THIS IS ALBION GIDLEY SINGER at the pen, a man with a weakness for a good fact. The first fact is always the hardest: you have to begin somewhere, and such is the nature of this intractable universe that the only thing you can start with is yourself. If I am nothing else, I am at least a link in the endless chain of proof which stretches back to a time when Albion Gidley Singer cannot even be imagined.
Mirrors show me a tall man with a splendid head, and a mouth that would never weaken. That person in the mirror has been so many solid things. He has always been a gentleman, and in addition he has been a son, a husband, and a father. He has been a customer in shops where long yellow gloves were laid out before him on glass, he has been a drinker on sawdust, and in the hushed leathery air of the best clubs. He has been a man in plus-fours, a man in a wing collar, a man in a nightshirt, a man in a striped bathing-suit. He has even been a praying man, staring at the dust between his knees and looking forward to lunch. He has been all these things with exceptional completeness, and has convinced the world, and himself.
I move from room to empty room in my house, inspecting the objects that I own. In the muffled air of the closed drawing-room I grasp a poker and hear it rattle against the grate; in the entrance hall, where no one enters now, I feel the marble of the hall-stand cold against my palm; in the gleaming dining-room I grasp the Dresden shepherd on the sideboard, and find the flute in his silly pink hand snapping off between my fingers: but these things remain strangers to me.
That dining-room is all chairs now, drawn up tightly against the table with the spindles grinning at me. Now that there is no one to sit in them, those chairs are multiplying, and the blank sheen of the table fills the entire room.
This is Albion Gidley Singer at the pen, locked in behind his mahogany, filling the silence around himself with the busy squeak of the nib across the paper. I will begin where I always like to begin, with a fact. Once upon a time, there was a man and his daughter, and all was well. There was a man and his daughter, that was a definite fact, and nothing a man need be ashamed of. I have never been ashamed of any fact, and I am not a mumbler: I like the way my face vibrates with the resonance of my voice as I declare a fact, and my chest swells. My voice fills the room completely, corner to corner and up to the ceiling like a smell.
I am in danger of becoming irrational. At any moment I will begin tittering. Grip yourself, Albion. Tell the story.