+Sydney Porter+.
c/o Jas. S. Coleman.
The answer to this seems to have been cautious and conditional, for
further explanations soon started north as follows:
Asheville, N. C., 1/25 ’10.
+My dear Mr. Tyler+:
I will be brief. Why I want the money in a lump sum is to make a
getaway quick. Your proposition is better than mine, but it lacks
the hastiness and expedition necessary to a big theatrical success.
As I told you I have been busy down here for about four months
getting rid of cirrhosis of the liver, fatty degeneration of the
heart and neurasthenia--none of which troubles I have ever had. But
I was about as nervous and reflex-actiony as the hind-leg of a frog
as shown in the magazine-section of almost any Sunday newspaper.
The country and the mountains have been worth more to me than
money--I am almost as strong and tough as a suffragette.
But I have (by order of the Old Doctor) avoided work gladly and
cheerfully. Consequently I have as much money on hand as was left
lying around the box office at the last performance of “Lo.”
Now, suppose we have a few moments conversation as heart-to-heart
as an editorial on chicken-salad in the Ladies’ Home Journal by
Edward Everett Hale.
I owe something in the neighborhood of $500 down here that should
and shall be paid before the obsequious porter of the So. Ry. Co.
can have the opportunity of brushing the soot off the window sill
of Mr. Pullman’s car onto the left knee of my new trousers. I’m not
after money now--it’s transportation, transposition and a chance
that I want. I can work the proposition out in the short story
line; but it’s slow, Colonel, slow. I want to get into the real
game, and I’ll stake my reputation as the best short story writer
within a radius of Asheville that we can pull it off.
Here’s what I need in order to start things going.
I’ve got to pay up everything here and leave a small bunch of
collateral with my long-suffering family to enable them to purchase
the usual cuisine of persimmons and rabbits for a while.