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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collaborators, by Robert S. Hichens
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Collaborators
+       1896
+
+Author: Robert S. Hichens
+
+Release Date: November 8, 2007 [EBook #23421]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLLABORATORS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE COLLABORATORS.
+
+By Robert S. Hichens
+
+1896
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"Why shouldn't we collaborate?" said Henley in his most matter-of-fact
+way, as Big Ben gave voice to the midnight hour. "Everybody does it
+nowadays. Two heads may be really better than one, although I seldom
+believe in the truth of accepted sayings. Your head is a deuced good
+one, Andrew; but--now don't get angry--you are too excitable and too
+intense to be left quite to yourself, even in book-writing, much less in
+the ordinary affairs of life. I think you were born to collaborate, and
+to collaborate with me. You can give me everything I lack, and I can
+give you a little of the sense of humour, and act as a drag upon the
+wheel."
+
+"None of the new humour, Jack; that shall never appear in a book with
+my name attached to it. Dickens I can tolerate. He is occasionally
+felicitous. The story of 'The Dying Clown,' for instance, crude as it is
+it has a certain grim tragedy about it. But the new humour came from the
+pit, and should go--to the _Sporting Times_."
+
+"Now, don't get excited. The book is not in proof yet--perhaps never
+will be. You need not be afraid. My humour will probably be old enough.
+But what do you y to the idea?"
+
+Andrew Trenchard sat for awhile in silent consideration. His legs were
+stretched out, and his slippered feet rested on the edge of the brass
+fender. A nimbus of smoke surrounded his swarthy features, his shock of
+black hair, his large, rather morose, dark eyes. He was a man of about
+twenty-five, with an almost horribly intelligent face, so observant that
+he tried people, so acute that he frightened them. His intellect was
+never for a moment at rest, unless in sleep. He devoured himself with
+his own emotions, and others with his analysis of theirs. His mind was
+always crouching to spring, except when it was springing. He lived an
+irregular life, and all horrors had a subtle fascination for him. As
+Henley had remarked, he possessed little sense of humour, but immense
+sense of evil and tragedy and sorrow. He seldom found time to
+calmly regard the drama of life from the front. He was always at the
+stage-door, sending in his card, and requesting admittance behind the
+scenes. What was on the surface only interested him in so far as
+it indicated what was beneath, and in all mental matters his normal
+procedure was that of the disguised detective. Stupid people disliked
+him. Clever people distrusted him while they admired him. The mediocre
+suggested that he was liable to go off his head, and the profound
+predicted for him fame, tempered by suicide.
+
+Most people considered him interesting, and a few were sincerely
+attached to him. Among these last was Henley, who had been his friend
+at Oxford, and had taken rooms in the same house with him in Smith's
+Square, Westminster. Both the young men were journalists. Henley, who,
+as he had acknowledged, possessed a keen sense of humour, and was not
+so much ashamed of it as he ought to have been, wrote--very
+occasionally--for _Punch_, and more often for _Fun_, was dramatic critic
+of a lively society paper, and "did" the books--in a sarcastic vein--for
+a very unmuzzled "weekly," that was libellous by profession and truthful
+by oversight. Trenchard, on the other hand, wrote a good deal of very
+condensed fiction, and generally placed it; contributed brilliant
+fugitive articles to various papers and magazines, and was generally
+spoken of by the inner circle of the craft as "a rising man," and a
+man to be afraid of. Henley was full of common-sense, only moderately
+introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a
+book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary
+sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He
+lacked imagination; but his descriptive powers were racy, and he knew
+instinctively what was likely to take, and what would be caviare to the
+general.
+
+Trenchard, as he considered the proposition now made to him, realized
+that Henley might supply much that he lacked in any book that was
+written with a view to popular success. There could be no doubt of it.
+
+"But we should quarrel inevitably and doggedly," he said at last. "If I
+can not hold myself in, still less can I be held in. We should tear
+one another in pieces. When I write, I feel that what I write must be,
+however crude, however improper or horrible it may seem. You would want
+to hold me back."
+
+"My dear boy, I should more than want to--I should do it. In
+collaboration, no man can be a law unto himself. That must be distinctly
+understood before we begin. I don't wish to force the proposition on
+you. Only we are both ambitious devils. We are both poor. We are both
+determined to try a book. Have we more chance of succeeding if we try
+one together? I believe so. You have the imagination, the grip, the
+stern power to evolve the story, to make it seem inevitable, to force
+it step by step on its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few
+flowers--they shall not be peonies, I promise you--on the roadside.
+And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the
+story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now,
+you needn't be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a
+good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to the mill. That is
+understood."
+
+Andrew's great eyes flashed in the lamplight.
+
+"The mill," he said. "Sometimes I feel inclined to let it stop working.
+Who would care if one wheel ceased to turn? There are so many others."
