Читать книгу The Pretender - Robert William Service - Страница 5

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Whether or not a sense of humour is an attribute of the Divine, I am too ignorant of theology to conjecture; but I am sure that as a sustaining power amid the tribulations of life it is one of the blessedest of dispensations.

For a moment, I must confess, the words of Quince and Vaine stung me to resentment. Being one of these people who think in moving pictures, I had a gratifying vision in which I was clutching them savagely and knocking their heads together. Then the whole thing struck me on the funny side, and a little page boy, entering to turn on the lights, must have been amazed to hear me burst into sudden laughter.

So that presently, as Mr. Quince, having spilt some cigar ash over the still uncut leaves of Poems Plutonian, was arising to daintily dust the volume, I approached him with a bright and happy smile.

"Hullo, Quince," I began, cheerily.

He looked up. His eyes gleamed frosty interrogation, and his clipped grey moustache seemed to bristle in his purple face.

"What is it?" he grunted.

"It's about that matter we spoke of this morning. You know I've been thinking it over, and I've decided to go on that note of yours."

Quince was astonished. He was also overjoyed; but his manner was elaborately off-hand.

"Ah! Thanks awfully, Madden. Only a matter of renewal, you know. Old endorser went off to Europe, and the bank got after me. Well, you'll go on the note, then?"

"Yes, on one condition."

"Hum! Condition! What?" he demanded anxiously.

"Well," I said. "I believe one good turn deserves another. Now I was down at the bank this morning, and I know you're in rather a hole about that renewal. Backers for thousand dollar notes aren't picked up so easily. However, I'm willing to go on it if you'll"—here I paused deliberately, "give my last book a good write up in your next Compass causerie."

His face fell. "I'm afraid—you see, I've promised Vaine—"

"Oh, hang Vaine! Sidetrack him."

"But—there's the policy of the paper—"

"Oh, well, I'll buy a controlling interest, and alter your policy. But, as a matter of fact, you know they'll print anything over your name."

"Yes—well, there are my own standards, the ideals I have fought for—"

"Rot! Look here, Quince, let's be honest. We're both in the writing game for what we can get out of it. We may strut and brag; but we know in our hearts there's none of us of much account. Why, man, show me half a dozen writers of to-day who'll be remembered twenty years after they're dead?"

"I protest—"

"You know it's true. We're bagmen in a negligible day. Now, I don't want you to alter your standards; all I want of you is to adjust them. You know that as soon as you see a book of mine coming along you get your knife out. You've flayed me from the start. You do it on principle. You've got regular formulas of abuse. My characters are sticks, my plots chaotic, my incidents melodramatic. You judge my work by your academic standards. Don't do that. Don't judge it as art—judge it as entertainment. Does it entertain?"

"Possibly it does—the average, unthinking man."

"Precisely. He's my audience. My business is to amuse him, to take him outside of himself for an hour or two."

"It's our duty to elevate his taste."

"Fiddlesticks! my dear chap. I don't take myself so seriously as that. And, anyway, it's hopeless. If you don't give him the stuff he wants, he won't take any. You'll never educate the masses to anything higher than the satisfaction of their appetites. They want frenzied fiction, plot, action. The men want a good yarn, the women sentiment, and we writers want—the money."

"It's a sad state of affairs, I admit."

"Well, then, admit that my books fill the bill. They're good yarns, they're exciting, they're healthy. Surely they don't deserve wholesale condemnation. So go home, my dear Quince, and begin a little screed like this:

In the past we have frequently found occasion to deal severely with the novels of Norman Dane, and to regret that he refuses to use those high gifts he undoubtedly possesses; but on opening his latest novel, The House of a Hundred Scandals, we are agreeably surprised to note a decided awakening of artistic conscience.

And so on. No one knows how to do it better than you. Bring to the bank to-morrow a proof of the article, and I'll put my name on the back of your note."

"I—I don't know. I'll think it over. Perhaps I've been a little too dogmatic. Let me see—Literary Criticism and the Point of View—yes, I'll see what I can do."

As I left him ruefully brooding over the idea I felt suddenly ashamed of myself.

"Poor old chap!" I thought; "I've certainly taken a mean advantage of him. Perhaps, after all, he may be right and I wrong. I begin to wonder: Have I earned success, or only achieved it? It seems to me this literary camp is divided into two bands, the sheep and the goats, and, sooner or later, a man must ask himself which he belongs to. Am I a sheep or am I a goat?"

