E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
by
Author of the Three Sisters, etc.
1916
Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not—ifI'm to be decent—for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they'restill alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, thoughthat was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me theymust have taken all the risks, always.
I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly theway they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed iton the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying aboutthat last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk livingat all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."
And he added, "If I'd only your luck!"
Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck Iought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. Butthere is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of thisstory. He can hold it up as long as he lives—as long as she lives—ashe has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But hecan't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernaltalent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assureyou he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.
I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his owneccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, ifnobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't takehis own big things, particularly not that last thing.
When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm notforgetting that I have published the end of it already. But only in theway of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.
And when you think that it was just touch and go—Why, if I hadn't buckedup and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. Noamount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to seehim.
What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after Ihad seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off fromthe rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong tohim; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I hadto leave her out.
Told like that, it didn't amount to much.
This is the real telling.
I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.
I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met himin nineteen-six—no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was atBlackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when WoolwichArsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He wasthere as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for somesporting paper.
He held m