Robert Wilson - Julian Comstock - A Story of 22-nd Century America

There are all sorts of noises around an army camp: army engineers banging wood for inscrutable purposes, army blacksmiths bending horseshoes on an anvil, infantrymen at target practice, and any number of other clattery pursuits. But most of those sounds had abated on account of the Sabbath. What I heard was a sound that could be mistaken, at a distance, for the irregular knocking of a woodpecker on a tree, or a boy drummer unsuccessfully attempting some novel rhythm. But the sound had a brittler, more mechanical quality than that; and once my curiosity was engaged I could think of nothing else but to track the noise to its source.

Its approximate source, I soon discerned, was a square canvas tent situated up a sloping meadow that became, farther east, a respectable hill. The tent’s flaps were open so I wandered past it, hands clasped behind my back, feigning indifference but sparing a subtle glance or two inside. But it was difficult to see inside in any meaningful way―my vision was hampered not just by the shade of the canvas but by an obscuring miasma of tobacco and hemp smoke, which wafted into the sunshine in coiling exhalations as if the tent itself were alive and breathing―and I had to make several passes before I could discern the agency responsible for so much smoke and noise: it was a man seated at a flimsy wooden table, working a machine.

My effort to remain inconspicuous was apparently not successful, for on my seventh or eighth pass the mysterious man called out, “Stop hovering there, whoever you are!” His voice was rough, and he spoke with a nasal accent not unlike Julian’s. “Come in or go out―I don’t care which―but choose one.”

“I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I said hastily.

“I was disturbed before you came along; don’t take all the credit… What are you staring at?”

“That machine,” I admitted, taking an uninvited step into the shade, and resisting the temptation to hold my breath. As my vision adapted to the dim light I could see that the man had equipped himself with an ashtray, pipe, leather poke-bag, and a flask that added the astringent odor of alcohol to the already dizzying assortment of musks in the air. He was not dressed as an infantryman, and in fact he seemed to be a civilian. His clothes were threadbare and patched but must have been respectable at one time. He wore a narrow hat slouched over his eyes.

But this was only a sparing assay of the man, for I was much more interested in the machine.

The machine, though not much larger than a generously-proportioned bread box, was as intricate as a pocket watch turned inside-out, finished in black enamel and studded with round ridged buttons on which letters were etched, one per key. A sheet of paper was squeezed around a cylinder like a rolling pin set behind all this, and words were printed on the page.

“It’s a typewriter,” the man said. “I suppose they don’t have typewriters in whatever hamlet you hail from.”

I ignored this implied insult to Williams Ford and said, “You mean it’s a printing press? Are you making a book?” (For I had not yet inquired into the mechanics of book-making, and I guessed this might be the way books were manufactured: by grubby men copying them one letter at a time.) “Do I look like a publisher to you? You ought not to impose on my hospitality and then insult me.”

“My name is Adam Hazzard,” I said.

“Theodore Dornwood,” he muttered, and returned his attention to the business before him.

“That’s an admirable machine,” I persisted, “even if it’s not a printing press. What do you do with it? Do you make signs or notices?”

“I’m not a publisher, I’m not a sign-maker, and I’m not even a company clerk. My station in life is below all those. I’m a writer.”

That startled me―I had never seen a writer before, nor met anyone who described himself as one. My eyes widened; and I exclaimed without much in the way of forethought, “So am I!”

Mr. Dornwood caught the smoke from his pipe the wrong way and began to cough.

“At least,” I added, “that’s my ambition. I mean one day to write books such as the ones by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton―I assume you’ve heard of him?”

“Of course I’ve heard of him. His books litter all the stalls in Hudson Street.”

“Where is Hudson Street, then?” (Thinking that if this street were in Montreal I might be willing to part with some of my Army pay in order to catch up with Mr. Easton’s recent work.) “Manhattan,” Mr. Theodore Dornwood said, casting a glance at the page in his typewriter with a certain rueful longing.

“You’re a New York writer, then?”

“I correspond for the Spark. ”

The Spark was a New York City newspaper. I had never seen a copy―of the Spark, or any other newspaper―but Julian had mentioned it once or twice as a popular if vulgar daily journal.

“Is that what you’re doing now―corresponding?”

“No! Just at the moment I’m passing the time with every idle infantryman who happens to wander by; but I was working, curiously enough, before you began hovering at the tent-flap.”

Since Theodore Dornwood came from Manhattan I was tempted to ask whether he had met Julian Comstock there, or passed him on the streets; but I remembered that any careless identification of Julian as a Comstock might attract the attention of Julian’s murderous uncle. [And Deklan Conqueror must be uniquely sinister, I had lately thought, if he was more dangerous to confront than a legion of armed and angry Dutchmen. The difference, Sam explained, was that our enlistment would only last a year or so, while the threat from Julian’s uncle would persist throughout his reign.]

Therefore I left Julian’s name out of the discussion and said, “Well, I wish I had a machine as fine as that one. Do all New York writers own one?”

“The privileged few.”

“How does it work?”

“You push the keys―like this, see?―and the letters are impressed on the paper―at least when the operator is allowed sufficient privacy in which to work.”

“Isn’t it a slow process, compared to handwriting?”

“Faster, if you’re trained to it, and the finished manuscript is easier to set as copy… Hazzard, you said your name was? Are you the soldier who’s been teaching these country boys their letters?”

The lessons I gave Lymon Pugh had been so successful that a few other infantrymen had begged to be included. I was pleased that Mr. Dornwood had heard of me. “I’m the one.”

“And you write, too?” He inhaled from his pipe and gave out a Vesuvius-load of smoke. The pungent air in the tent was beginning to make me feel light-headed, though it seemed to have no such effect on Dornwood, who must have saturated himself in his vices so long that he had acquired an immunity to them. (He wasn’t old, in the sense that Sam Godwin was old, but he was at least ten years older than myself―old enough to be hardened to his own bad habits.) “What are you working on at the moment, Adam Hazzard?”

I blushed at the question and said, “Well, I do keep paper and pencils handy… though I don’t have a writing-machine with springs and levers… I mark down a word or two from time to time…”

“No modesty between scribblers,” said Dornwood. “Fiction, is it?”

“Yes―a story about a Western boy kidnapped by Chinese traders, and taken to sea against his will, and when he escapes his captors he falls in with pirates, but what they don’t know is―”

“I see. And how many pirates have you met, Adam Hazzard?”

The question took me by surprise. “In life? Well―none.”

“But you must have studied them extensively, from a distance?”