The artist’s soul is a reality. I admitted that. But it is also a disease. I had learned to believe in it as a man learns to believe in influenza when his temperature runs up to 104 degrees and his bones ache furiously. But there is a difference between admitting the existence of a disease and deliberately cultivating the germs of it.
I crossed 5th Avenue at 32nd Street in great peril of my life, for the traffic at that point is as wild as the emotions of the artistic soul.
It came into my mind that quite possibly the thrills and throbs which Mrs. Ascher enjoys, of which I myself had a brief and mild experience, are not only real, but worth while. There may after all be something greater in the world than common sense. I fell to dreaming of what life might be like to the man who refused to take it as it is, who insisted on seeing above him, not silly little twinkling stars, but great worlds coursing through the infinite spaces of eternity. I ran into a boy carrying books, while I was thinking about eternity. His books were scattered over the pavement and I hurt my knee. I decided that my faint longing for what Mrs. Ascher would call “higher possibilities” is a temptation, something to be conquered. I finished my meditation with a “Retro Satanas”, and returned to my hotel for luncheon, confident that I should come out victor in my struggle.
Ascher has certainly far more determination and force of character than I have; but he does not seem able to break himself of the habit of making money. His wife says that he hates doing it and wants to stop. But he goes on doing it. He has formed a habit of making money, and habit is almost unconquerable. It was plainly the path of wisdom for me to check my tendency towards art at the very beginning, not to allow the habit of feeling artistically, indeed of feeling at all, to form itself.
CHAPTER VII.
I had no idea of breaking the promise I made Mrs. Ascher; but I felt a certain hesitation about entering again the Holiest of Holies in the office of Ascher, Stutz & Co. I was a little afraid of Stutz, who seemed to me a severe man, very little tolerant of human folly. Still I would have faced Stutz without shrinking, especially in a good cause. What I really disliked was the idea of suggesting a business policy to Ascher. The man was immeasurably my superior in natural ability and in experience. I felt that I should be guilty of insolence if I offered him any advice, and of something worse than insolence if I insisted on my advice being taken. Yet it was just this which Mrs. Ascher expected of me, and I did not want to disappoint her.
It is true that I was a shareholder in the New Excelsior Cash Register Company. I may have been a director. Gorman said something about my being a director. I had accepted the office, pledged beforehand to the approval of Gorman’s policy and therefore had no right to intervene. What claim had I to insist on Ascher’s doing this or that? I should not feel myself justified in calling on an archbishop and insisting on drastic alterations in the Apostle’s Creed. Ascher is at least an archbishop, possibly a patriarch, or even a cardinal, in that truly catholic church which worships Mammon.
But I had promised.
I went to the office next morning, early. Having forgotten to make an appointment with Ascher beforehand I had to wait some time before I saw him. I sat in the large anteroom through which I had passed when I first visited the office with Gorman. Through the glass door I was able to see the public office outside where men went busily to and fro.