I
With the publication of his first book, _This Weary World_, Abner Joyce
immediately took a place in literature. Or rather, he made it; the book
was not like other books, and readers felt the field of fiction to be the
richer by one very vital and authentic personality.
_This Weary World_ was grim and it was rugged, but it was sincere and it
was significant. Abner's intense earnestness had left but little room for
the graces;--while he was bent upon being recognised as a "writer," yet
to be a mere writer and nothing more would not have satisfied him at all.
Here was the world with its many wrongs, with its numberless crying
needs; and the thing for the strong young man to do was to help set
matters right. This was a simple enough task, were it but approached with
courage, zeal, determination. A few brief years, if lived strenuously and
intensely, would suffice. "Man individually is all right enough," said
Abner; "it is only collectively that he is wrong." What was at fault was
the social scheme,--the general understanding, or lack of understanding.
A short sharp hour's work before breakfast would count for a hundred
times more than a feeble dawdling prolonged throughout the whole day.
Abner rose betimes and did his hour's work; sweaty, panting, begrimed,
hopeful, indignant, sincere, self-confident, he set his product full in
the world's eye.
Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories--twelve clods of earth
gathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, a
farmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, the
intimate, humble ground; warmed by his own passionate sense of right, it
steamed incense-like aloft and cried to the blue skies for justice. He
pleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of all
the world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilized
society, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths of
slighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and gross
tyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously, yet reaped
so scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the man who lived
indeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his solicitous eye
upon the earth. All this revolted Abner; the indignation of a youth that
had not yet made its compromise with the world burned on every page. Some
of his stories seemed written not so much by the hand as by the fist, a
fist quivering from the tension of muscles and sinews fully ready to act
for truth and right; and there were paragraphs upon which the intent and
blazing eye of the writer appeared to rest with no less fierceness,
coldly printed as they were, than it had rested upon the manuscript
itself.
"Men shall hear me--and heed me," Abner declared stoutly.
A few of those who read his book happened to meet him personally, and one
or two of this number--clever but inconspicuous people--lucidly
apprehended him for what he was: that rare phenomenon, the artist (such
he was already calling himself)--the artist whose personality, whose
opinions and whose work are in exact accord. The reading public--a body
rather captious and blase, possibly--overlooked his rugged diction in
favour of his novel point of view; and when word was passed around that
the new author was actually in town a number of the _illuminati_
expressed their gracious desire to meet him.