A Book o' Nine Tales Part 24

_F._ Well, I really had to go, you know. You can't keep a dinner party waiting, of course.

_A._ Oh, of course not. Good-bye. I'm awfully glad you came.

_F._ Good-bye. I've had a lovely time.

[_She at last really goes, and Alice, after lingering a second to regret the things she has not said, retires and closes the door of the now pretty well aired house._]

Tale the Sixth.

BARUM WEST'S EXTRAVAGANZA.

BARUM WEST'S EXTRAVAGANZA.

Barum West threw down his pen, and looked about his attic with a gloomy face. The light from his one window, a dormer facing the east, was too faint to permit his writing any longer, even had he been in the mood; and how far he was from desiring to go on with his work was shown by his seizing the sheets which were the result of his afternoon's labor, and angrily tearing them into bits.

The room was not unlike the traditional abode of that melancholy thing, a poor-devil author. The roof sloped from the middle of the ceiling almost to the floor, the niche of the dormer-window where his writing-table stood being the only part of the eastern side of the chamber where one could stand upright. In the corner on the opposite side stood an old-fashioned, high-posted bedstead; a bureau, over which hung a tarnished mirror of antique frame, was placed opposite the tall stove, in which was carefully cherished a frugal coal fire; a black trunk was pushed under the eaves, while some pine shelves held the young man's unimposing library. Both carpet and wall-paper were dingy and faded, and in the darkening winter twilight the attic was gloomy enough to depress the spirits of one in a frame of mind far more cheerful than that in which West found himself.

Most authors are too unhappily familiar with the fact that a financial crisis is apt to be so desperately unproductive of marketable ideas that even the excitement of a definite order is likely, at such a time, to beget in the brain rather a confused sense of impotence than a creative inspiration. One must be well seasoned in the vicissitudes of a literary career to be able to do his best under the combined pressure of sore need and the necessity of seizing at once an unusual opportunity. West was still young in his profession, as well as in years, and the wild exhilaration of receiving a conditional commission had given place to an awful feeling of despairing helplessness. A friend who had considerable confidence in him, and, what was more to the purpose, some acquaintance and influence in theatrical circles, had persuaded a manager to promise to consider an extravaganza from the pen of the would-be playwright, and Barum felt as if his whole future depended upon his success.

He had started upon his task with the utmost hope and confidence. He had for a couple of years been studying stage work, writing plays that n.o.body would touch, and serving that dreary apprenticeship which comes before literary success, but which is, unhappily, not always followed by it. He had pinned above his writing-table a sentence from "Earl's Dene,"

which had afforded him a sombre support often enough: "The only road to the skies, Mademoiselle, is up the garret stairs. Mozart climbed them, Moretti climbed them, ... everybody who has ever done anything has had to climb them; and you, Mademoiselle, are one whose duty for the present is to starve." It may have been because he secretly felt that he had starved long enough, or from the buoyant hope pathetically natural to youth, that West was convinced that his time had come; but at least of that fact he had no doubt.

When, however, he sat down to write, he found his brain teeming, in place of valuable ideas, with the single notion that this time he must succeed; instead of a plot, his mind spun visions of coming greatness; and in place of elaborating witticisms, his thoughts turned alternately to dismal memories and to yet more gloomy forebodings. To-day ended a week of futile endeavor, and the unlucky writer was forced to confess to himself that, so far from being further on in his work than he was seven days earlier, he had stuck where he set out, and acquired the fatal hindrance of a self-distrust which benumbed all his powers.

It grew quickly darker as he brooded, the brief February twilight shutting down rapidly. It was so dark when at last he got heavily upon his feet that he was obliged to fumble about for his shabby hat and coat in the shallow closet which held his scant wardrobe. He muttered to himself as he did so a quotation from Octave Feuillet. He could hardly have been an aspirant for literary honors, and not be crammed to the throat with quotations.

"'_Ce n'est donc pas un vain mot, la faim!_'" he said aloud, with so much bitterness that a hearer, had there been one, might have forgiven his sentimentality. "'_Il y a donc vraiment une maladie de ce nom-la._'"

He went down the three flights of stairs which lay between his chamber and the sordid street, taking his way to a cheap restaurant, which his soul loathed, but to which the narrowness of his purse constrained him.

