“Yes, like a fish. Why not, since I was dead and it helped me to forget?”
“Steve! I hate to preach, it doesn’t become me; but—”
“Preach if you want to; you can’t hurt my feelings now.” Armstrong grew calm, for the first time that evening. “When a fellow has worked as I have worked for years, and hoped against hope, and still hoped on and worked on after failure and failure and failure three times repeated—No, don’t worry about hurting my feelings, Harry. Say what you please.”
“I wasn’t going to hurt your feelings,” evenly; “I was only going to preach a little. I merely wanted to take exception to that forgetting business. If you’ll just hold hard for a bit you’ll forget normally, not artificially. Another six months and you’ll be hard at another scheme, developing it; and the way you feel now—It’ll be a joke then, a sort of nightmare to laugh over.”
“Never.... Don’t get restless; I’m not irresponsible now. I’m merely telling you. I’ve been asleep and dreaming for a long time, but at last I’m awake. Come what may, and truly as I’m telling you now, I’ll never write another 129 novel. I couldn’t if I wanted to—I’ve tried and know; and I wouldn’t if I could. There’s a limit to everything, and the limit of my patience and endurance is reached. I’m done for now and for all time.” The voice was not excited now or unnaturally tense, but normal, almost conversational.
“For ten years I’ve fought the good fight. Every spare hour of that time that I could muster I’ve worked. I’ve lain awake night after night and night after night tossing and planning and struggling for a definite end. The thing got to be a sort of religion to me. I convinced myself that it was my work in the big scheme, my allotted task, and I tried faithfully to do it. I never spared myself. I dissected others, of course; but I dissected myself most, clear to the bone. I even took a sort of joy in it when it hurt most, for I felt it was my contribution and big. I’m not bragging now, mind. I’m merely telling you as it was. I’ve gone on doing this for ten years, I say. When I failed again I tried harder still. I still believed in myself—and others. Recognition, appreciation, might be delayed, but eventually it would come, it must; for this was my work,—to please others, to amuse them, to carry them 130 temporarily out of the rut of their work-a-day lives and make them forget. I believed this, I say, believed and hoped and waited and worked on until the last few months. Then—I told you what happened. Then—” For the first time the speaker paused. He shrugged characteristically. “But what’s the use of disturbing the corpse. I’ve simply misread the signs in the sky—that’s all. I couldn’t produce a better novel than I’ve written if I had the longevity of the Wandering Jew and wrote to the end—for I’ve done my best. The great public that I’ve torn myself to pieces to please has seen the offering and passed it by. They will have none of it—and they’re the arbiters.” He shrugged again, the narrow shoulders eloquent. “So be it. I accept; but I offer no more. For all time, to finality, I’m done, done!”
“Even if some of your books should win?”
“If every one of them should do so. If half a dozen publishers came to me personally and begged me to resume work. I may be a poor artist, may lack completely the artistic subservience to or superiority to discouragement, probably I do; but at least I know I’m human. I’m like a well in the desert that’s been pumped empty and left never a mark on the surrounding 131 sand. I couldn’t produce again if I wanted to; I’m drained dry.”
Randall said nothing. He knew this other man.
“I tell you I’m awake, Harry, at last, and see things as they are; things now so childishly obvious that it seems incredible I could have gone on so long without recognizing them. People prate about appreciation of artists of various kinds and of their work, grow maudlin over it by artificial light in the small hours of the night. And how do they demonstrate it? Once in a while, the isolated exception that proves the rule, by recognizing and rewarding the genius in his lifetime. Once in a very, very long time, I say. Mind, I don’t elevate myself as a genius. I’m merely speaking as an observer who’s awakened and knows. As a rule what do they do? Let him struggle and work and eat his heart out in obscurity and without recognition. Let him starve himself body and soul. After he’s dead, after a year or a hundred years, after there is no possibility of his receiving the reward or the inspiration, they arouse. His fame spreads. His name becomes a household word. They desecrate his grave, if they can find it, by hanging laurel on his tombstone. 132 They tear the wall-paper from the house where he once chanced to live into ribbons for souvenirs. If he happens to be a painter the picture that brought him enough perhaps to keep body and soul together for a month is fought for until eventually it sells for a fortune. If he was a writer they bid for a scrap of his manuscript more than he received for his whole work. There are exceptions, I say; but even exceptions only prove the rule. Think over the names of the big artists, the big geniuses. How many of them are alive or were appreciated in their own lives? How many living to-day compare in the public appreciation with those dead? None of them, practically, none. And still do you or does any other sane person fancy that human beings are degenerating every generation, that artistic genius is decadent? It’s preposterous, unthinkable! It merely points the moral that history repeats itself. Some place, somewhere, the greatest artist in the world is painting the greatest picture the world has ever known—and this same world passes him by. It must be so, for human beings advance with every generation inevitably. Some place, somewhere, the biggest writer of all time is writing the biggest book—and his neighbors smile because his 133 clothes are rusty. This is the reward they get in their own day and their own generation, when it would sweeten their lives, make them worth living. The fellow who invents a mouse-trap or a safety razor or devises a way of sticking two hogs where one was killed before, inherits the earth, sees his name and fame heralded in every periodical; while the other, the real man—God, it’s unbelievable, neither more nor less; and still it’s true to the last detail. Again, it’s all civilization, the civilization we brag of; magnificent twentieth century civilization!”