It was an exclamation rather than a question, and he smiled at the blank stare with which Fulton received it.
“Oh, I mean that it won’t pay my board bill or buy clothes! It feeds the spirit, maybe, but that’s all. You see, I’m not a genius like you!”
“We will pass that as an irrelevant point and one you’d better not try to defend. I agree with you about journalism, so we needn’t argue that. But scribbling verses has taught you some things—the knack of appraising material—quick and true selection—and the ability to write clean straight prose, so you needn’t be ungrateful. Very likely it has cultivated your sympathies, broadened your knowledge of people, shown you lights and shadows you would otherwise have missed. These are all worth while.”
“Yes, I appreciate all that; but for the long future I must have a surer refuge than the newspaper office, where the tenure is decidedly uncertain. I feel that I ought to break away pretty soon. I’m twenty-six, and the years count; and I want to make the best use of them; I’d like to crowd twenty years of hard work into ten and then be free to lie back and play on my little tin whistle,” he continued earnestly. “And I have a chance to go into business; Mr. Redfield has offered me a place with him; he’s the broker, you know, one of the real live wires and already very successful. My acquaintance with people all over the State suggested the idea that I might make myself useful to him.”
The Poet dropped the paper-cutter, and permitted Fulton to grope for it to give himself time to think.
The narrow circumference within which the game of life is played had always had for the Poet a fascinating interest; and he read into coincidences all manner of mysteries, but it was nothing short of startling that this young man, whom he had never seen before, should have spoken Miles Redfield’s name just when it was in his own mind.
“I know Redfield quite well,” he said, “though he’s much younger than I am. I understand that he’s prospering. He had somewhat your own problem to solve not so very long ago; maybe you don’t know that?”
“No; I know him only in a business way; he occasionally has news; he’s been in some important deals lately.”
“It’s odd, but he came to me a dozen years ago and talked to me much as you have been talking. Art, not poetry, was his trouble. He had a lot of talent—maybe not genius but undeniable talent. He had been to an art school and made a fine record, and this, he used to say jokingly, fitted him for a bank clerkship. He has a practical side, and most of the year could clean up his day’s work early enough to save a few daylight hours for himself. There’s a pen-and-ink sketch of me just behind your head that’s Miles’s work. Yes; it’s good; and he could pluck the heart out of a landscape, too;—in oils, I mean. He was full of enthusiasm and meant to go far. Then he struck the reefs of discouragement as we all do, and gave it up; got a job in a bank, got married—and there you are!”