Mr. Burnaby hesitated for a moment. “It was published anonymously,” he replied. He opened the book and began to read.
Marcus thought there was something rather strange in his manner. He listened carefully. The book began with five long quotations from the ‘Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.’ All these dealt with well authenticated cases of revelation of the future. When he had finished them Mr. Burnaby closed the book. “I’m afraid that’s all we’ll have time for tonight,” he said. “What do you think of it?”
“I think it’s jolly interesting,” Marcus responded sincerely. He was glad that for once he was able to be genuinely enthusiastic.
“Of course we haven’t really got into the book itself yet,” Mr. Burnaby pointed out. “I mean the author’s part. Those were only quotations.”
“You’ve no idea who did write it?” Marcus asked.
“Yes,” Mr. Burnaby answered, still in the same slightly unnatural manner. “This copy happens to have been autographed by the author.”
He handed the book across to Marcus who opened it and began to turn the pages. It was beautifully, though plainly, bound and printed on thick, hand-made paper. The fly-leaf was blank, but on the title-page, under the title, was the signature John Burnaby.
Marcus was embarrassed. He cleared his throat. “You mean, er, you mean you wrote it.”
“I wrote it,” Mr. Burnaby told him.
Marcus cleared his throat again. “Er, congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Burnaby said.
There was an awkward little pause and then Mr. Burnaby went on. “I wrote it five years ago. I didn’t send it to a publisher. It was printed privately. I looked after the production myself. I chose the type and arranged the layout and chose the paper—it’s hand-made paper. I took a great deal of time and trouble over it—and I must say I enjoyed that part of it, nearly as much as writing it. When I was satisfied—and I took a good deal of satisfying—I made them run off a hundred copies. Then the type was broken up. After that there was the binding. I tried six different bindings before I got one that really pleased me.”
“And how did you sell it?” Marcus asked.
“I didn’t. I gave away a few copies. The rest I still have. I’ll tell you about the copies I gave away some other time. Now it’s nearly twelve and we should both be in our beds. Goodnight.”
“And how do you like it now?” Mr. Burnaby asked, the following evening at about half-past ten, as he closed his book after reading the fifth chapter. Till this he had put no questions, though he had glanced at Marcus from time to time in attempts to judge by his expression how he was taking it. He had learned nothing. Marcus had appeared to be paying attention, but his expression had revealed no particular signs of pleasure. Did he hear the rhythm of the prose Mr. Burnaby wondered. Did he notice the beautiful clarity of the sentences?
Marcus never lied except in desperation—though with Mr. Burnaby he was often desperate. But he hated lying: his first refuge was always evasive truthfulness. “It’s very good,” he said.
Mr. Burnaby found a pipe and began to fill it. He hadn’t been able to smoke all evening. Some Suggestions Regarding Extra-Sensory Experience was too precious to be trusted to Marcus’s blundering elocution. He had read it very carefully, very well, and he had been struck with how good it was. The last time he had read it was when the finished book had come to him from the binders. Then he had been just a little tired of it. Sometimes he had wondered since if he shouldn’t have kept it longer, given it perhaps one more revision. Coming to it afresh after a lapse of years he was impressed with its quality. There was hardly a sentence that he would have wished to alter. He was surprised that immediately he stopped reading Marcus had not broken out with some expressions of enthusiasm. Though the boy had shown already so much deadness to the finer things of literature, Mr. Burnaby felt that he could not fail to appreciate such an achievement as this. “But what impression does it make on you?” he demanded with a trace of exasperation.
Marcus was troubled. He hardly knew what impression the book had made on him, if indeed it had made an impression. “It’s like things you’ve said to me,” he responded feebly. “It’s like hearing you talking,” he added with a burst of hopefulness.
“But the style!” Mr. Burnaby exclaimed. “Surely you noticed the style?”
