It was some little time before I realized what the
publisher was talking about. Hamilton, without asking
permission, had sent my stories to him. Eveleigh Nash
was the publisher, and his reader at that time was Maude
ffoulkes, who later wrote Lady Cardigan's Memoirs,
numerous other biographies, also "My Own Past," and
to whom I owe an immense debt for unfailing guidance,
help and encouragement from that day to this. I never
forget my shrinking fear at the idea of appearing in print,
my desire to use another name, my feeling that it was all
a mistake somewhere, the idea that I should have a book
of my own published being too absurd to accept as true.
My relief when, eventually, the papers gave it briefest
possible mention, a few words of not unkindly praise or
blame, I remember too, and my astonishment, some
weeks later, to find a column in the Spectator, followed
not long afterwards by an interesting article in the Literary
Page of the Morning Post on the genus "ghost story,"
based on my book--by Hilaire Belloc, as he told me
years later. All of which prompted me to try another
book ... and after the third, "John Silence," had
appeared, to renounce a problematical fortune in dried
milk, and with typewriter and kit-bag, to take my
precious new liberty out to the Jura Mountains where,
at frs. 4.50 a day, I lived in reasonable comfort and wrote
more books. I was then thirty-six.
Whether I should be grateful to my fellow-reporter on the Evening Sun is another matter. Liberty is priced above money, at any rate. I have written some twenty books, but the cash received for these, though it has paid for rent, for food, for clothing, separately, has never been enough to pay for all three together, even on the most modest scale of living, and my returns, both from America and England, remain still microscopic. Angus Hamilton I never saw again. A year or so later, while on a lecture tour in New York, things apparently went wrong with him. Life drove against him in some way. He put a sudden end to himself.
It seems strange to me now that so few incidents,