+
+"Ah, that's the sort of thing I shall cut out of the book!" cried
+Henley, turning the soda-water into his whisky with a cheerful swish.
+
+"We will be powerful, but never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not
+without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the
+stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird
+fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid.
+Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you possess a corrective in
+me."
+
+Trenchard's face lightened in a rare smile as, with a half-sigh, he
+said:
+
+"I believe you are right, and that I need a collaborator, an opposite,
+who is yet in sympathy with me. Yes; either of us might fail alone;
+together we should succeed."
+
+"_Will_ succeed, my boy!"
+
+"But not by pandering to the popular taste," added Andrew in his most
+sombre tones, and with a curl of his thin, delicately-moulded lips. "I
+shall never consent to that."
+
+"We will not call it pandering. But we must hit the taste of the day, or
+we shall look a couple of fools."
+
+"People are always supposed to look fools when, for once, they are not
+fools," said Andrew.
+
+"Possibly. But now our bargain is made. Strike hands upon it. Henceforth
+we are collaborators as well as friends."
+
+Andrew extended his long, thin, feverish hand, and, as Henley held it
+for a moment, he started at the intense, vivid, abnormal personality its
+grasp seemed to reveal. To collaborate with Trenchard was to collaborate
+with a human volcano.
+
+"And now for the germ of our book," he said, as the clock struck one.
+"Where shall we find it?"
+
+Trenchard leaned forward in his chair, with his hands pressed upon the
+arms.
+
+"Listen, and I will give it you," he said.
+
+And, almost until the dawn and the wakening of the slumbering city,
+Henley sat and listened, and forgot that his pipe was smoked out, and
+that his feet were cold. Trenchard had strange powers, and could enthral
+as he could also repel.
+
+*****
+
+"It is a weird idea, and it is very powerful," Henley said at last.
+"But you stop short at the critical moment. Have you not devised a
+_denouement?_"
+
+"Not yet. That is where the collaboration will come in. You must help
+me. We must talk it over. I am in doubt."
+
+He got up and passed his hands nervously through his thick hair.
+
+"My doubt has kept me awake so many nights!" he said, and his voice was
+rather husky and worn.
+
+Henley looked at him almost compassionately.
+
+"How intensely you live in your fancies!"
+
+"My fancies?" said Andrew, with a sudden harsh accent, and darting
+a glance of curious watchfulness upon his friend. "My---- Yes, yes.
+Perhaps I do. Perhaps I try to. Some people have souls that must escape
+from their environment, their miserable life-envelope, or faint. Many
+of us labour and produce merely to create an atmosphere in which we
+ourselves may breathe for awhile and be happy. Damn this London, and
+this lodging, and this buying bread with words! I must create for myself
+an atmosphere. I must be always getting away from what is, even if I go
+lower, lower. Ah! Well--but the _denouement_. Give me your impressions."
+
+Henley meditated for awhile. Then he said; "Let us leave it. Let us get
+to work; and in time, as the story progresses, it will seem inevitable.
+We shall see it in front of us, and we shall not be able to avoid it.
+Let us get to work"--he glanced at his watch and laughed--"or, rather,
+let us get to bed. It is past four. This way madness lies. When we
+collaborate, we will write in the morning. Our book shall be a book of
+the dawn, and not of the darkness, despite its sombre theme."
+
+"No, no; it must be a book of the darkness."
+
+"Of the darkness, then, but written in the dawn. Your tragedy tempered
+by my trust in human nature, and the power that causes things to right
+themselves. Good-night, old boy."
+
+"Good-night."
+
+When Henley had left the room, Tren-chard sat for a moment with his head
+sunk low on his breast and his eyes half closed. Then, with a jerk, he
+gained his feet, went to the door, opened it, and looked forth on the
+deserted landing. He listened, and heard Henley moving to and fro in his
+bedroom. Then he shut the door, took off his smoking-coat, and bared his
+left arm. There was a tiny blue mark on it.
+
+"What will the _denouement_ be?" he whispered to himself, as he felt in
+his waistcoat pocket with a trembling hand.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The book was moving onward by slow degrees and with a great deal of
+discussion.
+
+In those days Henley and Trenchard lived much with sported oaks.
+They were battling for fame. They were doing all they knew. Literary
+gatherings missed them. First nights knew them no more. The grim
+intensity that was always characteristic of Trenchard seemed in some
+degree communicated to Henley. He began to more fully understand what
+the creating for one's self of an atmosphere meant. The story he and his
+friend were fashioning fastened upon him like some strange, determined
+shadow from the realms of real life, gripped him more and more closely,
+held him for long spells of time in a new and desolate world. For the
+book so far was a deepening tragedy, and although, at times, Henley
+strove to resist the paramount influence which the genius of Trenchard
+began to exercise over him, he found himself comparatively impotent,
+unable to shed gleams of popular light upon the darkness of the pages.
