Three Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

saddler’s history of the plague; and therefore that no one
who writes stories of either, the devil or the plague, should forthwith be dismissed
as a forger or a thief.
    When, years ago, he resolved to set down on paper the story of his island, he found
that the words would not come, the pen would not flow, his very fingers were stiff
and reluctant. But day by day, step by step, he mastered the writing business, until
by the time of his adventures with Friday in the frozen north the pages were rolling
off easily, even thoughtlessly.
    That old ease of composition has, alas, deserted him. When he seats himself at the
little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand feels
as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before.
    Does he, the other one, that man of his, find the writing business easier? The stories
he writes of ducks and machines of death and London under the plague flow prettily
enough; but then so did his own stories once. Perhaps he misjudges him, that dapper
little man with the quick step and the mole upon his chin. Perhaps at this very moment
he sits alone in a hired room somewhere in this wide kingdom dipping the pen and
dipping it again, full of doubts and hesitations and second thoughts.
    How are they to be figured, this man and he? As master and slave? As brothers, twin
brothers? As comrades in arms? Or as enemies, foes? What name shall he give this
nameless fellow with whom he shares his evenings and sometimes his nights too, who
is absent only in the daytime, when he, Robin, walks the quays inspecting the new
arrivals and his man gallops about the kingdom making his inspections?
    Will this man, in the course of his travels, ever come to Bristol? He yearns to meet
the fellow in the flesh, shake his hand, take a stroll with him along the quayside
and hearken as he tells of his visit to the dark north of the island, or of his adventures
in the writing business. But he fears there will be no meeting, not in this life.
If he must settle on a likeness for the pair of them, his man and he, he would write
that they are like two ships sailing in contrary directions, one west, the other
east. Or better, that they are deckhands toiling in the rigging, the one on a ship
sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east. Their ships pass close, close enough
to hail. But the seas are rough, the weather is stormy: their eyes lashed by the
spray, their hands burned by the cordage, they pass each other by, too busy even
to wave.