The Collaborators | Page 2

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
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,