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The Collaborators

By ALBERT KINROSS

Author of "Joan of Garioch," etc

Illustrations by Dalton Stevens

T was after the publication of my first book, a historical romance dealing with the life and times of Charles XII of Sweden, that I received a letter in a strange and none too legible hand, addressed to me in the care of Messrs. Nicoll & Prout, the firm whose imprint stood upon my title-page. Such letters, coming from grateful readers, were scarce in those days. I opened it. I flushed with pleasure as I deciphered my unknown friend's warm praises and flattering testimony to the success wherewith I had presented a difficult personality and a barbaric period. He was in a position to judge of both, he said, and his own studies and a recent spell of travel had led him across much of the ground so vividly depicted.

This letter was signed "S. Bellamy," and infolded with it was an ordinary card such as a caller might send in by a servant. "Monsignor Canon Bellamy," it read, "17 Fairview Crescent, Claverton." Claverton I knew by repute as a fashionable watering-place in the southwest of England.

To the letter was added a postscript:

Call on me one afternoon. I am an old man, and you, I judge, are a young one. I am often in London, and you will find me at Wexford House in St. James's Place. I should be delighted to make the acquaintance of a writer who has given me so much pleasure, and hear something of his plans for the future; and, moreover, I have a proposal to make which I think will interest you. I shall be in town all next week.

Perhaps you can let me know on what afternoon I may expect you.

He had touched my vanity, he had roused my sense of adventure. Picture me as I was, a poor young man of our sober middle class who had starved himself in order to write a book. It was, in its way, a successful book. A second impression had been called for, a pirate had seized upon it in America, and my net profit was close on sixty pounds. For a beginner I had not done so badly.

I wander from the point. Let us get back to it. Here was a high personage who desired my acquaintance, a notable of the Roman Catholic Church, with quarters in St. James's Place. I did not know Wexford House, but I knew St. James's Place. Prying round London, as was my constant habit in those days, I had acquired a familiarity with the exteriors of many famous houses, with the lay and atmosphere of most of the great squares and of all the royal palaces. I wondered over that hidden life, I speculated and wove romances; and when a gentlewoman issued from one of those noble mansions, affording me a glimpse of the hall and powdered servants, I experienced a thrill which she, stepping into her carriage or limousine, might have envied. I was a prowler and a nobody, with a high, romantic passion for the unknown, and, living in London as I did on the hazardous earnings of a bookish hack, was I not altogether surrounded by the mysterious and inaccessible? It is a city the wealth and power and splendor of which would leave such a one as I was then gasping and ever

open-mouthed. Of its squalor, rascality, and evil I saw much and yet saw nothing. Youth has that knack, and middle age mourns the loss of it.

I return once more to Wexford House in St. James's Place. It must be, I fancied, one of the five large mansions which make an inclosure of the park end of that aristocratic back-water. In a public house I consulted the London Directory. Wexford House, I soon discovered, lay between the residences of the Duke of Mells and the Earl of Templehaven, the latter of which has no special name, but only a number. I found that number in St. James's Place, and so to Wexford House.

In the directory the present tenant was inscribed as plain Hugh Janvier. The name meant nothing to me then. He must be a rich man, and possibly the friend or patron of monsignor, if one so highly placed could suffer such protection. Hugh Janvier, I decided, was his friend. I had no means of ascertaining the actual facts, for I was too poor and too obscure to belong to clubs, and I had no acquaintance among the well informed who conduct our newspapers. I was a solitary student, with a turn for the historical romance, a precarious income, and an attic in the dingier part of Bloomsbury. My library was the one at the British Museum. There I browsed, there I raised my facts and fancies, there I wandered off into foreign lands, and made those visionary friendships with the illustrious dead to which, all said and done, I owe my present enviable position.

Before replying to my unknown correspondent I took the liberty of marking down Wexford House. So much has already been hinted. Like a pointer, or, better still, a detective, I gathered such information as its exterior could offer, and even looked in at the lower windows. These were separated by an iron railing from the street, and at that distance afforded no serious clue to the pomp and magnificence of Mr. Janvier. The house itself was spacious and plain-fronted, designed, no doubt, by one of those Georgian architects who aped the classic and ad

mired the smooth, melliflucus artifices of Mr. Pope. A neglected house, it seemed, without much life in it. None at all, if I except a tabby-cat that brooded on the door-step.

So much for the front of Wexford House. My next course was to take it in the rear. I found the narrow outlet which connects St. James's Place with St. James's Park, and discovered that the mansion possessed a garden of its own and rose to five sheer stories. A score of windows overlooked the park, and the little garden had its gate of entry. For London this was luxury indeed. I thought of my own penurious quarters and my hemmed-in view. Roofs and chimney-stacks were all I saw with the bodily eye, and at night I often rose to deal with cats. Here one could look out and observe the courtships of true lovers. A couple sat on a bench just now. He was carnest and silk-hatted; she was tender, and her gray shoes matched her stockings. Oh, heart, dear heart of me, how lonely and friendless and unloved I felt in this great city! I went away from there and mounted to my attic. I wrote in haste and agitation:

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hour struck, at last it struck, and I was free to ring the bell of Wexford House.

