The
priest wrote again, suggesting--to my amazement--that I must be
mistaken, that the main "facts" of "The Bowmen" must be true, that my
share in the matter must surely have been confined to the elaboration
and decoration of a veridical history. It seemed that my light fiction
had been accepted by the congregation of this particular church as the
solidest of facts; and it was then that it began to dawn on me that if
I had failed in the art of letters, I had succeeded, unwittingly, in
the art of deceit. This happened, I should think, some time in April,
and the snowball of rumour that was then set rolling has been rolling
ever since, growing bigger and bigger, till it is now swollen to a
monstrous size.
It was at about this period that variants of my tale began to be told
as authentic histories. At first, these tales betrayed their relation
to their original. In several of them the vegetarian restaurant
appeared, and St. George was the chief character. In one case an
officer--name and address missing--said that there was a portrait of
St. George in a certain London restaurant, and that a figure, just
like the portrait, appeared to him on the battlefield, and was invoked
by him, with the happiest results.
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