“Why shouldn’t we collaborate?” said Henley in his most matter-of-fact way, as Big Ben gave voice to the midnight hour. “Everybody does it nowadays. Two heads may be really better than one, although I seldom believe in the truth of accepted sayings. Your head is a deuced good one, Andrew; but—now don’t get angry—you are too excitable and too intense to be left quite to yourself, even in book-writing, much less in the ordinary affairs of life. I think you were born to collaborate, and to collaborate with me. You can give me everything I lack, and I can give you a little of the sense of humour, and act as a drag upon the wheel.”

“None of the new humour, Jack; that shall never appear in a book with my name attached to it. Dickens I can tolerate. He is occasionally felicitous. The story of ‘The Dying Clown,’ for instance, crude as it is it has a certain grim tragedy about it. But the new humour came from the pit, and should go—to the Sporting Times.”

“Now, don’t get excited. The book is not in proof yet—perhaps never will be. You need not be afraid. My humour will probably be old enough. But what do you y to the idea?”

Andrew Trenchard sat for awhile in silent consideration. His legs were stretched out, and his slippered feet rested on the edge of the brass fender. A nimbus of smoke surrounded his swarthy features, his shock of black hair, his large, rather morose, dark eyes. He was a man of about twenty-five, with an almost horribly intelligent face, so observant that he tried people, so acute that he frightened them. His intellect was never for a moment at rest, unless in sleep. He devoured himself with his own emotions, and others with his analysis of theirs. His mind was always crouching to spring, except when it was springing. He lived an irregular life, and all horrors had a subtle fascination for him. As Henley had remarked, he possessed little sense of humour, but immense sense of evil and tragedy and sorrow. He seldom found time to calmly regard the drama of life from the front. He was always at the stage-door, sending in his card, and requesting admittance behind the scenes. What was on the surface only interested him in so far as it indicated what was beneath, and in all mental matters his normal procedure was that of the disguised detective. Stupid people disliked him. Clever people distrusted him while they admired him. The mediocre suggested that he was liable to go off his head, and the profound predicted for him fame, tempered by suicide.

Most people considered him interesting, and a few were sincerely attached to him. Among these last was Henley, who had been his friend at Oxford, and had taken rooms in the same house with him in Smith’s Square, Westminster. Both the young men were journalists. Henley, who, as he had acknowledged, possessed a keen sense of humour, and was not so much ashamed of it as he ought to have been, wrote—very occasionally—for Punch, and more often for Fun, was dramatic critic of a lively society paper, and “did” the books—in a sarcastic vein—for a very unmuzzled “weekly,” that was libellous by profession and truthful by oversight. Trenchard, on the other hand, wrote a good deal of very condensed fiction, and generally placed it; contributed brilliant fugitive articles to various papers and magazines, and was generally spoken of by the inner circle of the craft as “a rising man,” and a man to be afraid of. Henley was full of common-sense, only moderately introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He lacked imagination; but his descriptive powers were racy, and he knew instinctively what was likely to take, and what would be caviare to the general.

Trenchard, as he considered the proposition now made to him, realized that Henley might supply much that he lacked in any book that was written with a view to popular success. There could be no doubt of it.

“But we should quarrel inevitably and doggedly,” he said at last. “If I can not hold myself in, still less can I be held in. We should tear one another in pieces. When I write, I feel that what I write must be, however crude, however improper or horrible it may seem. You would want to hold me back.”

“My dear boy, I should more than want to—I should do it. In collaboration, no man can be a law unto himself. That must be distinctly understood before we begin. I don’t wish to force the proposition on you. Only we are both ambitious devils. We are both poor. We are both determined to try a book. Have we more chance of succeeding if we try one together? I believe so. You have the imagination, the grip, the stern power to evolve the story, to make it seem inevitable, to force it step by step on its way. I can lighten that way. I can plant a few flowers—they shall not be peonies, I promise you—on the roadside. And I can, and, what is more, will, check you when you wish to make the story impossibly horrible or fantastic to the verge of the insane. Now, you needn’t be angry. This book, if we write it, has got to be a good book, and yet a book that will bring grist to the mill. That is understood.”

