The
sermon which the old Cure was preaching on Valmond's death was running in
my head. I could not continue my walk. Then and there I stepped into the
Windsor Hotel, which I was passing, and asked if there was a stenographer
at liberty. There was. In the stenographer's office of the Windsor Hotel,
with the life of a caravanserai buzzing around me, I dictated the last
few pages of When Valmond Came to Pontiac. It was practically my only
experience of dictation of fiction. I had never been able to do it, and
have not been able to do it since, and I am glad that it is so, for I
should have a fear of being led into mere rhetoric. It did not, however,
seem to matter with this book. It wrote itself anywhere. The proofs of
the first quarter of the book were in my hands before I had finished
writing the last quarter.
It took me a long time to recover from the great effort of that five
weeks, but I never regretted those consuming fires which burned up sleep
and energy and ravaged the vitality of my imagination. The story was
founded on the incident described in the first pages of the book, which
was practically as I experienced it when I was a little child.
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