"What you wish to tell me," evenly. "Neither more nor less."
"You have no curiosity?"
Randall made no comment this time, merely waited.
"Very well, then, if you have no curiosity.... I don"t know how much to tell you anyway, what you don"t already know. As I said when I first came in, I didn"t have it in mind to bore you at all, I just wanted to ask your opinion--" The speaker halted and hurriedly lit the cigar he had been holding. "To jump into the thick of it, I got a little letter from the president to-day, a little--warning." Armstrong smoked fiercely until the flame lit up his face. "It"s the bitterest humiliation of my life, Harry, the last straw!"
CHAPTER VII
REBELLION
For a moment Harry Randall said nothing, then deliberately he glanced up and met his friend"s eyes direct.
"Begin at the beginning and tell me the whole story," he said soberly. "I had no idea the thing was really so serious."
"Well, it is, take that for granted. It"s likely to be the end, so far as I am concerned."
"Cut that out, Steve," shortly. "It"s melodramatic and cheap. Things can"t be so bad if we look at them sanely." He hesitated, and went on with distinct effort. "To begin with, I"m going to ask you a question. I hate it, you know that without my telling you, but things have gone too far to mince matters evidently. I"ve heard a number of times lately that you were drinking. Is it so?"
"Who told you that?" hotly.
"Never mind who. I tell you I never believed a word of it until you mentioned the president"s warning. Now--Is it so?"
Armstrong"s face went red,--red to the roots of his hair,--then slowly shaded white until it was ghastly pale.
"Yes; it"s useless, it seems, to deny it. That others knew, were talking about it, though--It"s true, Harry. I admit it."
Slowly, slowly, Randall knocked the ashes out of the pipe-bowl and put it away in a drawer of the table.
"Very well, Steve. I shan"t moralize. None of us men are so good we can afford to begin throwing stones.... Let"s go back a bit to the beginning.
There must be one somewhere, a cause. Just what"s the trouble, old man?"
"Trouble!" It was the spark to tinder, the lead at last. "Everything, Harry, everything." A halt for composure. "I suppose if I were to pick out one single thing, though, that was worse than another, it"s my writing. I think, I know, that"s what brought on the whole cursed mess.
Until my last book failed I had hope and the sun shone. When that went down--down like a lump of lead--I haven"t been able to do a thing, care for a thing since. My brain simply quit work too. It died, and the best of me died with it."
"And you began to drink."
"Yes, like a fish. Why not, since I was dead and it helped me to forget?"
"Steve! I hate to preach, it doesn"t become me; but--"
"Preach if you want to; you can"t hurt my feelings now." Armstrong grew calm, for the first time that evening. "When a fellow has worked as I have worked for years, and hoped against hope, and still hoped on and worked on after failure and failure and failure three times repeated--No, don"t worry about hurting my feelings, Harry. Say what you please."
"I wasn"t going to hurt your feelings," evenly; "I was only going to preach a little. I merely wanted to take exception to that forgetting business. If you"ll just hold hard for a bit you"ll forget normally, not artificially. Another six months and you"ll be hard at another scheme, developing it; and the way you feel now--It"ll be a joke then, a sort of nightmare to laugh over."
"Never.... Don"t get restless; I"m not irresponsible now. I"m merely telling you. I"ve been asleep and dreaming for a long time, but at last I"m awake. Come what may, and truly as I"m telling you now, I"ll never write another novel. I couldn"t if I wanted to--I"ve tried and know; and I wouldn"t if I could. There"s a limit to everything, and the limit of my patience and endurance is reached. I"m done for now and for all time."
The voice was not excited now or unnaturally tense, but normal, almost conversational.
"For ten years I"ve fought the good fight. Every spare hour of that time that I could muster I"ve worked. I"ve lain awake night after night and night after night tossing and planning and struggling for a definite end.
The thing got to be a sort of religion to me. I convinced myself that it was my work in the big scheme, my allotted task, and I tried faithfully to do it. I never spared myself. I dissected others, of course; but I dissected myself most, clear to the bone. I even took a sort of joy in it when it hurt most, for I felt it was my contribution and big. I"m not bragging now, mind. I"m merely telling you as it was. I"ve gone on doing this for ten years, I say. When I failed again I tried harder still. I still believed in myself--and others. Recognition, appreciation, might be delayed, but eventually it would come, it must; for this was my work,--to please others, to amuse them, to carry them temporarily out of the rut of their work-a-day lives and make them forget. I believed this, I say, believed and hoped and waited and worked on until the last few months.
