He had started upon his task with the utmost hope and confidence. He had for a couple of years been studying stage work, writing plays that nobody would touch, and serving that dreary apprenticeship which comes before literary success, but which is, unhappily, not always followed by it. He had pinned above his writing-table a sentence from “Earl’s Dene,” which had afforded him a sombre support often enough: “The only road to the skies, Mademoiselle, is up the garret stairs. Mozart climbed them, Moretti climbed them, ... everybody who has ever done anything has had to climb them; and you, Mademoiselle, are one whose duty for the present is to starve.” It may have been because he secretly felt that he had starved long enough, or from the buoyant hope pathetically natural to youth, that West was convinced that his time had come; but at least of that fact he had no doubt.
When, however, he sat down to write, he found his brain teeming, in place of valuable ideas, with the single notion that this time he must succeed; instead of a plot, his mind spun visions of coming greatness; and in place of elaborating witticisms, his thoughts turned alternately to dismal memories and to yet more gloomy forebodings. To-day ended a week of futile endeavor, and the unlucky writer was forced to confess to himself that, so far from being further on in his work than he was seven days earlier, he had stuck where he set out, and acquired the fatal hindrance of a self-distrust which benumbed all his powers.
It grew quickly darker as he brooded, the brief February twilight shutting down rapidly. It was so dark when at last he got heavily upon his feet that he was obliged to fumble about for his shabby hat and coat in the shallow closet which held his scant wardrobe. He muttered to himself as he did so a quotation from Octave Feuillet. He could hardly have been an aspirant for literary honors, and not be crammed to the throat with quotations.
“‘Ce n’est donc pas un vain mot, la faim!’” he said aloud, with so much bitterness that a hearer, had there been one, might have forgiven his sentimentality. “‘Il y a donc vraiment une maladie de ce nom-là.’”
He went down the three flights of stairs which lay between his chamber and the sordid street, taking his way to a cheap restaurant, which his soul loathed, but to which the narrowness of his purse constrained him. The waiter-girls, gossiping together, knew his shabby figure too well to hasten to serve him with any alacrity born of expectation of tips; but one of them came to stand, leaning by one hand upon the table, while he studied the bill of fare in a vain attempt to discover some dish which would be alike satisfactory to his appetite and his finances. There were stains of coffee and of soup upon the card, which gave him a feeling of disgust, as if his food had been served in an unwashed dish; but he repressed his feelings and made out his meagre order. The damsel filled him the usual glass of ice-water, tossed an evening paper before him, and betook herself to cry the supper he had called for into the mouth of a rubber tube, which hung flabbily out of the wall. West could hear the voice of somebody under ground repeating the order, like a surly subterranean echo, and he was peevishly half inclined to fling a plate at the head of a man at the next table, on the supposition that that individual might have been listening to this double disclosure of the straitness of diet to which his poverty constrained him.
He tried to interest himself in the paper which had been given him. He picked out the smallest paragraphs with a feeling of being so much at variance with the world in general that nothing could possibly interest him which was not held to be of no especial moment to the majority. Suddenly he felt that little thrill with which a man always comes upon his name in print. Among a lot of brief jottings was the statement that a man in Chicago had left two hundred thousand dollars to Barum West. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, but instantly his common sense reasserted itself, and he smiled with the bitter but fleeting cynicism of youth at the impossibility that a fortune should come to him by any lucky throw of Fortune’s dice. The name was sufficiently uncommon, however, to make the coincidence striking, and what artistic youth, so placed that his wits were more or less disconcerted by the unevenness of life, could fail to make the paragraph the starting-point for a thousand dreams.
All that night, when he should have been sleeping, and when he really was half under the influence of slumber, Barum West’s thoughts, which should have been devising stage situations, droll dialogue, and popular allusions, occupied themselves with that illusive fortune. He considered what he would do did he really have it; how he would enjoy it; what delights he would purchase, and what miseries escape. In dreams his fancy wove a gorgeous tissue of enchantment, at which he smiled when he waked, although in reality it was little more extravagant than the airy fabric of his waking fancies. When once an imaginative youth gives rein to his fancy, especially if hope and need prick the tricksy steed forward, there is no telling to what lengths the race it runs may not stretch. West certainly did not believe that the legacy of which he had seen mention was really intended for his pocket, and yet the coincidence of the name seemed to him so good proof that it went far toward persuading him that he was, in truth, the legatee. For the rest, he, perhaps not unconsciously, humored a little a dream which at least amused for the time being a life all too little lightened by frivolity of any sort.
It was not until the following evening that it occurred to West that, having a fortune in hand, it would be necessary for him to invest it. He was once more at the eating-house, which to-night he regarded with less bitterness than hitherto, so strong was the effect of his dream in putting him in better temper toward life and the world. As he scanned the paper, in the hope that he might come upon some further information in regard to Barum West’s fortune, his eye lighted on the stock reports, and, with a sudden sense of importance he reflected that with two hundred thousand dollars to take care of it behooved him to furbish up whatever knowledge he possessed of stocks. The unintelligibility of the stock reports was sufficient proof that he had little knowledge to furbish, but this only aroused his combativeness, and made him determined to learn.
When he left the restaurant he bought a paper of his own, and taking it to his room, he passed the evening in studying finance as represented in the columns of the daily journal. There was something amusing, or pathetic, as one might look at it, about the absorption with which he gave himself to the occupation of deciding what he should do with $200,000 if he had it. He reflected shrewdly that it were wise not to invest his whole capital in a single stock, and he tried to recall whatever he had heard of the relative safety of different classes of security. He guessed at the amount of commission he would be obliged to pay a broker, his guide being a confused remembrance that in a play he had heard a certain rate mentioned. He carefully tabulated his investments, and retired at length, the possessor of an income of something over $11,000, all commissions having been paid.
It was perhaps not strange that Barum was in absolute ignorance of the fact, since a knowledge of the vagaries of the stock market was decidedly outside of his world, but the truth was that he had begun to manage his fancied fortunes on a falling market when the bears were raging in Wall Street. While he slept that night a combination was being completed which was the next day to run down twenty-five per cent the conservative railroad stock in which West had felt it safe to put half his fairy gold. When Barum took up the paper at the restaurant on the third evening he had lost about $40,000,—a fact which could hardly have caused him more chagrin had he really possessed the money to lose.