The waiter-girls, gossiping together, knew his shabby figure too well to hasten to serve him with any alacrity born of expectation of tips; but one of them came to stand, leaning by one hand upon the table, while he studied the bill of fare in a vain attempt to discover some dish which would be alike satisfactory to his appet.i.te and his finances. There were stains of coffee and of soup upon the card, which gave him a feeling of disgust, as if his food had been served in an unwashed dish; but he repressed his feelings and made out his meagre order. The damsel filled him the usual gla.s.s of ice-water, tossed an evening paper before him, and betook herself to cry the supper he had called for into the mouth of a rubber tube, which hung flabbily out of the wall. West could hear the voice of somebody under ground repeating the order, like a surly subterranean echo, and he was peevishly half inclined to fling a plate at the head of a man at the next table, on the supposition that that individual might have been listening to this double disclosure of the straitness of diet to which his poverty constrained him.

He tried to interest himself in the paper which had been given him. He picked out the smallest paragraphs with a feeling of being so much at variance with the world in general that nothing could possibly interest him which was not held to be of no especial moment to the majority.

Suddenly he felt that little thrill with which a man always comes upon his name in print. Among a lot of brief jottings was the statement that a man in Chicago had left two hundred thousand dollars to Barum West.

For a moment his heart seemed to stand still, but instantly his common sense rea.s.serted itself, and he smiled with the bitter but fleeting cynicism of youth at the impossibility that a fortune should come to him by any lucky throw of Fortune's dice. The name was sufficiently uncommon, however, to make the coincidence striking, and what artistic youth, so placed that his wits were more or less disconcerted by the unevenness of life, could fail to make the paragraph the starting-point for a thousand dreams.

All that night, when he should have been sleeping, and when he really was half under the influence of slumber, Barum West's thoughts, which should have been devising stage situations, droll dialogue, and popular allusions, occupied themselves with that illusive fortune. He considered what he would do did he really have it; how he would enjoy it; what delights he would purchase, and what miseries escape. In dreams his fancy wove a gorgeous tissue of enchantment, at which he smiled when he waked, although in reality it was little more extravagant than the airy fabric of his waking fancies. When once an imaginative youth gives rein to his fancy, especially if hope and need p.r.i.c.k the tricksy steed forward, there is no telling to what lengths the race it runs may not stretch. West certainly did not believe that the legacy of which he had seen mention was really intended for his pocket, and yet the coincidence of the name seemed to him so good proof that it went far toward persuading him that he was, in truth, the legatee. For the rest, he, perhaps not unconsciously, humored a little a dream which at least amused for the time being a life all too little lightened by frivolity of any sort.

It was not until the following evening that it occurred to West that, having a fortune in hand, it would be necessary for him to invest it.

He was once more at the eating-house, which to-night he regarded with less bitterness than hitherto, so strong was the effect of his dream in putting him in better temper toward life and the world. As he scanned the paper, in the hope that he might come upon some further information in regard to Barum West's fortune, his eye lighted on the stock reports, and, with a sudden sense of importance he reflected that with two hundred thousand dollars to take care of it behooved him to furbish up whatever knowledge he possessed of stocks. The unintelligibility of the stock reports was sufficient proof that he had little knowledge to furbish, but this only aroused his combativeness, and made him determined to learn.

When he left the restaurant he bought a paper of his own, and taking it to his room, he pa.s.sed the evening in studying finance as represented in the columns of the daily journal. There was something amusing, or pathetic, as one might look at it, about the absorption with which he gave himself to the occupation of deciding what he should do with $200,000 if he had it. He reflected shrewdly that it were wise not to invest his whole capital in a single stock, and he tried to recall whatever he had heard of the relative safety of different cla.s.ses of security. He guessed at the amount of commission he would be obliged to pay a broker, his guide being a confused remembrance that in a play he had heard a certain rate mentioned. He carefully tabulated his investments, and retired at length, the possessor of an income of something over $11,000, all commissions having been paid.

