A Set of Six | Page 4

may be mistrusting my imagination are
referred to that printed document, Vol. II, I forget the page, but it is
somewhere not far from the end. Another document connected with this
story is a letter of a biting and ironic kind from a friend then in Burma,
passing certain strictures upon "the gentleman with the gun on his
back" which I do not intend to make accessible to the public. Yet the
gun episode did really happen, or at least I am bound to believe it
because I remember it, described in an ex- tremely matter-of-fact tone,
in some book I read in my boyhood; and I am not going to discard the
beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth.
The Brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like Il Conde,
associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on
warm human lips. I will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship
but the first I heard of her homicidal habits was from the late Captain
Blake, commanding a London ship in which I served in 1884 as Second
Officer. Captain Blake was, of all my commanders, the one I remember
with the greatest affection. I have sketched in his personality, without
however mentioning his name, in the first paper of The Mirror of the
Sea. In his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute
and it is perhaps for that reason that I have put the story into the mouth
of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. The existence
of the brute was a fact. The end of the brute as related in the story is
also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another
ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which
certainly deserved a better fate. I have unscrupulously adapted it to the
needs of my story thinking that I had there something in the nature of
poetical justice. I hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon
the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales.
Of The Informer and An Anarchist I will say next to nothing. The
pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth
disentangling at this dis- tance of time. I found them and here they are.
The discriminating reader will guess that I have found them within my
mind; but how they or their elements came in there I have forgotten for

the most part; and for the rest I really don't see why I should give
myself away more than I have done already.
It remains for me only now to mention The Duel, the longest story in
the book. That story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a
small illustrated volume, under the title, "The Point of Honour." That
was many years ago. It has been since reinstated in its proper place,
which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent
editions of my work. Its pedigree is extremely simple. It springs from a
ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the South of
France. That paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending
between two well-known Parisian personalities, referred for some
reason or other to the "well-known fact" of two officers in Napoleon's
Grand Army having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars
and on some futile pretext. The pretext was never disclosed. I had
therefore to invent it; and I think that, given the character of the two
offi- cers which I had to invent, too, I have made it suffi- ciently
convincing by the mere force of its absurdity. The truth is that in my
mind the story is nothing but a serious and even earnest attempt at a bit
of historical fiction. I had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great
Napoleonic legend. I had a genuine feeling that I would find myself at
home in it, and The Duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader
prefers, of that presumption. Personally I have no qualms of con-
science about this piece of work. The story might have been better told
of course. All one's work might have been better done; but this is the
sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't
mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision,
an evanescent reverie. How many of those visions have I seen vanish in
my time! This one, however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to
my courage or a proof of my rashness. What I care to re- member best
is the testimony