+The power of the tale was undoubted. Henley felt that it was a big
+thing that they two were doing; but would it be a popular thing--a
+money-making thing? That was the question. He sometimes wished with all
+his heart they had chosen a different subject to work their combined
+talent upon. The germ of the work seemed only capable of tragic
+treatment, if the book were to be artistic. Their hero was a man of
+strong intellect, of physical beauty, full at first of the joy of life,
+chivalrous, a believer in the innate goodness of human nature. Believing
+in goodness, he believed also ardently in influence. In fact, he was
+a worshipper of influence, and his main passion was to seize upon the
+personalities of others, and impose his own personality upon them. He
+loved to make men and women see with his eyes and hear with his ears,
+adopt his theories as truth, take his judgment for their own. All that
+he thought _was_--to him. He never doubted himself, therefore he could
+not bear that those around him should not think with him, act towards
+men and women as he acted, face life as he faced it. Yet he was too
+subtle ever to be dogmatic. He never shouted in the market-place. He led
+those with whom he came in contact as adroitly as if he had been evil,
+and to the influence of others he was as adamant.
+
+Events brought into his life a woman, complex, subtle too, with a
+naturally noble character and fine understanding, a woman who, like so
+many women, might have been anything, and was far worse than nothing--a
+hopeless, helpless slave, the victim of the morphia habit, which had
+gradually degraded her, driven her through sloughs of immorality,
+wrecked a professional career which at one time had been almost great,
+shattered her constitution, though not all her still curious beauty, and
+ruined her, to all intents and purposes, body and soul. The man and the
+woman met, and in a flash the man saw what she had been, what she might
+have been, what, perhaps, in spite of all, she still was, somewhere,
+somehow. In her horrible degradation, in her dense despair, she
+fascinated him. He could only see the fire bursting out of the swamp. He
+could only feel on his cheek the breath of the spring in the darkness of
+the charnel-house. He knew that she gave to him his great lifework. Her
+monstrous habit he simply could not comprehend. It was altogether as
+fantastic to him as absolute virtue sometimes seems to absolute vice. He
+looked upon it, and felt as little kinship with it as a saint might feel
+with a vampire. To him it was merely a hideous and extraordinary growth,
+which had fastened like a cancer upon a beautiful and wonderful body,
+and which must be cut out. He was profoundly interested.
+
+He loved the woman. Seeing her governed entirely by a vice, he made the
+very common mistake of believing her to have a weak personality, easily
+falling, perhaps for that very reason as easily lifted to her feet. He
+resolved to save her, to devote all his powers, all his subtlety, all
+his intellect, all his strong force of will, to weaning this woman from
+her fatal habit. She was a married woman, long ago left, to kill herself
+if she would, by the husband whose happiness she had wrecked. He took
+her to live with him. For her sake he defied the world, and set himself
+to do angel's work when people believed him at the devil's. He resolved
+to wrap her, to envelop her in his influence, to enclose her in his
+strong personality. Here, at last, was a grand, a noble opportunity
+for the legitimate exercise of his master passion. He was confident of
+victory.
+
+But his faith in himself was misplaced. This woman, whom he thought so
+weak, was yet stronger than he. Although he could not influence her, he
+began to find that she could influence him. At first he struggled with
+her vice, which he could not understand. He thought himself merely
+horrified at it; then he began to lose the horror in wonder at its
+power. Its virility, as it were, fascinated him just a little. A vice
+so overwhelmingly strong seemed to him at length almost glorious, almost
+God-like. There was a sort of humanity about it. Yes, it was like a
+being who lived and who conquered.
+
+The woman loved him, and he tried to win her from it; but her passion
+for it was greater than her passion for him, greater than had been her
+original passion for purity, for health, for success, for homage, for
+all lovely and happiness-making things. Her passion for it was so great
+that it roused the man's curiosity at last; it made him hold his breath,
+and stand in awe, and desire furtively to try just once for himself what
+its dominion was like, to test its power as one may test the power of an
+electric battery. He dared not do this openly, for fear the fact of his
+doing so might drive the woman still farther on the downward path. So in
+secret he tasted the fascinations of her vice, once--and again--and yet
+again. But still he struggled for her while he was ceasing to struggle
+for himself. Still he combated for her the foe who was conquering him.
+Very strange, very terrible was his position in that London house with
+her, isolated from the world. For his friends had dropped him. Even
+those who were not scandalized at his relations with this woman had
+ceased to come near him. They found him blind and deaf to the ordinary
+interests of life. He never went out anywhere, unless occasionally with
+her to some theatre. He never invited anyone to come and see him. At
+first the woman absorbed all his interest, all his powers of love--and
+then at last the woman and her vice, which was becoming his too. By
+degrees he sank lower and lower, but he never told the woman the truth,
+and he still urged her to give up her horrible habit, which now he
+loved. And she laughed in his face, and asked him if a human creature
+who had discovered a new life would be likely to give it up. "A new
+death," he murmured, and then, looking in a mirror near to him, saw his
+lips curved in the thin, pale smile of the hypocrite.