It was perhaps not strange that Barum was in absolute ignorance of the fact, since a knowledge of the vagaries of the stock market was decidedly outside of his world, but the truth was that he had begun to manage his fancied fortunes on a falling market when the bears were raging in Wall Street. While he slept that night a combination was being completed which was the next day to run down twenty-five per cent the conservative railroad stock in which West had felt it safe to put half his fairy gold. When Barum took up the paper at the restaurant on the third evening he had lost about $40,000,--a fact which could hardly have caused him more chagrin had he really possessed the money to lose.

The game he was playing interested him like a new novel. His quick imagination had taken fire, and this defeat spurred him to a fresh endeavor. He felt himself in honor bound to regain what he had lost; and this evening went like the last, in complicated and decidedly amateurish efforts to bring his imaginary finances into a satisfactory condition.

The writing of the play of which he was to read the skeleton to the manager in a fortnight advanced not at all. He took his pen to write, and laid it down to refresh his memory on the latest quotation on some stock; he tried to think of his plot, and found himself reflecting concerning debenture bonds and second mortgages, with the vaguest possible notion of what either might be.

The strange possession which a vivid fancy may take of a lonely and imaginative mind is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to those who have studied the lives of men of fervid temperament; and the whim to which West now gave himself up was no more extravagant than many another which has had consequences far more serious. For days he went on, becoming more and more completely engrossed by the folly he was following. His writing-table was covered with papers upon which he had memoranda of stocks, of sales, of investments, calculations of commissions, and all the rest of it. He even thought of going down town to watch the bulletin boards at some broker's, but he would hardly have been the fanciful dreamer he was, had he not shrunk from actually coming in contact with men and the reality of the business at which he played.

For a week this absurdity continued. Sometimes West gained a little in his visionary speculations, and this inspired him with new courage, although whether he won or lost he was still possessed with the fatal gambling mania. His work meanwhile was not advancing. It is true that he sat for hours at his table nominally at work upon his play, but he interrupted himself constantly to consider whether there were not some way of recovering the money he had lost.

When Sat.u.r.day night came he looked back over his week with regret and shame. The date fixed for his presenting his sketch to the manager was now only eight days off, and he was practically no further advanced in his preparation than on the day when his friend brought him the delightful news that that elusive personage had consented to make the appointment. He had wasted the past week in a foolish day-dream, as profitless as it was absurd. Yet he smiled to himself at the reflection that his day-dream had at least been amusing. It had been like creating a story or the plot for a play; and with a characteristically bachelor thought, he added to himself that it was at least less dangerous to play with visions of fortune than of love, and quite as sensible.

He could not, on the whole, however, be satisfied with the result of his week, and he determined to have no more of this folly. He must set to work in earnest, and he resented the consciousness which forced itself upon him that his lonely life and imaginative turn made it possible for him to fall into vagaries which to the practical common-sense of mankind in general would be held to indicate anything but a sound mind. He started up suddenly and gathered all the papers upon which were recorded his unlucky stock transactions, and began to thrust them into the stove. He would make an end of the whole foolish business. And yet, so far from entirely burning his ships, he at least left for himself a little boat in which to continue his explorations into the delusive regions of financial fairy-land, since he saved the one slip which contained the statement of the present condition of his much-diminished fortune. He condescended to the weak, but eminently human trick of attempting to humbug himself in regard to his reasons for doing so. He said to himself, exactly as if he were explaining to another person, that the bit of paper would serve as a warning to him, should he ever be tempted to indulge in so idiotic a diversion again; and he added, as if to quiet the least suspicion that he meant to use the memorandum, that the morrow being Sunday there would be no market with which he could play.

And yet, so weak is human resolution, such a rope of sand is it to fetter the resistless progress of character,--which is destiny,--that the next evening found West with the Sunday paper spread before him, carefully studying the financial article, and elaborating his plans for a grand _coup_, by which he should regain all the thousands he had lost.

He had become very canny during the week's study of the market reports, and he felt this Sunday evening all the pleasant satisfaction of one who, out of sight, cunningly devises the overthrow of clever enemies. On Monday morning he would--in imagination, of course--go into the field with a shrewdly devised scheme of buying and selling, which should result in the triumphant re-establishment of his financial standing.

When one is dealing with life in imagination merely there is of course no limit to the extent to which one may make himself master of events; and partly from a keen fancy, partly from pure _navete_, West's plan involved nothing less than bulling the market himself upon his visionary capital, now shrunken to some $70,000.

