iv
I should have liked to have given, rather than purely descriptive passages, a slice of the complicated and tense action with which the story brims over, but there is the difficulty that such a scene might not be intelligible to one not having read the story from the beginning. I must resist the tendency to quote any more, having indulged it already to excess, and I am ready to propound my theory of the existence of Richard Dehan.
If you receive a letter from The Towers, Beeding, it will bear a double signature, like this:
| RICHARD DEHAN CLOTILDE GRAVES |
Clotilde Graves has become a secondary personality.
There was once a time when there was no Richard Dehan. There now are times when there is no Clotilde Graves.
To a woman in middle age an opportunity presented itself. It was the chance to write a novel around the subject which, as a girl, she had come to know a great deal about—the subject of war. To write about it and gain attention, the novel required a man’s signature.
Then there was born in the mind of the woman who purposed to write the novel the idea of a man—of the man—who should be the novelist she wanted to be. He should use as by right and from instinct the material which lay inutile at her woman’s disposal.
She created Richard Dehan. Perhaps, in so doing, she created another monster like Frankenstein’s. I do not know.
Born of necessity and opportunity and a woman’s inventiveness, Richard Dehan took over whatever of Clotilde Graves’s he could use. He is now the master. It is, intellectually and spiritually, as if he were the full-grown son of Clotilde Graves. It is a partnership not less intimate than that.