“How far off do you think any one could hear that?” I would demand anxiously, on recovering sufficient breath to speak at all.
“Well, it would depend upon whether you knew it was coming,” Wakeham would reply kindly, not wishing to discourage me.
We abandoned the scheme by mutual consent at about the end of a fortnight.
“I suppose it's something that you've got to have inside you,” I suggested to Wakeham in consolation.
“I don't think the roof of your mouth can be quite the right shape for it,” concluded Wakeham.
My success as story-teller, commentator, critic, jester, revived my childish ambition towards authorship. My first stirrings in this direction I cannot rightly place. I remember when very small falling into a sunk dust-bin—a deep hole, rather, into which the gardener shot his rubbish. The fall twisted my ankle so that I could not move; and the time being evening and my prison some distance from the house, my predicament loomed large before me. Yet one consolation remained with me: the incident would be of value to me in the autobiography upon which I was then engaged. I can distinctly recollect lying on my back among decaying leaves and broken glass, framing my account. “On this day a strange adventure befell me. Walking in the garden, all unheeding, I suddenly”—I did not want to add the truth—“tumbled into a dust-hole, six feet square, that any one but a moon calf might have seen.” I puzzled to evolve a more dignified situation. The dust-bin became a cavern, the entrance to which had been artfully concealed; the six or seven feet I had really fallen, “an endless descent, terminating in a vast and gloomy chamber.” I was divided between opposing desires: One, for rescue followed by sympathy and supper; the other, for the alarming experience of a night of terror where I lay. Nature conquering Art, I yelled; and the episode terminated prosaically with a warm bath and arnica. But from it I judge that desire for the woes and perils of authorship was with me somewhat early.
Of my many other dreams I would speak freely, discussing them at length with sympathetic souls, but concerning this one ambition I was curiously reticent. Only to two—my mother and a grey-bearded Stranger—did I ever breathe a word of it. Even from my father I kept it a secret, close comrades in all else though we were. He would have talked of it much and freely, dragged it into the light of day; and from this I shrank.
My talk with the Stranger came about in this wise. One evening I had taken a walk to Victoria Park—a favourite haunt of mine at summer time. It was a fair and peaceful evening, and I fell a-wandering there in pleasant reverie, until the waning light hinted to me the question of time. I looked about me. Only one human being was in sight, a man with his back towards me, seated upon a bench overlooking the ornamental water.
I drew nearer. He took no notice of me, and interested—though why, I could not say—I seated myself beside him at the other end of the bench. He was a handsome, distinguished-looking man, with wonderfully bright, clear eyes and iron-grey hair and beard. I might have thought him a sea captain, of whom many were always to be met with in that neighbourhood, but for his hands, which were crossed upon his stick, and which were white and delicate as a woman's. He turned his face and glanced at me. I fancied that his lips beneath the grey moustache smiled; and instinctively I edged a little nearer to him.
“Please, sir,” I said, after awhile, “could you tell me the right time?”