[Back to [Contents]]
[p190]
CHAPTER XVII
LITERATURE IS LOW
But after half an hour’s further struggle he got up and drifted aimlessly out of the room, finally bringing up in the kitchen.
Kate was here concocting a savoury and an entrée and two or three other things for his dinner, for she had packed the depressed and depressing Ellen off to the bakers’ picnic with Anna from “Greenways” and was sole mistress of her hearth and home for the day.
Here she was when her brother found her, covered up in a spotless apron and, with sleeves rolled engagingly back over her plump white arms, energetically pounding up some anchovies. Hugh sat down heavily on the edge of the dresser.
“A writer’s a miserable beast, K,” he said dejectedly.
“Give it up to-day, boy,” she said. “I can see you can’t help yourself. Go for a walk,—go and look up the little pets. Or have a romp with the children across the road. [p191] Don’t break your back to-day over a load that another day you will snap your fingers at.”
He took no notice of her suggestions.
“Can you deny that it is a miserable trade? A womanish sort of business? You sit twiddling your pen, your nerves so a-stretch that if a door bangs the mood shuts down on you for the day. And there’s that fellow across the road swinging away with his axe among the trees just as he has been ever since breakfast. He’ll leave off presently and boil his billy and eat his bread and cheese and have his smoke, and then back he’ll go to his work. There it is spread out straight before him, and the muscles on his arms—have you ever noticed the fellow’s muscles?—tell him that he is equal to it. Do you ever see him pacing distractedly about, wondering if the mood will come to him? Do you ever see him sitting dejectedly twiddling his axe, and rendered quite incapable because he has been interrupted at a critical time and put out of vein? I tell you, my girl, that fellow’s a man, and I’d like to go out and shake hands with him.”