Andrew’s great eyes flashed in the lamplight.

“The mill,” he said. “Sometimes I feel inclined to let it stop working. Who would care if one wheel ceased to turn? There are so many others.”

“Ah, that’s the sort of thing I shall cut out of the book!” cried Henley, turning the soda-water into his whisky with a cheerful swish.

“We will be powerful, but never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid. Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you possess a corrective in me.”

Trenchard’s face lightened in a rare smile as, with a half-sigh, he said:

“I believe you are right, and that I need a collaborator, an opposite, who is yet in sympathy with me. Yes; either of us might fail alone; together we should succeed.”

“Will succeed, my boy!”

“But not by pandering to the popular taste,” added Andrew in his most sombre tones, and with a curl of his thin, delicately-moulded lips. “I shall never consent to that.”

“We will not call it pandering. But we must hit the taste of the day, or we shall look a couple of fools.”

“People are always supposed to look fools when, for once, they are not fools,” said Andrew.

“Possibly. But now our bargain is made. Strike hands upon it. Henceforth we are collaborators as well as friends.”

Andrew extended his long, thin, feverish hand, and, as Henley held it for a moment, he started at the intense, vivid, abnormal personality its grasp seemed to reveal. To collaborate with Trenchard was to collaborate with a human volcano.

“And now for the germ of our book,” he said, as the clock struck one. “Where shall we find it?”

Trenchard leaned forward in his chair, with his hands pressed upon the arms.

“Listen, and I will give it you,” he said.

And, almost until the dawn and the wakening of the slumbering city, Henley sat and listened, and forgot that his pipe was smoked out, and that his feet were cold. Trenchard had strange powers, and could enthral as he could also repel.

---

“It is a weird idea, and it is very powerful,” Henley said at last. “But you stop short at the critical moment. Have you not devised a dÉnouement?”

“Not yet. That is where the collaboration will come in. You must help me. We must talk it over. I am in doubt.”

He got up and passed his hands nervously through his thick hair.

“My doubt has kept me awake so many nights!” he said, and his voice was rather husky and worn.

Henley looked at him almost compassionately.

“How intensely you live in your fancies!”

“My fancies?” said Andrew, with a sudden harsh accent, and darting a glance of curious watchfulness upon his friend. “My—— Yes, yes. Perhaps I do. Perhaps I try to. Some people have souls that must escape from their environment, their miserable life-envelope, or faint. Many of us labour and produce merely to create an atmosphere in which we ourselves may breathe for awhile and be happy. Damn this London, and this lodging, and this buying bread with words! I must create for myself an atmosphere. I must be always getting away from what is, even if I go lower, lower. Ah! Well—but the dÉnouement. Give me your impressions.”

Henley meditated for awhile. Then he said; “Let us leave it. Let us get to work; and in time, as the story progresses, it will seem inevitable. We shall see it in front of us, and we shall not be able to avoid it. Let us get to work”—he glanced at his watch and laughed—“or, rather, let us get to bed. It is past four. This way madness lies. When we collaborate, we will write in the morning. Our book shall be a book of the dawn, and not of the darkness, despite its sombre theme.”

“No, no; it must be a book of the darkness.”

“Of the darkness, then, but written in the dawn. Your tragedy tempered by my trust in human nature, and the power that causes things to right themselves. Good-night, old boy.”

“Good-night.”

When Henley had left the room, Tren-chard sat for a moment with his head sunk low on his breast and his eyes half closed. Then, with a jerk, he gained his feet, went to the door, opened it, and looked forth on the deserted landing. He listened, and heard Henley moving to and fro in his bedroom. Then he shut the door, took off his smoking-coat, and bared his left arm. There was a tiny blue mark on it.

“What will the dÉnouement be?” he whispered to himself, as he felt in his waistcoat pocket with a trembling hand.