I
It must be for the thousandth time now he was sitting down at the neat
table looking out on the little lawn, and trying to get his ideas
together, trying to get something new, something startling, that would
awaken these hard-boiled men who had control of theaters, magazines,
publishing houses to the sense that he was alive, worth while,
valuable. If he could only think up a new detective, or--or something.
Any other than he would have given up the game long ago, but he knew he
had talent--he would n't go quite so far as to say genius, but great
talent. It was no use their turning him down all the time. He was
certain they never read the stuff.
He was certain, too, there was some trick, some knack he had n't
discovered. Just some little trick. These men of national,
international fame--he could see from their faces they had no especial
brains, any more than he had.
But just some little trick he could n't get.
He had taken courses in writing, gone to schools of journalism, and
here were all his manuscripts with neat rejection slips; here was what
he thought the great American novel battered and dog-eared, a study of
the temptations of a girl in the great city; and here was his crook
drama, that some filthy reader had marked with the rim of a coffee cup.
It was enough to make a man quit.
But he would n't quit. He 'd be as big as the biggest of them. He,
too, would have his pictures in the papers, not gaunt and bitter as
most of them seemed, but pleasant, dignified, literary. And his
picture would look like an author's, with its well-marked features, its
masculine little mustache, its intellectual glasses. And he, too,
would be interviewed. And he, too, would sign contracts involving
great sums of money. And there would be gossip about him, too, in the
papers, where in Florida he was spending the winter vacation, what he
was doing in summer.
He would n't quit. Had n't they all said at school and college he was
cut out to be a writer? Had n't he gone to Europe for six months?
And, what was more, had n't he the money his father, the hardware man,
had left him? Had n't he his home? He could stick it out.
His home! His wife! If instead of these few trees, this lawn, the
outlook of the quiet sound, if instead of here he lived somewhere in
the welter of affairs, wouldn't he be better? Somewhere things
changed, where one did not have to go three quarters of an hour in a
train to the theater. Down town in New York. Only trees and grass and
water and sky here. Nothing to write about.
And his wife, Berenice--oh, she was a sweet girl, a nice girl,
but--hadn't he perhaps made a mistake? She was so good and wholesome!
Too much? Would n't it have been better to be married to--to an
actress, or a sculptress, or--or something. Some one who could feel
things; who would n't smile, and be nice. Berenice was all right, but--
And his mother. She was a nice, darling person, but--she did n't just
understand. She was just a mother, like anybody's mother: If she could
feel the great complex things! But she was just loving, and everything
he did was right.
Berenice, and his mother ... the trees, the water ... essential
barrenness of life ... nothing to write about ... so unfair.