I

One day in October while that table talk of Keppel's was still very vivid in the mind of Mr. Joseph Davis, G. B. Query, his Literary Agent, called to see him and discuss his prospects for the coming year. How was the great work getting on about which Davis had spoken a year ago? Was it sufficiently in shape to negotiate? What had he called it after all? The Glorious Succession? Sword and Cross? The Undying Past? Our Mighty Heritage? Grand Parade of Humanity?

G. B. Q. couldn't remember. G. B. Q. had heard nothing about Davis for months. He was quite out of touch.

Davis stood defiantly in front of his study fire.

'I've not looked at it for half a year,' he said.

'I've decided at last—I'm not going to finish it. Ever. It's on the wrong lines.'

'But you had done a lot of work upon it. You even let me see some passages. They seemed to me quite a splendid beginning.'

'It got more and more splendid. It became like an altar screen of saints and heroes. It became like a cathedral. It became like the great grotto at Han. It became a sort of compendium of all the epics and sagas and all the patriotic history and all the romance and all the brave stuff human beings have told themselves about themselves since the very beginning of things. It took on more colour and more. It blew out like a magnificent bubble. And it burst. There's heaps of it in these drawers.'

'But—' protested Mr. Query. 'The Pageant of Mankind.'

'The bankruptcy,' said Davis compactly.

'You of all people! You're not joining the pessimists!?'

'Have you never heard of the Martians?'

'But that I thought was just a pseudo–scientific mystification.'

'It's a fact. Our world is in liquidation. We are played out. And they are coming, they are coming now, to succeed us and make a new world.'

Mr. Query considered this announcement. It was not his business to measure the mental balance of his clients. Davis was not joking. He believed what he was saying, simply and entirely.

'Maybe you will write something about that?' said Mr. Query.

'I belong to the bankrupt system,' said Davis, 'one of the inconvertibles—one of the encumbrances. Gradually as our agreements fall in I mean all my books to go out of print.'

Mr. Query opened out his hand helplessly. On the spur of the moment he could summon no argument against this immense withdrawal.

'A new world is coming,' said Davis, 'and I have tied myself to the old. I know better now, but there it is.'

Query roused himself to say something more, but he knew the case was hopeless even while he spoke. He didn't argue now. He lamented.

'Just now,' he said. 'When people need encouragement. They feel so doubtful. Where they are going? What is happening? Even about the Coronation? Perplexing issues everywhere. Armament? After the Peace Ballot! America too. Profoundly unsettled. And now you too! Your book would have been a great success—a heartening success. A certainty. It would have sold like hot cakes. Even H. V. Morton would have had to look to his laurels….'

He stood up. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

'It is a very great pity.'