+
+*****
+
+So far the two young men had written. They worked hard, but their
+industry was occasionally interrupted by the unaccountable laziness
+of Andrew, who, after toiling with unremitting fury for some days, and
+scarcely getting up from his desk, would disappear, and perhaps not
+return for several nights. Henley remonstrated with him, but in vain.
+
+"But what do you do, my dear fellow?" he asked. "What becomes of you?"
+
+"I go away to think out what is coming. The environment I seek helps
+me," answered Andrew, with a curious, gleaming smile. "I return full of
+fresh copy."
+
+This was true enough. He generally mysteriously departed when the book
+was beginning to flag, and on his reappearance he always set to work
+with new vigour and confidence.
+
+"It seems to me," Henley said, "that it will be your book after all, not
+mine. It is your plot, and when I think things over I find that every
+detail is yours. You insisted on the house where the man and the woman
+hid themselves being on the Chelsea Embankment. You invented the woman,
+her character, her appearance. You named her Olive Beauchamp."
+
+"Olive Beauchamp," Andrew repeated, with a strange lingering over the
+two words, which he pronounced in a very curious voice that trembled, as
+if with some keen emotion, love or hate. "Yes; I named her as you say."
+
+"Then, as the man in the play remarks, 'Where do I come in?'" Henley
+asked, half laughing, half vexed. "Upon my word, I shall have some
+compunction in putting my name below yours on the title-page when the
+book is published, if it ever is."
+
+Andrew's lips twitched once or twice uneasily. Then he said, "You need
+not have any such compunction. The greatest chapter will probably be
+written by you."
+
+"Which chapter do you mean?"
+
+"That which winds the story up--that which brings the whole thing to its
+legitimate conclusion. You must write the _denouement_."
+
+"I doubt if I could. And then we have not even now decided what it is to
+be."
+
+"We need not bother about that yet. It will come. Fate will decide it
+for us."
+
+"What do you mean, Andrew? How curiously you talk about the book
+sometimes--so precisely as if it were true!"
+
+Trenchard smiled again, struck a match, and lit his pipe.
+
+"It seems true to me--when I am writing it," he answered. "I have been
+writing it these last two days and nights when I have been away, and now
+I can go forward, if you agree to the new development which I suggest."
+
+It was night. He had been absent for some days, and had just returned.
+Henley, meanwhile, had been raging because the book had come to a
+complete standstill. He himself could do nothing at it, since they had
+reached a dead-lock, and had not talked over any new scenes, or mutually
+decided upon the turn events were now to take. He felt rather cross and
+sore.
+
+"_You_ can go forward," he said: "yes, after your holiday. You might at
+least tell me when you are going."
+
+"I never know myself," Andrew said rather sadly.
+
+He was looking very white and worn, and his eyes were heavy.
+
+"But I have thought some fresh material out. My idea is this: The man
+now becomes such a complete slave to the morphia habit that concealment
+of the fact is scarcely possible. And, indeed, he ceases to desire to
+conceal it from the woman. The next scene will be an immensely powerful
+one--that in which he tells her the truth."
+
+"You do not think it would be more natural if she found it out against
+his will? It seems to me that what he had concealed so long he would try
+to hide for ever."
+
+"No," Andrew said emphatically; "that would not be so."
+
+"But----"
+
+"Look here," the other interrupted, with some obvious irritability; "let
+me tell you what I have conceived, and raise any objections afterwards
+if you wish to raise them. He would tell her the truth himself. He
+would almost glory in doing so. That is the nature of the man. We have
+depicted his pride in his own powers, his temptation, his struggle--his
+fall, as it would be called----"
+
+"As it would be called."
+
+"Well, well!--his fall, then. And now comes the moment when his fall is
+complete. He bends the neck finally beneath his tyrant, and then he goes
+to the woman and he tells her the truth."
+
+"But explain matters a little more. Do you mean that he is glad, and
+tells almost with triumph; or that he is appalled, and tells her with
+horror?"
+
+"Ah! That is where the power of the scene lies. He is appalled. He is
+like a man plunged at last into hell without hope of future redemption.
+He tells her the truth with horror."
+
+"And she?"
+
+"It is she who triumphs. Look here: it will be like this."
+
+Andrew leaned forward across the table that stood between their two worn
+armchairs. His thin, feverish-looking hands, with the fingers strongly
+twisted together, rested upon it. His dark eyes glittered with
+excitement.