I stood in the porch of that great mansion, expecting a lobby full of footmen, a hall of dazzling splendor, and, beyond these, Monsignor Canon Bellamy, with cassock and skull-cap, seated in a deep chair before the blazing fire that cunning hands had laid in the big library. It was an interior by Fortuny. Actually, the face of Wexford House was dark and blind, with only a single muffled light burning below-stairs, and presenting that aspect of desertion which great houses show in the dead season.

The door swung back, and I discerned a hall and only a single man-servant. Both were dimmed by the intruding fog. Still, it was a fine hall, and more brilliantly occupied and illuminated

"Mr. Loughborough?" The man-servant had recalled my wits from their wool-gathering; and without waiting for a reply, "This way," he added, examining me with all the odious insolence of his class. He felt and made me feel my shabbiness.

I followed him, and scorned him in return. He was a big fellow, and would have made two of me. He led me up a wide and enshrouded staircase,- that whole house seemed deathly and enshrouded, we passed into a corridor, then up more stairs, and so to a small study. Within this cozy chamber sat monsignor.

I had expected a stout, benignant priest, shrewd, able, and pink-jowled with good living, or else a lean and ardent-eyed ascetic. Monsignor was neither. He possessed a watery quality which I have since learned to associate with the more scholarly among our aristocracy. A wisp of a man, thin, bald, ancient, with a lamentable nose and vague, blue eyes, he stood up to receive me. His courtesy contrasted well with that of the disdainful man-servant.

ease.

He did his best to put me at my Breeding is breeding, and no matter how lamentable the personage, it is the last thing to decay.

He offered me a chair, and a large cigar similar to the one he himself was smoking.

The fire was a gas-stove; we sat together and looked at it. His costume was something like that of an ordinary parson, and included legs and trousers. His head, I have before remarked, was bare and bald.

"It was good of you to come," he began; "I feared you might not care to face this dreadful weather."

"Not at all, not at all," said I, puffing away at the large cigar.

"It occurred to me after I had sent my letter that possibly you did not live in London. A lucky chance," he added.

Naturally, I agreed with him.

"Mr. Janvier will be in presently," he pursued. "This is his house; but of course you know it."

Again I assented, omitting, however, to state the precise circumstances in which I had acquired my information.

"Do you know why I wrote to you?" he inquired, after these preliminaries. "You liked my book," I began.

"Certainly, I liked your book; but I want you to write another one, I want you to collaborate."

"Collaborate?" It was the first I had heard of it.

"The last ten years," he pursued, "I have devoted myself to a task which the historian has neglected. There exists no life, there has been no memoir, of the greatest adventurer who ever lived." I pricked up my ears at this.

"The greatest adventurer who ever lived," he repeated, and then added: “I am no hand at a novel, but with your magic pen-the pen of a wizard, if I may say so we might do something considerable. I have all the materials; the research work is done; it only remains for you to write the story."

"What story?" I interrupted.

"We are coming to that," said he, rising from his chair and crossing over to a side-table.

He returned with a bulky pile of manuscript, typed and all ready for the publishers, which he dumped down before me. It looked as though it had traveled overmuch, and had been rudely treated in the

process.

"This is my 'Life of Perkin Warbeck,'" he resumed. "The publishers to whom I have submitted it decline it. They have used it badly, have they not? One has even gone so far as to spill coffee upon chapter eleven. They say-their letters, at least, are very courteous-they say that as an historical work my book stands no chance of success; that, despite its unique. interest, there exists no public demand for such a biography. Their letters are virtually of one mind, and maybe the public does adopt this attitude. I have, however, spent ten years of my life and as many hundred pounds on the bare collection of my materials. Is all this labor and expenditure to run to waste?"

He eyed me, and I quailed before the sudden ferocity wherewith he put the question. The matter of his frustrate toil had moved him, and he was now as nearly plebeian and human as myself. More so, perhaps; for when your true aristocrat once begins, he runs to an extremity.

"I read your novel," he continued, rising and striding to and fro before me. "If this young man can do so much with Charles XII,' I said, 'what would he not make of Perkin Warbeck?' Reshaped into a historical romance,- for that is what the fickle public asks of us,-my book would make the lasting fame of any writer. There is a fortune in this scheme, and there is fame as well. As to the money, I ask no more than the bare return of what I have expended; the fame we will share alike. Its glory must cover both our names and hand them down."

I was moved. Eloquence, sincerity, had then more weight with me; nor had I counted on anything so savage and determined from this watery old gentleman.

"I am afraid that I know next to nothing of Perkin Warbeck," I replied, as soon as ever he gave me an opportunity. "Apart from Dr. Gairdner and what we learned at school—”

"He was the greatest adventurer who ever lived," monsignor had interrupted me, and then and there, in so far as he had fathomed it, he told me the story of Perkin's life from beginning to end.

