FIRST NOTE

The pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only.  She seems to have been the writer’s childhood’s friend.  They had parted as children, or very little more than children.  Years passed.  Then something recalled to the woman the companion of her young days and she wrote to him:  “I have been hearing of you lately.  I know where life has brought you.  You certainly selected your own road.  But to us, left behind, it always looked as if you had struck out into a pathless desert.  We always regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost.  But you have turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my memory welcomes you and I confess to you I should like to know the incidents on the road which has led you to where you are now.”

And he answers her:  “I believe you are the only one now alive who remembers me as a child.  I have heard of you from time to time, but I wonder what sort of person you are now.  Perhaps if I did know I wouldn’t dare put pen to paper.  But I don’t know.  I only remember that we were great chums.  In fact, I chummed with you even more than with your brothers.  But I am like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the Two Pigeons.  If I once start to tell you I would want you to feel that you have been there yourself.  I may overtax your patience with the story of my life so different from yours, not only in all the facts but altogether in spirit.  You may not understand.  You may even be shocked.  I say all this to myself; but I know I shall succumb!  I have a distinct recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you always could make me do whatever you liked.”

He succumbed.  He begins his story for her with the minute narration of this adventure which took about twelve months to develop.  In the form in which it is presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their common past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly to the friend of his childhood.  And even as it is the whole thing is of considerable length.  It seems that he had not only a memory but that he also knew how to remember.  But as to that opinions may differ.

This, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in Marseilles.  It ends there, too.  Yet it might have happened anywhere.  This does not mean that the people concerned could have come together in pure space.  The locality had a definite importance.  As to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at about the middle years of the seventies, when Don Carlos de Bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all Europe against the excesses of communistic Republicanism, made his attempt for the throne of Spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of Guipuzcoa.  It is perhaps the last instance of a Pretender’s adventure for a Crown that History will have to record with the usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance.  Historians are very much like other people.