+
+"It will be like this. It is evening--a dark, dull evening, like the
+day before yesterday, closing in early, throttling the afternoon
+prematurely, as it were. A drizzling rain falls softly, drenching
+everything--the sodden leaves of the trees on the Embankment, the road,
+which is heavy with clinging yellow mud, the stone coping of the wall
+that skirts the river.
+
+"And the river heaves along. Its gray, dirty waves are beaten up by a
+light, chilly wind, and chase the black barges with a puny, fretful,
+sinister fury, falling back from their dark, wet sides with a hiss of
+baffled hatred. Yes, it is dreary weather.
+
+"Do you know, Henley, as I know, the strange, subtle influence of
+certain kinds of weather? There are days on which I could do great deeds
+merely because of the way the sun is shining. There are days, there are
+evenings, when I could commit crimes merely because of the way the
+wind is whispering, the river is sighing, the dingy night is clustering
+around me. There can be an angel in the weather, or there can be a
+devil. On this evening I am describing there is a devil in the night!
+
+"The lights twinkle through the drizzling rain, and they are blurred, as
+bright eyes are blurred, and made dull and ugly, by tears. Two or three
+cabs roll slowly by the houses on the Embankment.. A few people hurry
+past along the slippery, shining pavement. But as the night closes in
+there is little life outside those tall, gaunt houses that are so near
+the river! And in one of those houses the man comes down to the woman to
+tell her the truth.
+
+"There is a devil in the weather that night, as I said, and that devil
+whispers to the man, and tells him that it is now his struggle must end
+finally, and the new era of unresisted yielding to the vice begin. In
+the sinister darkness, in the diminutive, drenching mist of rain, he
+speaks, and the man listens, and bows his head and answers 'yes!' It
+is over. He has fallen finally. He is resolved, with a strange, dull
+obstinacy that gives him a strange, dull pleasure--do you see?--to
+go down to the room below, and tell the woman that she has conquered
+him--that his power of will is a reed which can be crushed--that
+henceforth there shall be two victims instead of one. He goes down."
+
+Andrew paused a moment. His lips were twitching again. He looked
+terribly excited. Henley listened in silence. He had lost all wish to
+interrupt.
+
+"He goes down into the room below where the woman is, with her dark
+hair, and her dead-white face, and her extraordinary eyes--large,
+luminous, sometimes dull and without expression, sometimes dilated, and
+with an unnatural life staring out of them. She is on the sofa near the
+fire. He sits down beside her. His head falls into his hands, and at
+first he is silent. He is thinking how he will tell her. She puts her
+soft, dry hand on his, and she says: 'I am very tired to-night. Do not
+begin your evening sermon. Let me have it to-morrow. How you must love
+me to be so persistent! and how you must love me to be so stupid as to
+think that your power of will can break the power of such a habit as
+mine!'
+
+"Then he draws his hand away from hers, and he lifts his head from his
+hands, and he tells her the truth. She leans back against a cushion
+staring at him in silence, devouring him with her eyes, which have
+become very bright and eager and searching. Presently he stops.
+
+"'Go on,' she says, 'go on. Tell me more. Tell me all you feel. Tell
+me how the habit stole upon you, and came to you again and again, and
+stayed with you. Tell me how you first liked it, and then loved it, and
+how it was something to you, and then much, and then everything. Go on!
+go on!'
+
+"And he catches her excitement. He conceals nothing from her. All the
+hideous, terrible, mental processes he has been through, he details
+to her, at first almost gloating over his own degradation. He even
+exaggerates, as a man exaggerates in telling a story to an eager
+auditor. He is carried away by her strange fury of listening. He lays
+bare his soul; he exposes its wounds; he sears them with red-hot irons
+for her to see. And then at last all is told. He can think of no more
+details. He has even embellished the abominable truth. So he is silent,
+and he looks at her."
+
+"And what does she do?" asked Henley, with a catch in his voice as he
+spoke. Undoubtedly in relating a fictitious narrative Andrew had a quite
+abnormal power of making it appear true and real.
+
+"She looks at him, and then she bursts out laughing. Her eyes shine with
+triumph. She is glad; she is joyous with the joy of a lost soul when it
+sees that other souls are irrevocably lost too; she laughs, and she says
+nothing."
+
+"And the man?"
+
+Andrew's eyes suddenly dilated. He leaned forward and laid his hand on
+Henley's arm.
+
+"Ah, the man! that is my great idea. As she laughs his heart is changed.
+His love for her suddenly dies. Its place is taken by hatred. He
+realizes then, for the first time, while he hears her laugh, what she
+has done to him. He knows that she has ruined him, and that she is proud
+of it--that she is rejoicing in having won him to destruction. He sees
+that his perdition is merely a feather in her cap. He hates her. Oh, how
+he hates her!--hates her!"
+
+The expression on Andrew's face became terrible as he spoke--cruel,
+malignant, almost fiendish. Henley turned cold, and shook off his hand
+abruptly.
