The Collaborators | Page 5

"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 dénouement."
"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