Portrait of a Man with Red Hair

It is appropriate, in a way, that I should give you this book when so much of it was written under your roof. It is a romance, and this has not been, during the last twenty years, a favourable time for romances. But I like to give it to you because you know how it was written, in a very happy summer after a long and arduous lecture tour during which, more than ever before, I learned to love your country.

I wrote it as a rest and a refreshment, and I will tell you frankly that I have enjoyed writing it very much. But I do not know whether, in these stern days, stories are intended to be enjoyed either by the writer of them or the reader.

I have noticed sometimes that people speak rather scornfully of a story as "readable." But if it be not first of all "readable" what afterwards can it be? Surely dead before it is born.

I hope then, and I believe, that this tale is "readable" at least. I know no more than that what it is--fancy, story allegory, what you will. I might invoke the great names of Hoffmann and Hawthorne for its Godfathers. I might recall a story much beloved by me, Sintram and His Companions, did I not, most justly, fear the comparison!

But the word allegory is, in these days, a dangerous one, and some one will soon be showing me that we have, each one of us, his Sea-Fog, his White Tower, and that it is the fault of his own weakness if he does not fling out of the window his Red-Haired man.

No, no, God forbid. This is a tale and nothing but a tale, and all I ask is that once beginning it you will find it hard to lay down unfinished--

and that you will think of me always as

Your affectionate friend

HUGH.

. . . Within these few restrictions, I think, every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he then keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprise the reader the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him.

As a genius of the highest rank observes in his fifth chapter of the Bathos, "The great art of all poetry is to mix truth with fiction, in order to join the credible with the surprising."

For though every good author will confine himself within the bounds of probability, it is by no means necessary that his characters or his incidents should be trite, common, or vulgar; such as happen in every street, or in every house, or which may be met with in the home articles of a newspaper. Nor must he be inhibited from showing many persons and things which may possibly never have fallen within the knowledge of great part of his readers.

HENRY FIELDING.

CONTENTS

PART I

The Sea Like Bronze

PART II

The Dance Round the Town

PART III

Sea-fog

PART IV

The Tower

PART I: THE SEA LIKE BRONZE. . . .

I

You're my friend: I was the man the Duke spoke to: I helped the Duchess to cast off his yoke too: So here's the tale from beginning to end, My friend!

* * *

Ours is a great wild country; If you climb to our castle's top, I don't see where your eye can stop; For when you've passed the cornfield country, Where vineyards leave off, flocks are packed, And sheep-range leads to cattle-tract, And cattle-tract to open-chase, And open-chase to the very base Of the mountain where, at a funeral pace, Round about, solemn and slow, One by one, row after row, Up and up the pine trees go, Go, like black priests up, and so Down the other side again To another greater, wilder country. . . . 'To another greater, wilder country . . . 'To another greater . . .'

The soul of Charles Percy Harkness slipped, like a neat white pocket-handkerchief, out through the carriage window into the silver-blue air, hung there changing into a tiny white fleck against the immensity, struggling for escape above the purple-pointed trees of the dark wood, then, realising that escape was not yet, fluttered back into the carriage again, was caught by Charles Percy, neatly folded up, and put away.