But I quickly steeled myself. Why should I have compunction? Was I not in a land where money was the standard of success? Here then was the virtue of my bloated bank-book—Power. Let them sneer at me, these æsthetic apes, these flabby degenerates. There by the door was a group of them, and I ventured to bet that they were all in debt to their tailors. Yet they regarded me as an outsider, a barbarian. Looking around for some object to soothe my ruffled feelings, I espied the red, beefsteak-and-beer face of Porkinson, the broker. Here was a philistine, an unabashed disciple of the money god. I hailed him.

Over our second whiskey I told Porkinson of the affair in the library. He laughed a ruddy, rolling laugh.

"What do you care?" he roared raucously, "You put the stuff over and grab the coin—that's the game, isn't it? Let those highbrow freaks knock you all they want—you've got away with the goods. And, anyway, they've got the wrong dope. Why, I guess I'm just as level-headed as the next man, and I wouldn't give a cent for the piffle they turn out. When I'm running to catch a train I grab one of your books every time. I know if there's none of the boys on board to have a card game with I've got something to keep me from being tired between drinks. What I like about your yarns, old man, is that they keep me guessing all the time, and the fellow never gets the girl till the last page. I always skip a whole lot, I get so darned interested. I once read a book of yours clean through between breakfast and lunch."

Thanking Porkinson for his enthusiasm, which somehow failed to elate me, I took the elevator up to my apartment on the tenth story of the club. Travers, the artist, had a studio adjoining me, and, seeing a light under his door, I knocked.

"Enter," called Travers.

He was a little frail old man, with a peaked, grey face framed in a plenitude of iron-grey hair, and ending in a white Vandyke beard. A nervous trouble made him twitch his right eye continually, sometimes emphasising his statements with curious effect. He believed he was one of the greatest painters in the world; yet that very day three of his best pictures had been refused by the Academy.

"I knew it," he cried excitedly; "I knew when I sent them they'd come back. It's happened for the last ten years. They know if they hung me I'd kill every one else in the room. They're afraid of my mountains." (A wink.) "Their little souls can't conceive of any scenery beyond Connecticut. But it's the last time I'll send." (A wink.) "I'll get recognition elsewhere, London, Paris; then when they want my pictures for their walls they'll have to come and beg, yes, beg for them." (A portentous wink.)

Every year he vowed the same thing; every year he canvassed the members of the hanging committee; every year his pictures came cruelly back; yet his faith in himself was invincible.

"I tell you what," I said; "you might be one of the popular painters of the day if you only looked at it right. Here you go painting straight scenery as it was in the days before Adam. You object to the least hint of humanity—a hut, a bridge, a boat. My dear sir, what the General Public wants is the human, the dramatic. There's that River Rapids picture you did two years ago, and it's still on your hands. Now that's good. That water's alive, it boils; as I look at it I can hear it roar, and feel the sting of the spray. But—it's straight water, and the G.P. won't take its water straight. Now just paint two men in a birch-bark canoe going down these rapids. Paint in a big rock, call it A Close Shave, and you'll sell that picture like winking."

"Oh, I couldn't do that. You're talking like a tradesman."

"There's that sunset," I went on. "It's splendid. That colour seems to burn a hole in the canvas. But just you paint in a black cross against that smouldering sky, and see how it gives significance, aye, and poetry to the picture. Call it The Lone Grave."

"But don't you see," said Travers, with some irritation, "I'm trying to express a mood of Nature. Surely there's enough poetry in Nature without trying to drag in lone graves?"

"Not for the G.P. You've got to give it sentiment. Did that millionaire brewer buy anything?"

Travers sighed rather wofully.

"No, he kept on asking me where my pictures were, and I kept on telling him they weren't anywhere, they were everywhere; they were in his own heart if he only looked deep enough. They were just moods of nature. He couldn't see it. I believe he bought an eight by ten canvas at Rosenheimer's Department Store: Moses Smiting the Rock."

"There you are. He was getting more for his money. He wanted action, interest. Daresay he had the gush of water coloured to look like beer. But I'll tell you what I'll do—I'll give you five hundred for that thing you call Morning Mist in the Valley."

