“I move. If they don’t want to follow——”
“No writer can afford to abandon his public,” said Coltfoot, seriously.
Annan, also serious, said slowly: “The Masters we scribblers try to follow went that way. They went on. Few followed them all the way.... Poe wrote only one ‘Tales of the Grotesque’; Kipling wrote only one ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’; Scott one ‘Ivanhoe,’ Hawthorne one ‘Scarlet Letter’; Cooper, Dickens, Thackeray only the one each.... And there was only one ‘Hamlet.’... And but one ‘Inferno.’... And one ‘Song of Songs.’... And one ‘Iliad.’”
He shrugged: “So maybe, in my own cheap little job I have hit my high-spot with those stories of yours.... Maybe.... But I’m going on, I’m going to write what I please if it costs me my last reader.”
Coltfoot made his last effort: “Dumas wrote ‘Twenty Years After’?”
“There was only one ‘Three Musketeers.’”
“Sure.... The greatest romance ever written.... Sure.... All right, Barry....”
That evening Annan made himself some black coffee and wrote his farewell article for Coltfoot. It took him only half an hour and it left him too much keyed up for sleep. He called his article: “The Great American Ass.”
“September flowers gone to seed,” it began, deceptively; “withering leaves and dry dirt—the Park and Fifth Avenue at their shabbiest. Streets torn up, piles of sand, escaping steam, puddles of mortar, red flag and red lantern crowning the débris, and the whole mess stinking of illuminating gas: heat, dirt, noise—unnecessary, incessant, hellish noise—seven million sweating people milling like maggots in the midst—your New York, fellow citizens, on an unwashed platter!
“Of the metropolis itself there is scarcely any beauty—a church here, an office-building there, one or two statues, a few dwellings: