Is not this awful? Oh, it is terrible! It is beyond belief! A whole month gone, and only a note like that to show for it! Four weeks of yearning and hoping—of watching the mail in agony—of struggling and toiling to forget! And then a note like this!
Oh, it drives me wild! I sat to-night in a chair motionless, forgetting that I was hungry, forgetting everything. I looked to the future; I had a feeling that I do not think I ever had in my life before—a horrible, black, yawning despair—a thing so fearful that it took my breath away. Suppose you were standing on a bridge over an abyss, and that suddenly it gave way, and in one dreadful instant you realized that you were going down—down like a flash—and that nothing could save you!
So it is to be this, so this is to be my life! I am to send this book to publisher after publisher, and have it come back like this! And meanwhile to spend my time alternating between this room—and the wholesale-paper business!
Yes, I am getting to see the truth! I am a helpless atom, struggling to survive—a glimmering light in the darkness—and I am going out! I am losing—and what shall I do! Who will save me—who will help me?
I was talking to a friend yesterday; he predicted just what happened. “Make one rule,” he said, “expect nothing of the world. When you send out a manuscript, know that it is coming back!—Otherwise you go mad.”
But I should go mad that way. Why, what am I to do? How am I to work unless I can get free? I can not live a single day unless I have that hope. And if these blind creatures that make money out of books keep on sending my poem back—why, it will kill me—it will turn me into a fool!