‘Pretty much. Well, I suppose you’d like to try the Times, wouldn’t you?’
‘No,’ said Keller, looking at Winchester Cathedral. ‘Might as well try to electrify a haystack. And to think that the World would take three columns and ask for more - with illustrations too! It’s sickening.’
‘But the Times might,’ I began.
Keller flung his paper across the carriage, and it opened in its austere majesty of solid type - opened with the crackle of an encyclopaedia.
‘Might! You might work your way through the bow-plates of a cruiser. Look at that first page!’
‘It strikes you that way, does it?’ I said. ‘Then I’d recommend you to try a light and frivolous journal.’
‘With a thing like this of mine - of ours? It’s sacred history!’
I showed him a paper which I conceived would be after his own heart, in that it was modelled on American lines.
‘That’s homey, he said, ‘but it’s not the real thing. Now, I should like one of these fat old Times columns. Probably there’d be a bishop in the office, though.’
When we reached London Keller disappeared in the direction of the Strand. What his experiences may have been I cannot tell, but it seems that he invaded the office of an evening paper at 11.45 a.m. (I told him English editors were most idle at that hour), and mentioned my name as that of a witness to the truth of his story.
‘I was nearly fired out,’ he said furiously at lunch. ‘As soon as I mentioned you, the old man said that I was to tell you that they didn’t want any more of your practical jokes, and that you knew the hours to call if you had anything to sell, and that they’d see you condemned before they helped to puff one of your infernal yarns in advance. Say, what record do you hold for truth in the country, anyway?’
‘A beauty. You ran up against it, that’s all. Why don’t you leave the English papers alone and cable New York? Everything goes over there.’
‘Can’t you see that’s just why?’ he repeated.
‘I saw it a long time ago. You don’t intend to cable then?’
‘Yes, I do,’ he answered, in the over-emphatic voice of one who does not know his own mind.
That afternoon I walked him abroad and about, over the streets that run between the pavements like channels of grooved and tongued lava, over the bridges that are made of enduring stone, through subways floored and sided with yard-thick concrete, between houses that are never rebuilt, and by river-steps hewn, to the eye, from the living rock. A black fog chased us into Westminster Abbey, and, standing there in the darkness, I could hear the wings of the dead centuries circling round the head of Litchfield A. Keller, journalist, of Dayton, Ohio, U.S. A., whose mission it was to make the Britishers sit up.
He stumbled gasping into the thick gloom, and the roar of the traffic came to his bewildered ears.
‘Let’s go to the telegraph-office and cable,’ I said. ‘Can’t you hear the New York World crying for news of the great sea-serpent, blind, white, and smelling of musk, stricken to death by a submarine volcano, and assisted by his loving wife to die in mid-ocean, as visualised by an American citizen, the breezy, newsy, brainy newspaper man of Dayton, Ohio? ’Rah for the Buckeye State. Step lively! Both gates! Szz! Boom! Aah!’ Keller was a Princeton man, and he seemed to need encouragement.
‘You’ve got me on your own ground,’ said he, tugging at his overcoat pocket. He pulled out his copy, with the cable forms -for he had written out his telegram - and put them all into my hand, groaning, ‘I pass. If I hadn’t come to your cursed country -If I’d sent it off at Southampton - If I ever get you west of the Alleghannies, if - ’
‘Never mind, Keller. It isn’t your fault. It’s the fault of your country. If you had been seven hundred years older you’d have done what I am going to do.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Tell it as a lie.’
‘Fiction?’ This with the full-blooded disgust of a journalist for the illegitimate branch of the profession.
‘You can call it that if you like. I shall call it a lie. ’
And a lie it has become; for Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or to turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.
William Hope Hodgson
THE FINDING OF THE GRAIKEN
The Sargasso Sea is that legendary area of the Atlantic blighted by seaweed, in which for generations unwary skips and their crews were helplessly and fatally trapped. The rotting hulks which marked this dreadful place were also said to be filled with fearsome rats and the most terrible forms of sea life. . .
The man who immortalised the Sargasso Sea was William Hope Hodgson (1878-1918), for years a shamefully neglected writer, now at last gaining the international reputation he so richly deserves through new paperback editions of his best work. Born the second of twelve children of an Essex clergyman, he ran away to sea in his youth. Though his life afloat was extremely harsh and unhappy for years, it provided him with a cause - to better the lives of seamen - and the raw material for a whole succession of books and short stories about life at sea. He dwelt in particular on the wilder and lesser-known areas of ocean.
His first novel was the eerie Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ (1907), followed by the even stranger 'Ghost Pirates' (1909). He began to exploit his interest in the Sargasso Sea through a series of interrelated tales which, strangely, have never been collected in a single volume, although there have been several anthologies of his best sea stories including 'The Luck of the Strong' (1916) and 'Men of Deep Waters' (1917).
William Hope Hodgson was killed while serving bravely with the Army in France in 1918, but it has taken well over half a century for his importance as a writer to be recognised. I am, therefore, pleased to be playing my own small part by returning to print one of his best Sargasso Sea stories, ‘The Finding of the Graiken' (1913) and would urge any reader who has not done so, to investigate the other works by this marvellous writer of sea mysteries.
When a year had passed, and still there was no news of the full-rigged ship Graiken, even the most sanguine of my old chum’s friends had ceased to hope perchance, somewhere, she might be above water.
Yet Ned Barlow, in his inmost thoughts, I knew, still hugged to himself the hope that she would win home. Poor, dear old fellow, how my heart did go out towards him in his sorrow!
For it was in the Graiken that his sweetheart had sailed on that dull January day some twelve months previously.
The voyage had been taken for the sake of her health; yet since then - save for a distant signal recorded at the Azores - there had been from all the mystery of ocean no voice; the ship and they within her had vanished utterly.
And still Barlow hoped. He said nothing actually, but at times his deeper thoughts would float up and show through the sea of his usual talk, and thus I would know in an indirect way of the thing that his heart was thinking.
Nor was time a healer.
It was later that my present good fortune came to me. My uncle died, and I - hitherto poor - was now a rich man. In a breath, it seemed, I had become possessor of houses, lands, and money; also - in my eyes almost more important - a fine fore-and-aft-rigged yacht of some two hundred tons register.