Also, I must mention the French-Canadian family that lived up on the mountain side and sent me fresh milk and eggs and butter by a little ragged boy. I tried out my homemade French on them, and the mère of the household paid me a high compliment. “Oh, you speak French French!” Now and then she would write me notes, in homemade spelling, and one of these deserves a wider audience. She explained that she would not be able to send milk on the morrow because she was going to the town—“il me faut faire arracher dedans.” The vision of the poor woman having herself “pulled out inside” disturbed me greatly, until I realized that she meant some teeth (des dents).
Summer came, and the city boarders. Halfway to town was a golf links—a new game, then coming in. I saw able-bodied men driving a little white ball about a field all day, and it seemed to me more than ever necessary that they should have a new ideal. I was impatient of every form of human vanity and stupidity, and if I have become less so with the passage of the years, it has been merely to spare my digestion.
The summer brought my mother and some friends, including the girl with whom I was to fall in love. But that is a story I’ll save for the next chapter; here, I am dealing with the book. I labored over it, sometimes five or six hours without moving from my seat, and for days at a time without seeing a soul or thinking about anything else. The human organism is not made to stand such strain, and I began to notice stomach trouble. It grew worse and plagued me for years—until I humbled my stubborn pride and learned mother nature’s lesson—to limit the number of hours of brainwork, and get some exercise and recreation every day. Many years later I came upon a saying of old John Burroughs, which came home to me as truth immortal and ultimate. “This writing is an unnatural business; it makes your head hot and your feet cold, and it stops the digestion of your food.”
On the first of August the owner of my fairy cabin took it for her own use, and I moved up to a lonely farmhouse on the mountainside, where I became the sole and solitary boarder. I would go out into the woods—sugar-maple trees they were, and for breakfast I had their juice in a thick dark syrup, freshly melted. I always have to have a place to walk up and down while I am working out my stories, and in that sugar-maple forest I wore a path six inches deep—back and forth, back and forth, for hours on end every day.
There were mosquitoes, almost as annoying to me as human beings, and when they found me, I would go out and sit in the middle of a field of clover hay and do my writing. The crickets hopped over my manuscript, and the fieldmice nibbled at my shoes; and then came the mowers to destroy my hiding place. I remember one little French-Canadian whom I engaged in conversation, and how he rolled up his sleeves and boasted of the power of his stringy muscles. “You want to mow avec me, il you faut très strong bras!” I remember also walking miles down the road in the morning to meet the mail carrier; I had sent the first part of my great novel to a publisher and was hoping for a reply, but none came. It was the beginning of an agony that lasted many weary years. My curses upon those publishers who let manuscripts pile up on their desks unread!
September came, and an invitation from my clergyman friend, Mr. Moir, who now had a camp at Lake Placid. He asked me to visit him for a couple of weeks. I was so near the end of my story, I ventured out of hiding; but I found it was a mistake, because I could do no work at all when I had to fit myself to the meal hours and other habits of the world. I tried in vain for a week or two; I remember that I read the letters of Robert Louis Stevenson in this interval—and very thin and poor they seemed in comparison with what filled my soul.
At last, in desperation, because cold weather was coming fast, I went out on one of the islands of Lake Placid and found a little “cook house”—a tiny cabin with no windows and no furniture but a stove. I rented it for the sum of five dollars, and spread a couple of blankets; and with the brown leaves falling in showers about me, and the cries of blue jays and the drumming of partridges in the air, I wrote the closing scenes of my tragedy. I later used that little cook house in The Journal of Arthur Stirling. Also I used the siege of the publishers that was still to come. But of that I had no vision as I bundled up my belongings and returned to New York, a conquering hero in my own fantasy. I was carrying in my suitcase the great American novel for which all the critics of those days were waiting on tiptoe!