The Project Gutenberg EBook of Schwartz: A History, by David Christie Murray

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Title: Schwartz: A History
From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray

Author: David Christie Murray

Release Date: August 8, 2007 [EBook #22271]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY

By David Christie Murray

Author Of 'Aunt Rachel,' 'The Weaker Vessel,' Etc.

SCHWARTZ: A HISTORY

I

I was expatriated by a man with an axe. The man and the axe were alike
visionary and unreal, though it needed a very considerable effort of
the will to hold them at mental arm's length. I had work on hand which
imperatively demanded to be finished, and I was so broken down by a long
course of labour that it was a matter of actual difficulty with me when
I sat down at my desk of a morning to lay hold of the thread of last
night's work, and to recall the personages who had moved through my
manuscript pages for the past three or four months. The day's work
always began with a fog, which at first looked impenetrable, but would
brighten little by little until I could see my ideal friends moving in
it, and could recognise their familiar lineaments. Then the fog would
disperse altogether, and a certain indescribable, exultant, feverish
brightness would succeed it, and in this feverish brightness my ideal
friends would move and talk as it were of their own volition.

But one morning--it was in November, and the sand-tinged foam flecks
caught from the stormy bay were thick on the roadway before my
window--the fog was thicker and more obdurate than common. I read and
re-read the work of the day before, and the written words conveyed no
meaning. In a dim sort of way this seemed lamentable, and I remember
standing at the window, and looking out to where the white crests of the
waves came racing shorewards under a leaden-coloured sky, and saying to
myself over and over again, 'Oh, that way madness lies!' but without
any active sentiment of dismay or fear, and with a clouded, uninterested
wonder as to where the words came from. Quite suddenly I becam