+
+"That is horrible!" he said. "I object to that. The book will be one of
+unrelieved gloom."
+
+"The book!" said Andrew.
+
+"Yes. You behave really as if the story were true, as if everything in
+it were ordained--inevitable."
+
+"It seems so to me; it is so. What must be, must be. If you are afraid
+of tragedy, you ought never to have joined me in starting upon such a
+story. Even what has never happened must be made to seem actual to
+be successful. The art of fiction is to imitate truth with absolute
+fidelity, not to travesty it. In such circumstances the man's love would
+be changed to hatred."
+
+"Yes, if the woman's demeanour were such as you have described. But why
+should she be so callous? I do not think that is natural."
+
+"You do not know the woman," began Andrew harshly. Then he stopped
+speaking abruptly, and a violent flush swept over his face.
+
+"I know her as well as you do, my dear fellow," rejoined Henley,
+laughing. "How you manage to live in your dreams! You certainly do
+create an atmosphere for yourself with a vengeance, and for me too. I
+believe you have an abnormal quantity of electricity concealed about you
+somewhere, and sometimes you give me a shock and carry me out of myself.
+If this is collaboration, it is really a farce. From the very first you
+have had things all your own way. You have talked me over to your view
+upon every single occasion; but now I am going to strike. I object to
+the conduct you have devised for Olive. It will alienate all sympathy
+from her; it is the behaviour of a devil."
+
+"It is the behaviour of a woman," said Andrew, with a cold cynicism that
+seemed to cut like a knife.
+
+"How can you tell? How can you judge of women so surely?"
+
+"I study all strange phenomena, women among the rest."
+
+"Have you ever met an Olive Beauchamp, then, in real life?" said Henley.
+
+The question was put more than half in jest; but Trenchard received it
+with a heavy frown.
+
+"Don't let us quarrel about the matter," he said, "I can only tell you
+this; and mind, Jack, I mean it. It is my unalterable resolve. Either
+the story must proceed upon the lines that I have indicated, or I
+cannot go on with it at all. It would be impossible for me to write it
+differently."
+
+"And this is collaboration, is it?" exclaimed the other, trying to force
+a laugh, though even his good-nature could scarcely stand Trenchard's
+trampling demeanour.
+
+"I can't help it. I cannot be inartistic and untrue to Nature even for
+the sake of a friend."
+
+"Thank you. Well, I have no desire to ruin your work, Andrew; but it is
+really useless for this farce to continue. Do what you like, and let us
+make no further pretence of collaborating. I cannot act as a drag upon
+such a wheel as yours. I will not any longer be a dead-weight upon you.
+Our temperaments evidently unfit us to be fellow-workers; and I feel
+that your strength and power are so undeniable that you may, perhaps,
+be able to carry this weary tragedy through, and by sheer force make it
+palatable to the public. I will protest no more; I will only cease any
+longer to pretend to have a finger in this literary pie."
+
+Andrew's morose expression passed away like a cloud. He got up and laid
+his hand upon Henley's shoulder.
+
+"You make me feel what a beast I am," he said. "But I can't help it. I
+was made so. Do forgive me, Jack. I have taken the bit between my teeth,
+I know. But--this story seems to me no fiction; it is a piece of life,
+as real to me as those stars I see through the window-pane are real to
+me--as my own emotions are real to me. Jack, this book has seized me.
+Believe me, if it is written as I wish, it will make an impression upon
+the world that will be great. The mind of the world is given to me like
+a sheet of blank paper. I will write upon it with my heart's blood.
+But"--and here his manner became strangely impressive, and his sombre,
+heavy eyes gazed deeply into the eyes of his friend--"remember this!
+You will finish this book. I feel that; I know it. I cannot tell you
+why. But so it is ordained. Let me write as far as I can, Jack, and let
+me write as I will. But do not let us quarrel. The book is ours, not
+mine. And--don't--don't take away your friendship from me."
+
+The last words were said with an outburst of emotion that was almost
+feminine in intensity. Henley felt deeply moved, for, as a rule,
+Andrew's manner was not specially affectionate, or even agreeable.
+
+"It is all right, old fellow," he said, in the embarrassed English
+manner which often covers so much that might with advantage be
+occasionally revealed. "Go on in your own way. I believe you are a
+genius, and I am only trying to clip the wings that may carry you
+through the skies. Go on in your own way, and consult me only when you
+feel inclined."
+
+Andrew took his hand and pressed it in silence.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It was some three weeks after this that one afternoon Trenchard laid
+down his pen at the conclusion of a chapter, and, getting up, thrust his
+hands into his pockets and walked to the window.
