“Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re wrong about business. Business is pretty awful. I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.”
“There are more delightful occupations, true. I have always had an ambition to be a cab-driver. It is the sole profession in which one becomes a licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary man. You know people mind the cabby no more than if he were the horse. I mean a horse-cab, of course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people expose their souls, their most intimate secrets. But I haven’t the cabby’s training. From things you have said, I fancied you knew horses.”
“A little. When I was a young girl I had some playmates who owned them.”
“Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the neck of any poor fool who had condescended to Pegasus.”
“The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t condescend often enough, nor persistently enough. You ought to be writing poems at this moment. You should have been doing it these last five years.”
“The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar tickling of the tummy that I haven’t felt for ages.”
Her eagerness to start him writing usually came to nothing in some such joke. At other times he would grow more serious.
“No, Madonna, I cannot. The blossom of life is gone—only the bare stalk is left. It may flower again, but it must be watered and fed. My affair with poetry has ended like so many marriages—in disillusion. That is rough, when one realizes that poetry demands the hardest labour for the smallest return of any occupation on earth. It takes all one’s youth, at the expense of practical things—and one is left with a handful of frail results that are hardly more substantial than memories. But the greater the early love, the more complete must be the separation, and one must recognize it when it comes. One must renounce; in that lies the only hope of renewal. People are mistaken about life being a steady progress from youth to age, anyway. It’s a constant shuttling from age to youth and back again. We all grow senile about every seven years, and then young again. I am in a senile period. Why should I do poetry the dishonour of pursuing her in such a state? Bah, it is better to do anything else. You mustn’t be impatient with me. I do not flower very often—but neither does the century plant. And it is counted among the world’s wonders.”
“Well,” she said consolingly, “perhaps you are right. Better a little that is good than a lot that is indifferent. All I know is that there are reputations built on no more talent than yours.”
“If I could believe that,” he said thoughtfully, “I should not surrender. But I can’t believe it. I shall have to squeeze business for a time, as one squeezes an orange—for the golden juice. I shall hoard it, as if every ounce meant a golden hour. Then we shall see. My God! Madonna,” he burst forth. “Fifty dollars a week—there in my hand, every week. Think of it. All my life fifty dollars has seemed like the other side of the moon.”