But the queer thing is that the unwritten book has outlived him. For some reason it was not forgotten in the stress of the South African war. And it will be remembered that, in the reaction of the first years of this century, As the Crow Flies was constantly “quoted,” and that there was quite a controversy as to whether the figure of Joseph Blake did not stand for that of Joseph Chamberlain.
Indeed, I was tempted to put down these notes of the true facts of the case because a friend asked me yesterday where he could get a book called As the Crow Flies, by George Wallace. A man had told him, he said, that it was the finest novel of the century.
THE NIGHT OF CREATION
PART 1: THE DISCUSSION
1
THE DISCUSSION had threatened while they were still at dinner. Leslie Vernon had begun it: and there had been a hardness and a determination in his expression that had sharpened the suggestion of fanaticism in his clever face. Little Harrison, already looking a trifle flushed and dishevelled, had only managed to avoid the direct issue by talking rapidly, and with something more than his usual brilliance, about the true inwardness of the Russian Revolution; a subject upon which he had recently acquired some very special information. Even Lady Ulrica More, who was manifestly prepared to encourage Vernon, had been borne down and fairly talked into silence.
The other guests of the week-end party, although they had shown no signs of disapproving Vernon’s choice of topic when he had irrelevantly introduced it, had accepted their cue with a tactful readiness. Little Harrison was their host, and if he wished, as he obviously did, to avoid this topic of Psychical Research, it was their duty to support him. Moreover, Mrs. Harrison had cut in almost at once, with that bird-like flustered air of hers, to the effect that spiritualism was almost “worse than religion with some people” and never led to anything but recriminations. Vernon had smiled with a fine effect of self-control when she had said that, but before he could defend himself, Harrison at the other end of the table had got under way with an anecdote of Lenin’s pre-revolution career in Switzerland.