“It’s too bad about his domestic affairs,” Fulton volunteered, as the Poet broke off with a gesture that was eloquent with vague implications.
“He seems to have flung aside all his ideals with his crayons and brushes!” exclaimed the Poet impatiently. “Mind you, I don’t blame him for abandoning art; I always have an idea that those who grow restless over their early failures and quit the game haven’t heard the call very clearly. A poet named McPhelim once wrote a sonnet, that began—
‘All-lovely Art, stern Labor’s fair-haired child,—’
working out the idea that we must serve seven years and yet seven other years to win the crown. We might almost say that it’s an endless apprenticeship; we are all tyros to the end of the chapter!”
“It must be the gleam we follow forever!” said the young man. “No matter how slight the spark I feel—I want to feel that it’s worth following if I never come in sight of the Grail.”
It was not the way of the Poet to become too serious even in matters that lay nearest his heart.
“We must follow the firefly even though it leads us into bramble patches and we emerge on the other side with our hands and faces scratched! It’s our joke on a world that regards us with suspicion that, when we wear our singing robes into the great labor houses, we are really more practical than the men who spend their days there. I’m making that statement in confidence to you as a comrade and brother; we must keep our conceit to ourselves; but it’s true, nevertheless. The question at issue is whether you shall break with the ‘Chronicle’ and join forces with Miles Redfield; and whether doing so would mean inevitably that you must bid your literary ambitions get behind you, Satan.”
Fulton nodded.
“Of course,” he said, “there have been many men who first and last have made an avocation of literature and looked elsewhere for their daily bread: Lamb’s heart, pressed against his desk in the India office, was true to literature in spite of his necessities. And poets have always had a hard time of it, stealing like Villon, or inspecting schools, like Arnold, or teaching, like Longfellow and Lowell; they have usually paid a stiff price for their tickets to the Elysian Fields.”
The Poet crossed the room, glanced at the portrait that Redfield had made of him, and then leaned against the white marble mantel.