WHAT Blaise Olifant told Olivia about his prospective co-inhabitant of
The Towers, and what Rowington, the publisher, and one or two others
knew about him, amounted to the following:
One morning a motor-car, having the second-hand air of a hiring garage
and unoccupied save for the chauffeur, drew up before the door of a
great London publishing house. The chauffeur stepped from his seat,
collected a brown-paper package from the interior, and entered.
“Can I see a member of the firm?”
The clerk in the enquiry office looked surprised. Chauffeurs offering
manuscripts on behalf of their employers were plentiful as blackberries
in September; but chauffeurs demanding an interview with the august
heads of the house were rare as blackberries in March.
“I’m afraid you can’t do that,” he replied civilly. “If you leave it
here, it will be all right. I’ll give you a receipt which you can take
back.”
“I want to explain,” said the chauffeur.
Scores of people weekly expressed the same desire. It was the business
of the clerk to suppress explanations.
“It’s a manuscript to be submitted? Well, you must tell the author——”
“I am the author,” said the chauffeur.
“Oh!” said the clerk, and his subconscious hand pushed the manuscript a
millimetre forward on the polished mahogany counter.
“The circumstances, you see, are exceptional.”
There being something exceptional in the voice and manner of the
chauffeur, the clerk regarded him for the first time as a human being.
“I quite see,” said he; “but the rules of the firm are strict. If you
will leave the manuscript, it will be read. Oh, I give you my word of
honour,” he smiled. “Everything that comes in is read. We have a staff
who do nothing else. Is your name and address on it?” He began to untie
the string.
“The name, but not the address.”
On the slip of paper which the clerk pushed across to him he wrote:
Alexis Triona,
c/o John Briggs.
3 Cherbury Mews,
Surrey Gardens, W.
The clerk scribbled an acknowledgment, the chauffeur thrust it into his
pocket, and, driving away, was lost in the traffic of London.
A fortnight afterwards, Alexis Triona, who, together with John Briggs,
as one single and indissoluble chauffeur, inhabited a little room over
the garage in Cherbury Mews, received a letter to the effect that the
publishing house, being interested in the MS. “_Through Blood and
Snow_,” which he had kindly submitted, would be glad if he would call,
with a view to publication. The result was a second visit on the part of
the chauffeur to the great firm. The clerk welcomed him with a bland
smile, and showed him into a comfortably furnished room whose thick
Turkey carpet signified the noiseless mystery of many discreet decades,
and where a benevolent middle-aged man in gold spectacles stood with his
back to the chimney-piece. He advanced with outstretched hand to meet
the author.
“Mr. Triona? I’m glad to meet you. Won’t you sit down?”
He motioned to a chair by the tidy writing table, where he sat and
pulled forward the manuscript, which had been placed there in readiness
for the interview. He said pleasantly:
“Well. Let us get to business at once. We should like to publish your
book.”
The slight quivering of sensitive nostrils alone betrayed the author’s
emotion.
“I’m glad,” he replied. “I think it’s worth publishing.”
Mr. Rowington tapped the MS. in front of him with his forefinger. “Are
these your own personal experiences?”
“They are,” said the chauffeur.
“Excuse my questioning you,” said the publisher. “Not that it would
greatly matter. But one likes to know. We should be inclined to publish
it, either as a work of fiction or a work of fact; but the handling of
it—the method of publicity—would be different. Of course, you see,” he
went on benevolently, “a thing may be absolutely true in essence, like
lots of the brilliant little war stories that have been written the past
few years, but not true in the actual historical sense. Now, your book
would have more value if we could say that it is true in this actual
historical sense, if we could say that it’s an authentic record of
personal experiences.”
“You can say that,” answered Triona quietly.
The publisher leaned back in his chair.
“How a man could have gone through what you have and remained sane
passes understanding.”
For the first time the young man’s set features relaxed into a smile.
“I shouldn’t like to swear that I am sane,” said he.
“I’ve heard ex-prisoners say,” Mr. Rowington remarked, “that six months’
solitary confinement under such conditions”—he patted the
manuscript—“is as much as the human reason can stand.”
“As soon as hunting and killing vermin ceases to be a passionate
interest in life,” said Triona.
They conversed for a while. Stimulated by the publisher’s question,
Triona supplemented details in the book, described his final adventure,
his landing penniless in London, his search for work. At last, said he,
he had found a situation as chauffeur in the garage of a motor-hiring
company. The publisher glanced at the slip pinned to the cover of the
manuscript.
“And John Briggs?”
“A pseudonym. Briggs was my mother’s name. I am English on both sides,
though my great-grandfather’s people were Maltese. My father, however,
was a naturalized Russian. I’ve mentioned it in the book.”
“Quite so,” said the publisher. “I only wanted to get things clear. And
now as to terms. Have you any suggestion?”
