"I suppose you'd really like to know what I've lately been up to; but I
hardly know myself. It's absurd, of course, but I almost think I'm
having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night--not dark-blue devils
exactly--say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things
have pushed me about, rather. It's that, I think. There's been too
much--of everything--somehow----
"You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all
Gaul, and as my business opportunities--Midas forgive them!--have all
come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's
the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great
old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second;
and chance--our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich
Village--is the skeleton key to the third.
"I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and
things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you,
Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to
date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since
I wrote Phil--and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too--all
about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and
impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of
AEsthetic May-Flies--I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that
way. Now--Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind
doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The
whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result--my
occasional flutterings among the AEsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully
less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends--to call them
that--with a May-Fly or two.
"One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart--but
there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy
combination--all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in
spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can _write_!
He's a lost soul, though--thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the
May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last
sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born
thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't
pity him--and get jeered at wittily for my pains!
"Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if
everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless
numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to
me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a
career--if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but
vivid sensation--from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty,
she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel
with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind
heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel
for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the
arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor
me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or
not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And
that's her one new sensation for the last three years!
"Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel
grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish _soirees
musicales_, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of _Whim_, the smarty-party weekly
review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the
harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and aesthetic fads and
freaks of the day--just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only.
Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an
undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd
never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it
means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after
the _goods_. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost.
He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne.
"Well, I didn't know _what_ he was when Mona casually dropped me beside
him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me--till my
thoughts chattered! I rattled on--like this, Jimmy--only not because I
wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I
made a fool of myself--utter; with the result that he detected a
slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel _bouquet_--let's
call it the 'Birch Street _bouquet_.' At any rate, he finally silenced
me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and
he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of
it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more
annoying laws of Nature.
"The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for
_Whim_; and the fantastic upshot of _that_ was, I'm now doing a nonsense
column a week for him--have been for the past five--and getting fifty
dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing "Dax"--a signature
invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three
times, just to see what would happen. "Dax" happened, and I'm to be
allowed to burble on as him--I think Dax is a him--for ten weeks; then,
if my stuff goes, catches on, gets over--I'm to have a year's contract.
And farewell to double-room-and-alcove for aye! Else, farewell _Whim_!
So it _must_ get over--I'm determined! I stick at nothing. I even test
my burble on poor Sister every week before sending it in. If she smiles
sadly, twice, I seal up the envelope and breathe again.
"That's my bird in the hand, Jimmy--a sort of crazily screaming jay--but
I mustn't let it escape.
"There's another bird, though. A real bluebird, still in the bush--and
oh, so shy! And he lures me into the second and beautifulest part of all
Gaul----
"It's no use, I'm dished! Sister says no one ever wrote or read such a
monstrous letter, and commands me to stop now and go to bed. There's a
look in her eye--she means it. Good-night and good luck--I'll tell you
about my other two parts of Gaul as soon as I can, unless you wire
me--collect--'Cut it out!' Or unless you run down--you never have--and
learn of them that way. Why not--_soon_?"