“Oh yes,” Marcus agreed immediately. “The style’s very good.” He was disappointed in himself. He was convinced that the book was good, just as good as Mr. Burnaby thought. The fact that he had found it rather dull was almost a proof of its goodness. He always did find good books dull. Of course he couldn’t say that. He tried hard to think of some comment that would please Mr. Burnaby.
He thought for a long time. Then Mr. Burnaby lost his temper. “I don’t believe you like it at all,” he said. “Why can’t you say so, instead of telling a lot of lies about it?”
So far Marcus hadn’t lied. Now, not so much in self-defence as in an agitated desire to comfort Mr. Burnaby he proceeded to do so. “I’m not lying,” he declared. “I know it’s good. I do like it, only it’s awfully hard to say anything. I’m not good at saying things.”
After half an hour or so Mr. Burnaby consented to be mollified, if not convinced, and shortly after eleven Marcus escaped thankfully to bed.
The next night Mr. Burnaby again enquired what they should read. It was only after considerable argument that Marcus was able to persuade him to go on with his own book. “I don’t want to force it down your throat,” he said. “I don’t like to read it to a hostile audience.”
After this Marcus showed a little more cunning. He picked out certain passages which he told Mr. Burnaby that he liked more than others. Nevertheless Mr. Burnaby remained dissatisfied. When at the fourth reading the book was finished there was another scene. Marcus was charged with stupidity and dishonesty. Marcus didn’t admit the charges, but he couldn’t deny them. Mr. Burnaby’s writing was a subject which thereafter was usually avoided between them. Any mention of it there was came from Mr. Burnaby. He adopted a tone of humorous resignation, Some Suggestions Regarding Extra-Sensory Experience being referred to as “My despised masterpiece,” or with truth perhaps as “Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu.”
In spite of this attitude it was quite clear he continued to feel hurt by Marcus’s failure to appreciate the book. Marcus blamed himself not for the way he had behaved, but for his own lack of good taste. It seemed to him that Mr. Burnaby had every accomplishment, while he had only the beginnings of one. He said as much a few evenings after the unfortunate reading had been completed. Mr. Burnaby took him up promptly. “Well, you know, there’s not the slightest reason why you shouldn’t acquire a few more.”
“How d’you mean?” Marcus asked very humbly.
“By hard work—French for instance. If you set yourself to it you could quite easily learn French.”
So it was agreed that henceforth two evenings a week were to be devoted to French and three more to a course of solid reading—the books to be chosen by Mr. Burnaby. “If you read a fair amount of good stuff”, Mr. Burnaby assured him, “your taste’s practically bound to improve. You’ll find in time that you don’t like reading rubbish.”
The remaining two evenings were to be free. They would read books of Marcus’s choosing, or play games. The free nights were Saturday and Sunday. Mr. Burnaby sent for a table-tennis set and it became their custom to play this game on Saturday nights. On Sundays they usually read some light novels or played double dummy bridge, of which Mr. Burnaby was very fond.
CHAPTER XXIII
MR. Burnaby never deliberately set out to tell Marcus the story of his life: it came out bit by bit, over a period of years, in scraps of reminiscence and explanation.
He belonged to a North of Ireland commercial family. His grandfather a
nd great-grandfather had been prosperous shipowners in Derry. His father, a younger son, had settled in Liverpool where, for a time, he too had prospered.
“But he was too greedy,” Mr. Burnaby would say, when he reached this stage in the story. “Like so many other people he didn’t know when he was well off. He put everything he had—staked all his credit too—into financing a silver mine in Peru. I never heard exactly what happened. Perhaps there was no mine, or no silver: perhaps it was just too expensive to operate. At any rate he failed—lost everything. His house, his furniture, his pictures—all had to be sold. He had some quite good pictures too. My mother used to have the catalogue of the sale. Well it was just at this point in our affairs that I came on the scene. They must have been pleased to see me.”
Whether this ever came as one uninterrupted speech I don’t know. I have taken it from two notes in Marcus’s journal, reporting almost identical conversations.