Afterwards, Alexis Triona confessed to a wild impulse to ask for a
hundred pounds—outright sale—and to a sudden lack of audacity which
kept him silent. The terms which the publisher proposed, when the
royalty system and the probabilities of such a book’s profits were
explained to him, made him gasp with wonder. And when, in consideration,
said the publisher, of his present impecunious position, he was offered
an advance in respect of royalties exceeding the hundred pounds of his
crazy promptings, his heart thumped until it became an all but
intolerable pain.
“Do you think,” he asked, amazed that his work should have such market
value, “that I could earn my living by writing?”
“Undoubtedly.” The publisher beamed on the new author. “You have the
matter, you have the gift, the style, the humour, the touch. I’m sure I
could place things for you. Indeed, it would be to our common advantage,
pending publication. Only, of course, you mustn’t use any of the matter
in the book. You quite understand?”
Alexis Triona understood. He went away dancing on air. Write? His brain
seethed with ideas. That the written expression of them should open the
gates of Fortune was a new conception. He had put together the glowing,
vivid book impelled by strange, unknown forces. It was, as he had
confidently declared, worth publishing. But the possible reward was
beyond his dreams. And he could see more visions. . . .
So he went back to his garage and drove idle people to dinners and
theatres, and in his scanty leisure wrote strange romances of love and
war in Circassia and Tartary, and, through the agency of the powerful
publishing house, sold them to solid periodicals, until the public mind
became gradually familiarized with his name. It was only when the book
was published, and, justifying the confidence of the great firm, blazed
into popularity, that Triona discarded his livery and all that
appertained to the mythical John Briggs and, arraying himself in the
garb of ordinary citizenship, entered—to use, with a difference, the
famous trope of a departed wit—a lion into the den of London’s Daniels.
For, in their hundreds, they had come to judgment. But knowing very
little of the Imperial Russian Secret Service in Turkestan, or the ways
of the inhabitants of the Ural Mountains, or, at that time, of Bolshevik
horrors in the remote confines of Asia, they tore each other to pieces,
while the lion stepped, with serene modesty, in the midst of them.
* * * * *
It was at Oxford, whither the sudden wave of fame had drifted him, that
he met Blaise Olifant, who was living in the house of his sister, the
wife of a brilliant, undomesticated and somewhat dissolute professor of
political economy. The Head of a College, interested in Russia, had
asked him down to dine and sleep. There was a portentous dinner-party
whose conglomerate brain paralyzed the salmon and refroze the imported
lamb. They overwhelmed the guest of honour with their learning. They all
were bent on probing beneath the surface of his thrilling personal
adventures, which he narrated from time to time with attractive modesty.
The episode of his reprieve when standing naked beside the steaming
chaldron in which he was to be boiled alive caused a shuddering silence.
Perhaps it was too realistic for a conventional dinner-party, but he had
discounted its ghastliness by a smiling nonchalance, telling it as
though it had been an amusing misadventure of travel. Very shortly
afterwards Mrs. Head of College broke into a disquisition on the
continuity of Russian literature from Sumakarov to Chekov. Triona, a
profound student of the subject, at last lost interest in the academic
socialist and threw up his hands.
“My dear lady,” said he, “there is a theory in the United States
accounting for the continued sale of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. They say
immigrants buy it to familiarize themselves with the negro question.
Russian literature has just as much to do with the Russia of to-day.
It’s as purely archæological as the literature of Ancient Assyria.”
Blaise Olifant, sitting opposite, sympathized with the man of
actualities set down in this polite academy. Once he himself had
regarded it as the ganglion of the Thought of the Universe; but having
recently seen something of the said Universe he had modified his view.
Why should these folk not be content with a plain human story of almost
fantastic adventure, instead of worrying the unhappy Soldier of Fortune
with sociological and metaphysical theories with which he had little
time to concern himself? Why embroil him in a discussion on the League
of Nations’ duty to Lithuania when he was anxious to give them
interesting pictures of Kurdish family life? He looked round the table
somewhat amusedly at the elderly intellectuals of both sexes, and,
forgetting for a moment the intellectual years of quiet biological
research to which he was about to devote his life, drew an unflattering
contrast between the theorists and their alien guest.
He liked the man. He liked the boyish, clean-shaven face, the broad
forehead marked by very thin horizontal lines, the thin brown hair,
parted carelessly at the side, and left to do what it liked; the dark
grey eyes that sometimes seemed so calm beneath the heavy lids, and yet
were capable of sudden illumination; the pleasant, humorous mouth, and
the grotesque dimple of a hole in the middle of a long chin. He pitied
the man. He pitied him for the hollows in his temples, for the swift
flash of furtive glances, for the great sinews that stood out in his
lean nervous hands, for the general suggestion of shrunken muscularity
in his figure. A stone, or two, thought he, below his normal weight. He
liked his voice, its soft foreign intonation; he liked his modesty, his
careless air of the slim young man of no account; he liked the courteous
patience of his manner. He understood his little nervous trick of
plucking at his lips.
In the drawing-room after dinner Mrs. Head of College said to him:
“A most interesting man—but I do wish he would look you in the face
when he speaks to you.”
