She sipped the water pensively as we all returned to our places. Then,
placing the partly empty glass beside her jar of sweetmeats, she opened
her incomparable lips.
* * * * *
It is a fine thing when a young man, born to travel the speedway of
luxury, voluntarily leaves it to hew out a pathway for himself through
life. Brown thought so, too. And at twenty-four he resolutely graduated
from Harvard, stepped out into the world, and looked about him very
sternly.
All was not well with the world. Brown knew it. He was there to correct
whatever was wrong. And he had chosen Good Literature as the vehicle for
self expression.
Now, the nine sister goddesses are born flirts; and every one of them
immediately glanced sideways at Brown, who was a nice young man with
modesty, principles, and a deep and reverent belief in Good Literature.
The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne seemed very attractive to him
until the tenth and most recent addition to the Olympian family
sauntered by with a flirt of her narrow skirt--the jade!
One glance into the starry blue wells of her baby eyes bowled him over.
Henceforth she was to be his steady--Thalomene, a casual daughter of
Zeus, and muse of all that is sacredly obvious in the literature of
modern realism.
From early infancy Brown's had been a career of richest promise. His
mother's desk was full of his earlier impressions of life. He had, in
course of time, edited his school paper, his college paper; and, as an
undergraduate, he had appeared in the contributor's columns of various
periodicals.
His was not only a wealthy but a cultivated lineage as well. The love of
literature was born in him.
To love literature is all right in its way; to love it too well is to
mistake the appreciative for the creative genius. Reverence and devotion
are no equipment for creative authorship. It is not enough to have
something to say about what other people have said. And the inspiration
which comes from what others have done is never the true one. But Brown
didn't know these things. They were not revealed unto him at Harvard; no
inward instinct made them plain to him.
He began by foregathering with authors. Many, many authors foregather,
from various causes--tradition, inclination, general shiftlessness. When
they do that they produce a sort of serum called literary atmosphere,
which is said to be delightful. And so Brown found it. However, there
are authors who seem to be too busy with their profession to foregather
and exhale atmosphere. But these are doubtless either literary hacks or
the degraded producers of best-sellers. They are not authors, either;
they are merely writers.
Now, in all the world there is only one thing funnier than an author;
and that is a number of them. But Brown didn't know that, either.
All authors are reformers. Said one of them to Brown in the Empyrean
Club:
"When an author in his own heart ceases to be a reformer he begins to be
a menace!"
It was a fine sentiment, and Brown wrote it in his note-book.
Afterward, the more he analyzed it the less it seemed to mean.
Another author informed him that the proper study for man is man. He'd
heard that before, but the repetition steeled his resolve. And his
resolve was to reproduce in literature exactly what he observed about
him; nothing more, nothing less.
There was to be no concession to imagination, none to convention, none
to that insidious form of human weakness known as good taste. As for
art, Brown already knew what Art really was.
There was art enough for anybody in sheer truth, enough in the realism
made up of photographic detail, recorded uncompromisingly in ordered
processional sequence. After all, there was really no beauty in the
world except the beauty of absolute truth. All other alleged beauty was
only some form of weakness. Thus Brown, after inhaling literary
atmosphere.
Like the majority of young men, Brown realised that only a man, and a
perfectly fearless, honest, and unprejudiced one, was properly equipped
to study woman and tell the entire truth about her in literature.
So he began his first great novel--"The Unquiet Sex"--and he made heavy
weather of it that autumn--what with contributing to the literary
atmosphere every afternoon and evening at various clubs and cafes--not
to mention the social purlieus into which he ventured with the immortal
lustre already phosphorescent on his brow. Which left him little time
for mere writing. It is hard to be an author and a writer, too.
The proper study for man being woman, Brown studied her solemnly and
earnestly. He studied his mother and his sisters, boring them to the
verge of distraction; he attempted to dissect the motives which governed
the behaviour of assorted feminine relatives, scaring several of the
more aged and timorous, agitating others, and infuriating one or
two--until his father ordered him to desist.
House-maids, parlour-maids, ladies'-maids, waitresses, all fought very
shy of him; for true to his art, he had cast convention aside and had
striven to fathom the souls and discover the hidden motives imbedded in
Milesian, Scandinavian and Briton.
"The thing for me to do," said Brown rather bitterly to his father, "is
to go out into the world and investigate far and wide."
"Investigate what?" asked his father.
"Woman!" said Brown sturdily.
"There's only one trouble about that."
"What's that?"
"Woman," said his father, "is likely to do the investigating. This
household knows more about you than you do about it."
Brown smiled. So did his father.
"Son," said the latter, "what have you learned about women without
knowing anything about them?"
"Nothing, naturally," said Brown.
"Then you will never have anything more than _that_ to say about them,"
remarked Brown senior.
"Why not?"
"Because the only thing possible for a man to say about them is what his
imagination dictates. He'll never learn any more concerning women than
that."
"Imagination is not literature," said Brown junior, with polite
toleration.
"Imagination is often the truer truth," said the old gentleman.
"Father, that is rot."
"Yes, my son--and it is almost Good Literature, too. Go ahead, shake us
if you like. But, if you do, you'll come back married."