"Sorry," said Travers, with a look of miserable hesitation; "I don't want to sell that. It's the best thing I've done. I want to leave it to the nation."

"All right. You know best. Good-night."

I knew I had offered more than the market value of the picture; I knew that Travers had not sold a canvas for months; I knew that he often ate only one meal a day, and that if he chose, he could paint commercial pictures; so I could not but admire the little man who, in the face of scorn, neglect, starvation even, clung to his ideals and refused to prostitute his art. But this knowledge did not tend to restore my self-esteem, and it was in a mood of singular self-criticism I entered my room.

As I switched on the light the first thing I saw was my reflection in a large mirror. Long and grimly I gazed, hands in pockets, legs widespread, head drooping. I have often thought of that moment. It seemed as if the reflection I saw was other than myself, was, indeed, almost a stranger to me.

"Ha!" I cried, grimacing at the man in the mirror; "you're getting found out, are you? Tell me, now, beneath your wrappings of selfishness and sham is there anything honest and essential? Is there a real You, such as might stand naked in the wind-swept spaces of eternity? Or are you, down to your very soul's depths a player of parts?"

Then my mood changed, and I savagely paced the room.

"Oh, the fools! The hypocrites! Can't they see that I am cleverer than they? Can't they see that I could write their futile sonnets, their fatuous odes? But if I did, wouldn't I starve? Am I to be blamed if I refuse? It's all right to starve if one's doing immortal work; but not six men in the world to-day are doing that. We're ephemera. Our stuff serves the moment. Then take the cash, and let the credit go."

I took off my boots, and threw them viciously into a corner.

"How Quince upset me to-night! So I made a chance hit with my first book? Well, it's true the public were up on their toes for it. But then I would have succeeded anyway. As to catering to the mass—I admit it. I'm between the devil and the deep sea. The publishers keep rushing me for the sort of thing that will sell, and the million Porkinsons keep clamouring for the sort of thing they can read without having to think. For the sake of his theoretical wife and six children, what can a poor devil do but commercialise his ideals?"

Here I paused thoughtfully, with one arm out of my coat.

"After all, is a book of fiction not entertainment just as much as a play? There's your audience, the public. You've got to try and please them, to be entertaining from cover to cover. Better be immoral than be dull. And when it comes to audiences, give me a big one of just plain 'folks,' to a small one of highbrows."

With knitted brows and lips pursed doubtfully, I proceeded to wind up my watch.

"Anyway, I haven't written for money; I've written for popularity. It's nice to think you can get on a train and find some one reading your books—even if it's only the nigger porter. True, my popularity has meant about twenty-five thousand a year to me; but it's not my fault if my publishers insist on paying me such big royalties. And I've not spent the money. I've gone on living on my private income. Then the writing itself has been such a distraction. Lord! how I have enjoyed it! Granted that my notion of Hades would be to be condemned to read my own books, yet, such as they are, I've done my best with them. I've lived them as I wrote. I've laughed with joy at their humour. I've shed real tears (with just as much joy) at their pathos."

I gave a wrench at my collar, expressive of savage perplexity; on which the stud shot out, and cheerfully proceeded to roll under the wardrobe.

"Perhaps I've done things I shouldn't? I've made coincidence work overtime; I've grafted on love scenes so that the artist could get in one or two 'clinch pictures.' On my last page you'll find the heroine clutched to the hero's waistcoat; but—they all do it. One's got to, or get out of the game."

Here I disappeared for a moment; and when I re-entered, clad in pale blue pyjamas, I was calm and cheerful again.

"So old Quince said I'd succeeded by a fluke. Well, I'd just like to bet my year's income against his that I could make a fresh start and do the same thing all over again. By Jove! What an idea! Why not? Go away to London, cut adrift from friends and funds, fight my way up the ladder from the very bottom. After all, I've had the devil's own luck, everything in my favour. It's hardly been a fair test. Perhaps I really am a four-flusher. Even now I begin to doubt myself. It seems like a challenge."

Switching off the light I jumped into bed.

"Life's too appallingly prosy. Here for seven years I've been imagining romance; it's time I tried to live it a little. Yes, I'll go to-morrow.... London ... garret ... poverty ... struggle ... triumph ..."

And at this point any one caring to listen at my door might have heard issuing from those soft blankets a sound resembling the intermittent harshness of a buzz-saw going through cordwood.