laughs, "of some fellows who took chances on the percentage, as Le
Blanc calls it, and yet, as we Americans say, 'arrived.' A well-born
young Englishman, down on his luck, had been tramping the streets, too
proud to go home to his father's house, the spirit of the hobo still in
him. One night he struck up an acquaintance with another young chap as
poor and independent as himself. Naturally they affiliated. Both were
sons of gentlemen and both vagabonds in the best sense. One became a
reporter and the other a news-gatherer. The first had no dress suit and
was debarred from state functions and smart receptions; the second
boasted not only a dress suit useful at weddings, but a respectable
morning frock-coat for afternoon teas. The two outfits brought them
lodgings and three meals a day, for what the dress suit could pick up in
the way of society news the man with the pen got into type. Things went
on this way until August set in and the season closed; then both men
lost their jobs. For some weeks they braved it out, badgering the
landlady; then came the pawning of their clothes, and then one meal a
day, and then a bench in St. James's Park out of sight of the bobbies.
This being rock bottom, a council of war was held. The news-gatherer
shipped aboard an outgoing vessel and disappeared from civilization. The
reporter kept on reporting. Both had courage and both had the best blood
of England in their veins, according to my view. Twenty years later the
two met at a drawing-room in Buckingham Palace. The reporter had risen
to a peer and the news-gatherer to a merchant prince. There was a hearty
handshake, a furtive glance down the long, gold-encrusted corridor, and
then, with a common impulse, the two moved to an open window and looked
out. Below them lay the bench on which the two had slept twenty years
before."
"Of course!" shouted Le Blanc; "that's just what I said--a case of good
blood--that's what kept them going. They owed it to their ancestors."
"Ancestors be hanged! It was a case of pure grit!" shouted Louis in
return. "All the blood in the world wouldn't have helped them if it
hadn't been for that. Neither of them expected, when they started out in
life, to be shown up six flights of marble stairs by a hundred flunkeys
in silk stockings, but, as Brierley puts it, 'they _arrived_ all the
same.' Blood alone would have landed them as clerks in government pay
or obscure country gentlemen waiting for somebody to die. They kept on
driving in the peg and before they got through all the chinks were
filled. Keep your toes in your pumps, gentlemen. High-Muck is loaded for
something; I see it in his eyes. Go on, High-Muck, and let us have it.
How do you vote--blood or brains?"
"Neither," I answered. "Lemois is nearest the truth. You can't make a
silk purse out of--you know the rest--neither can you force a man, nor
can he force himself, to succeed in something for which he is not
fitted. All you do is to split the plank and ruin his life. I'll tell
you a story which will perhaps give you and idea of what I mean.
"Perhaps five years ago--perhaps six--my memory is always bad for
dates--I met a fellow in one of our small Western cities at home who, by
all odds, was the most brilliant conversationalist I had run across for
years. The acquaintance began as my audience--I was lecturing at the
time--left the room and was continued under the sidewalk, where we had a
porter-house steak and a mug apiece, the repast and talk lasting until
two in the morning. Gradually I learned his history. He had started
life as a reporter; developed into space writer, then editor, and was
known as the most caustic and brilliant journalist on any of the Western
papers. With the death of his wife, he had thrown up this position and
was, when I met him, conducting a small country paper.
"What possessed me I don't know, but after seeing him half a dozen times
that winter--and I often passed through his town--I made up my mind that
his brilliant talk, quaint philosophy, and mastery of English were
wasted on what he was doing, and that if I could persuade him to write a
novel he would not only drop into the hole his Maker had bored for him,
but would make a name for himself. All that he had to do was to _put
himself into type_ and the rest would follow. Of course he protested; he
was fifty years old, he said, had but little means, no experience in
fiction, his work not being imaginative but concerned with the weightier
and more practical things of the day.
"All this made me only the keener to do something to drag him out of the
pit and start him in a new direction.
"The first thing was to make him believe in himself. I pooh-poohed the
idea of his failure to succeed at fifty as being any reason for his not
acquiring distinction at sixty, and counted on my fingers the men who
had done their best work late in life. Taking up some of the editorials
he had sent me (undeniable proofs, so he had maintained, of his
inability to do anything better or, rather, different), I picked out a
sentence here and there, reading it aloud and dilating on his choice of
words; I showed him how his style would tell in an up-to-date novel, and
how forceful his short, pithy epigrams would be scattered throughout its
text.
