IX
The manifesto in the Independent had proclaimed my personal independence—“I having consummated a victory,” and so on. I really thought it meant something that the literary world had hailed my book with such fervor. But in the course of time the publishers reported less than two thousand copies sold, and called my attention to a tricky clause in the contract whereby they did not have to pay any royalties until the book had earned its expenses—which, of course, it never did. This was before the authors of America had formed a league, and learned how contracts should be drawn.
So there were Corydon and Thyrsis, more fast in the trap than ever. Corydon and her baby were staying with her parents; while Thyrsis lived in a lodginghouse, this time up in Harlem. He was not permitted to see his wife whom he could not support. He had not seen his son for six months, and was naturally, anxious to know what that son looked like. It was arranged between the young parents that the Negro maid who took care of the child should wheel the baby carriage to a certain spot in Central Park at a certain hour of the afternoon, and Thyrsis would be there and watch the little one go by. The father kept the appointed tryst, and there came a Negro nursemaid, wheeling a baby carriage, and the father gazed therein and beheld a horrifying spectacle—a red-headed infant with a flat nose and a pimply skin. The father went away, sick at soul—until he had the inspiration to send a telegram, and received an answer informing him that the nursemaid had been prevented from coming.
The lodginghouse where Thyrsis had a room was kept by an elderly widow who had invested her little property in United States Steel common and had seen it go down to six dollars. As fellow lodgers, there was the father of Thyrsis, who was drinking more and more; and that Uncle Harry who had almost reached the stage where he put a bullet through his brain. Meanwhile, the uncle considered it his duty to give worldly-wise advice to a haggard young author who refused to “go to work.” The mother of Thyrsis, distracted, kept repeating the same formula; half a dozen other occupants of the lodginghouse, broker’s clerks, and other commercial persons, took an interest in the problem and said their say.
Such was the life of a would-be prophet in a business world! So that winter I wrote the most ferocious of my stories, A Captain of Industry, which became a popular item in the list of the State Publishing House of Soviet Russia. The manuscript was submitted to the Macmillans, and the president of that concern was kind enough to let me see the opinion of one of his readers. “What is the matter with this young author?” was the opening sentence. The answer of course was that the young author was unable to get enough to eat.
Critics of Arthur Stirling and of Love’s Pilgrimage complain of the too-idealistic characters portrayed, the lack of redeeming weaknesses in the hero. Let the deficiency be supplied by one detail—that during that dreadful winter I discovered my vice. Living in these sordid surroundings, desperate, and utterly without companionship, I was now and then invited to play cards with some of my fellow lodgers. I had played cards as a boy, but never for money; now I would “sit in” at a poker game with the young broker’s clerks and other commercial persons with whom fate had thrown me.
So I discovered a devastating emotion; I was gripped by a dull, blind frenzy of greed and anxiety, and was powerless to break its hold. The game was what is called penny ante, and the stakes were pitifully small, yet they represented food for that week. I cannot recall that I ever won, but I lost a dollar or two on several occasions. I remember that on Christmas Eve I started playing after dinner, and sat at a table in a half-warmed room gray with tobacco smoke until two or three in the morning; the following afternoon I began playing again and played all night. So it appeared that I was an orthodox Southern gentleman, born to be a gambler! After that Christmas experience I took a vow, and have never played cards for money since that time.