+
+The look-out was rather dreary. A gray sky leaned over the great,
+barrack-like church that gives an ecclesiastical flavour to
+Smith's Square. A few dirty sparrows fluttered above the gray
+pavement--feverish, unresting birds, Trenchard named them silently,
+as he watched their meaningless activity, their jerky, ostentatious
+deportment, with lacklustre, yet excited, eyes. How gray everything
+looked, tame, colourless, indifferent! The light was beginning to
+fade stealthily out of things. The gray church was gradually becoming
+shadowy. The flying forms of the hurrying sparrows disappeared in the
+weary abysses of the air and sky. The sitting-room in Smith's Square
+was nearly dark now. Henley had gone out to a _matinee_ at one of the
+theatres, so Trenchard was alone. He struck a match presently, lit a
+candle, carried it over to his writing-table, and began to examine the
+littered sheets he had just been writing. The book was nearing its end.
+The tragedy was narrowing to a point. Trenchard read the last paragraph
+which he had written:
+
+"He hardly knew that he lived, except during those many hours when,
+plunged in dreams, he allowed, nay, forced, life to leave him for
+awhile. He had sunk to depths below even those which Olive had reached.
+And the thought that she was ever so little above him haunted him like a
+spectre impelling him to some mysterious deed. When he was not dreaming,
+he was dwelling upon this idea which had taken his soul captive. It
+seemed to be shaping itself towards an act. Thought was the ante-room
+through which he passed to the hall where Fate was sitting, ready to
+give him audience. He traversed this ante-room, which seemed lined with
+fantastic and terrible pictures, at first with lagging footfalls. But at
+length he laid his hand upon the door that divided him from Fate."
+
+*****
+
+And when he had read the final words he gathered the loose sheets
+together with his long, thin fingers, and placed them one on the top
+of the other in a neat pile. He put them into a drawer which contained
+other unfinished manuscripts, shut the drawer, locked it, and carried
+the key to Henley's room. There he scribbled some words on a bit of
+notepaper, wrapped the key in it, and inclosed it in an envelope on
+which he wrote Henley's name. Then he put on his overcoat, descended the
+narrow stairs, and opened the front-door. The landlady heard him, and
+screamed from the basement to know if he would be in to dinner.
+
+"I shall not be in at all to-night," he answered, in a hard, dry voice
+that travelled along the dingy passage with a penetrating distinctness.
+The landlady murmured to the slatternly maidservant an ejaculatory
+diatribe on the dissipatedness of young literary gentlemen as the door
+banged. Trenchard disappeared in the gathering darkness, and soon left
+Smith's Square behind him.
+
+It chanced that day that, in the theatre, Henley encountered some
+ladies who carried him home to tea after the performance. They lived in
+Chelsea, and in returning to Smith's Square afterwards Henley took his
+way along the Chelsea Embankment. He always walked near to the dingy
+river when he could. The contrast of its life to the town's life through
+which it flowed had a perpetual fascination for him. In the early
+evening, too, the river presents many Dore effects. It is dim,
+mysterious, sometimes meretricious, with its streaks of light close to
+the dense shadows that lie under the bridges, its wailful, small waves
+licking the wharves, and bearing up the inky barges that look like the
+ferry-boat of the Styx. Henley loved to feel vivaciously despairing, and
+he hugged himself in the belief that the Thames at nightfall tinged his
+soul with a luxurious melancholy, the capacity for which was not far
+from rendering him a poet. So he took his way by the river. As he neared
+Cheyne Row, he saw in front of him the figure of a man leaning over
+the low stone wall, with his face buried in his hands. On hearing his
+approaching footsteps the man lifted himself up, turned round, and
+preceded him along the pavement with a sort of listless stride which
+seemed to Henley strangely familiar. He hastened his steps, and on
+coming closer recognised that the man was Trenchard; but, just as he
+was about to hail him, Trenchard crossed the road to one of the houses
+opposite, inserted a key in the door, and disappeared within, shutting
+the door behind him.
+
+Henley paused a moment opposite to the house. It was of a dull red
+colour, and had a few creepers straggling helplessly about it, looking
+like a torn veil that can only partially conceal a dull, heavy face.
+
+"Andrew seems at home here," he thought, gazing up at the blind, tall
+windows, which showed no ray of light. "I wonder----"
+
+And then, still gazing at the windows, he recalled the description of
+the house where Olive Beauchamp lived in their book.
+
+"He took it from this," Henley said to himself. Yes, that was obvious.
+Trenchard had described the prison-house of despair, where the two
+victims of a strange, desolating habit shut themselves up to sink, with
+a curious minuteness. He had even devoted a paragraph to the tall iron
+gate, whose round handle he had written of as "bald, and exposed to the
+wind from the river, the paint having long since been worn off it." In
+the twilight Henley bent down and examined the handle of the gate. The
+paint seemed to have been scraped from it.
+
+"How curiously real that book has become to me!" he muttered. "I could
+almost believe that if I knocked upon that door, and was let in, I
+should find Olive Beauchamp stretched on a couch in the room that lies
+beyond those gaunt, shuttered windows."
