A SHORT story every Sunday would have grilled the brains out of anybody, even a born story-teller.
Perhaps quality might have suffered; perhaps the thread of invention would have snapped had not Annan’s contract with the Planet ended with September.
He had done twenty stories for Coltfoot in six months. Those stories made Annan. It had finally come to—“Have you read Barry Annan in this week’s number?” That, and a growing hostility always certain to be aroused by recognition, were making of the young man a personage.
From the very beginning, scarce knowing why, he had avoided the shallow wallow of American “letters,” where the whole herd roots and snouts—literati, critics, public,—gruffling and snuffling for the legendary truffle disinterred and gobbled up so long—so long ago.
Already the younger aspirants hailed him. Already the dreary brethren of the obvious stared disapproval.
The dull read him as they read everything. It takes all kinds of pasture to keep a cow in cud. She chews but never criticises.
Realists peered at him evilly and askance. His description of swill didn’t smell like the best swill. There were mutterings of “heretic.”
The “small-town” school found fault with his microscope. Waste nothing—their motto—had resulted in a demand for their rag-carpets. But here was a man who saved only a handful of threads and twisted them into a phrase which seemed to do the duty of entire chapters. No, the small-town school took a sniff at Annan and trotted on down the alley.
As for the Romanticists, squirming and writhing and weaving amid their mess of properties and scenery, what did they want of the substance when the shadow cost nothing?
No, Annan didn’t fit anywhere. He was just a good story-teller.
Outside that, his qualifications for writing fiction were superfluous, from an American audience’s point of view, for, to please that audience, he didn’t have to write good English, he didn’t have to be intellectual, cultured, witty, or a gentleman. But these unnecessary addenda did not positively count against him.
He talked over the situation with Coltfoot, who was loath to lose him and muttered of moneys.
“No, Mike,” concluded Annan, “I’ve had my romp in your kindly columns. You let me train there. I feel fit for the fight, now. I’m on tip-toe, all pepped up.”
“How much do you want then?” demanded Coltfoot, unconvinced.
“Nothing. I’ve about a million things I want to try——”
“Bosco,” nodded the other wearily;—“I know. But you’ll end in a Coney Island show, matched against all comers to eat twenty-five feet of sausages in twenty-five minutes.... Do a serial for us. We’ve never tried it but I believe the newspaper is destined to put the magazine out of business. I’ll take a chance, anyway. Will you?”
“Maybe. I’m going to do a story—a kind of novel—a thing—something——”
“I’ll take it without sample or further identification. It may cost me my job. Are we on?”
“No, you crazy Irishman. Let me alone, I tell you. I may change my mind and try a play, or a continuity direct,—hang it all, I might even burst into verse. Do you want some poems?” he threatened.
“No,” replied Coltfoot calmly, “but I’ll take them.”
“I’ll do one farewell article for you. I’ll do it to-night. But that ends it.”
“You’re very kind,” said Annan laughing. “It’s just the yoke, Mike. It hasn’t galled, but let me drop it for a while.... That stuff I did for you—well, it’s out of my system. I don’t care, now, whether it’s good or bad; I shan’t do any more anyway——”
“Your public asks for it.”
“I’m through——”
“They want that!”
“Well, I won’t do any more. I don’t want to. I can’t. I don’t think that way any longer. Damn it, I’ve gone on——”
“They haven’t!”
“Let ’em stay put, then,” growled Annan.
“You mean you are going to abandon your public?”
“I move. If they don’t want to follow——”
“No writer can afford to abandon his public,” said Coltfoot, seriously.
Annan, also serious, said slowly: “The Masters we scribblers try to follow went that way. They went on. Few followed them all the way.... Poe wrote only one ‘Tales of the Grotesque’; Kipling wrote only one ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’; Scott one ‘Ivanhoe,’ Hawthorne one ‘Scarlet Letter’; Cooper, Dickens, Thackeray only the one each.... And there was only one ‘Hamlet.’... And but one ‘Inferno.’... And one ‘Song of Songs.’... And one ‘Iliad.’”
He shrugged: “So maybe, in my own cheap little job I have hit my high-spot with those stories of yours.... Maybe.... But I’m going on, I’m going to write what I please if it costs me my last reader.”
Coltfoot made his last effort: “Dumas wrote ‘Twenty Years After’?”
“There was only one ‘Three Musketeers.’”
“Sure.... The greatest romance ever written.... Sure.... All right, Barry....”
That evening Annan made himself some black coffee and wrote his farewell article for Coltfoot. It took him only half an hour and it left him too much keyed up for sleep. He called his article: “The Great American Ass.”
“September flowers gone to seed,” it began, deceptively; “withering leaves and dry dirt—the Park and Fifth Avenue at their shabbiest. Streets torn up, piles of sand, escaping steam, puddles of mortar, red flag and red lantern crowning the débris, and the whole mess stinking of illuminating gas: heat, dirt, noise—unnecessary, incessant, hellish noise—seven million sweating people milling like maggots in the midst—your New York, fellow citizens, on an unwashed platter!
