WOOING THE MUSE
“Five thousand words,” muttered Hugh, and then tilted back in the steady chair he had abstracted from the kitchen for the very purpose. Yes, this was going to be one of his good days—he willed it so. The mood was not there certainly, but then, now the finishing of the book had become a pressing necessity, the mood never was there; it was like a tantalizing butterfly that flitted a second in his face and then led him a desperate chase through a tangle of undergrowth that never ended.
Five thousand words! Yes, he could if he would. Let him brace up his sinews, summon up his blood! The mere act of battling for it hard and earnestly would probably bring the mood back—it had done so many a time ere this.
Let him read over the last chapter or so to get in touch again with his characters.
Great heavens, what balderdash it all was! [p180] He crashed his chair on to its four legs again and reached out blindly for his pen. And now he scored pages and pages across with heavy black lines; he seemed to take a vicious pleasure after a little time in destroying what he had written and went along with his lips tight and a hard look in his eye, weighing every sentence in the balance and adjusting that balance to such nicety that he found nearly every sentence wanting. Out they came: occasionally a fierce black zig-zag on the page he considered sufficient for future deliberations, but more frequently it needed greater physical activity to relieve his state of mind and he ripped the page fiercely off the block, crumpled it in his hand and sent it flying across the room.
If Miss Bibby had happened in that morning she would have come to the conclusion that the eccentricity of genius led it to divert itself at times with the game of paper snowballs.
The heavy slaughtering brought a degree of relief; he looked over his shoulder at the paper-strewn floor and felt a twinge of self-satisfaction: there were authors who would have passed the work quite complacently or at most have considered a little polishing was all it needed. For him it was satisfaction or snowballs—no medium course. But then he groaned, for his eye of a sudden fell on a [p181] calendar. Fell on the calendar, to be exact. Many of his lady friends and admirers invariably presented him with calendars at Christmas time (“Such a suitable present for an author, my dear!”); exquisite works of art some of them were, whose dainty strips of ribbon, adroitly pulled, brought into more or less perfect view the day of the month nestling in the heart of a flower. Or you would turn a gilded handle perhaps and a day of the week would appear on the silver sail of a ship, while another turn would bring the date to the figure head and the pressing of a spring send the name of the month fluttering as a flag on the top of the mast. Hugh had a sincere admiration for this ingenious trifle, and frequently when a hero was behaving untowardly idly amused himself with spinning up the signs.
But of course, if one really wanted to know the date one looked at the plainest one had: this year it happened to be a gratis one, presented with the advertisement pamphlets of some patent medicine, and it had stood Hugh in good stead from January to now, when November’s cloud of heat clung closely to the mountains.
But the sight of it caused him to groan and to realize that the just passed Berserk mood had cost him perhaps seven thousand words; and the seven thousand words represented [p182] all the work he had done up here at “Tenby”—“Tenby” that he had taken expressly for the performance of doughty deeds of literature.
He looked ruefully at his snowballs;—perhaps after all he had been hypercritical, perhaps one or two of those pages might be rescued and smoothed out and made to answer. After all, who else would be the better or the worse for it? All the public wanted of him was a piquant flavour for its jaded appetite and the details on which he bestowed such a fever of care would probably escape its attention altogether. Yes, after all, what was he? Just the paid provider of certain species of mental refreshment,—a sort of fashionable drink that the hurrying public, coming along and seeing others drinking, took a gulp at and went on with its much more important work nor better nor worse for the quaff. Why, an orange boy, selling his honest juicy fruit to a thirsty crowd was a better public benefactor than himself! Pah! he had been over-estimating himself of late; he was not of the authors who might legitimately claim to refresh and stimulate the race to higher things. He was just a maker of “bitters,” and the public, in its charmingly inscrutable fashion, declaring for it as its favourite beverage for the moment, he had become “popular.” Why worry himself ill over the concoction of the bitters; sharp and [p183] strong that was all it asked? Yes, yes, those snowballs on the floor were quite good enough, let him pick them up and uncrumple them and pin them back in their places ready for the typewriter.