Chalk Face

A weakness we have long shared, and nurtured together: our hankering after good mystery stories. We have opened many a volume that promised luridly--and failed to keep its promise. And whenever we did find a passable tale, our best pleasure in it was to pass it on to the other. In these exchanges, I have learned that you are more critical than I: so that as ever, in bringing you this book, I do so timidly. If it please you, I shall not need to worry about its other readers.

I can foretell certain of your observations. “Chalk Face” may seem to you at least as much a Parable as a mystery story. But what indeed is the difference between them? What more lurid than the depths of desire, what more mysterious than the hinterlands of conscience? And what event is so great a mystery as life itself? I believe that every tale should be a mystery tale. I believe that the only stories that are not mystery stories are the shallow stories.... Howsoever, if you find in this book elements of moral and of wonder usually absent from tales of crime, these are ancestral traits which I have straight from you. So, in the impulse making me write my story as in the consequence, you have your share--and you must be indulgent.

W. F.

Seville, February, 1924.

CONTENTS

Part One The Man With the White Head

Part Two The Other Room

Part Three The Challenge

“THEN THE LORD ANSWERED JOB OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND....”

CHALK FACE

_The man who writes the story of his life begins by trying to justify his impulse. But justification masks the true desire; and the sincerest confessions often start with falsehood. I could invent a reason for these pages, easily and plausibly enough. I could say, being a man of science and having failed in my elected sphere, that with my story I shall make amends: give to the world a document whose revelation may mean far more to it than any alienist’s career. This statement would perhaps be truth. My tale will add to that source of knowledge beyond the axioms of rational science from which to-morrow the true science of man may spring. But this statement would not be the truth: it would not express the extent nor the inwardness of my impulse in writing. For I am moved by a will far warmer than any altruism. I write, first of all, for myself._

_In setting down a record of my terrible adventure, I hope to escape (for brief and precious hours) from this eternal Twilight. I shall dwell once more in the innocent world of men: in the world where the sun is luminous because the night is black, where life seems good because death seems real. Let me not dwell upon the nature of this Twilight. It is neither darkness nor brightness, neither warmth nor cold. It is penetrant and it is hungry, and it devours the flesh of man that is made of sunnier senses. You who read do not know the blessed marriage of your world. You do not know that sun is sweet to you, because you are sun: that your five senses catching to your mind the rounded beauty of nature and of love bring but fond reflections ... stars, fair women, mountains ... of yourself._

_There is a Truth in which the sun burns up as swiftly as your flesh. All is gone here; and in this thundering silence the march of man that to you seems so bloody, to me has the cadence of a quiet song. Man is born into his mother’s arms, and belief cradles him. That breast and that milk are real, for they are part of himself. The day is real and the night, work and reward are real, love is real: pain is real because the need of victory is real. What blessedness! Man is complete in his flesh because no form, no thought comes to his mind that is not portion of his flesh. He loves his flesh in the sun and calls it God: he loves his flesh in a woman and calls it Love. He is all simple and whole: only his words, like in a child’s game, break his unitary world. But where I am, the flesh is not gone: it has become a fragment of a truth vastly beyond it. This is agony, and from this I seek respite._