scare-head, double-leaded descriptive articles--supplemented by
interviews with sheriffs and ante-mortem statements. Good grist for a
county paper; good opportunities for an unspoiled, observant,
imaginative young fellow at the formative period of his life. Such was
the time, such the environment, such the conditions that prevailed when
young Overbeck, at the age of twenty-one, sat down to the writing of his
first novel.
He completed it in five months, and, though he did not know the fact
then, the novel was good. It was not great--far from it, but it was not
merely clever. Somehow, by a miracle of good fortune, young Overbeck
had got started right at the very beginning. He had not been influenced
by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other
writer's. He was not literary. He had not much time for books. He
lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet;
a life of passions that were often elemental in their simplicity and
directness. His schooling and his newspaper work--it was he who must
find or ferret out the news all along the line, from Penrhyn to Emigrant
Gap--had taught him observation without--here was the miracle--dulling
the edge of his sensitiveness. He saw, as those few, few people see who
live close to life at the beginning of an epoch. He saw into the life
and the heart beneath the life; the life and the heart of Bunt McBride,
as with eight horses and much abjuration he negotiated a load of steel
"stamps" up the sheer leap of the Indian Canon; he saw into the life and
into the heart of Irma Tejada, who kept case for the faro players at
Dutch Flat; he saw into the life and heart of Lizzie Toby, the
biscuit-shooter in the railway eating-house, and into the life and heart
of "Doc" Twitchel, who had degrees from Edinburgh and Leipsic, and who,
for obscure reasons, chose to look after the measles, sprains and
rheumatisms of the countryside.
And, besides, there were others and still others, whom young Overbeck
learned to know to the very heart's heart of them: blacksmiths,
traveling peddlers, section-bosses, miners, horse-wranglers,
cow-punchers, the stage-drivers, the storekeeper, the hotel-keeper, the
ditch-tender, the prospector, the seamstress of the town, the
postmistress, the schoolmistress, the poetess. Into the lives of these
and the hearts of these young Overbeck saw, and the wonder of that sight
so overpowered him that he had no thought and no care for other people's
books. And he was only twenty-one! Only twenty-one, and yet he saw
clearly into the great, complicated, confused human machine that clashed
and jarred around him. Only twenty-one, and yet he read the enigma that
men of fifty may alone hope to solve! Once in a great while this thing
may happen--in such out of the way places as that country around Colfax
in Placer County, California, where no outside influences have play,
where books are few and misprized and the reading circle a thing
unknown. From time to time such men are born, especially along the line
of cleavage where the furthest skirmish line of civilisation thrusts and
girds at the wilderness. A very few find their true profession before
the fire is stamped out of them; of these few, fewer still have the
force to make themselves heard. Of these last the majority die before
they attain the faculty of making their message intelligible. Those
that remain are the world's great men.
At the time when his first little book was on its initial journey to the
Eastern publishing houses, Overbeck was by no means a great man. The
immaturity that was yet his, the lack of knowledge of his tools, clogged
his work and befogged his vision. The smooth running of the cogs and the
far-darting range of vision would come in the course of the next fifteen
years of unrelenting persistence. The ordering and organising and
controlling of his machine he could, with patience and by taking
thought, accomplish for himself. The original impetus had come straight
from the almighty gods. That impetus was young yet, feeble, yet, coming
down from so far it was spent by the time it reached the earth--at
Colfax, California. A touch now might divert it. Judge with what care
such a thing should be nursed and watched; compared with the delicacy
with which it unfolds, the opening of a rosebud is an abrupt explosion.
Later on, such insight, such undeveloped genius may become a tremendous
world-power, a thing to split a nation in twain as the axe cleaves the
block. But at twenty-one, a whisper--and it takes flight; a touch--it
withers; the lifting of a finger--it is gone.
The same destiny that had allowed Overbeck to be born, and that thus far
had watched over his course, must have inspired his choice, his very
first choice, of a publisher, for the manuscript of "The Vision of Bunt
McBride" went straight as a home-bound bird to the one man of all others
who could understand the beginnings of genius and recognise the golden
grain of truth in the chaff of unessentials. His name was Conant, and he
accepted the manuscript by telegram.