After the smash Mr. Burnaby’s father returned to the North of Ireland, where he obtained a position as manager of a small factory in Belfast. For two years he kept his family in reasonable comfort, with a cook, a house-parlour maid, and a nurse for the children. Then, quite unexpectedly he died of pneumonia. His widow was left to bring up eight children on a hundred pounds a year and the charity of relations.
Mr. Burnaby grew up in genteel poverty, hating the uncles and aunts who helped with gifts of cast-off clothing and with small sums of money doled out grudgingly at irregular intervals. He had never been old enough to know his father, and he was not taught to be proud of his memory. He learned to think of him only as the author of the family misfortunes. For Mrs. Burnaby had never been in love with her husband. She was English, and came of an old, land-owning family who had drifted idly, and with aristocratic extravagance, to distress. She didn’t blame them. That they themselves should have entered business she found almost unthinkable. She had married her husband for his money. She considered that she had been cheated, and she resented it. She never said as much, but her youngest son grew up to share her feelings. For her relations, whom he never saw, and for their way of life, he felt a nostalgic affection. For his mother herself he had no affection. He was proud of her, proud of her blood, her pride, her good breeding, her obvious superiority to his coarser, prosperous Ulster relatives. All his childish love was reserved for dream companions, and for the memory of an old nurse who had remained with them in their misfortune only leaving through absolute necessity when Mr. Burnaby was four.
In spite of being the youngest in this large family, Mr. Burnaby had had a lonely childhood. He disliked the brother who was next to him in age, and his mother was at pains to break off whatever friendships he formed with the sons of their lower middle-class neighbours. She kept before her children a picture of the way of life and the upbringing to which she considered her birth entitled them.
Mr. Burnaby had accepted this picture. “I ought to have gone to a public school, you know,” he would tell Marcus, raising his voice a little, and speaking with a slightly English accent. “It would have suited me down to the ground. All Mother’s brothers were at Winchester.”
Marcus thought he over-estimated the advantages of which he had been deprived, but these advantages, nevertheless, were very real to Mr. Burnaby. He had grown up to hate poverty, and determined, somehow or other, to give himself the education he felt should have been given to him. He had been sent to a secondary school in Belfast, but at sixteen he offended the uncle who was paying his fees, and he was put into business. This was not a great disadvantage, for he was naturally studious. In his spare time he read French and Latin and began to teach himself Greek. But he wanted to make money, and to begin with he didn’t know how to set about it. His work as an apprentice was at first to address envelopes, to copy letters and to take letters to the post. Over a period of five years he was paid one hundred pounds, the normal wages for an apprentice in the Belfast wholesale trade at that time.
By his own account he was good at his work, but he made no attempt to hide his dislike and contempt of it. This did not please his employers. He was a dreamy youth, and like Marcus he had occasional dreams of the future, but to begin with he did not attach much importance to them. He knew that he was looked on as a little odd, and that oddness in business was regarded with disfavour. So he kept his knowledge of the future to himself. Besides, the things he did know were not of very great interest to him. He knew that the firm was going to get a new book-keeper before very long, but whether the present book-keeper was going to die, or be dismissed, or retire, he had no idea. In his dream he saw the cash office with the new book-keeper at work. He had a pen behind his ear and was giving the message-boy a penny from the cash drawer to buy milk for the cats. The message-boy was the boy actually employed by the firm at the time the dream occurred, and he looked no older than in everyday life. Six weeks after the dream the old book-keeper was dismissed. It had been discovered that he had been systematically defrauding the firm of small amounts over a period of years. He was replaced by the man Mr. Burnaby had seen in his dream. In another dream he saw the furniture being removed from the house next door. This too came to pass, and for two months the house was empty.
“Many people have such dreams,” Mr. Burnaby said. “Most of them are forgotten. By some means that I don’t yet quite understand I was able to recognize my true dreams—and I didn’t forget them.”