Blaise Olifant suppressed a sigh. These good people were hopeless. They
knew nothing. They did not even recognize the unmistakable brand of the
prisoner who has suffered agony of body and degradation of soul. No man
who has been a tortured slave regains, for years, command of his eyes.
Hundreds of such men had Olifant seen, and the sight of them still made
his heart ache. He explained politely. And with a polite air of
unconvinced assent, the lady received his explanation.
He asked Triona to lunch the next day, and under the warmth of his
kindly sympathy Triona expanded. He spoke of his boyhood in Moscow,
where his father, a naturalized Russian, carried on business as a
stockbroker; of his travels in England and France with his English
mother; of his English tutor; of his promising start in life in a great
Russian motor firm—an experience that guaranteed his livelihood during
his late refuge months in London; of his military service; of his early
war days as a Russian officer; of the twists of circumstance that sent
him into the Imperial Secret Service; of incredible wanderings to the
frontiers of Thibet; of the Revolution; of the murder of father and
mother and the disappearance of his fortune like a wisp of cloud
evaporated by the sun; of many strange and woeful things related in his
book; of his escape through Russia; of his creeping as a stowaway into a
Swedish timber boat; of his torpedoing by a German submarine and his
rescue by a British destroyer; of his landing naked save for shirt and
trousers, sans money, sans papers, sans everything of value save his
English speech; of the Russian Society in London’s benevolent aid; of
the burning desire, an irresistible flame, to set down on paper all that
he had gone through; of the intense nights spent over the book in his
tiny ramshackle room over the garage; and, lastly, of the astounding
luck that had been dealt him by the capricious Wheel of Fortune.
In the presence of a sympathetic audience he threw aside the previous
evening’s cloak of modest impersonality. He talked with a vivid
picturesqueness that held Olifant spellbound. The furtive look in his
eyes disappeared. They gleamed like compelling stars. His face lost its
ruggedness, transfigured by the born narrator’s inspiration. Olifant’s
sister, Mrs. Woolcombe, a gentle and unassuming woman on whom the
learning of Oxford had weighed as heavily as the abominable conduct of
her husband, listened with the rapt attention of a modern Desdemona. She
gazed at him open eyed, half stupefied as she had gazed lately at a
great cinematograph film which had held all London breathless.
When he had gone she turned to her brother, still under the spell.
“The boy’s a magician.”
Blaise Olifant smiled. “The boy’s a man,” said he.
* * * * *
Chance threw them together a while later in London. There they met
frequently, became friends. The quiet sincerity of the soldier-scholar
that was Blaise Olifant seemed to strike some chord of soothing in the
heart of the young magician. Fundamentally ignorant of every geological
fact, Triona brought to Olifant’s banquet of fossil solvents of the
mystery of existence an insatiable appetite for knowledge. He listened
to reluctant lectures on elementary phenomena such as ammonites, with
the same rapt attention as Olifant listened to his tales of the old
Empire of Prester John. The Freemasonry of war, with its common
experiences of peril and mutilation—once Triona slipped off pump and
sock and showed a foot from which three toes had been shot away and an
ankle seared with the fester of fetters—formed a primary bond of
brotherhood. By the Freemasonry of intellect they found themselves
members of a Higher Chapter.
“London is wonderful,” said Triona one day. “London’s appreciation of
the poor thing I have done is enough to turn anyone’s head. But while my
head is being turned, in the most delightful way in the world, I can’t
find time to do any work. And I must write in order to live. Do you know
a little quiet spot where I could stay for the winter and write this
precious novel of mine?”
Blaise Olifant reflected for a moment.
“I myself am looking for a sort of hermitage. In fact, I’ve heard of one
in Shropshire which I’m going to look at next week. I want a biggish
house,” he explained, with a smile—“I’ve had enough of dug-outs and
billets in a farmhouse with a hole through the roof to last me my
natural life. So there would be room for a guest. If you would care to
come and stay with me, wherever I pitch my comfortable tent, and carry
on your job while I carry on mine, you would be more than welcome.”
“My dear fellow,” cried Triona, impulsively thrusting out both hands to
be shaken, “this is unheard-of generosity. It means my soul’s salvation.
Only the horrible dread of loneliness—you know the old solitary
prisoner’s dread—has kept me from running down to some little
out-of-the-way place—say in Cornwall. I’ve shrunk from it. But London
is different. In my chauffeur’s days it was different. I had always
associates, fares, the multitudinous sights and sounds of the vast city.
But solitude in a village! Frankly, I funked it. I’ve lived so much
alone that now I must talk. If I didn’t talk I should go mad. Or rather
I must feel that I can talk if I want to. I keep hold of myself,
however. If I bored you with my loquacity you wouldn’t have made me your
delightful proposal.”
“Well, you’ll come, if I can get the right kind of house?”
“With all the gratitude in life,” cried Triona, his eyes sparkling. “But
not as your guest. Some daily, weekly, monthly arrangement, so that we
shall both be free—you to kick me out—I to go——”
“Just as you like,” laughed Olifant. “I only should be pleased to have
your company.”
“And God knows,” cried Triona, “what yours would be to me.”