He did more than this, and one evening Overbeck stood on the steps of
the post-office and opened a letter in his hand, and, looking up and
off, saw the world transfigured. His chance had come. In half a year
of time he had accomplished what other men--other young writers--strive
for throughout the best years of their youth. He had been called to New
York. Conant had offered him a minor place on his editorial staff.
Overbeck reached the great city a fortnight later, and the cutaway coat
and pique cravat--unworn since Commencement--served to fortify his
courage at the first interview with the man who was to make him--so he
believed--famous.
Ah, the delights, the excitement, the inspiration of that day! Let
those judge who have striven toward the Great City through years of
deferred hope and heart-sinkings and sacrifice daily renewed. Overbeck's
feet were set in those streets whose names had become legendary to his
imagination. Public buildings and public squares familiar only through
the weekly prints defiled before him like a pageant, but friendly for
all that, inviting, even. But the vast conglomerate life that roared by
his ears, like the systole and diastole of an almighty heart, was for a
moment disquieting. Soon the human resemblance faded. It became as a
machine infinitely huge, infinitely formidable. It challenged him with
superb condescension.
"I must down you," he muttered, as he made his way toward Conant's, "or
you will down me." He saw it clearly. There was no other alternative.
The young boy in his foolish finery of a Colfax tailor's make, with no
weapons but such wits as the gods had given him, was pitted against the
leviathan.
There was no friend nearer than his native state on the other fringe of
the continent. He was fearfully alone.
But he was twenty-one. The wits that the gods had given him were good,
and the fine fire that was within him, the radiant freshness of his
nature, stirred and leaped to life at the challenge. Ah, he would win,
he would win! And in his exuberance, the first dim consciousness of his
power came to him. He could win, he had it in him; he began to see that
now. That nameless power was his which would enable him to grip this
monstrous life by the very throat, and bring it down on its knee before
him to listen respectfully to what he had to say.
The interview with Conant was no less exhilarating. It was in the
reception-room of the great house that it took place, and while waiting
for Conant to come in, Overbeck, his heart in his mouth, recognised, in
the original drawings on the walls, picture after picture, signed by
famous illustrators, that he had seen reproduced in Conant's magazine.
Then Conant himself had appeared and shaken the young author's hand a
long time, and had talked to him with the utmost kindness of his book,
of his plans for the immediate future, of the work he would do in the
editorial office and of the next novel he wished him to write.
"We'll only need you here in the mornings," said the editor, "and you
can put in your afternoons on your novel. Have you anything in mind as
good as 'Bunt McBride'?"
"I have a sort of notion for one," hazarded the young man; and Conant
had demanded to hear it.
Stammering, embarrassed, Overbeck outlined it.
"I see, I see!" Conant commented. "Yes, there is a good story in that.
Maybe Hastings will want to use it in the monthly. But we'll make a
book of it, anyway, if you work it up as well as the McBride story."
And so the young fellow made his first step in New York. The very next
day he began his second novel.
In the editorial office, where he spent his mornings reading proof and
making up "front matter," he made the acquaintance of a middle-aged
lady, named Miss Patten, who asked him to call on her, and later on
introduced him into the "set" wherein she herself moved. The set called
itself the "New Bohemians," and once a week met at Miss Patten's
apartment up-town. In a month's time Overbeck was a fixture in "New
Bohemia."
It was made up of minor poets whose opportunity in life was the blank
space on a magazine page below the end of an article; of men past their
prime, who, because of an occasional story in a second-rate monthly,
were considered to have "arrived"; of women who translated novels from
the Italian and Hungarian; of decayed dramatists who could advance
unimpeachable reasons for the non-production of their plays; of
novelists whose books were declined by publishers because of
professional jealousy on the part of the "readers," or whose ideas,
stolen by false friends, had appeared in books that sold by the hundreds
of thousands. In public the New Bohemians were fulsome in the praise of
one another's productions. Did a sonnet called, perhaps, "A Cryptogram
is Stella's Soul" appear in a current issue, they fell on it with eager
eyes, learned it by heart and recited lines of it aloud; the conceit of
the lover translating the cipher by the key of love was welcomed with
transports of delight.
