CHAPTER I

Which is Not a Chapter at All

It was Asaph Tidditt who told me how to begin this history. Perhaps I should be very much obliged to Asaph; perhaps I shouldn't. He has gotten me out of a difficulty—or into one; I am far from certain which.

Ordinarily—I am speaking now of the writing of swashbuckling romances, which is, or was, my trade—I swear I never have called it a profession—the beginning of a story is the least of the troubles connected with its manufacture. Given a character or two and a situation, the beginning of one of those romances is, or was, pretty likely to be something like this:

“It was a black night. Heavy clouds had obscured the setting sun and now, as the clock in the great stone tower boomed twelve, the darkness was pitchy.”

That is a good safe beginning. Midnight, a stone tower, a booming clock, and darkness make an appeal to the imagination. On a night like that almost anything may happen. A reader of one of my romances—and readers there must be, for the things did, and still do, sell to some extent—might be fairly certain that something WOULD happen before the end of the second page. After that the somethings continued to happen as fast as I could invent them.

But this story was different. The weather or the time had nothing to do with its beginning. There were no solitary horsemen or strange wayfarers on lonely roads, no unexpected knocks at the doors of taverns, no cloaked personages landing from boats rowed by black-browed seamen with red handkerchiefs knotted about their heads and knives in their belts. The hero was not addressed as “My Lord”; he was not “Sir Somebody-or-other” in disguise. He was not young and handsome; there was not even “a certain something in his manner and bearing which hinted of an eventful past.” Indeed there was not. For, if this particular yarn or history or chronicle which I had made up my mind to write, and which I am writing now, had or has a hero, I am he. And I am Hosea Kent Knowles, of Bayport, Massachusetts, the latter the village in which I was born and in which I have lived most of the time since I was twenty-seven years old. Nobody calls me “My Lord.” Hephzy has always called me “Hosy”—a name which I despise—and the others, most of them, “Kent” to my face and “The

Quahaug” behind my back, a quahaug being a very common form of clam which is supposed to lead a solitary existence and to keep its shell tightly shut. If anything in my manner had hinted at a mysterious past no one in Bayport would have taken the hint. Bayporters know my past and that of my ancestors only too well.

As for being young and handsome—well, I was thirty-eight years old last March. Which is quite enough on THAT subject.

But I had determined to write the story, so I sat down to begin it. And immediately I got into difficulties. How should I begin? I might begin at any one of a dozen places—with Hephzy's receiving the Raymond and Whitcomb circular; with our arrival in London; with Jim Campbell's visit to me here in Bayport; with the curious way in which the letter reached us, after crossing the ocean twice. Any one of these might serve as a beginning—but which? I made I don't know how many attempts, but not one was satisfactory. I, who had begun I am ashamed to tell you how many stories—yes, and had finished them and seen them in print as well—was stumped at the very beginning of this one. Like Sim Phinney I had worked at my job “a long spell” and “cal'lated” I knew it, but here was something I didn't know. As Sim said, when he faced his problem, “I couldn't seem to get steerage way on her.”

Simeon, you see—He is Angeline Phinney's second cousin and lives in the third house beyond the Holiness Bethel on the right-hand side of the road—Simeon has “done carpentering” here in Bayport all his life. He built practically every henhouse now gracing or disgracing the backyards of our village. He is our “henhouse specialist,” so to speak. He has even been known to boast of his skill. “Henhouses!” snorted Sim; “land of love! I can build a henhouse with my eyes shut. Nowadays when another one of them foolheads that's been readin' 'How to Make a Million Poultry Raisin'' in the Farm Gazette comes to me and says 'Henhouse,' I say, 'Yes sir. Fifteen dollars if you pay me cash now and a hundred and fifteen if you want to wait and pay me out of your egg profits. That's all there is to it.'”

And yet, when Captain Darius Nickerson, who made the most of his money selling fifty-foot lots of sand, beachgrass and ticks to summer people for bungalow sites—when Captain Darius, grown purse-proud and vainglorious, expressed a desire for a henhouse with a mansard roof and a cupola, the latter embellishments to match those surmounting his own dwelling, Simeon was set aback with his canvas flapping. At the end of a week he had not driven a nail. “Godfrey's mighty!” he is reported to have exclaimed. “I don't know whether to build the average cupola and trust to a hen's fittin' it, or take an average hen and build a cupola round her. Maybe I'll be all right after I get started, but it's where to start that beats me.”

