The Three Fates

by F. Marion Crawford

“If you will be so kind as to read my article——”

“Yes, of course. I said I would. I mean——” Johnson looked away, and his pale face blushed to the roots of his hair. “I mean—if you should need twenty dollars while the article is being written, I can——”

George felt a very peculiar emotion, and his voice was a little thick, as he took the other’s hand.

“Thank you, Johnson, but I don’t need it. You are awfully kind, though. Nobody ever did as much for me before.”

When he left the room, the nervous flush had not yet disappeared from the literary editor’s forehead, nor had the odd sensation quite subsided from George’s own throat. If Tom Craik had offered him the loan of twenty dollars, he would have turned his back on him with a bitter answer. It was a very different matter when poor, overworked Johnson put his hand in his pocket and proffered all he could spare. For a minute George forgot all his disappointments and troubles in the gratitude he felt to the pale young man. Nor did he ever lose remembrance of the kindly generosity that had prompted the offer.

But as he walked slowly homewards the bitterness of his heart began to show itself in another direction. He thought of the repeated admonitions and parcels of advice which had been thrust upon him during the last few days, he thought of his poverty, of his failures, and he compared all these facts with his aspirations. He, a poor devil who seemed to be losing the power to earn a miserable ten dollars with his pen, he, whose carefully prepared articles had been rejected again and again, often without a word of explanation, he, the unsuccessful scribbler of second-rate notices, had aspired, and did still aspire, not only to marry Constance Fearing, but to earn for himself such a position as should make him independent of her fortune, so far as money was concerned, and which, in the direction of personal reputation, should place him in the first rank in his own country. Wonderful things happened, sometimes, in the world of letters; but, so far as he knew, they needed a considerable time for their accomplishment. He was well advanced in his twenty-sixth year already, and it was madness to hope to achieve fame in less than ten years at the least. In ten years, Constance would be two and thirty. He had not thought of that before, and the idea filled him with dismay. It seemed a great age, an absurd age for marriage. And, after all, there was not the slightest probability of her waiting for him. In the first place, she did not love him, or, at least, she said that she did not, and if her affection was not strong enough to declare itself, it could hardly be taken into consideration as an element in the great problem. The whole thing was ridiculous, and he would give up the idea—if he could.

But he could not. He recognised that the thought of Constance was the bright spot in his life, and that without her image he should lose half his energy. In the beginning, there had been a sort of complacent acquiescence in the growth of his love, which made it seem as though he had voluntarily set up an idol of his own choosing, which he could change at will. But the idol had begun to feed on his heart, and was already exerting its mysterious, dominating influence over his actions and beliefs. He began to concoct a philosophy of self-deception, in the hope of obtaining a good result. It seemed certain that he could never marry Constance—certain, at all events, while this mood lasted—but he could still dream of her and look forward to his union with her. The great day would come, of course, when she would marry some one else, and when he should doubtless be buried in the ruin of his dreams, but until then he would sustain the illusion.

And what an illusion it was! The magnitude of it appalled him. Penniless, almost; dependent for his bread upon his ruined father; baffled at every turn; taught by experience that he had none of the power he seemed to feel—that was the list of his advantages, to be set in the balance against those possessed by Constance Fearing. George laughed bitterly to himself as he pursued his way through the crowded streets. It struck him that he must be a singularly unlucky man, and he wondered how men felt upon whom fortune smiled perpetually, who had never known what it meant to work hard to earn a dollar, to whom money seemed as common and necessary an element as air. He remembered indeed the time when, as a boy, he had known luxury, and existed in unbroken comfort, and the memory added a bitterness to his present case. Nevertheless he was not downhearted. Black as the world looked, he could look blacker, he fancied, and make the cheeks of fortune smart with the empty purse she had tossed in his face. His walk quickened, and his fingers itched for the pen. He was one of those men who harden and grow savage under defeat, reserving such luxuries as despondency for the hours of success.

Without the slightest hesitation, he set to work. He scarcely knew how it was that he determined to write an article upon critics and criticism; but when he sat down to his table the idea was already present, and phrases of direful import were seething in the fire of his brain. All at once he realised how he hated the work he had been doing, how he loathed himself for doing it, how he detested those who had doled out to him his daily portion. What a royal satisfaction it was to “sling ink,” as the reporters called it! To heap his full-stocked thesaurus of abuse upon somebody and something, and most especially upon himself, in his capacity as one of the critics! To devote the whole profession to the perdition of an everlasting contempt, to hold it up as a target for the public wrath, to spit upon it, to stamp upon it, to tear it to rags, and to scatter the tatters abroad upon the tempest of his reprobation! The phrases ran like wildfire along the paper, as he warmed to his work, and dragged old-fashioned anathemas from the closets of his memory to swell the hailstorm of epithets that had fallen first. Anathema Maranatha! Damn criticism! Damn the critics! Damn everything!

It was a very remarkable piece of work when it was finished, more remarkable in some ways than anything he ever produced afterwards, and if he had taken it to Johnson in its original form, the pale young man’s future career might have been endangered by a fit of sudden and immoderate mirth. Fortunately, George already knew the adage—is it not Hood’s?—which says “it is the print that tells the tale.” He was well aware that writing ink is to printers’ ink as a pencil drawing to a painted canvas, and that what looks mild and almost gentle when it appears in an irregular handwriting upon a sheet of foolscap can seem startlingly forcible when impressed upon perfectly new and very expensive paper, in perfectly new and very expensive type. He read the article over.