"Ah, one of the most exquisitely delicate allegories I've ever heard,
and so true--so 'in the tone'!"
Did a certain one of the third-rate novelists, reading aloud from his
unpublished manuscript, say of his heroine: "It was the native
catholicity of his temperament that lent strength and depth to her
innate womanliness," the phrase was snapped up on the instant.
"How he understands women!"
"Such _finesse_! More subtle than Henry James."
"Paul Bourget has gone no further," said one of the critics of New
Bohemia; "our limitations are determined less by our renunciations than
by our sense of proportion in our conception of ethical standards."
The set abased itself. "Wonderful, ah, how pitilessly you fathom our
poor human nature!" New Bohemia saw colour in word effects. A poet
read aloud:
_The stalwart rain!_
_Ah, the rush of down-toppling waters;_
_The torrent!_
_Merge of mist and musky air;_
_The current_
_Sweeps thwart my blinded sight again._
"Ah!" exclaimed one of the audience, "see, see that bright green flash!"
Thus in public. In private all was different. Walking home with one or
another of the set, young Overbeck heard their confidences.
"Keppler is a good fellow right enough, but, my goodness, he can't write
verse!"
"That thing of Miss Patten's to-night! Did you ever hear anything so
unconvincing, so obvious? Poor old woman!"
"I'm really sorry for Martens; awfully decent sort, but he never should
try to write novels."
By rapid degrees young Overbeck caught the lingo of the third-raters.
He could talk about "tendencies" and the "influence of reactions." Such
and such a writer had a "sense of form," another a "feeling for word
effects." He knew all about "tones" and "notes" and "philistinisms."
He could tell the difference between an allegory and a simile as far as
he could see them. An anticlimax was the one unforgivable sin under
heaven. A mixed metaphor made him wince, and a split infinitive hurt him
like a blow.
But the great word was "convincing." To say a book was convincing was
to give positively the last verdict. To be "unconvincing" was to be
shut out from the elect. If the New Bohemian decided that the last
popular book was unconvincing, there was no appeal. The book was not to
be mentioned in polite conversation.
And the author of "The Vision of Bunt McBride," as yet new to the world
as the day he was born, with all his eager ambition and quick
sensitiveness, thought that all this was the real thing. He had never so
much as seen literary people before. How could he know the difference?
He honestly believed that New Bohemia was the true literary force of New
York. He wrote home that the association with such people, thinkers,
poets, philosophers, was an inspiration; that he had learned more in one
week in their company than he had learned in Colfax in a whole year.
Perhaps, too, it was the flattery he received that helped to carry
Overbeck off his feet. The New Bohemians made a little lion of him when
"Bunt McBride" reached its modest pinnacle of popularity. They kotowed
to him, and toadied to him, and fagged and tooted for him, and spoke of
his book as a masterpiece. They said he had succeeded where Kipling had
ignominiously failed. They said there was more harmony of prose effects
in one chapter of "Bunt McBride" than in everything that Bret Harte ever
wrote. They told him he was a second Stevenson--only with more
refinement.
Then the women of the set, who were of those who did not write, who
called themselves "mere dilettantes," but who "took an interest in young
writers" and liked to influence their lives and works, began to flutter
and buzz around him. They told him that they understood him; that they
under stood his temperament; that they could see where his forte lay;
and they undertook his education.
There was in "The Vision of Bunt McBride" a certain sane and healthy
animalism that hurt nobody, and that, no doubt, Overbeck, in later
books, would modify. He had taken life as he found it to make his book;
it was not his fault that the teamsters, biscuit-shooters and "breed"
girls of the foothills were coarse in fibre. In his sincerity he could
not do otherwise in his novel than paint life as he saw it. He had
dealt with it honestly; he did not dab at the edge of the business; he
had sent his fist straight through it.
But the New Bohemians could not abide this.
"Not so much _faroucherie_, you dear young Lochinvar!" they said. "Art
must uplift. 'Look thou not down, but up toward uses of a cup';" and
they supplemented the quotation by lines from Walter Peter, and read to
him from Ruskin and Matthew Arnold.