Where to start beat me, also, and it might be beating me yet, if I hadn't dropped in at the post-office and heard Asaph Tidditt telling a story to the group around the stove. After he had finished, and, the mail being sorted, we were walking homeward together, I asked a question.

“Asaph,” said I, “when you start to spin a yarn how do you begin?”

“Hey?” he exclaimed. “How do I begin? Why, I just heave to and go to work and begin, that's all.”

“Yes, I know, but where do you begin?”

“At the beginnin', naturally. If you was cal'latin' to sail a boat race you wouldn't commence at t'other end of the course, would you?”

“I might; practical people wouldn't, I suppose. But—what IS the beginning? Suppose there were a lot of beginnings and you didn't know which to choose.”

“Oh, we-ll, in that case I'd just sort of—of edge around till I found one that—that was a beginnin' of SOMETHIN' and I'd start there. You understand, don't you? Take that yarn I was spinnin' just now—that one about Josiah Dimick's great uncle's pig on his mother's side. I mean his uncle on his mother's side, not the pig, of course. Now I hadn't no intention of tellin' about that hog; hadn't thought of it for a thousand year, as you might say. I just commenced to tell about Angie Phinney, about how fast she could talk, and that reminded me of a parrot that belonged to Sylvanus Cahoon's sister—Violet, the sister's name was—loony name, too, if you ask ME, 'cause she was a plaguey sight nigher bein' a sunflower than she was a violet—weighed two hundred and ten and had a face on her as red as—”

“Just a minute, Ase. About that pig?”

“Oh, yes! Well, the pig reminded me of Violet's parrot and the parrot reminded me of a Plymouth Rock rooster I had that used to roost in the pigpen nights—wouldn't use the henhouse no more'n you nor I would—and that, naturally, made me think of pigs, and pigs fetched Josiah's uncle's pig to mind and there I was all ready to start on the yarn. It pretty often works out that way. When you want to start a yarn and you can't start—you've forgot it, or somethin'—just begin somewhere, get goin' somehow. Edge around and keep edgin' around and pretty soon you'll fetch up at the right place TO start. See, don't you, Kent?”

I saw—that is, I saw enough. I came home and this morning I began the “edging around” process. I don't seem to have “fetched up” anywhere in particular, but I shall keep on with the edging until I do. As Asaph says, I must begin somewhere, so I shall begin with the Saturday morning of last April when Jim Campbell, my publisher and my friend—which is by no means such an unusual combination as many people think—sat on the veranda of my boathouse overlooking Cape Cod Bay and discussed my past, present and, more particularly, my future.

CHAPTER II

Which Repeats, for the Most Part, What Jim Campbell Said to Me and What I Said to Him

“Jim,” said I, “what is the matter with me?”

Jim, who was seated in the ancient and dilapidated arm-chair which was the finest piece of furniture in the boathouse and which I always offered to visitors, looked at me over the collar of my sweater. I used the sweater as I did the arm-chair when I did not have visitors. He was using it then because, like an idiot, he had come to Cape Cod in April with nothing warmer than a very natty suit and a light overcoat. Of course one may go clamming and fishing in a light overcoat, but—one doesn't.

Jim looked at me over the collar of my sweater. Then he crossed his oilskinned and rubber-booted legs—they were my oilskins and my boots—and answered promptly.

“Indigestion,” he said. “You ate nine of those biscuits this morning; I saw you.”

“I did not,” I retorted, “because you saw them first. MY interior is in its normal condition. As for yours—”

“Mine,” he interrupted, filling his pipe from my tobacco pouch, “being accustomed to a breakfast, not a gorge, is abnormal but satisfactory, thank you—quite satisfactory.”

“That,” said I, “we will discuss later, when I have you out back of the bar in my catboat. Judging from present indications there will be some sea-running. The 'Hephzy' is a good, capable craft, but a bit cranky, like the lady she is named for. I imagine she will roll.”

He didn't like that. You see, I had sailed with him before and I remembered.

“Ho-se-a,” he drawled, “you have a vivid imagination. It is a pity you don't use more of it in those stories of yours.”

