He did! Amid great yet repressed excitement, the mysterious glass slid to and fro, spelling out a name. As far as can be ascertained, for once the exact requirements of time and place and method came together, and some sort of communication was established across the “gateless barrier” that separates us from the souls who linger near the scenes of their earthly existence, loth to wander far from their native air. Night after night, for long hours, these inexperienced folk sat round their table holding converse with the spirits that syllable men’s names, piecing together the fragments, evoking new witnesses to check up obscure allusions, puzzling over the illiterate and archaic words and phrases which none of them, by any possible chance, could have heard before.
No provision, however, is made in modern publishing for works produced by authors after they are dead. It is absolutely necessary, when it comes to publishing, to have some representative this side of the grave, and Margery Allingham, whose mortal hand wrote the following novel, is compelled by the hidebound rules of a material and grown-up world to assume the authorship. Publishers, it seems, from an inspection of our correspondence, are grown-ups.
It cannot be said that they have, in this particular case, failed in their obligations to the public. There is one notable feature about this novel, which the present writer did not read until it had been accepted for publication, and that is the clean and workmanlike characterization. Here is no fine writing, no groping for “style.” With crisp hammer-blows the tale is told. A realistic romance, if you please, in the sense that no one stands between us and the characters of Black’erchief Dick. It is the realism of Defoe’s Captain Singleton and the Plague Year, where the author achieves a magical invisibility. So far from leading his characters forward and leaving them to speak, and so revealing themselves as the children of his brain, the realistic romanticist never appears at all. Unlike the romantic realist, who passes everything through the spectrum of his own personality, his story must stand by its own inherent quality. There are some who would deny him the rank of artist, claiming that title exclusively for the introspective specialists. The present writer cannot subscribe to that narrow creed. He can even imagine a votary of introspection casting envious eyes upon this stirring tale of love and piracy in seventeenth-century England, and wondering whether something may not be said for the objective method after all, where you begin at the beginning and end at the end, where something is allowed for the picturesque, and the artist works within the ancient and honourable conventions that are accepted, and loved, and comprehended by the crowd.
William McFee.
BLACK’ERCHIEF DICK
CHAPTER I
“DANGEROUS! Why, there’s no trade from here to the Indies more dangerous than ours. I’ve been about a bit, and mind you I know.”