Locke, William John, 1863-1930 / 2008-09-15 00:00:00

EBOOK THE MOUNTEBANK ***


Produced by Curtis A. Weyant
and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team


The Mountebank
by
William J. Locke


Chapter I

In the month of June, 1919, I received a long letter from Brigadier-General
Andrew Lackaday together with a bulky manuscript.
The letter, addressed from an obscure hotel in Marseilles, ran as
follows:--
MY DEAR FRIEND,
On the occasion of our last meeting when I kept you up to an ungodly hour
of the morning with the story of my wretched affairs to which you patiently
listened without seeming bored, you were good enough to suggest that I
might write a book about myself, not for the sake of vulgar advertisement,
but in order to interest, perhaps to encourage, at any rate to stimulate
the thoughts of many of my old comrades who have been placed in the same
predicament as myself. Well, I can't do it. You're a professional man of
letters and don't appreciate the extraordinary difficulty a layman has, not
only in writing a coherent narrative, but in composing the very sentences
which express the things that he wants to convey. Add to this that English
is to me, if not a foreign, at any rate, a secondary language--I have
thought all my life in French, so that to express myself clearly on any
except the humdrum affairs of life is always a conscious effort. Even this
little prelude, in my best style, has taken me nearly two cigarettes to
write; so I gave up an impossible task.
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