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 arch?ological 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.”