Chapter I

One Sunday afternoon I was driving through a sparsely settled region on the southwest slope of the Catskills. It was growing late and I was anxious to get back to New York, but I had lost my way. In an attempt to cut across to the Hudson River road I turned up a poorly traveled lane, which, after ten miles of going, petered out into a mere abandoned trail.

I kept on this for perhaps three miles further without passing a house, and then came to a low rambling structure half hidden among a grove of ancient overhanging trees. It was near lamp-lighting time and I was puzzled to know whether the place was deserted or not. I turned my car in toward the house, bumped over loose rocks--and my engine died.

A man appeared on the porch. He was lanky in build, a little stooped, apparently about forty years of age, and was dressed in a blue flannel shirt and a pair of corduroy trousers.

"Can you tell me how far it is to New York?" I asked.

"Yes."

"How far is it?"

"About a hundred miles as the crow flies."

"But how far is it by automobile?"

"I don't know," replied the man, who seemed to be better posted on crow flights than auto travel.

He offered no further remarks, but stood there indifferently eyeing the car.

Curbing my annoyance I inquired: "How do I get out to a good automobile road?"

"The way you came in."

Realizing that I could get no information from this uncivil being, I pushed the starter--not a sound. I got out and cranked the engine--not a kick. I looked into my gas tank--not a drop!

"Where is the nearest gas station?" I demanded.

"I don't know--I burn kerosene," was the terse reply; and the man turned and entered the house.

I tried to recall the last gas station I had passed, and realized it must have been all of fifteen miles behind. It was now growing dark. I climbed into the car to think of a way out of my awkward situation, but all I could think of was that there were sound reasons for abandoned farms. Then I got to wondering who this queer character was and why he was living here.

As I had slept but little the night before, I must have dozed off, for the next thing I knew, a voice was saying: "Supper is ready."

I got out of the car and followed the man through a dark hall into a large, low room, at one end of which a fire was burning briskly in a huge stone fireplace. In the center of the room was a table where we sat down to a dinner of delicious hot biscuits and a great pot of honey.

"These biscuits are fine," I said.

"They are."

I ate another in silence. "And the honey is exquisite."

"It is."

"Do you keep bees?"

"Yes, millions of them."

"Do you keep any other stock?" I asked, thinking a glass of milk would taste fine.

"Yes, a blind cat."

"Do you find the bees profitable?"

"No, I keep them for company."

"Why do you live in this lonesome place?"

"To avoid automobilists."

I ate three more biscuits, drowned in honey, then the silence became unbearable. "Do you do anything else besides keep bees?"

"I read."

"That is interesting. What do you read?"

"Books."

"Ah!" I said, "perhaps you write also."

"I do."

"What do you write?"

"Books."

We finished the meal in silence, then my host arose and cleared the table. Meanwhile I wandered about the big room and glanced at the titles on the bookshelves. I was amazed at the catholicity of his taste. Side by side, with Godesius was "In His Steps"; leaning against Schopenhauer's "_Die Welt Als Wille Und Vorstellung_," was a popular novel of the day.

Thus made to realize that my host was a person of some caliber, and aspiring to pursue his acquaintance upon an intellectual plane, I stepped forward, as he came through the door, and extended my hand, saying: "My name is Harold Hersey."

"What of it?" he said, and turned to adjust a kerosene lamp. Then he came forward and extended his hand. "I will not say I am glad to meet you until I find out that I am."

"Your name?" I inquired.

"Dan Spain."

"That sounds like a nom de plume," I ventured.

"It is."

Feeling that there was nothing further that I could say, I pulled out my pipe and seated myself before the fire.

Dan Spain settled into a chair nearby. "The fact that your name is Harold Hersey means nothing to me," he remarked, "but as I presume that you will spend the night here, I might be able to make it less disagreeable for you if I knew your trade or occupation."

I have always been a little sensitive about revealing my profession to strangers, because, unfortunately, some men do not regard it highly; so I replied: "What would you judge me to be from my appearance?"

"A cigar salesman."

I hastened to controvert him. "Looks are deceiving," I said, "I am a writer."

