s Willard Hinton stood on the porch of Your Hotel and waited for his host for the night to call for him, he was in that state of black dejection that comes to a young man when Ambition has proposed to Fortune, and been emphatically rejected. For six years he had worked persistently and ceaselessly toward a given goal, doing clerical work by day and creative work by night, going from shorthand into longhand, and from numerical figures into figures of speech. For the way that Hinton’s soul was traveling was the Inky Way, and at its end lay Authorship.
Hinton had taken himself and his work seriously, and served an apprenticeship of hard study and conscientious [p175] preparation. So zealous was he, in fact, that he had arrived at the second stage of his great enterprise with a teeming brain, a practised hand, and a pair of affected eyes over which the oculists shook their heads and offered little encouragement.
For four months he had implicitly obeyed orders, attending only to his regular work, eating and sleeping with exemplary regularity, and spending all of his spare time in the open air. But the ravages made in the long nights dedicated to the Muses were not to be so easily repaired, and his eyes, instead of improving, were growing rapidly worse. The question of holding his position had slipped from a matter of months into weeks.
As he stood on the porch, he could hear the bustle of entertainment going on within the limited quarters of Your Hotel. Jimmy Fallows was in his element. As bartender, head waiter, and jovial landlord he was playing a triple bill to a crowded house. Occasionally he [p176] opened the door and urged Hinton to come inside.
“Mr. Opp’ll be here ’fore long,” he would say. “He’s expecting you, but he had to stop by to take his girl home. You better step in and get a julep.”
But Hinton, wrapped in the gloom of his own thoughts, preferred to remain where he was. Already he seemed to belong to the dark, to be a thing apart from his fellow-men. He shrank from companionship and sympathy as he shrank from the light. He longed to crawl away like a sick animal into some lonely corner and die. Whichever way he turned, the great specter of darkness loomed before him. At first he had fought, then he had philosophically stood still, now he was retreating. Again and again he told himself that he would meet it like a man, and again and again he shrank back, ready to seek escape anywhere, anyhow.
“O God, if I weren’t so damnably young!” he cried to himself, beating his clenched hand against his brow. “More [p177] than half my life yet to live, and in the dark!”
The rattle of wheels and the stopping of a light in front of the hotel made him pull himself together.
The small gentleman in the checked suit whom he had seen on the wharf strode in without seeing him. He paused before he opened the door and smoothed his scanty locks and rearranged his pink necktie. Then he drew in his chin, threw out his chest, and with a carefully prepared smile of welcome entered.
The buzz within increased, and it was some minutes before the door opened again and Jimmy Fallows was heard saying: