Читать книгу Mutiny on the Bounty. Historical Novel онлайн

4 страница из 113

We planned with the resolution of genius. Then and there Hall and Nordhoff drew up the rough outline of a miraculous work on the South Seas, and when a day or two later the silent partner took it with him to New York, all the spices of the East were in the chapter headings. One publisher was pitted against another. For once in his life the salesman was a credit to his profession, and when he returned, the respectable firm of Hall and Nordhoff was incorporated with a capital of $7,000—$1,000 paid in. After all, there is more to literature than pretty words and an agile pen.

Historically, the first work of the firm was the official history of the Lafayette Flying Corps. Then came, I believe, the work on the South Seas which, as I have said, I had the honor to sell. Nordhoff wrote by himself a capital boy’s story, “The Pearl Lagoon,” based on his own early life in Lower California. Hall meantime turned out some admirably individual essays, stories, and poems, but the firm added enormously to its reputation when the story of the Escadrille was brilliantly retold as fiction under the title, “Falcons of France.” Of all aerial narratives, this, in my judgment, takes the first place both in its thrilling realism and in that delicate understanding of the co-ordination of mind, body, and spirit which is at once a flyer’s inheritance and his salvation.