Then--I told you what happened. Then--" For the first time the speaker paused. He shrugged characteristically. "But what"s the use of disturbing the corpse. I"ve simply misread the signs in the sky--that"s all. I couldn"t produce a better novel than I"ve written if I had the longevity of the Wandering Jew and wrote to the end--for I"ve done my best. The great public that I"ve torn myself to pieces to please has seen the offering and pa.s.sed it by. They will have none of it--and they"re the arbiters." He shrugged again, the narrow shoulders eloquent. "So be it. I accept; but I offer no more. For all time, to finality, I"m done, done!"
"Even if some of your books should win?"
"If every one of them should do so. If half a dozen publishers came to me personally and begged me to resume work. I may be a poor artist, may lack completely the artistic subservience to or superiority to discouragement, probably I do; but at least I know I"m human. I"m like a well in the desert that"s been pumped empty and left never a mark on the surrounding sand. I couldn"t produce again if I wanted to; I"m drained dry."
Randall said nothing. He knew this other man.
"I tell you I"m awake, Harry, at last, and see things as they are; things now so childishly obvious that it seems incredible I could have gone on so long without recognizing them. People prate about appreciation of artists of various kinds and of their work, grow maudlin over it by artificial light in the small hours of the night. And how do they demonstrate it? Once in a while, the isolated exception that proves the rule, by recognizing and rewarding the genius in his lifetime. Once in a very, very long time, I say. Mind, I don"t elevate myself as a genius.
I"m merely speaking as an observer who"s awakened and knows. As a rule what do they do? Let him struggle and work and eat his heart out in obscurity and without recognition. Let him starve himself body and soul.
After he"s dead, after a year or a hundred years, after there is no possibility of his receiving the reward or the inspiration, they arouse.
His fame spreads. His name becomes a household word. They desecrate his grave, if they can find it, by hanging laurel on his tombstone. They tear the wall-paper from the house where he once chanced to live into ribbons for souvenirs. If he happens to be a painter the picture that brought him enough perhaps to keep body and soul together for a month is fought for until eventually it sells for a fortune. If he was a writer they bid for a sc.r.a.p of his ma.n.u.script more than he received for his whole work. There are exceptions, I say; but even exceptions only prove the rule. Think over the names of the big artists, the big geniuses. How many of them are alive or were appreciated in their own lives? How many living to-day compare in the public appreciation with those dead? None of them, practically, none. And still do you or does any other sane person fancy that human beings are degenerating every generation, that artistic genius is decadent? It"s preposterous, unthinkable! It merely points the moral that history repeats itself. Some place, somewhere, the greatest artist in the world is painting the greatest picture the world has ever known--and this same world pa.s.ses him by. It must be so, for human beings advance with every generation inevitably. Some place, somewhere, the biggest writer of all time is writing the biggest book--and his neighbors smile because his clothes are rusty. This is the reward they get in their own day and their own generation, when it would sweeten their lives, make them worth living. The fellow who invents a mouse-trap or a safety razor or devises a way of sticking two hogs where one was killed before, inherits the earth, sees his name and fame heralded in every periodical; while the other, the real man--G.o.d, it"s unbelievable, neither more nor less; and still it"s true to the last detail. Again, it"s all civilization, the civilization we brag of; magnificent twentieth century civilization!"
Still Randall said nothing, still waited.
Armstrong hesitated, drumming on the arm of his chair with his slender fingers. But the lull was only temporary, the storm not past; the end was not yet.
