“And if it splits the plank, Louis?” I asked.
“Let it split! A man, High-Muck, who can’t make a success of his life is better out of it, unless he’s a cripple, and then he can have my pocket-book every time. Look at Herbert!—he’s forged ahead; yet he’s been so hungry sometimes he could have gnawed off the soles of his shoes.”
“Only the imagination of the out-door painter, gentlemen,” answered Herbert with a laughing nod to the table at large. “The hungry part is, perhaps, correct, but I forget about the shoes.”
“I stick to my point!” exclaimed Le Blanc, facing Herbert as he spoke. “It’s blood as well as push that makes a man a success. When he lacks the combination he fails—that is, he does nine times out of ten, and that percentage, of course, is too small to trust to.”
“That reminds me of a story,” interrupted Brierley with one of his quiet laughs, “of some fellows who took chances on the percentage, as Le Blanc calls it, and yet, as we Americans say, ‘arrived.’ A well-born young Englishman, down on his luck, had been tramping the streets, too proud to go home to his father’s house, the spirit of the hobo still in him. One night he struck up an acquaintance with another young chap as poor and independent as himself. Naturally they affiliated. Both were sons of gentlemen and both vagabonds in the best sense. One became a reporter and the other a news-gatherer. The first had no dress suit and was debarred from state functions and smart receptions; the second boasted not only a dress suit useful at weddings, but a respectable morning frock-coat for afternoon teas. The two outfits brought them lodgings and three meals a day, for what the dress suit could pick up in the way of society news the man with the pen got into type. Things went on this way until August set in and the season closed; then both men lost their jobs. For some weeks they braved it out, badgering the landlady; then came the pawning of their clothes, and then one meal a day, and then a bench in St. James’s Park out of sight of the bobbies. This being rock bottom, a council of war was held. The news-gatherer shipped aboard an outgoing vessel and disappeared from civilization. The reporter kept on reporting. Both had courage and both had the best blood of England in their veins, according to my view. Twenty years later the two met at a drawing-room in Buckingham Palace. The reporter had risen to a peer and the news-gatherer to a merchant prince. There was a hearty handshake, a furtive glance down the long, gold-encrusted corridor, and then, with a common impulse, the two moved to an open window and looked out. Below them lay the bench on which the two had slept twenty years before.”
“Of course!” shouted Le Blanc; “that’s just what I said—a case of good blood—that’s what kept them going. They owed it to their ancestors.”
“Ancestors be hanged! It was a case of pure grit!” shouted Louis in return. “All the blood in the world wouldn’t have helped them if it hadn’t been for that. Neither of them expected, when they started out in life, to be shown up six flights of marble stairs by a hundred flunkeys in silk stockings, but, as Brierley puts it, ‘they arrived all the same.’ Blood alone would have landed them as clerks in government pay or obscure country gentlemen waiting for somebody to die. They kept on driving in the peg and before they got through all the chinks were filled. Keep your toes in your pumps, gentlemen. High-Muck is loaded for something; I see it in his eyes. Go on, High-Muck, and let us have it. How do you vote—blood or brains?”
“Neither,” I answered. “Lemois is nearest the truth. You can’t make a silk purse out of—you know the rest—neither can you force a man, nor can he force himself, to succeed in something for which he is not fitted. All you do is to split the plank and ruin his life. I’ll tell you a story which will perhaps give you and idea of what I mean.
“Perhaps five years ago—perhaps six—my memory is always bad for dates—I met a fellow in one of our small Western cities at home who, by all odds, was the most brilliant conversationalist I had run across for years. The acquaintance began as my audience—I was lecturing at the time—left the room and was continued under the sidewalk, where we had a porter-house steak and a mug apiece, the repast and talk lasting until two in the morning. Gradually I learned his history. He had started life as a reporter; developed into space writer, then editor, and was known as the most caustic and brilliant journalist on any of the Western papers. With the death of his wife, he had thrown up this position and was, when I met him, conducting a small country paper.
“What possessed me I don’t know, but after seeing him half a dozen times that winter—and I often passed through his town—I made up my mind that his brilliant talk, quaint philosophy, and mastery of English were wasted on what he was doing, and that if I could persuade him to write a novel he would not only drop into the hole his Maker had bored for him, but would make a name for himself. All that he had to do was to put himself into type and the rest would follow. Of course he protested; he was fifty years old, he said, had but little means, no experience in fiction, his work not being imaginative but concerned with the weightier and more practical things of the day.