“Of the metropolis itself there is scarcely any beauty—a church here, an office-building there, one or two statues, a few dwellings:
“In the metropolis there is more beauty than anywhere else in the world. It is to be found in the faces and figures of its women and children.
“For the beauty of woman is as usual in New York as it is rare in the capitals of Europe. Without the charm, symmetry, vivacity of the faces of her women, New York would be, indeed, the ugliest, dingiest, and stupidest metropolis in the world.
“Flower-like her pretty women bloom all over the arid, treeless agglomeration of mortar and metal, serene amid the asinine clamour; smiling, piquant, nourished by suffocating heat, flourishing in arctic cold, hardy, healthy, wonderful in the vast abiding place of the Great American Ass,—New York.
“Here is his stronghold and he runs it to suit himself. Any woman manages her own flat far better.
“For your New Yorker comes of an untidy race, knowing neither civic nor national pride in the proper sense.
“His forefathers cleared forests and lived among charred stumps. He is aware of no inborn necessity for beauty.
“New York is the wastrel among states. Her sons pollute streams; her country roads are vistas of bill-boards; even the ‘eternal’ hills that line the Hudson crumble daily into cement. Here the Great American Ass found a Paradise and created a Dump. He ravages, stamps out, obliterates the lovely face of nature,—digs, burns, crushes, tramples. Hundreds of miles of ghastly, charred forests mark the trail of the Great American Ass among his mountains. Filthy sea-waves dash his refuse upon his shores.
“Loud, wanton, strident, and painted his metropolis sprawls, unbuttoned, on the island leering at ugliness and devastation. And, in her dirty ears, the ceaseless and complacent braying of the Great American Ass. Her lover, Bottom, the eternal New Yorker.
“Any woman’s kitchen is cleaner and her household run with greater economy.
“Poor bread—when France can teach him what bread really is—poorly prepared food, making candy eaters of an entire people—an alimentary viciousness unknown where food is properly cooked and properly eaten.
“A poor people, you New Yorkers, spite of your money—poorly educated, bodily and mentally; poor in physique; poor sportsmen who tolerate professionalism as your popular sport; too poor in spirit to submit to universal service for the common weal.
“So poor that your laws are made for you by the most recently settled and most ignorant section of the nation.
“The ‘Centre of Population,’ with its incubus of half educated women, prescribes your bodily and your moral menu. And you become a metropolis of moonshiners.
“What are you, Manhattan? Ruins already, alas, to build upon—the Yankee Ninevah trodden by an ass less wild.
“And yet the endless caravans continue. Still, to New York come all things, all people. And, alas, Youth comes too, and all afire to see and learn and achieve. High ideals, high hopes, vigour, courage, face to face with the Great American Ass enthroned amid the débris.
“Youth floundering in the dump-heap bares a clean sword to hew its way to beauty. And strikes a shower of ashes. There is no sympathy; no audience for beauty in New York.
“Dull eyes look on, dull minds weary. There is official inquiry as to the purpose of ‘these here art artists.’ The waiter, taxi-driver, janitor, gambler of yesterday are the arbiters of Art on Broadway to-day.
“It is not a sword that Youth needs in New York; it is a gas-mask. And, somewhere, Destiny is already mixing mortar and Fate is baking bricks for that coming temple that shall stand upon the futile ruins where, some day, shall be disinterred the fossil bones of the Great American Ass.”
Annan sent it to Coltfoot with a note:
“This is a crazy article. You don’t have to use it.”
Coltfoot used it. A few people laughed, a few protested, the Middle West was angry, and the owners of the Planet told Coltfoot to be more careful.
But the majority of New Yorkers liked the article, and grinned, having been overfed on “our fair city” stuff.
Besides, the tendency of the times was toward the unpleasant.
Stilton and caviar are acquired tastes.
That night Annan made himself some black coffee and began his first novel, “The Cloud.”
About three o’clock in the morning he tore up what he had written and smoked another pipe.
“Oh, the rotten start!” he yawned, conscious that inwardly he was all a-tremble with creative power,—like a boiler that taxes its safety valve.
The young vigour in him laughed its menace. All the insolent certainty of youth was in his gesture as he flung the torn manuscript into the fireplace.
That night he embarked upon the sea of dreams. He seldom dreamed. But this night tall clouds loomed in his sleep and an ocean rolled away. His ship plunged on, always on, he at the helm.
Far upon the storm-wastes pitched a tiny craft under naked poles, hurled toward destruction. As he drove past her under thundering sail he saw—for the first time in any dream—the ghost of Eris lashed to the little helm, her death-white face fixed, her gaze intent upon the last fading star.
He awoke calling to her, the strain of nightmare an agony in his throat, and shaking all over. But now, awake, he couldn’t understand what had so terrified him in his dream, why he quivered so.
“I suppose I thought she couldn’t ride out the storm in that cockle-shell,” he muttered, gazing at the grey warning of dawn outside his windows.
The first sparrow chirped. Annan pulled the quilt over his ears, disgusted.
“I ought to look up that kid,” he thought.
It was his last conscious effort until he awoke for another day.