“Humph! I am obliged to use the most of it on the royalty statements you send me. If you call me 'Hosea' again I will take the 'Hephzy' across the Point Rip. The waves there are fifteen feet high at low tide. See here, I asked you a serious question and I should like a serious answer. Jim, what IS the matter with me? Have I written out or what is the trouble?”

He looked at me again.

“Are you in earnest?” he asked.

“I am, very much in earnest.”

“And you really want to talk shop after a breakfast like that and on a morning like this?”

“I do.”

“Was that why you asked me to come to Bayport and spend the week-end?”

“No-o. No, of course not.”

“You're another; it was. When you met me at the railroad station yesterday I could see there was something wrong with you. All this morning you've had something on your chest. I thought it was the biscuits, of course; but it wasn't, eh?”

“It was not.”

“Then what was it? Aren't we paying you a large enough royalty?”

“You are paying me a good deal larger one than I deserve. I don't see why you do it.”

“Oh,” with a wave of the hand, “that's all right. The publishing of books is a pure philanthropy. We are in business for our health, and—”

“Shut up. You know as well as I do that the last two yarns of mine which your house published have not done as well as the others.”

I had caught him now. Anything remotely approaching a reflection upon the business house of which he was the head was sufficient to stir up Jim Campbell. That business, its methods and its success, were his idols.

“I don't know any such thing,” he protested, hotly. “We sold—”

“Hang the sale! You sold quite enough. It is an everlasting miracle to me that you are able to sell a single copy. Why a self-respecting person, possessed of any intelligence whatever, should wish to read the stuff I write, to say nothing of paying money for the privilege, I can't understand.”

“You don't have to understand. No one expects an author to understand anything. All you are expected to do is to write; we'll attend to the rest of it. And as for sales—why, 'The Black Brig'—that was the last one, wasn't it?—beat the 'Omelet' by eight thousand or more.”

“The Omelet” was our pet name for “The Queen's Amulet,” my first offence in the literary line. It was a highly seasoned concoction of revolution and adventure in a mythical kingdom where life was not dull, to say the least. The humblest character in it was a viscount. Living in Bayport had, naturally, made me familiar with the doings of viscounts.

“Eight thousand more than the last isn't so bad, is it?” demanded Jim Campbell combatively.

“It isn't. It is astonishingly good. It is the books themselves that are bad. The 'Omelet' was bad enough, but I wrote it more as a joke than anything else. I didn't take it seriously at all. Every time I called a duke by his Christian name I grinned. But nowadays I don't grin—I swear. I hate the things, Jim. They're no good. And the reviewers are beginning to tumble to the fact that they're no good, too. You saw the press notices yourself. 'Another Thriller by the Indefatigable Knowles' 'Barnacles, Buccaneers and Blood, not to Mention Beauty and the Bourbons.' That's the way two writers headed their articles about 'The Black Brig.' And a third said that I must be getting tired; I wrote as if I was. THAT fellow was right. I am tired, Jim. I'm tired and sick of writing slush. I can't write any more of it. And yet I can't write anything else.”

Jim's pipe had gone out. Now he relit it and tossed the match over the veranda rail.

“How do you know you can't?” he demanded.

“Can't what?”

“Can't write anything but slush?”

“Ah ha! Then it is slush. You admit it.”

“I don't admit anything of the kind. You may not be a William Shakespeare or even a George Meredith, but you have written some mighty interesting stories. Why, I know a chap who sits up till morning to finish a book of yours. Can't sleep until he has finished it.”

“What's the matter with him; insomnia?”

“No; he's a night watchman. Does that satisfy you, you crossgrained old shellfish? Come on, let's dig clams—some of your own blood relations—and forget it.”

“I don't want to forget it and there is plenty of time for clamming. The tide won't cover the flats for two hours yet. I tell you I'm serious, Jim. I can't write any more. I know it. The stuff I've been writing makes me sick. I hate it, I tell you. What the devil I'm going to do for a living I can't see—but I can't write another story.”

