“Most of us,” he said, “gamble frightfully in choosing art as a career. That’s why there are so many hopeless artists. We mistake an urge for a talent, and the devil of it is there is no sure way of knowing whether we’re on the right road or not. But I think you are. In the first place you have the steady enthusiasm and not just mere plugging industry. In the second place you are a self-teacher. Everybody worth a hang is that.”
They were the first really golden words she had ever heard, and she was certain afterward that simply hearing them had improved her work miraculously—made her surer of the knowledge she had gained and helped her to discard excrescences.
Osprey had few visitors. Perhaps twice a year a gathering of extraordinary individuals with whom he had consorted at various periods and in many parts of the world crowded into the house, took possession of it, kept up a racket until morning and departed, leaving him with a few more intimate cronies, some to recover from the effects and others simply to prolong the reunion. These entertainments occurred usually in the early spring or fall, the seasons of change when people come together most spontaneously. And they were spontaneous. He had no use for set affairs.
On rare occasions women drove out to see him, for luncheon or tea; and he himself went to town about once a month, seldom remaining longer than over night. He seemed to have cultivated not only the love of solitude, but the power to enjoy it for long periods.
There was one visitor, however, who arrived often. Moira saw his heavy blue roadster drawn up beside the lawn three times during the first month of her stay, and she wondered who the impressive man was, with short grey curly hair, and the easy bearing of accomplishment. She was not surprised to learn later that he was somebody—no less a person, in fact, than Emmet Roget, the producer, a man who was both a power in the business phase of the theatre and an artistic radical in his own right.
The friendship between these two men appeared to be less extraordinary now than it had been in past years, but it was still a friendship in which a certain inequality was apparent. The rôle of Roget toward Osprey, during three-fourths of their adult lives, had been that of a detached but watchful guardian. A dozen years ago Osprey had been something of a riderless horse, a centre of explosions, the victim of unexpected mishaps and misunderstandings, constantly involved with a woman, and taking his affairs with desperate seriousness, careless of his talent and his time. Much of this relationship he skilfully suggested to her himself, in his humorously philosophic moments.
As he put it, he was born somewhere between his thirty-eighth and his fortieth year, and began to live his life in a sense backward; for though he went on having experiences it was always something in his life before his thirty-eighth year that he seemed to be living over in these experiences, and relishing where he previously had suffered. The actual occasion of the change had been a painful separation from the last of his devastating loves, and more or less complete celibacy since. The result was a fresh joy in work, a really enormous volume of production ... peace and contentment and plenty.
The life of Emmet Roget had been exactly the antithesis. He was penniless in his youth. No sooner had he reached New York—to which initial step Osprey had assisted him—than he began to have means for his needs. At twenty-nine he left Europe, after having immersed himself in as much of French culture as an able young foreigner can obtain with diligence and enthusiasm, and studied the beginnings of the German theatre movement. A season was spent directing a Denver “little theatre,” but the provinces offered too little future and freedom. Once more in New York, Roget was designing sets and directing productions. In his late thirties he was instituting new methods into the theatre which were hailed and copied abroad.
Many regarded Emmet Roget as primarily a “man for the future,” yet to him the present seemed invariably kind. Unlike his friend, nothing touched him; but whatever he touched gained from his personality, took on fascination and beauty. Hard at the core, immovable and unimpressionable, he was yet acutely sensitive, capable of profound appreciations, for music, for colour, for a scene, a woman—and surprisingly human in his contacts. No doubt it was this intuitive appreciation, coupled with early friendship, which had made him cling to Osprey through many hopeless seasons and experiments.
The first two or three times that Roget visited him that summer, Osprey did not refer to his new tenants except casually. Later, however, when he had had a half dozen talks with Moira, he introduced the subject to his friend at the dinner table.