession in my mind. The man had appeared to be honest, the story sounded true as he told it, yet his phraseology and his accent were not those I should have expected from one of his literary experience.

But what worries me most of all is the vague but horribly persistent impression that somewhere, at some time, I have seen that story of his in print....

AS THE CROW FLIES

It is more than twenty years, now, since the late George Wallace came into the offices of Hallows and Rice one afternoon and talked to me about the novel he was writing. He was well known, even then, as journalist, essayist, playwright, and poet, and I welcomed with enthusiasm the suggestion that the firm of publishers for which I was then reader should consider the book when it was written. He told me in the strictest confidence that the title was to be _As the Crow Flies_, and gave me a hint of the subject he proposed to treat. Both title and subject were, I thought, admirable from every point of view, but he said that he would prefer me to say nothing to the firm about the novel until it was actually written. “Wait until you’ve read it, my dear chap,” he said. “I haven’t told another soul as yet, and I don’t want to, until the thing’s done and off my hands.”

I did not see him again for nearly six months. He was the guest of the evening at a small literary dining club on that occasion, and when I went over and sat down by him, after the speeches, he instantly referred to our last interview by saying, “It’s getting on, but we can’t talk about it here. How’s the business?” I told him that the business, so far as I was concerned, remained in a state of tense expectation for a really firstclass novel. He nodded with an air of satisfaction. “You shall have it,” he said. “If you’ll walk part of the way home with me I’ll tell you something about it.” He lived at Highgate, and my rooms were at Herne Hill, but I was prepared to miss the last train rather than lose that confidence. I was very eager in those days.

And I certainly did not regret the walk to Highgate and back, nor the two hours’ wait at Ludgate Hill for the 3.15 “paper” train. Wallace let himself go that night, and made me realise that his novel was to be the best thing for years. He told me all about it. The book was to be a complete exposition of the British national character, as portrayed in the person of his hero, Joseph Blake. Blake was to be a success; a typical member of the middle class, educated at a grammar school, entering a business career at eighteen, and Parliament at forty-five; achieving cabinet rank at fifty-four, and the Premiership at sixty-three. As a background to the central figure there were to be any number of minor characters, all, as it were, supporting and representing Blake--“the firm mass of British opinion” Wallace called it. The single exception was to be a school friend of Blake’s, a man of brilliant parts, but without social or personal ambitions, who spent his life in writing works of philosophy that nobody wanted to read. He was not poor, nor, in a sense, neglected--“we’ll get away altogether from the typical romance,” Wallace commented--but his work and life counted for nothing in popular opinion. The real climax of the book, and incidentally the very first suggestion that Blake was not a great man nor his friend (“I have thought of calling him John Rooke,” Wallace said) a failure, was reached in the last few pages, when Blake, after a prolonged illness, and patiently waiting for death, confides in Rooke that he knows, now, that such a career as his had been was wasted effort. To which Rooke replies that he had known that at school.

“How much of the book have you written?” I asked Wallace just before we parted.

“About 80,000 words,” he told me, “but I am not absolutely satisfied with some of the detail. What I propose to do is to finish the thing and then partly rewrite it.”

He went to America on a long lecture-tour that autumn, and I did not see him again for twelve months. I sought him out, then, because McGillett made a casual reference to the magnum opus at lunch one day, and I realised that I was no longer the only recipient of Wallace’s confidence. In those days one of McGillett’s sources of income was finding books for publishers, and afterwards using what influence he had to get his discoveries well noticed in the Press; and when I found that he knew about the book, I was afraid that I might not, after all, get it for Hallows and Rice.

Wallace reassured me, however. He said that he never went back on a bargain, and when I pointed out to him that no bargain had been made as yet, he promised to call at the office next day and discuss terms with the partners. On my recommendation, the terms offered were amazingly liberal for a first novel; but my enthusiasm was powerful enough for once to overcome the awful inertia of old Hallows. (He had been in the publishing business for thirty years, and his one idea was to buy as cheaply as he could. He had no conception of what Rice and myself understood by “enterprise.”) The firm even went so far as to offer to pay a proportion of the “advance” on signing the agreement, but Wallace refused to accept that. He said that it would harass him to feel tied; and he would not promise any particular date for the delivery of the manuscript. “I’ve nearly finished the book,” he told us, “but when it’s written, I want to put it away for three months and then go right through it again with a fresh mind. I mean this book to be a classic.” Old Hallows was tremendously impressed, I remember, and congratulated me on having made “a real find.”

After that agreement was signed I no longer felt it necessary to hold my tongue about the book, and I dropped a hint or two here and there as to what might be expected when it was published. I cannot believe, however, that I was the chief instigator of the steadily growing interest that was being aroused by the promise of Wallace’s novel. No doubt both old Hallows and Rice made occasional references in public to the same subject, but I fancy that Wallace himself was the really active propagandist. In any case, one was continually finding references to _As the Crow Flies_ in the Press that spring, even the name of Joseph Blake was sometimes referred to as an exemplar of the British character. The book was asked for at the libraries, and I more than once met people who declared that they had read it. At the office we had decided to print a first edition of 20,000 copies, and we put a note about it in our autumn list. Wallace assured me that summer (1899) that the thing was done and only needed a final revision. “If I died tomorrow,” he said, “the story is all there ready to be published, but there is an incident or two that I want to alter before I send it along to you. I mean to deliver you a perfect manuscript. I sha’n’t touch the thing in proof.”

And then, of course, we did not press him for delivery in the autumn of that year. We should not, in any case, have published so important a book during the first months of the Boer war. And in the following spring Wallace himself went out to South Africa. I did not see him before he went. In fact, I did not know he had enlisted until I saw a reference to the fact in the “literary notes” that were just beginning to break out again in the daily and weekly papers.

In that paragraph Wallace’s name was, as usual, coupled with that of his novel _As the Crow Flies_, a precedent that was invariably followed two months later in his obituary notices. (It will be remembered that he died of enteric in June 1900.) Many of the writers assumed that the book had already been published, but some of the better informed expressed their eagerness to read the book which they understood had been completed before Wallace went out to the front.

I firmly believe that our failure to discover that precious manuscript of Wallace’s was the cause of old Hallows’s breakdown and subsequent retirement from the business. He used to go up to Highgate two or three days a week to search Wallace’s house for possible hiding places. “He would have been sure to have put it in some very safe place before he left the country,” he would say, and then fret himself into a fever lamenting the “rank imbecility” of not having insisted on taking charge of the precious script before Wallace went away.

Rice’s theory was that Wallace had taken the MS. with him to make his final revision, but I have often wondered whether Wallace had ever begun it. I have found a suggestion of that one fatal omission, in his title. He took too direct a method. So far as he was concerned, the book was written, and published, and noticed, without his having put pen to paper.

But the queer thing is that the unwritten book has outlived him. For some reason it was not forgotten in the stress of the South African war. And it will be remembered that, in the reaction of the first years of this century, _As the Crow Flies_ was constantly “quoted,” and that there was quite a controversy as to whether the figure of Joseph Blake did not stand for that of Joseph Chamberlain.

Indeed, I was tempted to put down these notes of the true facts of the case because a friend asked me yesterday where he could get a book called _As the Crow Flies_, by George Wallace. A man had told him, he said, that it was the finest novel of the century.

THE NIGHT OF CREATION