All these things seem long in the telling—and they lasted for ages in Nort's soul—but as a matter of fact they were brief enough in time. Fergus, stumbling along behind in the cold road, his hard-set spirit suffering dumbly, was only waiting the choice of a moment to lay his hand upon Nort's shoulder. And thus the two of them came, by no forethought, to the little hill just north of my farm, and I entered for a moment, all unconsciously, upon the comedy, or the tragedy, of that historic night.
I can't tell exactly what time it was, but I had been asleep for some time when I heard knocking on the outer door. As I started up in bed I heard some one calling my name, "David! David!" I ran downstairs quickly, wondering why Harriet was not before me, for she is a light sleeper. As I opened the door I saw a man on the porch.
"David!"
"Nort! What are you doing here at this time of the night?"
"Let me come in!" he said in a tense voice. "I've got something I must tell you."
I got him into my study and shut the door so that Harriet would not be disturbed. Then I struck a light and looked at Nort. His face was uncommonly pale; but his eyes, usually blue and smiling, were black with excitement. I could not fathom it at all. I had seen him before in a mood of exaltation, but nothing like this.
"David," said he, "I'm going to write a novel—a great novel."
He paused and looked at me with tremendous seriousness. The whole thing struck me all at once, partly in revulsion from the alarm I had felt when he first came in, as being the most absurd and humorous proceeding I had ever known. I laughed outright.
"Is this what you came to tell me at three o'clock in the morning?"
But Nort's mood was beyond ridicule. He did not seem to notice my laughter at all, but plunged at once into an account, a more or less jumbled account I am forced to admit, of all the things he would put into his novel. As nearly as I could make out he proposed to leave nothing out, nothing whatever that was in any way related to American life—politics, religion, business, love, art, city life, country life—everything. He didn't seem to be quite sure yet whether he could get it all into one large volume, like one of Scott's novels, or whether he would make a trilogy of volumes, like Frank Norris, or a whole comédie humaine after the manner of Balzac. I gathered that it was not only to be the great American novel, but the greatest that would ever be written.