He tried not to look relieved at the announcement. "Really, I didn't put Annie up to this, but if you are content to stay, I think it will smooth you out a bit."
After supper the three sat out in the yard. There was a heavy richness in the air, a soft sea-wind flavored with wood-fires and finished fields. Reifferscheid smoked his pipe and did most of the talking.
"I glanced over Bertram Lintell's new book—out to-day," he said. "It sort of hurts. Two or three months ago, I dropped in on him while he was doing it.... I have always had a certain interest in Lintell because I accepted his first story seven or eight years ago, as a magazine reader.... You may not know that nine-tenths of the unsolicited fiction material in a magazine's mail is a personal affront to intelligence at large. Nowhere does a man show the youth of his soul so pitifully as when first alone with white paper and an idea. He shakes down a crow's rookery and believes in his heart it's an eagle's nest. That there are men in the world paid to open his package, inspect and return same respectfully—and do it again—is an uncommercial peculiarity of a most commercial age. Editors rely upon the more or less technically flawless products of the trained, the "arrived"; writers who have forgotten their dreams—rung the bell once or twice—and show a willingness to take money for the echoes.
"An expensive reading staff is not necessary for these contributors; their stuff goes to the heart of things at once. But what sorry caravans halt in the outer courts of a magazine-office; what sick, empty, unwashed confusion is impounded there! Yet a company of men moves ever through and about, peering into the unsightly, unsavory packs—ever ordering away, ever clearing the court, lest the mess rise to heaven.... But perfect pearls have been found in these restless, complaining trash-heaps, and will be found again. Men are there to glance at all, because one of these pearls is worth a whole necklace of seconds. There's no way out of it. To make lasting good in the literary game, one must be steeled to reverses—long, ugly corroding reverses. This is the price which a man pays for the adjustment of his brain and hand to the needs of the time. As flesh needs bone, he needs these reverses. They clear the fat from the brain; increase the mental circuits, and lend to the fibres that firm delicacy which alone can carry live hot emotions without blowing out, and big voltage ideas swift and true to their appointed brilliance of expression.
"I'm gabbing a lot, but I was going to tell you about Bertram Lintell. I was first in the office to get his manuscript, and I raised the cry of 'Pearl.' It was faulty, but full of the arrogance of unhurt youth. The face of Twenty-one with all its unlined audacity stared out from the pages, and every page was an excursion. Here was a true subconscious ebullition—a hang-over from a previous incarnation, like as not. It was hard, glassy, but the physical prowess of it stimulated. Frank, brutal boyishness—that was the attraction. I shouldn't have taken it."
"You what?" Paula asked.
"It was a shame to take it," Reifferscheid mused, "but someone else—the next man, would have. You see, he needed buffeting—seven years at least. I knew he didn't have the beam and displacement to stand making good so young. It was doing him an evil turn, but we sent him the brass tag that shines like gold. Lintell was not adult enough to twig the counterfeit, not mellowed enough to realize that nothing is so sordid, nothing labeled so securely to Failure, as conscious success. As I say, I saw him at work two or three months ago. He was a patch-haired, baby lion still, dictating stories first draft to a stenographer, supplying demand like a huckster—the real treasure-house of his soul locked for life and the key thrown away.... Even money turns the head of the multitude, but money is small beer compared to the fiery potential wine of literary recognition. Long hammering, refining reverses, alone prepare a man for this. Quentin Charter said something of the kind: that a young writer should live his lean years full length, and if he really craters the mountain, he will praise every god in the Pantheon because his achievements were slow.
"Lintell's present stuff is insufferable. The point is he may have had in the beginning no less a gift than Charter's. That's why the new book sickens me so.... By the way, I got a letter from Charter this afternoon. I meant to bring it along, but I'll pass it over to you in the morning. It's yours, Miss Linster, though he did me the honor to think that I had written his critique. He says you crawled right inside his book. We don't usually answer letters of this kind. There are writers, you know, glad to turn a review office into an Admiration Exchange. But you'll want to write to Charter, I'm sure. He's different."
Paula did not answer, but she was pleased and excited that her review had been a joy to this thunderer of the West, and that he had answered her tidings of high hope for the future.