So I read him the following. There was a curious silence afterwards:

_When the limpid highbrows chatter And their candlelights are low; When their purple souls are bitter From discussing thus and so, And the Lucy Stoners twitter In some frowsy studio;_

_When the fat-legged mantees mutter And you see their eyeballs twitch; When the parlor wobblies hover Around the newly rich, And the men of bread-and-butter Get the "art-for-art's-sake" itch...._

_Then I don't regret the making Of this idle verse of mine, And my pickling by the Poohbahs In their literary brine, Nor the gesture of a Burdash For not hewing to the line._

_My humor is the laughter From life's tickled ribs. It's rough, For it's written from the raw Where I like to get my stuff, And it ought to rise in letters: Goodness knows it's light enough._

"It is nothing to be ashamed of," said Dan Spain, "I once worked in a slaughter house."

"What books have you had published?" I asked after a time.

"None."

Having had a number of books published myself, I felt that I might be of some service to this hermit scholar who had evidently not adjusted himself to the practical exigencies of the publishing business. "It is just possible," I suggested, "that my experiences and acquaintances might enable me to help you get some of your work in print--that is, if you would care to tell me what you are writing."

Dan Spain leaned over and attended the fire. After poking it to his satisfaction, he picked up a live coal and dropped it in the bowl of his pipe. Finally he spoke, and his words were startling enough. "Just at present," he said, "I am writing an autobiography of God."

There was a sudden rattle at the shutter.

"What was that?" I asked nervously.

Dan Spain laughed. "Wind," he replied, "wind through the trees. Lightning may strike us dead at any moment because of my blasphemous ambitions. That is why I live as a hermit--should God's lightning strike at me, there will be no complications through it hitting an innocent bystander. You are the first person who has spent a night under this roof with me. I am sorry to subject you to the danger, but you came without an invitation."

"But why," I asked, "do you want to write a blasphemous book? You are aware, I suppose, that it might be suppressed."

"In a country, the constitution of which guarantees freedom of speech and religious liberty, I grant the possibility."

"Then why," I persisted, "do you want to write it?"

"Because," said Spain, "I am tired of tempering the wind of truth to the lamb of stupidity. Must we so fear the anger of the childish mob, that we dare not deprive them of their fairy tales of ghosts and gobblins, lest they kick out the props of civilizations? Must we, who no longer bend the knees of the mind in spook idolatry nor shake with the ague of hell fear, pretend that science and religion have been reconciled and mumble incantations to a metaphysical essence instead of saying to a maternal God to open the windows of the sky and spill rain out of heaven? I want to write a blasphemous book because the gods who throttle human intelligence and block human progress have revealed their vulnerable spot--for they are the gods who fear laughter."

"But surely?" I said, "all that is old stuff--Ingersoll has been dead twenty years. Present day thinkers only smile indulgently when some handsome faced bucolic clergyman invades a metropolitan pulpit and gets the forgotten monkey argument into the headlines of the daily press. Modern philosophy has reconciled religion and science and shown that they hail from the same psychic origins."

"The dictionary has never been made a sacred book," returned Spain, "and I cannot try men for heresy who blaspheme it. If a man wishes to designate the emotions he experiences when gazing at the stars by the term 'religion' I cannot prevent him. My dictionary defines religion as 'a belief in binding the spirit of man to a supernatural being' and further includes the idea of duties and rites founded upon such belief. If that be religion the war between religion and science can never end. The particular battle ground may change from age to age; it may be concerned with the mobility of the sun, the origin of species or the immaculate conception...."

"Well what of it," I remarked, "those things are all relatively unimportant."

"True" said Spain, "they are, but science has a job in the future that is vastly important and religion stands in its way."

"And what is that?" I asked.

"It is the job of saving civilization from degenerating into a chaos besides which the dark ages, medievalism would seem Bericlean by comparison. As we are headed now we are on the road for a grand smash. The growing complexities of civilization can only be managed by a human breed of superior capacity, and instead of breeding a race of better men we are letting the inborn capacity of the human species regress and degenerate.

"Natural selection or the survival of the fittest raised us up from brutes, and civilization stops the operation of that law which made it possible. Blind charity preserves the rabbitries of stupidity--the differential birth rate snuffs out the flame of innate intelligence. The only visible salvation is systematic breeding of superior men; and against human breeding religion stands garbed in all her mummeries, shielding behind her wish fancies of immortality, the leering face of the ape man returned to prowl in the ruins of all we have builded.