All day Monday West was in a state of excitement which was amazingly absurd when one considers that the cause was wholly fancy. When a drunkard returns to his cups he is notoriously more intemperate than before, and in delivering himself up for a second time to the intoxication of his vagaries Barum plunged more recklessly than ever into its extravagances. On Tuesday he was once more to be rich, and then he would speculate no more. Safe mortgages and government bonds should suffice him as investments, even though the rate of interest they paid was low. He would not again expose himself to the chances of such feverish excitement as that in which he had spent the past week.

So real had the whole business become to him that, while he smiled at his own folly as he took up the Tuesday evening paper, he actually felt a pang of disappointment to discover that his imaginary operations had produced no effect on the stock market. So far from rising, stocks had that day gone almost out of sight, so great had been the fall in the price of securities of all sorts.

A feeling almost of despair came over the young man as he read. He had gone out into the street to buy the earliest edition which would contain the account of the sales that day, and as he walked toward his attic he experienced almost as sharp a pang as if the absolute wreck which he found had overtaken his imaginary fortune had befallen a genuine bank-account. That unreasonable youthful disappointment which arises from a sense of failure _per se_, with little reference to the real importance of the stake, stung him keenly; and he was one of those men who cannot but confound real and aesthetic grievances.

He returned to his attic and figured it out. He was absolutely and hopelessly ruined. He had not only lost every dollar of his imaginary fortune, but he was, on paper, some seven or eight hundred dollars in debt to his brokers for commissions. He was so overwhelmed by this catastrophe that he sat brooding over it in the darkness of the February twilight and gathering night, until it was far past the hour when he usually took his apology for a dinner. He was not without a sense of humor sufficiently vivid to make him laugh at himself, and mentally mock at the vexation which the result of his airy speculations caused him; but this did not prevent his being vexed, or take his thoughts from laborious calculations how a different result might have been reached.

He went off to dinner at last with a sober and abstracted mien, ordering a repast even more economical than usual, as befitted one who had just lost his whole fortune in ill-starred speculation.

It was his custom to time his visit to the restaurant so as to dine before the crowd of customers came for their evening meal. To-night, however, he was behind them. The place was no fuller than he usually found it, but it bore signs of the recent crush. The cloth of the table was crumpled and soiled, the gla.s.s in which the inevitable ice-water was poured was yet warm from being washed, while the evening paper the waiter gave him was adorned with an irregular stain of coffee. In the midst of the brown blotch of this stain was a patch undiscolored; and by one of those odd and improbable coincidences of which life is full, in the midst of this spot of dingy white Barum West once more caught sight of his own name. The whimsical fate which had started the fantastic train of thought in his mind ten days before now finished its work by a paragraph stating that the will by which $200,000 had been bequeathed to Barum West by Richard Granger, of Chicago, was now found to antedate a second testament by which the money was left to Harvard College.

Barum West went home with the light step of a boy. A great responsibility seemed suddenly lifted from his shoulders. The capricious fancy which had insisted that he should be depressed because he had lost an imaginary fortune had apparently been willing to accept the fact that even in hypothesis the possession of the money had been a mistake, and the unlucky speculator was formally acquitted at the bar of his inner consciousness. He lit his lamp and his pipe, seated himself in his chintz-covered rocking-chair, with his heels on the top of the coal stove, and ruminated. He reflected upon the fact that it was only five days before he was to meet the manager, and nothing was done in the way of a play which he could for an instant regard as at all satisfactory.

"Instead of writing an extravaganza," he thought, with mingled amus.e.m.e.nt and self-reproach, "I have been living one."

The form of the thought struck him instantly. His feet came down to the floor with a crash, and in his excitement his pipe went smashing down beside them.

"By Jove!" he cried aloud, "I have it!"

And the plot of the extravaganza, which everybody will remember as being so successful the following winter, "A Speculator in Air," and which set Barum West on his feet financially, was only a properly modified version of the vagaries in which the author had indulged in the handling and the losing of his imaginary fortune.

Interlude Sixth.

A BUSINESS MEETING.

A BUSINESS MEETING.