And had he not been torpedoed? Cast ashore in shirt and trousers, penniless? Was not the real truth of this adventure even more to his credit than the fictitious narrative? For, a naval rating, he had reported to a British man-of-war, and had spent months in a mine sweeper in the North Sea, until the final catastrophe occurred. Then, after a short time in hospital a kindly medical board found something wrong with his heart and sent him out into the English world, a free man. Yes. His real record was one that no man need be ashamed of. Why, then, the fiction? Sitting there in the uncompromising reality of his mother’s kitchen, he strove for the first time to answer the question. He found an answer in the obsession of the little book. During the scant leisure of his months at sea it had been his breviary. More, it had been a talisman, a secret scroll of enchantment which, wrapped in oilskin, never left his person, save when, beneath the dim lamp of the fo’c’sle, he pored over it, hunched up against a bulkhead. The spirit of the writer whom he had seen dead and naked, seemed to have descended upon him. In the bitter watches of the North Sea he lived through the dead man’s life with bewildering intensity. There were times, so he assured himself, when it became a conscious effort to unravel his own experiences from those of the dead man. That he had not lived in remoter Kurdistan was unthinkable. And, surely too, he had been tortured. And when, in the attic in Cherbury Mews, impelled by irresistible force, he began to write his fantasia of fact and imagination, the obsession grew mightier. His pen was winged with flame. “Why,” said he, half aloud, one day, staring into the kitchen fire, “why should it not be a case of psychic obsession for which I am not responsible?” And that was the most comforting solution he could find.