I
Being an author actually at work, and not an author being photographed
at work by a lady admirer, he did not gaze large-eyed at a poppy in a
crystal vase, one hand lightly touching his forehead, the other tossing
off page after page in high godlike frenzy. On the contrary, the young
man at the table yawned, lolled, sighed, scratched his ear, read
snatches of Virginia Carter's "Letters to My Girl Friends" in the
morning's "Post," read snatches of any printed matter that happened to
be about, and even groaned. When he gazed, it was at no flower, but more
probably at his clock, a stout alarm-clock well known to the trade as
"Big Bill"; and the clock gazed back, since there was a matter between
them this evening, and seemed to say, "Well, are you going to the
Redmantle Club, or are you _not_?" But that was precisely the point
on which the young man at the table had not yet made up his mind.
Of course, if he went to the Redmantle Club, he could not possibly spend
the whole evening here, writing, and, oddly enough, this was at once a
cogent reason for staying away from the Redmantle Club, and a seductive
argument for going to the same. No lady admirer could ever grasp this
paradox, but every true writer must admit that I know his secret
perfectly.
From time to time, no diversion offering, the author would read over the
last sentence he had written, which very likely ran as follows:--
We have a society organized on the agreeable assumption that
every woman, at twenty-five or thereabouts, finds herself in
possession of a home, a husband, and three darling little
curly-headed children.
Stimulated a trifle, he would thereupon sharpen up his pencil and charge
forward a few sentences, as now:--
Slipshod people never test such old assumptions against
actuality; they cling to what their grandfathers said, and call
their slipshodness conservatism. So (like ostriches) they avoid
the fact that there are three large and growing classes of
women who simply have no relation to their comfortable old
theory. I refer, of course, to the classes of Temporary
Spinsters, of Permanent Spinsters, and of Married but
Idle--childless wives living in boarding-houses, for example.
Let no Old Tory conceive that he has disposed of the Woman
Question until he can plainly answer: What are all these
various women to DO in their fifteen waking hours a day?
Following which, he lit a cigarette in a moody manner, and sat frowning
at the back of the head of his relative and secretary, who was clacking
away all the while on a second-hand typewriter near by.
It will be contended that some hesitancy was fitting enough to the
writer's thesis, Woman having raised perplexities in the bosoms of
philosophers from the earliest times on. But perplexity did not happen
to be the trouble with this philosopher, Charles King Garrott. These
sentences Mr. Garrott so apathetically set down were the ancient
commonplaces of his mind, the familiar bare bones of special researches
long holding a unique position in his life. The dull General Public,
with its economic eye, might yet rate him merely as a private tutor,
formerly of Blaines College; the relative and secretary there might
judge him only a young man of an unmasculine thin sedentary quality, who
mysteriously gave his youth to producing piles of strange stuff that all
had to be copied out on the typewriter. But, in the privacy of his own
soul, Charles Garrott was, through all, not alone the coming American
novelist (which rather went without saying), but, in that direct
connection, probably the only man in the world who really understood
Woman.
Old times used this phrase unscientifically; "understanding women" has
acquired misleading connotations. The words seem to call up the picture
of a purely gallant observer, one with a polished mustache and amorous
gay eyes, sitting under a sidewalk awning and ogling out over a purplish
drink. We may go so far as to state plainly that they call up the
picture of a Frenchman. The young man at the table is scarcely imagined
as this sort of authority, viewing Woman crudely as La Femme. As he
could not put pencil to paper without revealing, Charles Garrott viewed
Woman, never as La Femme, but exclusively as a Question. Himself the New
Man obviously, he saw Woman solely as a Movement, meditated about her
strictly as an Unrest. When he considered her in the concrete--and that
he seldom did nowadays, if we need not count his friend, Mary Wing, who
was as New as he, to say the least of it--his eye reviewed and
criticized her, not as a Sex, but strictly as a human being against an
environment. Charles Garrott would scientifically diagnose a Woman to
her face, in a manner which she, poor creature, but little suspected.
Romance [he began again] left us with the sentimental tradition
that a w----
"Charles!" said his relative and secretary, speaking for the first time
in ten minutes, a long silence for him--"I'll thank you for your
attention a moment."
"Certainly, Judge," said Charles Garrott, with that alacrity with which
a true writer habitually welcomes an interruption.
"Here, near the end of this story--passage I can't for the life of
me.... Here! Seems to go like this: 'Let a man,' cried Dionysius,
cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness, 'but free his eyes
from the magic of sex, and mask my words'--no!--let's see--'_mark_ my
words, Bishop, he shall see strange truths.'"
There was a pause.
"Mistake somewhere!" said the gentleman at the typewriter, with a
chuckle. "Well, what's what?"
"No, that's right, I believe. Why, what's the matter with it?"
"Why!--there's no sense in it!"
"Oh--it's advanced talk, you know. Modern, epigrammatic stuff, you might
call it."
"Conceding that, here's the bit about the nuts. That's where the mistake
is, _I_ claim. Let me see--'cracking walnuts with a sort of _splendid_
sadness.' Good gad,--that can't be right, Charles! 'Sober sadness,'
'sorrowful sadness'--something of that sort you meant, eh?"
The secretary had swung about suddenly, revealing a face almost
startlingly handsome, fine-cut as a cameo, pink and white as a
professional beauty's, and topped with a magnificent crown of snow-white
hair.
"'Pathetic sadness,' now, my dear fellow? Go just a little better,
wouldn't it?"
"Well--no, Judge, not just in this particular story. Fact is, it's meant
to be a little queer, you see."
"It _is_ queer, that's my point!" said the Judge, rather worried.
"'Cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness'--if the public
understands _that_!--Well, as you like, of course."
Having thus washed his hands of all responsibility, the relative gazed a
moment at a little red "Nothing But Business, Please" sign that hung
above his typewriter-table, hummed a bar or two in a sweet tenor voice,
and resumed his now expert clacking.