PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION
To offer a volume of short stories to the countrymen of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry is an operation which requires nerve. According to my publisher it also requires "a foreword" which I find, after consultation with the dictionary, is the same thing as a preface. Now to write a preface to one's own book seems to me about as embarrassing a task as any author can be asked to undertake. It is like standing outside the front door calling the attention of indifferent passers-by to the more attractive features of one's own house. They managed things better in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when for a comparative trifle some great artist like John Dryden was cheerfully prepared to furnish a flattering introduction to the work of any author on the simple understanding that he was not expected to read the volume in question.
Not possessing the pen of Dryden, and being additionally handicapped by the fact that I have read the accompanying stories, I find myself very much at a loss how to fulfil my publishers' request. Desperate situations demand desperate remedies, and I will, therefore, tell the truth. I wrote these stories in order to satisfy an inward craving—not for artistic expression, but for food and drink. I took a great deal of trouble over them, and if they are not good they are at least as good as I could make them. I should not, however, have had the audacity to offer them to the American public in book form, except for the fact that they have sold well and are continuing to sell well in England. The most curious phenomena occasionally repeat themselves, and it is with a wistful hope that something of the sort may occur in the present case that I venture to launch the Scandal on the time-honoured trail of Columbus.
VICTOR BRIDGES.
CHELSEA; LONDON,
January 2, 1920.