Particularly I favoured walking in an evening of soft-falling rain. It turned the boulevards into avenues of delight. The pavements were of beaten gold; down streets that were like plaques of silver shot ruby lights of taxicabs; the vivid leaves on the trees were clustered jewels. Perhaps I would see two people descending from a shining carriage, the lady in exquisite gown, held up to show silk-stockinged ankles, the man in evening dress. “They are going to dinner,” I would say; “to force themselves to be agreeable for three hours; to eat much rich, unnecessary food. Ah! how much better to be one’s own self and to walk and dream in the still, soft rain.”
So on I would go, and the world would become like a shadow beside the glow of my imagination. I would think of my work, thrill at its drama, chuckle over its humour, choke at its pathos. I would talk aloud my dialogues till people stared at me, even in Paris, this city of privileged eccentricity. I was more absent-minded than ever, and my nerves were often on edge. My manner became spasmodic, my temper uncertain. I avoided my friends, took almost no notice of Anastasia; in short, I was agonising in the travail of, alas! best-seller birth.
For my story had once more got out of hand. It was writing itself. I could not check it. I would rattle off page after page till the old typewriter seemed to curse me and my frenzy. Then, if perchance I was sitting mute and miserable before it, a few cups of that hot, black coffee till my heart began to thump, and I would be at it once more. I wanted to get it finished, to rid my mind of it, to send it away so that I would never see it again.
At last with a great spurt of effort I again wrote the sweetest word of all—The End. I leaned back with a vast sigh: “Thank God, I can rest now.”
Then I looked at the manuscript sadly.
“Another of them. I’ve no doubt it will sell in the tens of thousands. It will be a success; yet what a failure! What a chance I had to make art of it! What poetry! What romance! And I have sacrificed them for what?—adventure, exciting narrative, melodrama. I had to invent a villain, an educated super-ape who makes things hum. But I couldn’t help it. It was just the way it came to me and I could do no other.
“Oh, cursed Fate! I am doomed to success. Like a Nemesis it pursues me. If I could only achieve one glorious failure how happy I would be! But no. I am fated to become a writer with a vogue, a bloated bond-clipper.
“Alas! No more the joy of the struggle, the hope, the despair. Farewell, garrets and crusts! Farewell, light-hearted poverty! Farewell, the gay, hard life! Bohemia, Paris, Youth—farewell!”
And as I gazed at the manuscript that was to make for me a barrel of money there never was more miserable scribe than I.