The Collaborators | Page 2

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 dénouement?"
"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 dénouement. Give me your impressions."
Henley meditated for awhile. Then he said;