Ah, the spiritual was the great thing. We were here to make the world
brighter and better for having lived in it. The passions of a waitress
in a railway eating-house--how sordid the subject! Dear boy, look for
the soul, strive to rise to higher planes! Tread upward; every book
should leave a clean taste in the mouth, should tend to make one
happier, should elevate, not debase.
So by degrees Overbeck began to see his future in a different light. He
began to think that he really had succeeded where Kipling had failed;
that he really was Stevenson with more refinement, and that the one and
only thing lacking in his work was soul. He believed that he must
strive for the spiritual, and "let the ape and tiger die." The
originality and unconventionally of his little book he came to regard as
crudities.
"Yes," he said one day to Miss Patten and a couple of his friends, "I
have been re-reading my book of late. I can see its limitations--now.
It has a lack of form; the tonality is a little false. It fails somehow
to convince."
Thus the first Winter passed. In the mornings Overbeck assiduously
edited copy and made up front matter on the top floor of the Conant
building. In the evenings he called on Miss Patten, or some other
member of the set. Once a week, up-town, he fed fat on the literary
delicatessen that New Bohemia provided. In the meantime, every
afternoon, from luncheon-time till dark, he toiled on his second novel,
"Renunciations." The environment of "Renunciations" was a far cry from
Colfax, California. It was a city-bred story, with no fresher
atmosphere than that of bought flowers. Its _dramatis personae_ were all
of the leisure class, opera-goers, intriguers, riders of blood horses,
certainly more refined than Lizzie Toby, biscuit-shooter, certainly more
_spirituelle_ than Irma Tejada, case-keeper in Dog Omahone's faro joint,
certainly more elegant than Bunt McBride, teamster of the Colfax Iowa
Hill Freight Transportation Company.
From time to time, as the novel progressed, he read it to the dilettante
women whom he knew best among the New Bohemians. They advised him as to
its development, and "influenced" its outcome and denouement.
"I think you have found your _metier_, dear boy," said one of them, when
"Renunciations" was nearly completed. "To portray the concrete--is it
not a small achievement, sublimated journalese, nothing more? But to
grasp abstractions, to analyse a woman's soul, to evoke the spiritual
essence in humanity, as you have done in your ninth chapter of
'Renunciations'--that is the true function of art. _Je vous fais mes
compliments_. 'Renunciations' is a _chef-d'oeuvre_. Can't you see
yourself what a stride you have made, how much broader your outlook has
become, how much more catholic, since the days of 'Bunt McBride'?"
To be sure, Overbeck could see it. Ah, he was growing, he was
expanding. He was mounting higher planes. He was more--catholic.
That, of all words, was the one to express his mood. Catholic, ah, yes,
he was catholic!
When "Renunciations" was finished he took the manuscript to Conant and
waited a fortnight in an agony of suspense and repressed jubilation for
the great man's verdict. He was all the more anxious to hear it
because, every now and then, while writing the story,
doubts--distressing, perplexing--had intruded. At times and all of a
sudden, after days of the steadiest footing, the surest progress, the
story--the whole set and trend of the affair--would seem, as it were, to
escape from his control. Where once, in "Bunt McBride," he had gripped,
he must now grope. What was it? He had been so sure of himself, with
all the stimulus of new surroundings, the work in this second novel
should have been all the easier. But the doubt would fade, and for
weeks he would plough on, till again, and all unexpectedly, he would
find himself in an agony of indecision as to the outcome of some vital
pivotal episode of the story. Of two methods of treatment, both equally
plausible, he could not say which was the true, which the false; and he
must needs take, as it were, a leap in the dark--it was either that or
abandoning the story, trusting to mere luck that he would, somehow, be
carried through.
A fortnight after he had delivered the manuscript to Conant he presented
himself in the publisher's office.
"I was just about to send for you," said Conant. "I finished your story
last week."
There was a pause. Overbeck settled himself comfortably in his chair,
but his nails were cutting his palms.
"Hastings has read it, too--and--well, frankly, Overbeck, we were
disappointed."
"Yes?" inquired Overbeck, calmly. "H'm--that's too b-bad."
