I returned to Vauclaire, for it seemed now my home; and there I experienced a true, a deep repentance; and I humbled myself before my Maker. And while in this state, sitting one bright day in front of the monastery-gate, something said to me: “You will never be a good man, nor permanently escape Hell and Frenzy, unless you have an aim in life, devoting yourself heart and soul to some great work, which will exact all your science, your thought, your ingenuity, your knowledge of modern things, your strength of body and will, your skill of head and hand: otherwise you are bound to succumb. Do this, therefore, beginning, not tomorrow nor this afternoon, but now: for though no man will see your work, there is still the Almighty God, who is also something, in His way: and He will see how you strive, and try, and groan: and perhaps, seeing, He may have mercy upon you.”
In this way arose the idea of the Palace—an idea, indeed, which had entered my brain before, but merely as a bombastic and visionary outcome of my raving moods: now, however, in a very different way, soberly, and soon concerning itself with details, difficulties, means, limitations, and every kind of practical matter-of-fact; and every obstruction which, one by one, I foresaw was, one by one, as the days passed, overborne by the vigour with which that thought, rapidly becoming a mania, possessed me. After a week of incessant meditation, I decided Yes: and I said: I will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace worthy the King of Earth.
After this decision I remained at Vauclaire another week, a very different man to the lounger it had seen, strenuous, converted, humble, making plans of this and of that, of the detail, and of the whole, drawing, multiplying, dividing, adding, conic sections and the rule-of-three, totting up the period of building, which came out at a little over twelve years, estimating the quantities of material, weight and bulk, my nights full of nightmare as to the sort, deciding as to the size and structure of the crane, forge, and workshop, and the necessarily-limited weights of their component parts, making a list of over 2,400 objects, and finally, up to the third week after my departure from Vauclaire, skimming through the topography of nearly the whole earth, before fixing upon the island of Imbros for my site.
I returned to England, and, once more, to the hollow windows and strewn streets of black, burned-out and desolate London: for its bank-vaults, etc., contained the necessary complement of the gold brought from Paris, and then lying in the Speranza at Dover; nor had I sufficient familiarity with French industries and methods to find, even with the aid of Bottins, one half of the 4,000 odd objects which I had now catalogued. My ship was the Speranza, which brought me from Havre, for at Calais, to which I first went, I could find nothing suitable for all purposes, the Speranza being an American yacht, very palatially fitted, three-masted, air-driven, with a carrying capacity of 2,000 tons, Tobin-bronzed, in good condition, containing sixteen interacting tanks, with a five-block pulley-arrangement amidships that enables me to lift very considerable weights without the aid of the hoisting air-engine, high in the water, sharp, handsome, containing a few tons only of sand-ballast, and needing when I found her only three days’ work at the waterline and engines to make her decent and fit. I threw out her dead, backed her from the Outer to the Inner Basin to my train on the quai, took in the twenty-three hundredweight bags of gold, and the half-ton of amber, and with this alone went to Dover, thence to Canterbury by motor, and thence in a long train, with a store of dynamite from the Castle for blasting possible obstructions, to London: meaning to make Dover my depot, and the London rails my thoroughfare from all parts of the country.
Instead of three months, as I had calculated, it took me nine: a harrowing slavery. I had to blast no less than forty-three trains from the path of my loaded wagons, several times blasting away the metals as well, and then having to travel hundreds of yards without metals: for the labour of kindling the obstructing engines, to shunt them down sidings perhaps distant, was a thing which I would not undertake. However, all’s well that ends well, though if I had it to go through again, certainly I should not. The Speranza is now lying seven miles off Cape Roca, a heavy mist on the still water, this being the 19th of June at 10 in the night: no wind, no moon: cabin full of mist: and I pretty listless and disappointed, wondering in my heart why I was such a fool as to take all that trouble, nine long servile months, my good God, and now seriously thinking of throwing the whole vile thing to the devil; she pretty deep in the water, pregnant with the palace. When the thirty-three …
Those words: “when the thirty-three” were written by me over seventeen years since—long years—seventeen in number, nor have I now any idea to what they refer. The book in which I wrote I had lost in the cabin of the Speranza, and yesterday, returning to Imbros from an hour’s aimless cruise, discovered it there behind a chest.
I find now considerable difficulty in guiding the pencil, and these few lines now written have quite an odd look, like the handwriting of a man not very proficient in the art: it is seventeen years, seventeen, seventeen … ah! And the expression of my ideas is not fluent either: I have to think for the word a minute, and I should not be surprised if the spelling of some