"Little by little he began to enthuse: I had kindled his
pride--something that had lain dormant for years--and the warmth of its
revival soon sent the blood of a new hope tingling through his veins. He
now confessed that he _had_ always wanted to write sustained fiction
without ever having had either the opportunity or the strength to begin.
Inspired by my efforts, others of his friends at home joined in the
bracing up, recognizing as I had done the charm and quality of the
man--his wit and tenderness, his philosophy and knowledge of the life
about him. They forgot, of course, as had I, that in fiction--and in all
imaginative literature for that matter--something more is required than
either a knowledge of men or the ability for turning out phrases. As an
actor steps in between the dramatist and the audience--visualizing and
vitalizing the text by deft gestures, telling emphases, and those silent
pauses often more effective than the speech itself--so must the author
with his pen: in other words, he must infuse into the written word
something that presents to you in print that which the actor makes you
_see_ beyond the footlights. This, however, you men know all about, so I
won't dilate on it.
"Well, he started in and threw himself into the task with a grip and
energy of which I had not thought him capable. It took him about six
months to finish the novel; then he came East and laid the manuscript in
my hands. We shut ourselves up in my study and went over it. When I
suggested that a page dragged, he would snatch it from my hand, square
himself on my hearth-rug with his back to the fire, and read it aloud,
pumping his personality into every line. Conversations which, when I
read them, had seemed long-winded and commonplace took on a new meaning.
When he had gone to bed I reread the passages and again my heart sank.
"The publisher came next, I delivering the manuscript myself with all
the good things I could say about it.
"At the end of the week that ominous-looking white coffin of an envelope
in which so many of our hopes are buried, and which most of us know so
well, was laid on my study table, and with it the short obituary notice:
'Not adapted to our uses.'
"I was afraid to tell him, and didn't. I arranged a dinner instead for
the three of us--the editor, whom he had not yet met, being one. During
the meal not a word was said about the rejected novel. I had cautioned
the author--and, of course, the editor never brought his shop to a
dinner-table.
"After the cigars I took up the manuscript and the discussion opened.
The editor was very frank, very kind, and very helpful. He had wanted to
publish it, but there were long passages--essays, really--in which the
reader's galloping interest would get stalled. Experience had taught him
that it was slow-downs like these that mired so much of modern fiction.
"'Which passages, for instance,' I asked rather casually.
"'Well, the part which--Hand me the manuscript and I will----'
"'No; suppose my friend reads it--you have enough of that to do all
day.'
"Just as I expected, the reader's personality again transformed
everything. The long-winded descriptions under the magic of his voice
seemed too short, while every conversation thought dull before appeared
to be illumined by a hidden meaning tucked away between the lines.
"When the editor left at midnight the coffin was in his pocket. Two days
later the book department forwarded a contract with a check for five
hundred dollars as advance royalties.
"There was no holding my friend down to earth after that. His joy and
pride in that shambling, God-forsaken, worthless plodder whom he had
despised for years was overwhelming. He was like a boy out of school.
Stories which he had forgotten were pulled out of the past and given
with a humor and point that dazzled every one around my study fire.
Personal reminiscences of politicians he had known, and campaigns he had
directed from his editorial chair, were told in a way that made them
live in our memories ever after. Never had any of my friends met so
delightful and cultivated a man.
"The next day he went back to his home town carrying his enthusiasm with
him.
"In two months the usual book notices began to crop out in the
papers--all written in the publisher's establishment--a fact which he
must have known, but which, from his enthusiastic letters, I saw he had
overlooked. His own village papers reprinted the notices with editorial
comments of their own--'Our distinguished fellow-citizen,' etc.--that
sort of thing.
"These were also forwarded to me by mail with renewed thanks for the
service I had done him--he, the 'modern Lazarus snatched from an early
grave.' When a bona fide reviewer noticed the book at all, it was in
half a dozen lines, with allusions to the amateurishness of the
effort--'his first and, it is hoped, his last,' one critic was brutal
enough to add. When one of these reached him, it was dismissed with a
smile. He knew what he had done, and so would the world once the book
got out among the people.
"Then the first six months' account was mailed him. The royalty sales
had not reached one-half of the first payment!