+
+He gave a last glance at the house, and as he did so he fancied that
+he heard a slight cry come from it to him. He listened attentively and
+heard nothing more. Then he walked away toward home.
+
+When he reached his room, he found upon his table the envelope which
+Trenchard had directed to him. He opened it, and unwrapped the key from
+the inclosed sheet of note-paper, on which were written these words:
+
+     "Dear Jack,
+
+     "I am off again. And this time I can't say when I shall be
+     back. In any case, I have completed my part of the book, and
+     leave the finishing of it in your hands. This is the key of
+     the drawer in which I have locked the manuscript. You have
+     not seen most of the last volume. Read it, and judge for
+     yourself whether the _denouement_ can be anything but
+     utterly tragic. I will not outline to you what I have
+     thought of for it. If you have any difficulty about the
+     _finale_, I shall be able to help you with it even if you do
+     not see me again for some time. By the way, what nonsense
+     that saying is, 'Dead men tell no tales!' Half the best
+     tales in the world are told, or at least completed, by dead
+     men.
+
+    "Yours ever,
+
+     "A. T."
+
+Henley laid this note down and turned cold all over. It was the
+concluding sentence which had struck a chill through his heart. He took
+the key in his hand, went down to Trenchard's room, unlocked the drawer
+in his writing-table, and took out the manuscript. What did Andrew mean
+by that sinister sentence? A tale completed by a dead man! Henley sat
+down by the fire with the manuscript in his hands and began to read. He
+was called away to dinner; but immediately afterward he returned to
+his task, and till late into the night his glance travelled down the
+closely-written sheets one after the other, until the light from the
+candles grew blurred and indistinct, and his eyes ached. But still he
+read on. The power and gloom of Andrew's narrative held him in a vice,
+and then he was searching for a clue in the labyrinth of words. At last
+he came to the final paragraph, and then to the final sentence:
+
+"But at length he laid his hand upon the door that divided him from
+Fate."
+
+Henley put the sheet down carefully upon the table. It was three o'clock
+in the morning, and the room seemed full of a strange, breathless cold,
+the peculiar chilliness that precedes the dawn. The fire was burning
+brightly enough, yet the warmth it emitted scarcely seemed to combat the
+frosty air that penetrated from without, and Henley shivered as he
+rose from his seat. His brows were drawn together, and he was thinking
+deeply. A light seemed slowly struggling into his soul. That last
+sentence of Tren-chard's connected itself with what he had seen in the
+afternoon on the Chelsea Embankment. "He laid his hand upon the door
+that divided him from Fate."
+
+A strange idea dawned in Henley's mind, an idea which made many things
+clear to him. Yet he put it away, and sat down again to read the
+unfinished book once more. Andrew had carried on the story of the man's
+growing hatred of the woman whom he had tried to rescue, until it had
+developed into a deadly fury, threatening immediate action. Then he had
+left the _denouement_ in Henley's hands. He had left it ostensibly
+in Henley's hands, but the latter, reading the manuscript again with
+intense care, saw that matters had been so contrived that the knot of
+the novel could only be cut by murder. As it had been written, the man
+must inevitably murder the woman. And Andrew? All through the night
+Henley thought of him as he had last seen him, opening the door of the
+red house with the tattered creepers climbing over it.
+
+At last, when it was dawn, he went up to bed tired out, after leaving a
+written direction to the servant not to call him in the morning. When he
+awoke and looked at his watch it was past two o'clock in the afternoon.
+He sprang out of bed, dressed, and after a hasty meal, half breakfast,
+half lunch, set out towards Chelsea. The day was bright and cold. The
+sun shone on the river and sparkled on the windows of the houses on the
+Embankment. Many people were about, and they looked cheerful. The weight
+of depression that had settled upon Henley was lifted. He thought of the
+strange, yet illuminating, idea that had occurred to him in the night,
+and now, in broad daylight, it seemed clothed in absurdity. He laughed
+at it. Yet he quickened his steps toward the red house with the
+tarnished iron gate and the tattered creepers.
+
+But long before he reached it he met a boy sauntering along the
+thoroughfare and shouting newspapers. He sang out unflinchingly in the
+gay sunshine, "Murder! Murder!" and between his shouts he whistled
+a music-hall song gaily in snatches. Henley stopped him and bought a
+paper. He opened the paper in the wind, which seemed striving to prevent
+him, and cast his eyes over the middle pages. Then suddenly he dropped
+it to the ground with a white face, and falteringly signed to a cabman.
+The _denouement_ was written. The previous night, in a house on the
+Chelsea Embankment, a woman had been done to death, and the murderer had
+crept out and thrown himself into the gray, hurrying river.
+
+The woman's name was Olive Beauchamp.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Collaborators, by Robert S. Hichens
+
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