He could not hear, or at least could not understand, just what the
publisher said next. Then, after a time that seemed immeasurably long,
he caught the words:
"It would not do you a bit of good, my boy, to have us publish it--it
would harm you. There are a good many things I would lie about, but
books are not included. This 'Renunciations' of yours is--is, why,
confound it, Overbeck, it's foolishness."
Overbeck went out and sat on a bench in a square near by, looking
vacantly at a fountain as it rose and fell and rose again with an
incessant cadenced splashing. Then he took himself home to his hall
bedroom. He had brought the manuscript of his novel with him, and for a
long time he sat at his table listlessly turning the leaves, confused,
stupid, all but inert. The end, however, did not come suddenly. A few
weeks later "Renunciations" was published, but not by Conant. It bore
the imprint of an obscure firm in Boston. The covers were of limp
dressed leather, olive green, and could be tied together by thongs, like
a portfolio. The sale stopped after five hundred copies had been
ordered, and the real critics, those who did not belong to New Bohemia,
hardly so much as noticed the book.
In the Autumn, when the third-raters had come back from their vacations,
the "evenings" at Miss Patten's were resumed, and Overbeck hurried to
the very first meeting. He wanted to talk it all over with them. In
his chagrin and cruel disappointment he was hungry for some word of
praise, of condolement. He wanted to be told again, even though he had
begun to suspect many things, that he had succeeded where Kipling had
failed, that he was Stevenson with more refinement.
But the New Bohemians, the same women and fakirs and half-baked minor
poets who had "influenced" him and had ruined him, could hardly find
time to notice him now. The guest of the evening was a new little lion
who had joined the set. A symbolist versifier who wrote over the
pseudonym of de la Houssaye, with black, oily hair and long white hands;
him the Bohemians thronged about in crowds as before they had thronged
about Overbeck. Only once did any one of them pay attention to the
latter. This was the woman who had nicknamed him "Young Lochinvar."
Yes, she had read "Renunciations," a capital little thing, a little thin
in parts, lacking in _finesse_. He must strive for his true medium of
expression, his true note. Ah, art was long! Study of the new
symbolists would help him. She would beg him to read Monsieur de la
Houssaye's "The Monoliths." Such subtlety, such delicious word-chords!
It could not fail to inspire him.
Shouldered off, forgotten, the young fellow crept back to his little
hall bedroom and sat down to think it over. There in the dark of the
night his eyes were opened, and he saw, at last, what these people had
done to him; saw the Great Mistake, and that he had wasted his
substance.
The golden apples, that had been his for the stretching of the hand, he
had flung from him. Tricked, trapped, exploited, he had prostituted the
great good thing that had been his by right divine, for the privilege of
eating husks with swine. Now was the day of the mighty famine, and the
starved and broken heart of him, crying out for help, found only a
farrago of empty phrases.
He tried to go back; he did in very fact go back to the mountains and
the canons of the great Sierras. "He arose and went to his father,"
and, with such sapped and broken strength as New Bohemia had left him,
strove to wrest some wreckage from the dying fire.
But the ashes were cold by now. The fire that the gods had allowed him
to snatch, because he was humble and pure and clean and brave, had been
stamped out beneath the feet of minor and dilettante poets, and now the
gods guarded close the brands that yet remained on the altars.
They may not be violated twice, those sacred fires. Once in a lifetime
the very young and the pure in heart may see the shine of them and pluck
a brand from the altar's edge. But, once possessed, it must be watched
with a greater vigilance than even that of the gods, for its light will
live only for him who snatched it first. Only for him that shields it,
even with his life, from the contact of the world does it burst into a
burning and a shining light. Let once the touch of alien fingers
disturb it, and there remains only a little heap of bitter ashes.
_*Grettir at Drangey*_
*I*
*HOW GRETTIR CAME TO THE ISLAND*
A long slant of rain came from out the northwest, and much fog; and the
sea, still swollen by the last of the winter gales--now two days
gone--raced by the bows of their boat in great swells, quiet, huge.
It was cold, and the wind, like a hound at fault, hunted along through
the gorges between the wave heads, casting back and forth swiftly in
bulging, sounding blasts that made an echo between the walls of water.
At times the wind discovered the boat and leaped upon it suddenly with a
gush of fierce noise, clutching at the sail and bearing it down as the
dog bears down the young elk.