Still, that book had got to be written, and was going to be written. And one happy night the whole matter of that famous second chapter was manifested to me. As far as I remember, in the original design, Lucian was at this point to be packed off to London to the miseries of the inevitable garret; now it seemed that there were further adventures for him in his native country. I thought of these and wrote them and so got the opportunity of dwelling a little longer among the dear woods and the domed hills and the memorable vales of my native Gwent, of trying once more to set down some faint echoes of the inexpressive song that the beloved land always sang to me and still sings across all the waste of weary years. Then I found somewhere or other, the recipe for the “Roman Chapter,” an attempted recreation of the Roman British world of Isca Silurum, Caerleon-on-Usk, the town where I was born, and soaked myself so thoroughly in the vision of the old golden city—now a little desolate village—and listened so long in the deep green of Wentwood for the clangour of the marching Legion and for the noise of their trumpets that I grew quite “dithery” as they say in some parts of England. I would go out on my dim Bloomsbury strolls, deep in my dream, and would “come to myself” with a sudden shock in Lamb’s Conduit Street or Mecklenburgh Square or in the solitudes of Great Coram Street, realizing certainly, that I was not, in actuality, in the Garden of Avallaunins or delaying in the Via Nympharum or on the Pons Saturni—it is called Pont Sadwrn to this day—but utterly at a loss to know exactly where I was or what I was doing, without the faintest notion of the various positions of north and south, east and west, and not at all clear as to how I was to get home to Gray’s Inn and my lunch. And it was in this queer way that the fourth chapter was accomplished. I was somewhat proud of it, and went on gaily through Chapters Five, Six and Seven, and had a month’s holiday in Provence, and came back to finish my book, feeling confident and in the best of spirits.
Alas! my pride had a deep fall indeed. I read over those last three chapters and saw suddenly that they were all hopelessly wrong, that they would not do at any price, that I had turned, unperceiving, from the straight path by ever so little, and had gone on, getting farther and farther away from the true direction till the way was hopelessly lost. I was in the middle of a black wood and I could not see any path out of it.
There was only one thing to be done. The three condemned chapters went into the drawer and I began over again from the end of Chapter Four. Five and Six were done, and then again I struggled desperately for many weeks, trying to find the last chapter. False tracks again, hopeless efforts, spoilt folios thick about me till by some chance or another, I know not how, the right notion was given me, and I wrote the seventh and last chapter in a couple of nights. Once more the thought of the old land had come to my help; the book was finished. It had occupied from first to last the labour of eighteen months.
Then I began to send the manuscript round to the publishers. The result would have melted the heart of the sourest cynic. To those hard men of business, as they are sometimes called, time was nothing, kindness everything. They wrote me, one after another, long letters in small writing on large quarto paper. They all implored me, as I loved them, not to publish this book because, as they explained, it was so poor and weak and dull that its publication would ruin what little reputation I had gained before.
One of these good men went farther. A month or two after he had refused The Hill of Dreams on folios of in quarto kindness, I saw amongst the “literary announcements” in some paper a paragraph which interested me deeply. It ran something like this:
“Mr. Blank the publisher and Mr. Dash an eminent man of letters have got hold of a promising idea for a romance. They propose, so Mr. Blank tells me, to describe the adventures of a lad who lives partly in the life of today and partly in the Roman world of the second century of our era. The plan seems a novel and arresting one and I look forward to reading the book next spring. The collaborators have not yet thought of a title for what should be a striking story.”
I chuckled. I knew that lad and whence he came: from Chapter Four of my MS. However, nothing more was heard of him in his revised and improved form. The Hill of Dreams was published in 1907, ten years after it had been finished.
