In reading the manuscript of this trilogy you encountered characters whom you had met in earlier novels; if at some future time you have the patience to read those later novels which have been executed, or at least planned, but not yet published, you are more than likely to meet some of them again. The practice of carrying certain characters from one book to another is hardly so much an arrogant assumption that the public has made their acquaintance in a former presentation as an effort to give additional verisimilitude to a picture which is being built up in sections: an academic history of the years before the war, of the war itself and of the years following it would inevitably introduce, in volume after volume, some at least of the same warriors, statesmen, financiers and social leaders; if, in an imaginary picture of the same period, the novelist offends by following the same method, he offends in the consoling company of Balzac, Disraeli and Thackeray among the dead and of Galsworthy and Mackenzie among the living.
To you I need offer no excuse for having hitherto confined myself for the most part to men and women whose means and leisure enable them to be occupied with public affairs or preoccupied with private introspection: as human beings, susceptible to pain and pleasure, they are not less interesting than those who devote a greater proportion of their time to the struggle for existence; in the opinion of some, they may win an added interest by the larger air of a more spacious life and by the subtile discrimination of wider intellectual sympathies; if a novelist offends by neglecting the narrow streets and sunless cottages of this era, he offends once more in the company of Disraeli and Thackeray.
The present volume of The Sensationalists brings the trilogy to an end; the reception accorded to the first volumes was too evenly mixed to indicate how the third will be greeted; but, since all three books were planned and completed as one whole before the first was published, it is as one whole that I should like them to be judged. Jointly and severally, however, their fate is of less importance to me than the pleasure which I derived from writing them; and, in the present volume, no words give me greater pleasure than those on the dedication page.
Ever yours,
Stephen McKenna.
Lincoln’s Inn,
24 August, 1921.
CONTENTS
| CHAPTER | PAGE | |
| I | Vigil | [15] |
| II | Dawn | [38] |
| III | The Wilderness of This World | [57] |
| IV | Everybody’s Business | [79] |
| V | The Price of Sympathy | [95] |
| VI | The Reward of Sympathy | [111] |
| VII | A Double Rescue | [125] |
| VIII | Half-Honeymoon | [152] |
| IX | A Double Escape | [181] |
| X | The Wandering of Ishmael | [210] |
| XI | Mirage | [228] |
| XII | Night | [248] |
| XIII | Journey’s End | [276] |
| XIV | Vigil | [291] |