It is my own impression that Fothergil's fears are exaggerated; but they are very real to him. He visualizes his own soul as a fugitive climbing higher and higher, running faster and faster, to escape this Beast. Perhaps Fothergil secretly hopes that the speed of his gong will induce combustion, and he will leap from the topmost hills of Art, flaming, directly into the heavens, there to burn and shine immortality, an authentic star. Well, well, we all have our little plane, our little vanities!
"Fothergil," I said, cheerily, "Popularity has not overtaken you yet. Cheer up — perhaps it never will."
We were in Fothergil's studio in Greenwich Village, where I had gone to see how his poem on Moonlight was getting along. He strode to the window. Fothergil is not tall, and he is slightly pigeon-toed — the fleshly toes of Fothergil symbolize the toes of his ever-fleecing soul — but he strides. Female poets undulate. Erotic male poets saunter. Tramp poets lurch and swagger. Fothergil, being a vers libre poet, a Prophet of the Virile, a Little Brother of the Cosmic Urge, is compelled by what his verse is to stride vigorously across rooms as if they were vast desert places, in spite of what his toes are. He strode magnificently, triumphantly, to the window and flung the shade up and looked out at the amorphous mist creeping in across the roofs. The crawling fog must have suggested his great, gray Dread, for presently he turned away with a shudder and sank upon a couch and moaned.
'Ah, Heaven! Popularity! The disgrace of it — the horror of it! Popularity! Ignominy! When it catches me — when it happens ——"
He plucked from his pocket a small phial and held it up toward the light and gazed upon it desperately and raptly.
"I am never without this!" he said. "It is my means of escape. I will not be taken unawares! I carry it always. At night it is beneath my pillow. The day it happens — the moment I feel myself in the grip of Popularity——"
I caught his hand; in his excitement he was raising the poison to his lips.
"What I cannot understand, Fothergil," I said, "is why a Poet of the Virile, a Reincarnation of the Cave Man — excuse me, but that is what you are being this year, is it not ? — should give way to Fear. Is it not more in character to meet this Beast and slay It? Is there not a certain contradiction between your profession and your practice?"
"More than a contradiction," he said eagerly. "It is more than contradictory! It is paradoxical!"
I eliminate much that followed. When Fothergil gets started on the paradox, time passes. He is never really interested in things until he has dis- covered the paradoxical quality in them. Sometimes I think that his enthusiasm over himself is due to the fact that he discovered early in life that he himself was a paradox — and sometimes I think that discovery is the explanation of his enthusiasm for the paradox.