Jim put his pipe in his pocket. I think at last he was convinced that I meant what I said, which I certainly did. The last year had been a year of torment to me. I had finished the 'Brig,' as a matter of duty, but if that piratical craft had sunk with all hands, including its creator, I should not have cared. I drove myself to my desk each day, as a horse might be driven to a treadmill, but the animal could have taken no less interest in his work than I had taken in mine. It was bad—bad—bad; worthless and hateful. There wasn't a new idea in it and I hadn't one in my head. I, who had taken up writing as a last resort, a gamble which might, on a hundred-to-one chance, win where everything else had failed, had now reached the point where that had failed, too. Campbell's surmise was correct; with the pretence of asking him to the Cape for a week-end of fishing and sailing I had lured him there to tell him of my discouragement and my determination to quit.

He took his feet from the rail and hitched his chair about until he faced me.

“So you're not going to write any more,” he said.

“I'm not. I can't.”

“What are you going to do; live on back royalties and clams?”

“I may have to live on the clams; my back royalties won't keep me very long.”

“Humph! I should think they might keep you a good while down here. You must have something in the stocking. You can't have wasted very much in riotous living on this sand-heap. What have you done with your money, for the last ten years; been leading a double life?”

“I've found leading a single one hard enough. I have saved something, of course. It isn't the money that worries me, Jim; I told you that. It's myself; I'm no good. Every author, sometime or other, reaches the point where he knows perfectly well he has done all the real work he can ever do, that he has written himself out. That's what's the matter with me—I'm written out.”

Jim snorted. “For Heaven's sake, Kent Knowles,” he demanded, “how old are you?”

“I'm thirty-eight, according to the almanac, but—”

“Thirty-eight! Why, Thackeray wrote—”

“Drop it! I know when Thackeray wrote 'Vanity Fair' as well as you do. I'm no Thackeray to begin with, and, besides, I am older at thirty-eight than he was when he died—yes, older than he would have been if he had lived twice as long. So far as feeling and all the rest of it go, I'm a second Methusaleh.”

“My soul! hear the man! And I'm forty-two myself. Well, Grandpa, what do you expect me to do; get you admitted to the Old Man's Home?”

“I expect—” I began, “I expect—” and I concluded with the lame admission that I didn't expect him to do anything. It was up to me to do whatever must be done, I imagined.

He smiled grimly.

“Glad your senility has not affected that remnant of your common-sense,” he declared. “You're dead right, my boy; it IS up to you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am, but that doesn't help me a whole lot.”

“Nothing will help you as long as you think and speak as you have this morning. See here, Kent! answer me a question or two, will you? They may be personal questions, but will you answer them?”

“I guess so. There has been what a disinterested listener might call a slightly personal flavor to your remarks so far. Do your worst. Fire away.”

“All right. You've lived in Bayport ten years or so, I know that. What have you done in all that time—besides write?”

“Well, I've continued to live.”

“Doubted. You've continued to exist; but how? I've been here before. This isn't my first visit, by a good deal. Each time I have been here your daily routine—leaving out the exciting clam hunts and the excursions in quest of the ferocious flounder, like the one we're supposed—mind, I say supposed—to be on at the present moment—you have put in the day about like this: Get up, bathe, eat, walk to the post-office, walk home, sit about, talk a little, read some, walk some more, eat again, smoke, talk, read, eat for the third time, smoke, talk, read and go to bed. That's the program, isn't it?”

“Not exactly. I play tennis in summer—when there is anyone to play with me—and golf, after a fashion. I used to play both a good deal, when I was younger. I swim, and I shoot a little, and—and—”

“How about society? Have any, do you?”

“In the summer, when the city people are here, there is a good deal going on, if you care for it—picnics and clam bakes and teas and lawn parties and such.”

“Heavens! what reckless dissipation! Do you indulge?”

“Why, no—not very much. Hang it all, Jim! you know I'm no society man. I used to do the usual round of fool stunts when I was younger, but—”

“But now you're too antique, I suppose. Wonder that someone hasn't collected you as a genuine Chippendale or something. So you don't 'tea' much?”

“Not much. I'm not often invited, to tell you the truth. The summer crowd doesn't take kindly to me, I'm afraid.”

“Astonishing! You're such a chatty, entertaining, communicative cuss on first acquaintance, too. So captivatingly loquacious to strangers. I can imagine how you'd shine at a 'tea.' Every summer girl that tried to talk to you would be frost-bitten. Do you accept invitations when they do come?”

“Not often nowadays. You see, I know they don't really want me.”

“How do you know it?”

“Why—well, why should they? Everybody else calls me—”