I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Claude Houghton

Author:Claude Houghton [Houghton, Claude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2015-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

CHAPTER VIII

Three months went by in a whirl of activity. Three months packed with experiences so removed from any I had known, that my old life soon became as vague as the memory of a memory.­ Once, I had known only loneliness; now, I rarely possessed an hour’s solitude.

It is no longer possible to record individual events as and when they occurred, and if it were possible the history of those three months would still be in­complete. I can only set down what that period meant to me, the life I lived, and the discoveries I made.

In an early chapter of this book I tried to explain that, allowing for obvious differences, I was some­what in the position of a novelist whose characters suddenly became living human beings, independent of his will, who went their ways irrespective of any limitations imposed by an arbitrary plot. I added that the novelist thereupon became simply an ad­ditional character in a series of scenes and situations not of his contriving. A slight extension of that comparison will illuminate my present difficulty.

A novelist is aware of each thought and act of every one of his puppets. No two of them can meet unless he sanctions the tryst and is present at it. He has difficulties enough, I have no doubt, but at any rate his characters cannot go behind his back. They cannot establish relations of which he is not fully cognizant.

I have no such authority. During the three months which followed my visit to Bruton Street, Pauline, Fran­cesca, Middleton, and Rivers became intimate. Naturally they met frequently when I was not pres­ent and I learnt just so much of developments between them as each chose to tell me.

During the period covered by the first part of this book, I was in a strategical position in that I could see the moves of my “characters.” I was an onlooker, if not a creator. In this second part, I am chiefly a detective, and one concerned with several problems, for Scrivener’s friends not only shed little light on the mystery surrounding him, but were themselves mysterious. But the whole point, at this stage, is that it did not matter how many problems I had to solve, for the adequate reason that I had no time in which to think. I now had four friends in London and I soon possessed a host of acquaintances.

Before explaining, however, the manner of my life during those three months, it is necessary to say this: to present an adequate record of that period it would be essential for Pauline, Fran­cesca, Middle­ton, and Rivers, each to write a book. And, pos­sibly, Scrivener. . . .

It has been said of London that the world does not contain a worse city in which to be friendless. I believe it. If I had not made friends of my visitors, I am quite certain I could have lived in Scrivener’s flat for half a century and never have known a soul. Pauline, Fran­cesca, Middleton and Rivers, however, were not just four persons—each was an entrance to a world.

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