After Mr. Burnaby had been a year in business the firm engaged another apprentice and Mr. Burnaby was transferred from the ‘Post’ to the despatch office. The despatch clerk backed horses. Every day at lunch time he visited his book-maker, and every evening the message-boy brought him the Belfast Telegraph. Mr. Burnaby got into the habit of looking over the racing results with him. When they were busy Mr. Burnaby read out the results to him. As a rule these were received with groans of dismay.
One night Mr. Burnaby dreamed that he was reading out the results of the day’s racing with the despatch clerk beside him, but in the dream instead of groans there were cries of jubilation. He awoke with the voice of the despatch clerk ringing in his ears: “Every one o’ them’s up. Man dear, we’ll make a night o’ it.”
It was early in the morning of the second of April, 1902. The date on the paper had been the eighteenth of April, 1902. Mr. Burnaby remembered the names of four of the winners. He got out of bed and wrote down on a piece of paper, Carpet Knight, Cogia, Ashanti Gold, Veles. Then he returned to bed and went to sleep again.
When he got to the office he showed the piece of paper to the despatch clerk and told him that these four horses would win on April the eighteenth. He was too shy however to say how he had got his information. The despatch clerk was interested, but sceptical. “How much are you puttin’ on them yourself?” he demanded.
It had not occurred to Mr. Burnaby to back the horses himself. Judging by the despatch clerk’s experience it had never seemed to him that betting was a profitable occupation. To prove his good faith he felt obliged to put a shilling on each of the horses he had dreamed about. It was almost all the money he had. The despatch clerk was convinced. He put ten shillings each on the same four horses.
Mr. Burnaby made one pound, five and ninepence, the despatch clerk twelve pounds, seventeen and six. The despatch clerk said, “Every one o’ them’s up. Man dear, we’ll make a night o’ it.”
Till then Mr. Burnaby had never tasted whiskey and never been in a public house, but as soon as the office closed the despatch clerk insisted on taking him to one. They fell in with some cronies of the despatch clerk and Mr. Burnaby was introduced as “My financial adviser.” The story of the mysterious bit of paper was told again and again. Mr. Burnaby kept his secret, but when at last they let him go home he was drunk.
“I’ll never forget it,” Mr. Burnaby told Marcus. “The family had just finished tea when I reached the front door. I couldn’t get it open and Emily, my seco
nd sister—she was four years older than me—came to let me in. She took one look at me and then let out a shriek: ‘Oh Mother, it’s Jack, and he’s drunk!’ I could have murdered her. What a fuss there was. Mother wept, and for at least a month everyone went about with long faces. They even got the curate in on Sunday afternoon to pray with me. That’s what stopped me going to church. I told him to mind his own business.
“The only one who showed any sense in the matter was Tom, my eldest brother. He said I was ‘a damned wee fool’ to come home in that state and that if I got drunk again I’d better go somewhere and ‘lie up’ till I had slept it off.”
“And did you?” Marcus enquired.
“Did I what?”
“Did you get drunk again?”
“Occasionally,” Mr. Burnaby answered guardedly, “from time to time. You see I had more money after that—not a lot, but all I needed. I went on backing horses. I found out that with a little practice I could induce myself to dream of the future fairly frequently, or perhaps I should say to remember dreams of the future in which I was looking at racing results. At first, I had a little difficulty with dates. I would get a set of winners but I wouldn’t know on what day or at what meeting they were running. I got over this by making a habit of always looking at the date on a paper as soon as I opened it—and very shortly I found myself doing the same thing in my dreams. But I didn’t bet only when I knew the winners. I didn’t want to attract too much attention to myself. So I backed a certain number of losers as well. Partly on this account, partly because I didn’t feel it was quite fair to the bookies, I didn’t stake very large sums. For the same reasons I spread my bets, particularly when I knew I was backing certainties. I arranged things so that I made a small profit every week—usually about two pounds, never more than five.
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