"He sat--so his brother told me afterward--with the firm's letter in
his hand, and for an hour never opened his lips. That afternoon he went
to bed; in three months he was dead! It had broken his heart.
"I, too, sat with a paper in my hand--his brother's telegram. Had I done
right or wrong? I am still wondering and I have not yet solved the
question. Had I never crossed his path and had he kept on in his
editor's chair, giving out short, crisp comments on the life of the day,
he would, no doubt, be alive and earning a fair support. I had attempted
the impossible and failed. The square peg in the round hole had split
the plank!"
"Better split it," remarked Louis, "than stop all driving. Poor fellow,
I'm sorry for him; nothing hurts like having your pride dragged in the
mud, and nothing brings keener suffering--I've seen it and know. Why
didn't you brace him up again, High-Muck?"
"I did try, but it was too late. Just before he died he wrote me the old
refrain: 'At twenty-five I might have weathered it, but not at fifty.'"
Herbert drew his chair closer, assuming his favorite gesture, his hands
on the edge of the table.
"I say 'poor fellow' too, Louis, but High-Muck has not put his finger on
the right spot. It was not the man's pride that was wounded; nor did he
die of a broken heart. He died because he had not reached his pinnacle,
and that is quite a different thing. What blinded him and destroyed his
reason--for it cannot be thought very sensible for a man to abandon a
certain fixed income for a rainbow--was not your reviving his belief in
himself, but your giving him, for the first time, an opportunity to
spread his wings. But for that you could not have persuaded him to write
a line. The pitiful thing was that the wings were not large
enough--still they were _wings_ to be used in the air of romance, and
not legs with which to tread the roads of the commonplace, and he knew
it. He had felt them growing ever since he was a boy. It is only a
question of the spread of one's feathers, after all, whether one
succeeds soaring over mountains with a view of the never-ending Valley
of Content below, or whether one keeps on grovelling in the mud."
As Herbert paused a tremulous silence fell upon the group. That he, of
all men, should thus penetrate, if not espouse, the cause of
failure--the hardest of all things for a man of phenomenal success to
comprehend or excuse in his fellows--came as a new note.
"To illustrate this theory," he continued, unconscious of the effect he
had produced, "I will tell you about a man whom I once came across in
one of the studios of Paris, back of the Pantheon. All his life he had
determined to be a sculptor--and when I say 'determined' I mean he had
thought of nothing else. By day he worked in the atelier, at night he
drew from a cast--a custom then of the young sculptors. In the Louvre
and in the Luxembourg--out in the gardens of the Tuileries--wherever
there was something moulded or cut into form, there at odd hours you
could always find this enthusiast. At night too, when the other students
were trooping through the Quartier, breaking things or outrunning the
gendarmes, this poor devil was working away, doing Ledas and Venuses and
groups of nudes, with rearing horses and chariots,--all the trite
subjects a young sculptor attempts whose imagination outruns his
ability.
"Year after year his things would come up before the jury and be
rejected; and they deserved it. Soon it began to dawn on his associates,
but never on him, that, try as he might, there was something lacking in
his artistic make-up. With the master standing over him advising a bit
of clay put on here, or a slice taken off there, he had seemed to
progress; when, however, he struck out for himself his results were most
disheartening. It was during this part of his life that I came to know
him. He was then a man of forty, ten years younger than your dead
novelist, High-Muck, and, like him, a man of many sorrows. The
difference was that all his life my man had been poor; at no time for
more than a week had he ever been sure of his bread. As he was an expert
moulder and often gratuitously helped his brother sculptors in taking
casts of their clay figures, he had often been begged to accept
employment at good wages with some of the stucco people, but he had
refused and had fought on, preferring starvation to _pâtisserie_, as he
called this kind of work.
"Nor had he, like your novelist, happiness to look back upon. He had
married young, as they all do, and there had come a daughter who had
grown to be eighteen, and who had been lost in the whirl--slipped in the
mud, they said, and the city had rolled over her. And then the wife died
and he was alone. The girl had crept up his stairs one night and lay
shivering outside his door; he had taken her in, put her to bed, and
fed her. Later on her last lover discovered by chance her hiding-place,
and in the mould-maker's absence the two had found the earthen pot with
the few francs he owned and had spent them. After that he had shut his
door in her face. And so the fight went on, his ideal still alive in his
heart, his one purpose to give it flight--'soaring over the heads of the
millions,' as he put it, 'so that even dullards might take off their
hats in recognition.'