"I suppose," he forged on, "the work should be its own reward, its own justification. At least would-be artists are told so repeatedly. Whenever one rebels at the injustice the world is there with this sophistry, feeds him with it as a nurse feeds pap to a crying child, until he"s full and temporarily comatose. But just suppose for an instant that the same argument were used in any other field of endeavor. Suppose, for instance, you told the prospector who"d spent years searching for and who"d finally found a gold mine that his reward should be in the mere knowledge of having found it, the feeling of elation that he had added to the sum total of the world"s wealth, and that he should relinquish it intact as a public trust. Just preach this gospel, and how long would you escape the mad-house? Or the architect who designs and superintends the construction of a sky-sc.r.a.per. Take him aside and argue with him that the artistic satisfaction of having conceived that great pile of stone and steel should repay him for his work, that to expect remuneration was sordid and disgusting. Do you think he"d sign a certificate to the effect that you were normal and sane? And still how is it with a writer in this the twentieth century,--century of enlightenment and of progress? First of all he must go through the formative period, which means years. Nothing, even genius, springs without preparation into full bloom. No matter how good the idea, how big the thought, it must be moulded by a mastery of technique and a proficiency that only experience can give. And meanwhile he must live. How? No matter. The suggestion is mundane. Let him settle that for himself. At last, perhaps, if he has the divine spark, he gets a hearing. We"ll suppose he accomplishes his purpose,--pleases them, makes them think, or laugh, or forget temporarily, as the case may be. In a way he has made an opening and arrived. And yet, though an artist, he is, first of all, a human being, an animal. The animal part of him demands insistently the good things of life. If he is normal he wants a home and a family of his own; and wants that home as good as that of his neighbor who practises law or makes soda biscuits. With this premise what do the public, who don"t know him personally but whom he serves just the same, do? The only way they can show their appreciation tangibly is by buying his work; giving him encouragement, making it possible to live and to write more. I repeat I know this is all mundane and commonplace and unaesthetic, but it"s reality. And do they give this encouragement, buy themselves, and let him make his tiny royalty which in turn enables him to live, pa.s.s an appreciation on to their friends and induce them to buy?
In a fractional proportion of times, yes. In the main, John, whom the writer has worked a year, day and night, to reach, by chance meets his friend Charley. "By the way," he remarks, "I picked up that novel of Blank"s lately. It"s good, all right, all right; kept me up half the night to finish it. I want you to read it, old man. It"s just your style.
No use to buy it, though," he adds hurriedly. "Drop in sometime and I"ll lend it to you." Of a sudden he remembers. "Come to think of it, though, I believe just now it"s lent to Phil--or was it d.i.c.k who took it. The story"s a corker and they"ve both had it." He thinks again hard and remembers. "I have it now. d.i.c.k gave it to Sam; he told me so. Get it from him yourself. I know you"ll like it." And so the lending goes on so long as the covers hold together. Meanwhile the writer, away off somewhere waiting and hoping and watching the sale, in return for the pleasure he gives John and Charley and Phil and d.i.c.k and Sam and the rest, and in consideration of that year of work and weariness and struggle, gets enough perhaps to buy a meal at a Chinese restaurant. This is appreciation, I say, enlightened twentieth century appreciation; and the beauty of it is that every one of that company who get his work for nothing feel that by their praise and by reading his work they"ve given that writer, who can"t possibly know anything about it, all that he could possibly desire." For the first time that evening Armstrong paused to laugh. "Oh, it"s humorous, all right, when one stops to consider and appreciate! Just suppose, though, in the name of fair play, some one had suggested to John that he throw that copy of his in the furnace where no one could possibly borrow it, and then go on telling his appreciation.
Just supposing some one had suggested that! Do you fancy John would have considered that person wholly sane? And still that writer, besides being an artist, is an animal with a stomach and needs a home to live in, and maybe is human enough to have burdened himself with a wife and--and children--"
"Steve, confound it, you"ve gone on long enough."
"I know it--too long."
"It doesn"t do any good to rail at something you can"t help, that no one can help."
"Admitted. I"m just talking to myself--and you. It"s all the same."
"You"ve never starved yet or gone without clothes, so far as I know."
"Starved, no. I had soup at my boarding-house for lunch again to-day--soup with carrots in it. Hungry--I don"t know. This is a big world we"re in and I"ve never had the chance even to look over the horizon yet. Hungry? I"ve been hungry for--Elice for years, and I don"t dare--Hunger is awfully near to starvation sometimes, friend Harry."
Harry Randall squirmed. He saw it coming--it!
"Oh, things will come all right if you"ll be patient," he said--and halted himself for the trite optimism.
"Elice won"t; for she"s gone already while I"ve been patient--gone and left me hungry."
"Nonsense. Rot, plain rot!"
"No, reality, plain reality. She probably wouldn"t admit it yet, not even to herself, maybe doesn"t know it yet herself; but I know. It"s been coming on a long time. I see it all now."