"The little priests of religion play in sweet innocence with their hopes of heaven having not the least conception of the human drift. But the high priests of religion know very well on which side their bread is buttered. They know that spook worship thrives only in the soil of stupidity. They will fight to the last ditch against any serious effort to breed men for brains. Their creeds are smoothly schemed to block intelligence in its efforts at biological perpetuation. The fable of a ghostly paternity of the human species fits their purpose like a glove. By inoculating the new-born human animal with a fantasy called a soul they clothe the act of reproduction with a garb of sanctification and endow all sexual and parental functions with rites so skillfully ingrained into popular thought that men who renounce the more patent absurdities of theology are still soaked in the sacramental conception of reactionary morality whenever it touches the reproduction of the species. So they hope to maintain our present scheme of mongrel breeding which is fast blotting out the hard won grains of the tedious climb of human evolution and riding us for a smash of the fabric of civilization, because the children of the stupid cannot maintain the structure we have wrought."

"But surely," I said, "you do not intend to propound such ponderous biological and sociological doctrines in an autobiography of your god--if you do so I am sure it will be very dull. I had hoped you had in mind some readable piece of literary composition."

"So I had; I was not telling you what I intended to write. You asked me why I wanted to write it. The god who mustn't be laughed at could make himself very ridiculous by setting down the story of his life. He should not be a metaphysical concept. I should prefer a nice old man with robe and halo and whiskers--I am sure he should have whiskers."

"And just when," I asked, "would you have him born?"

"I don't know," replied Spain, "I have stalled on eternity. I find it quite an awkward span of life to cover in a manuscript."

"Why not dodge the difficulty," I suggested, "by having your story begin the day after eternity."

Spain turned his gaze upon me with a twinkling light in his eyes. "Young man," he said, "No wonder you tried to drive an automobile without gasoline--you are suffering from a touch of genius.

"I shall doubtless need aid," confessed Spain, more cordial, I felt, than he had previously seemed.

As I caught the flame of enthusiasm in this man's conviction, my heart warmed to him. I found myself interested in his proposed "Autobiography of God"--interested and critical. "It might amuse you," I said, "to know that somewhere among my own writing notes I have this item jotted down. 'A tale that should begin the day after eternity.'"

Dan Spain looked at me, his eyes twinkling, "Not half bad," he said.

And so began an exchange of suggestions, a mutual laying on the table of the most guarded treasures of one's over-reaching ambitions to write the impossible.

As the night wore on our wits sharpened each on the other, and before dawn broke, Dan Spain and I both realized that we had cast in outline form the skeleton of a most ambitious piece of writing. Then we awoke to the fact, that we, who were acquaintances of a single session had joined our wits to create something that could not be disentangled without its destruction.

"And now," I said, "who is going to write this tale of the adventures of the great god Gud?"

"We must write it together," replied Spain, "nothing else would be honest."

There followed a period of intermittant work that strung out through several seasons. We worked sometimes alone; at other times I spent week-ends at Spain's hermitage, and on a few occasions I dragged the hermit down to my quarters in Greenwich Village. As the manuscript gathered bulk, I arranged for its typing, having always a copy made for each of us.

During the summer of 1924, I spent most of the month of July at Spain's hermitage and we got the book completed, though there were still many parts of it on which we had serious differences of opinion. Taking my draft with me, I went back to New York, where I had to attend to some neglected editorial duties.

Spain had agreed to come down to my place on the week-end of August thirtieth for a final effort to see if we could reconcile our differences of opinion.

The intervening weather in the city was oppressive and I did no further work on the manuscript. When August thirtieth arrived Spain did not show up. I waited for him another week and then drove my car up to his hermitage in the Catskills.

I bumped over the stones of the miserable trail and brought my car to a halt in front of where Spain's house had stood. Before me I saw a yawning circle of trees with the inner sides scorched and withered, and the great gaunt stone chimney alone now rearing from a heap of ashes.

The combustion had been complete. Not a charred stick remained. All was white ash, and well packed down, for it had rained heavily a few nights before.

The evidence of that rain sent my mind hurtling back in review of the weather since Spain had left New York. I remembered that one night a few days before Spain was due to return I had found my apartment so oppressive that I had gone to Brighton Beach. As I lay on the sands, it must have been toward midnight, a squall had driven across the sky and there had been a bit of a blow and a magnificent electrical display, but only a few heavy drops of rain had fallen.

Brighton Beach was over a hundred miles from this spot in the Catskills, and the weather in the two locations might have been wholly dissimilar. Still it was suggestive of the worst possible fears.

I looked about for something with which I could prod into the debris. The only thing available was a great twisted steel lightning rod that reared up through the ashes. The result of my effort was a discovery from which I recoiled.