"When I again met him he was living in an old, abandoned theatre on the
outskirts of Paris, a weird, uncanny ruin--rats everywhere--the scenery
hanging in tatters, the stage broken down, the pit filled to the level
of the footlights with a mass of coal--for a dealer in fuels had leased
it for this purpose, his carts going in and out of the main entrance.
One of the dressing-rooms over the flies was his studio, reached by a
staircase from the old stage entrance. A former tenant had cut a
skylight under which my friend worked.
"In answer to his 'Entrez' I pushed open his door and found him in a
sculptor's blouse cowering over a small sheet-iron stove on which some
food was being cooked. He raised his head, straightened his back, and
came toward me--a small, shrunken man now, prematurely old, his two
burning eyes looking out from under his ledge of a forehead like coals
beneath a half-burnt log, a shock of iron-gray hair sticking straight up
from his scalp as would a brush. About his nose, up his cheeks, around
his mouth, and especially across his throat, which was free of a cravat,
ran pasty wrinkles, like those on a piece of uncooked tripe. Only
half-starved men who have lived on greasy soups and scraps from the
kitchens have these complexions.
"I describe him thus carefully to you because that first glance of his
scarred face had told me his life's story. It is the same with every man
who suffers.
"He talked of his work, of the conspiracies that had followed him all
his career, shutting him out of his just rewards, while less brilliant
men snatched the prizes which should have been his; of his hopes for the
future; of the great competition soon to come off at Rheims, in which he
would compete--not that he had yet put his idea into clay--that was
always a mere question of detail with him. Then, as if by the merest
accident--something he had quite forgotten, but which he thought might
interest me--he told me, with a quickening of his glance and the first
smile I had seen cross his pasty face, of a certain statue of his, 'a
Masterpiece,' which a great connoisseur had bought for his garden, and
which faced one of the open spaces of Paris. I could see it any day I
walked that way--indeed, if I did not mind, he would go with me--he had
been housed all the morning and needed the air.
"I pleaded an excuse and left him, for I knew all about this masterpiece
which had been bought by a tradesman and planted in his garden among
groups of cast-iron dogs and spouting dolphins, the hedge in front cut
low enough for passers-by to see the entire collection. Hardly a day
elapsed that the poor fellow did not walk by, drinking in the beauty of
his work, comforting himself with the effect it produced on the plain
people who stopped to admire. Sometimes he would accost them and bring
the conversation round to the sculptor, and then abruptly take his
leave, they staring at him as he bowed his thanks.
"The following year I again looked him up; his poverty and his courage
appealed to me; besides, I intended to help him. When I knocked at his
door he did not cry 'Entrez'--he kept still, as if he had not heard me
or was out. When I pushed the door open he turned, looked at me for an
instant, and resumed his work. Again my eyes took him in--thinner,
dryer, less nourished. He was casting the little images you buy from a
board carried on a vendor's back.
"Without heeding his silence I at once stated my errand. He should make
a statue for my garden; furthermore, his name and address should be
plainly cut in the pedestal.
"He thanked me for my order, but he made no more statues, he said. He
was now engaged in commercial work. Art was dead. Nobody cared. Did I
remember his great statue--the one in the garden?--his Apollo?--the
Greek of modern times? Well, the place had changed hands, and the new
owner had carted it away with the cast-iron dogs and the dolphins and
ploughed up the lawn to make an artichoke-bed. The masterpiece was no
more. 'I found all that was left of my work,' he added, 'on a dirt heap
in the rear of his out-house, the head gone and both arms broken short
off.'
"His voice wavered and ceased, and it was with some difficulty that he
straightened his back, moved his drying plaster casts one side, and
offered me the free part of the bench for a seat.
"I remained standing and broke out in protest. I abused the ignorance
and jealousy of the people and of the juries--did everything I could, in
fact, to reassure him and pump some hope into him--precisely what you
did to your own author, High-Muck. I even agreed to pay in advance for
the new statue I had ordered. I told him, too, that if he would come
back to the country with me, I would make a place for him in an empty
greenhouse, where he could work undisturbed. He only shook his head.
"'What for?' he answered--'for money? I am alone in the world, and it's
of no use to me. I am accustomed to being starved. For fame? I have
given my life to express the thoughts of my heart and nobody would
listen. Now it is finished. I will keep them for the good God--perhaps
He will listen.'
