Читать книгу Her Reputation - Talbot Mundy - Страница 4

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It has happened, times out of number, that in mid-Africa, in India, in the deserts of Transjordan*—on an ant-heap in the drought, or in the mud of the tropical rain—I have felt a yearning for white lights, a dress suit and a tall silk hat, that corresponds, I suppose, in some degree to the longing a city man feels for those open spaces and far countries which it has been my destiny to wander in and to write about. A traveler, if he is wise, comes home at intervals to meet old friends and to remind himself that a gentler, more conventional world exists, in which events occur and problems arise, and in which delightful people live and move and have their being.

[* Transjordan—The Emirate of Transjordan was an autonomous political division of the British Mandate of Palestine, created as an administrative entity in April 1921 before the Mandate came into effect. It was geographically equivalent to today's Kingdom of Jordan, and remained under the nominal auspices of the League of Nations, until its independence in 1946. Excerpted from Wikipedia. ]

Writing books is only another phase of living life—reliving it, perhaps, in which the appeal of the stiff white shirt transforms itself into a desire to write "civilized" stories. So this story, which is in an entirely different field from my usual haunts in Africa and India, may be said to represent a home-coming, between long journeys; and I hope the public, which has followed me with such encouraging persistence to comparatively unknown places, will concede that I still know how to behave myself in a civilized setting.

But this story is no more mine than is the life of the big cities into which I plunge at long, uncertain intervals. To Bradley King, chief of the Thomas H. Ince staff of editors, belongs the credit for the plot; her genius, art and imagination, and the creative vision of my friend Thomas Ince combined to produce a plan of narrative, now lavishly offered to the eye in a motion picture, which appealed me so strongly that the impulse to transform it into a written book was irresistible. The writing has been a delight to me, and I trust it may prove as entertaining to the public.

Bradley King detected, tracked, ran down and caught the idea for the story —a much more difficult thing to do than those who have never hunted such elusive game will ever guess. She trained it to perform; I wrote this book; and Mr. Ince has made the picture. We hope the book will be accepted by the reader, as it was written, purely to entertain; and that fellow newspaper men will recognize the friendly and entirely sympathetic illustration of the way in which the mighty and far-reaching power of the Press occasionally is abused by individuals.

—T.M.