I should like to find that little picture of Henry Galleon's fairy book and place it as a frontispiece to this story. But Heaven alone knows where that old book has gone to! It was perhaps Galleon's own invention; he was a queer old man and went his own way and had his own fancies, possessions that many writers to-day are chary of keeping because they have been told on so many occasions by so many wise professors that they've got to stick to the Truth. Truth? Who knows what Truth may be? Platitudinous Pilate failed over that question many years ago, and to-day we are certainly as far as ever from an answer. There are a million Truths about Henry and Millicent and the times they lived in. Galleon's is at least one of them, and it's the one I've chosen because it happens to be the way I see them. But of course there are others.
"The whole Truth and nothing but the Truth." What absurdity for any story-teller in the world to think that he can get that--and what arrogance! This book is the truth about these children as near as I can get to it, and the truth about that strange year 1920 in that strange town, London, as faithfully as I can recollect, but it isn't everybody's Truth. Far from it--and a good thing too.
Henry's rooms were at the top of 24 Panton Street. To get to them you placed a Yale key in the lock of an old brown door, brushed your way through a dim passage, climbed a shabby staircase past the doors of the Hon. Nigel Bruce, Captain D'Arcy Sinclair, Claude Bottome, the singer, and old Sir Henry Bristow, who painted his face and wore stays. This was distinguished company for Henry who was at the beginning of his independent life in London, and the knowledge that he was in the very centre of the Metropolis, that the Comedy Theatre was nearly opposite his door and Piccadilly only a minute away gratified him so much that he did not object to paying three guineas a week for a small bed-sitting room _without_ breakfast. It was a _very_ small room, just under the roof, and Henry who was long and bony spent a good deal of his time in a doubled-up position that was neither aesthetic nor healthy. Three guineas a week is twelve pounds twelve shillings a month, and one hundred and fifty-one pounds four shillings a year. He had a hundred and fifty pounds a year of his own, left to him by his old grandfather, and by eager and even optimistic calculation he reckoned that from his literary labours he would earn at least another hundred pounds in his London twelve months. Even then, however, he would not have risked these handsome lodgings had he not only a month ago, through the kind services of his priggish brother-in-law, Philip Mark, obtained a secretaryship with Sir Charles Duncombe, Bart., at exactly one hundred and fifty pounds per annum.