THE NILE-GREEN ROADSTER
"I hope you slept well, sir," said Benson, as I sat down to my breakfast of iced Casaba and eggs O'Brien, a long month later.
"Like a top, thank you," I was able to announce to that anxious-eyed old retainer of mine.
"That sounds like old times, sir," ventured Benson, caressing his own knuckle-joints very much as though he were shaking hands with himself.
"It feels like old times," I briskly acknowledged. "And this morning, Benson, I'd like you to clear out my study and get that clutter of Shang and Ming bronzes off my writing-desk."
"Very good, sir."
"And order up a ream or two of that Wistaria Bond I used to use. For I feel like work again, Benson, and that's a feeling which I don't think we ought to neglect."
"Quite so, sir," acquiesced Benson, with an approving wag of the head which he made small effort to conceal.
It was the truth that I had spoken to Benson. The drought seemed to have ended. The old psychasthenic inertia had slipped away. Life, for some unaccountable reason or other, still again seemed wonderful to me, touched with some undefined promise of high adventure, crowned once more with the fugitive wine-glow of romance. Gramercy Square, from my front windows, looked like something that Maxfield Parrish might have drawn. A milk-wagon, just beyond the corner, made me suddenly think of Phaethon and his coursers of the stellar trails. I felt an itching to get back to my desk, to shake out the wings of creation. I wanted to write once more. It would never again be about those impossible Alaskan demigods of the earlier days, but about real men and women, about the people I had met and known and struggled into an understanding of. Life, I began to feel, was a game, a great game, a game well worth watching, doubly well worth trying to interpret.
So when I settled down that day I wrote feverishly and I wrote joyously. I wrote until my fingers were cramped and my head was empty. I surrendered to a blithe logorrhea that left me contentedly limp and lax and in need of an hour or two of open air.