Читать книгу Private Selby - Edgar Wallace - Страница 3

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SITTING down calmly to write the story of Dick Selby and all that came to him because of the Brown Lady, his "O.C.," I am terribly tempted to skip what may seem to be the unimportant periods of his life, and go straight to that wonder time of his. But were I to plunge into the heart of my story, and were I to begin my narrative with such a phrase as "This is the story of Selby, who from being a third-rate clerk, became the—" you might well call me to task for the strain I put upon credulity.

If, reading this story, you happen upon improbable combinations of circumstances, unlikely situations, events that stand on the outward rim of your belief, I would ask you to remember that Dick Selby had up to this time lived a most ordinary life. If the Brown Lady, Elise, had been your conventional prune and prism miss, this story would not have been written at all, for I could not bring myself to the recording of such thin romance as a conventional suburban courtship would afford.

I feel, in a degree, like a conjurer who, with pardonable ostentation, shows both sides of the handkerchief to his audience and hands the egg round for their inspection, to prove that all his paraphernalia is ordinary.

My hero, then, was an ordinary young man of the lower middle classes. He had but the dim outlines of an education, and if the Brown Lady had never existed, Dick Selby would have developed into a respectable obscure member of the community. He would have rented a little villa, furnished it on the hire-purchase system, gone to church on Sunday, and brought up, under considerable financial stress, a large family. As for his wife, I can imagine her—pert, with a ready and boisterous laugh, a little gauche, and a reader of Miss Corelli's admirable novels.

White Magic there is, wrought by pixies, fairies, elves, and woodland brownies; Black Magic, nearly associated with imps, hobgoblins, witches, and the dark legions of devilry; but it was Brown Magic that took Dick Selby, with his doubts, his unrest, his fume against circumstance, and made him what he eventually was, raising him to a position far higher than his merits alone could have raised him, lifting him so high, indeed, that there was a moment when the world halted momentarily to see what this lodger boy from Friendly Street would do.

This story is not intended to go forth as one founded upon fact: more extraordinary things have happened and will happen than are chronicled here. But if in my desire to show the British soldier at some advantage, I wander into the realms of improbability, it may be counted to my credit that, although I have placed my soldier here in remarkable environments, I have been careful to avoid exaggeration in describing the life of the soldier himself.