The Tale of Triona

by William John Locke

But on his way, his curiosity being aroused, he read in the little book an absorbing diary of amazing adventures, of hardships and prison and tortures unspeakable; and without a thought of its value, further than its romantic fascination, he grew to regard it during his wanderings as his most precious possession.

So far again, until he reached Riga, there was truth in the story of his Russian traverse. Had he not prowled suspect about revolutionary Petrograd? Had not the Prince and Princess, the idealized parents of the story, been murdered and their wealth, together with his own few thousand roubles, been confiscated? Was he not a fugitive? Indeed, had he not seen the inside of a horrible prison? It is true that after a day or two he managed by bribery to escape. But the essence of things was there—the grain of fact which, under the sunlight of his genius, expanded into the splendid growth of Truth. And his wit had served him, too. His guards were for taking away the precious book. Knowing them to be illiterate, he declared it to be the manuscript of his republican poem. Challenged to read, he recited from memory verses of Shevchenko, until they were convinced, not only of the book’s contents, but of his own revolutionary opinions. This establishment of his orthodoxy, together with a few roubles, assured his escape. And thence had he not gone northwards, hungry and footsore?

And had he not been torpedoed? Cast ashore in shirt and trousers, penniless? Was not the real truth of this adventure even more to his credit than the fictitious narrative? For, a naval rating, he had reported to a British man-of-war, and had spent months in a mine sweeper in the North Sea, until the final catastrophe occurred. Then, after a short time in hospital a kindly medical board found something wrong with his heart and sent him out into the English world, a free man.

Yes. His real record was one that no man need be ashamed of. Why, then, the fiction?

Sitting there in the uncompromising reality of his mother’s kitchen, he strove for the first time to answer the question. He found an answer in the obsession of the little book. During the scant leisure of his months at sea it had been his breviary. More, it had been a talisman, a secret scroll of enchantment which, wrapped in oilskin, never left his person, save when, beneath the dim lamp of the fo’c’sle, he pored over it, hunched up against a bulkhead. The spirit of the writer whom he had seen dead and naked, seemed to have descended upon him. In the bitter watches of the North Sea he lived through the dead man’s life with bewildering intensity. There were times, so he assured himself, when it became a conscious effort to unravel his own experiences from those of the dead man. That he had not lived in remoter Kurdistan was unthinkable. And, surely too, he had been tortured.

And when, in the attic in Cherbury Mews, impelled by irresistible force, he began to write his fantasia of fact and imagination, the obsession grew mightier. His pen was winged with flame.

“Why,” said he, half aloud, one day, staring into the kitchen fire, “why should it not be a case of psychic obsession for which I am not responsible?”

And that was the most comforting solution he could find.

There was none other. He moved uneasily, changing the crossing of his legs, and threw a freshly rolled and lighted cigarette into the grate. It was a case of psychic obsession. Otherwise he was a barefaced liar, a worm to be despised by his fellow-men. How else to account for the original lie direct, unreserved, to the publisher? Up to then he had no thought of sailing through the world under false colours. He had to give the mysterious dead man some identity. His own unconscious creative self clamoured for expression. He had woven the dead man and himself into a personality to which he had given the name of Alexis Triona. Naturally, for verisimilitude, he had assumed “Alexis Triona” as a pen-name. Besides, who would read a new book by one John Briggs? The publisher’s first direct question was a blow between the eyes under which he reeled for a few seconds. Then the romantic, the psychic, the whatever you will of the artist’s touch of lunacy asserted itself, and John Briggs was consumed in ashes and the Phœnix Alexis Triona arose in his stead. And when the book appeared and the Phœnix leaped into fame, what could the Phœnix do, for the sake of its ordinary credit, but maintain its Phœnixdom?

Until now it had been the simplest matter in the world, seeing that he half believed in it himself, seeing that the identification of the dead man with himself was so complete, that his lies, even to himself, had the generous air of conviction. But now, in the uncompromising John Briggs-dom of his surroundings, things were different. The obsession which still lingered when he bade Olivia adieu had vanished from his spirit. He saw himself naked, a mere impostor. If his past found absolution in the theory of psychic domination, his present was none the less in a parlous state.