We started at Tournai, and finished on
the scaffold, and this story, no less than
the manner of its telling, wearied me as
nothing has ever wearied me before or
since. Though monsignor might have
spent ten years and as many hundred
pounds on research work and the collect-
ing of materials, it seemed to me that
there were no materials to collect. He
had only a bare and unconvincing outline,
plentifully provided with gaps, with guess-
work. The motive force and the psychol-
ogy alike were incomplete; he had no
clear, inevitable picture of his hero, and
no more have I. To this day I fail to
see him, despite all that was to follow,
and the ridiculous chain of accident which

links my name and fame with this
"feigned boy."

Monsignor had set himself down again
and told this story. He told it as a suc-
cession of craven episodes, and it was
never explained why one episode rose out
of the other. So do schoolmasters inflict
their lessons on the defenseless young. I
had looked for more sense in a monsignor,
a more genuine culture in Wexford
House, St. James's Place. I was at that
time young enough to be honest, so I told
him exactly what I felt about it.

"This Perkin Warbeck," I said, "as you describe him, and as no doubt he is depicted by your leaky chroniclers, is nothing more than a driveling, base-born coward, as passive as a Hindu, yet without the Hindu's deep philosophy. His adventures seem to be forced on him; they arise from no inner need or impulse. When they become at all dangerous, he runs away, and leaves his followers in the lurch; when at last he is caught, he is as abject as a worm. He is supposed to be a pretender to the throne of England, and to win that throne he tries on five separate occasions, with more or less success, to raise the country against Henry VII. In reality, or, rather, as you have described him to me, he is ever the tool of greater men, the weakling, the cat's-paw, ready to their hand, the victim of their policy or their ambitions. He is entirely negative, and even his one romance was

with a woman who took and buried four husbands! How can one make a hero of an adventurer who never struck or received a blow, a heroine of a lady so impartial? His adventures leave me cold. What could I do with him? He became an impostor because he was bullied into it, and finding here an easy means of escaping honest work, he stuck to the job, and courts and princes used him. He is ever a pawn, and you cannot build a historical romance about a pawn. Give me a king or queen, a knight or bishop! I want life, blood, the joy and fire of passion, the surge of great events; I want the clash of weapons, a dazzling, fated, or romantic fig

ure-"

What else I might have said to that poor man I do not know, for at this particular juncture he leaped up from his

seat.

"But I have spent ten years over it!" he cried in desperation. "And Perkin Warbeck was the greatest adventurer— ah, here is Mr. Janvier."

The reader will guess the cause of this diversion: we had been interrupted by no less a personage than the lord and master of Wexford House himself.

He had come in breezily, and was still wearing his hunting-dress-pink coat, white breeches, and topped boots. Yet it was his face which most impressed me at that moment. Swarthy and brigandlike, clean-shaved, and with a jaw of steel, he looked as though here, indeed, was the arch-adventurer so coveted by monsignor.

"This is the Mr. Loughborough of whom I told you," said that venerable biographer.

"Mr. Loughborough-pleased to meet you, sir," remarked the new-comer. I judged by his accent and this cordial turn that he was an American; and, as the event proved, I was right.

He was not at all concerned with Perkin Warbeck.

"There was no fog in the country," he announced. "Had a great run. Met at Detling Forstal, found two foxes and killed one; other one got away. All over by three. Motored back, and caught the

fog outside Hayes. Ever go fox-hunting, Mr. Loughborough ?"

"I'm afraid not," was my reply. His dark gaze rested for a moment on my face, then passed into a smile.

"Neither does our friend here," he said. Then, looking me over more intently still, he added: "You and monsignor are going to collaborate. It will be the opportunity of a lifetime."

"But there is nothing in the story that I could seize on," I began.

"If monsignor says there is, there is." He laughed.

Again I protested.

"Of course-of course you will. What are your terms? I see we must make terms."

I looked from one to the other.

"I have already spent a thousand pounds in travel and the collection of materials," chimed in monsignor.

"Leave Mr. Loughborough to me," interposed our host; and, taking me by the shoulder, added, "I am monsignor's man of business. Monsignor is a child when it comes to business. Rewritten as a historical novel, he feels that his 'Life of Perkin Warbeck' would be the novel of the year. He tells me that he is unable to write a novel, but that, helped by your brilliant pen

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"Really," I interrupted, "I am afraid that monsignor is mistaken. Warbeck, as he has been explained to me, is one of those shadowy figures of whom one knows next to nothing, and apart from a few curious facts that have been rescued, I fear one cares very little about him."

"But we are not going to disappoint monsignor. Bettina and I are very fond of him."

"Well, why don't you collaborate And there are other writers--"

"But he wants you-particularly you. Come, now, is it a question of money?" I rose, and recovered my hat and over

coat.

"It is a question of conscience," I thundered, sick and tired of the pair of them. "It is a question of my artistic honesty, of everything that I hold sacred. I take no

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