For some three months before I had this conversation with Challis, I had been wrapped in solitude, dreaming, speculating. I had been uplifted in thought, I had come to believe myself inspired as a result of my separation from the world of men, and of the deep introspection and meditation in which I had been plunged. I had arrived at a point, perhaps not far removed from madness, at which I thought myself capable of setting out the true history of Victor Stott.
Challis broke the spell. He cleared away the false glamour which was blinding and intoxicating me, and brought me back to a condition of open-eyed sanity. To Challis I owe a great debt.
Yet at the moment I was sunk in depression. All the glory of my vision had faded; the afterglow was quenched in the blackness of the night that drew out of the east and fell from the zenith as a curtain of utter darkness.
Again Challis came to my rescue. He brought me a great sheaf of notes.
“Look here,” he said, “if you can’t write a true history of that strange child, I see no reason why you should not write his story as it is known to you, as it impinges on your own life. After all, you, in many ways, know more of him than any one. You came nearest to receiving his confidence.”
“But only during the last few months,” I said.
“Does that matter?” said Challis with an upheaval of his shoulders—“shrug” is far too insignificant a word for that mountainous humping. “Is any biography founded on better material than you have at command?”
He unfolded his bundle of notes. “See here,” he said, “here is some magnificent material for you—first-hand observations made at the time. Can’t you construct a story from that?”
Even then I began to cast my story in a slightly biographical form. I wrote half a dozen chapters, and read them to Challis.
“Magnificent, my dear fellow,” was his comment, “magnificent; but no one will believe it.”