"A week later I found him sitting bolt upright in his chair under the
skylight, dead. Above in the dull gloom hung a row of plaster models,
his own handiwork--fragments of arms and hands with fists clenched ready
to strike; queer torsos writhing in pain; queerer masks with hollow
eyes. In the grimy light these seemed to have come to life--the torsos
leaning over, hunching their shoulders at him as if blaming him for
their suffering; the masks mocking at his misery, leering at each other.
It was a grewsome sight, and I did not shake off the memory of the scene
for days.
"And so I hold," added Herbert, with a sorrowful shake of his head "that
it is neither pride nor suffering that kills men of this class. It is
because they have failed to reach the pinnacle of their ideals--that
goal for which some spirits risk both their lives and their hopes of
heaven."
XIV
A WOMAN'S WAY
However serious the talk of the night before--and Herbert's pathetic
story of the poor mould-maker was still in our memory when we awoke--the
effect was completely dispelled as soon as we began to breathe the air
of the out of doors.
The weather helped--another of those caressing Indian-summer days--the
sleepy sun with half-closed eyes dozing at you through its lace curtains
of mist; every fire out and all the windows wide open.
Leà helped. Never were her sabots so active nor so musical in their
scuffle: now hot milk, now fresh coffee, now another crescent--all on
the run, and all with a spontaneous, uncontrollable laugh between each
serving--all the more unaccountable as of late the dear old woman's
face, except at brief intervals, had been as long as an undertaker's.
And Mignon helped!
Helped? Why, she was the whole programme--with another clear, ringing,
happy song that came straight from her heart; her head thrown back, her
face to the sun as if she would drink in all its warmth and cheer, the
coffee-roaster keeping time to the melody.
And it was not many minutes before each private box and orchestra chair
in and about the court-yard, as well as the top galleries, were filled
with spectators ready for the rise of the curtain. Herbert leaned out
over his bedroom sill, one story up; Brierley from the balcony, towel in
hand, craned his head in attention; Louis left his seat in the kiosk,
where he was at work on a morning sketch of the court, and I abandoned
my chair at one of the tables: all listened and all watched for what was
going to happen. For happen something certainly must, with our pretty
Mignon singing more merrily than ever.
I, being nearest to the footlights, beckoned to old Leà carrying the
coffee, and pointed inquiringly to the blissful girl.
"What's the meaning of all this, Leà?--what has happened? Your Mignon
seemed joyous enough the other morning when she came from market, but
now she is beside herself."
The old woman lowered her voice, and, with a shake of her white cap,
answered:
"Don't ask me any questions; I am too happy to tell you any lies and I
won't tell you the truth. Ah!--see how cold monsieur's milk is--let me
run to Pierre for another"--and she was off; her flying sabots, like the
upturned feet of a duck chased to cover, kicking away behind her short
skirts.
Lemois, too, had heard the song and, picking up Coco, strolled toward me
his fingers caressing the bird, his uneasy glance directed toward the
happy girl as he walked, wondering, like the rest of us, at the change
in her manner. To watch them together as I have done these many times,
the old man smoothing its plumage and Coco rubbing his black beak
tenderly against his master's cheek, is to get a deeper insight into our
landlord's character and the subtle sympathy which binds the two.
The bird once settled comfortably on his wrist, Lemois looked my way.
"You should get him a mate, monsieur," I called to him in answer to his
glance, throwing this out as a general drag-net.
The old man shifted the bird to his shoulder, stopped, and looked down
at me.
"He is better without one. Half the trouble in the world comes from
wanting mates; the other half comes from not knowing that this is true.
My good Coco is not so stupid"--and he reached up and stroked the bird's
crest and neck. "All day long he ponders over what is going on down
below him. And just think, monsieur, what _does_ go on down below him in
the season! The wrong man and the wrong woman most of the time, and the
pressure of the small foot under the table, and the little note slipped
under the napkin. Ah!--they don't humbug Coco! He laughs all day to
himself--and I laugh too. There is nothing, if you think about it, so
comical as life. It is really a Punch-and-Judy show, with one doll
whacking away at the other--'Now, will you be good!--Now, will you be
good!'--and they are never good. No--no--never a mate for my Coco--never
a mate for anybody if I can help it."