For a moment I found it expedient to step away from the place. In doing so, I unconsciously dragged the piece of lightning rod along with me. Behind a screen of foliage I sat down weakly. Presently, my eyes followed along that lightning rod, and I noted that one end was freshly broken where I had bent it until it snapped in two. But the other end had been the tip that pointed skyward above the house. This I now saw was fused and melted in a way that no heat of a burning wood could have possibly accomplished.

I need write but little of the duties that followed. Suffice to say, that every paper that might have revealed more than my slight knowledge of Spain's origin or connections had been destroyed. The county records yielded nothing except the deed to his property purchased the year before I met him. There was nothing for me to do but turn matters over to the local authorities and let the law take its course.

I returned to New York and slept off the weariness the ordeal had engendered.

Then I went to my desk and produced my draft of "The Book of Gud" and turned slowly through it. It was all there, a complete manuscript, but including many things on which our differences of opinion had not been reconciled--and Dan Spain was dead!

Gradually the responsibilities of my position dawned upon me. I was joint author of "The Book of Gud." However, my "partner in crime" was dead. We had written much of the prose together although much of it was by Spain alone. The verse was mine.

How helpless I felt with this gigantic task staring me in the face!

Sensing keenly the sacred trust of fidelity to the intent of a dead author, I did not feel at liberty to make the changes in Spain's draft that I felt should be made. Yet, if my name were to be on the jacket of this book, I did not feel that I could possibly let some of the things in Spain's draft pass without registering my protest. Conversely I must, in all fairness, concede that he had felt the same about some of my lines.

My decision on going over the work the first time was that all I could do was to let the manuscript pass on to the world exactly as it was when God's lightning stilled forever the pen of Dan Spain.

However, upon going over the manuscript a second time, I found my instincts as an editor overwhelming this excellent resolution. For several months I was torn between my conscience as a writer with its full sense of duty to a dead author and my editorial conscience with its fuller sense of duty to the reading public--and I did nothing with the manuscript.

But at last a great compromising thought occurred to me. I could leave the manuscript stand intact, but I could write a preface in which I could explain the dreadful dilemma in which the death of my collaborator left me, and why I do not feel, under the distressing circumstances, that I should be held responsible for those parts of Spain's draft which do not meet my approval. My decision has made possible the publication of "The Book of Gud"; for otherwise I should have burned my copy also.

It is my hope that this explanation will mitigate the wrath of many readers, for it is a beautiful fact about human nature that it rarely holds the dead as responsible as it does the living.

I frankly confess that it has been a task to hold to this resolution, for I have been sorely tempted to delete as well as comment on some of Spain's text. As proof of my integrity in this matter, I have even left in the text of the book a note addressed to me by Spain in which he has expressed his contempt for my work in a most ungentlemanly manner.

I hold that the canons of literary ethics do not permit one to alter a dead man's manuscript. If they did, how quickly we could enrich the literary heritage of American children by expurgating the classics of Europe and rewriting them in a style acceptable to the American sense of decency.

To some very literally minded persons it may seem that the view just expressed is not consistent with my capacity as a joint author of "The Book of Gud." Let me therefore discount any such criticisms by explaining that the evil effects of literature all come from its realism. "The Book of Gud" is romantic and symbolic. There is true beauty in symbolism because of the variety of possible interpretations. Each reader can gain the meaning particularly adapted to himself.

The greatest art is that which can be interpreted in the most devious ways: Witness the character of Hamlet, the enigma of Mona Lisa, the riddle of the Book of Revelations. To me Hamlet is the personification of a weak will in a strong mind, due to the European habit of inbreeding royalty. Mona Lisa, I believe, reveals the patience of a great woman who knows that she will ultimately get what she wants. The Book of Revelation I deem to be a symbolic anticipation of the Darwinian theory of man's descent from prehistoric animals.

In "The Book of Gud" there is great symbolism, and in symbolism there can be nothing degrading, as each mind interprets it according to its own intellectual and moral plane. Hence there can never be degradation in symbolic literature, except for degraded minds.

Here then is "The Book of Gud"; and, with the exception of this preface, I bow to the principle that death should end an author's work and so it should remain, even as Sodom and Gomorrah, Pompeii and Herculaneum remained as they were when fire rained down on them from Heaven.

(Signed),

HAROLD HERSEY.

London, England, April First, 1925.