"Ah," he exclaimed, "so am I. Resigned." He switched the bare brambles
by the roadside. "A man can't serve two masters."
"You mean business and literature?"
"No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You've
got to choose which fruit you'll try; and you don't know till afterward
which of the two has the dead core."
"How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?"
"I'm sure," said Merrick sharply.
We turned back to the subject of his essays, and I was astonished at
the detachment with which he criticised and demolished them. Little by
little, as we talked, his old perspective, his old standards came
back to him; but with the difference that they no longer seemed like
functions of his mind but merely like attitudes assumed or dropped at
will. He could still, with an effort, put himself at the angle from
which he had formerly seen things; but it was with the effort of a man
climbing mountains after a sedentary life in the plain.
I tried to cut the talk short, but he kept coming back to it with
nervous insistence, forcing me into the last retrenchments of hypocrisy,
and anticipating the verdict I held back. I perceived that a great
deal--immensely more than I could see a reason for--had hung for him on
my opinion of his book.
Then, as suddenly, his insistence dropped and, as if ashamed of having
forced himself so long on my attention, he began to talk rapidly and
uninterestingly of other things.
We were alone again that evening, and after dinner, wishing to efface
the impression of the afternoon, and above all to show that I wanted him
to talk about himself, I reverted to his work. "You must need an outlet
of that sort. When a man's once had it in him, as you have--and when
other things begin to dwindle--"
He laughed. "Your theory is that a man ought to be able to return to the
Muse as he comes back to his wife after he's ceased to interest other
women?"
"No; as he comes back to his wife after the day's work is done." A new
thought came to me as I looked at him. "You ought to have had one," I
added.
He laughed again. "A wife, you mean? So that there'd have been some one
waiting for me even if the Muse decamped?" He went on after a pause:
"I've a notion that the kind of woman worth coming back to wouldn't
be much more patient than the Muse. But as it happens I never
tried--because, for fear they'd chuck me, I put them both out of doors
together."
He turned his head and looked past me with a queer expression at the low
panelled door at my back. "Out of that very door they went--the two of
'em, on a rainy night like this: and one stopped and looked back, to see
if I wasn't going to call her--and I didn't--and so they both went...."