Turns about Town Part 21

"Optimism," it developed too, was the supreme merit of fiction. One of the arresting terms employed was "economy of means."

There were, it is true, a few dissenting voices from the chorus of unrestrained praise, chiefly from certain notoriously dull, conservative, killjoy journals. The New York _Evening Postman_ said: "This somewhat amateurish little essay in fiction seems to be the product of an untutored sincerity. In this, its sincerity, it is not without a degree of vigor. We doubt, however, whether the author can repeat the performance." And that irrepressibly ribald organ, the New York _Beam_, could not forbear its customary jocular sport. Its smart review of this little cla.s.sic (as one bookseller already p.r.o.nounced it) began: "Hooray for 'Will'! Hooray also for 'Mabel'! They are the real simegoozlia."

"Don't you think you could write something now, dear?" inquired Mrs.

Keyes, who did not see how scholarship pure and simple was, so to say, to move the boat.

This idea of writing something now had indeed occurred to Keyes; but somehow he had not been able to think of anything in particular to write. So he went on with his studies, at the same time keeping an eye open for available material, characters, and plots.

"Surely you can write something, Ben, that we could get some money for,"

said Louise. A wife, after all, is only a woman, with a mind fitted to petty things, such as groceries, family washings, clothing, and divers household bills. It is irritating to a man of lofty mind who night and day is racking his brain for an idea, to be prodded on in this fashion.

Keyes ground his teeth and bore it; he reflected that an author's life is frequently a battle with mediocrity. Perhaps he was mistaken as to where lay the mediocrity with which he battled.

He fretted and worried and at length sat himself down to write without an inspiration. He bethought himself of Trollope's example to literary aspirants, and tried to grind out two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes for three hours a day. He couldn't write twenty. He kept doggedly on. He could not make his characters act or talk--the talk was the most hopeless thing of all. He couldn't, as once he had done, cry over them. Sometimes, in the stillness of the night with his clock ticking before him, he almost thought that he had regained for a moment a t.i.the of the power he once had; but in the morning when he reviewed his work he admitted that he had been sadly mistaken. Now doubts haunted his soul; even as he wrote another consciousness within not thus employed whispered of his impotency. Fact is, Keyes had not at all the creative gift.

He struggled through a number of stories, some better and some worse.

When he mailed these it was with a faltering, doubting heart. Something with a weak action away in his interior told him that they would not be accepted.

Keyes got thinner in flesh, more distressed in spirit, and poorer in this world's goods as time went on. Sometimes he felt like an imposter and was ashamed to face his wife; then he reread his press notices and a fever to do something shook him. But a man cannot support himself and his wife on a fever to do something. Benjamin Cecil Keyes could not understand the thing: if he had literary genius why couldn't he write?

If he had not, how then had he written? To sit in full view of one's wife day after day pretending to be interested in a book when the bill-collector calls; and to be tormented all the time by a desire to do something and not to be able to do it, or know when, if ever, one will be able; and to be ashamed and afraid to tell one's wife this; but to be compelled to be there, or to run away, or to hang one's self--this is a situation more than uncomfortable.

A thousand times Keyes decided to roll up his sleeves and do something else--engage in any profitable employment; and a thousand times he decided not to--just yet. A man often exists in this way until he gets quite to the end of the string where the wolf is.

"That was an accident, Louise," said Keyes sadly one day. "I find I can't write."

Keyes was mistaken again. No fine thing ever was made by accident. Keyes managed to write that story because its theme was the most interesting incident in his life; because it appealed to him more strongly than anything else had in his whole experience; because he was thoroughly familiar with the life and the people he featured in his story; because he was absolutely sincere in his sympathies, appreciation, and emotions here; he had no ideals set way beyond his power, no aping tendencies after an effective style, no attention distracted by an ill-digested knowledge of mechanical construction. The structure, and the style simply came, probably because--and finally he managed to write that story because--he was keyed up to it.

A domestic woman often has a wretchedly unworshipful view of art and fame. Keyes's confession did not kill Louise. I suppose he expected her to go back to her parents in high dudgeon as one who had been grossly swindled.

"Do you care if you can't write?" she said, after a moment's silence.

"Just think how nice you are--how much nicer you were before you tried to write! And how it has worried you!"

Keyes got a job as a collector for a mercantile house. "My health demands outdoor employment," he told his acquaintances.

Sometimes, alone with his lamp after the day's confounded drudgery, Keyes got out the old magazine and reread his forgotten story.

THE END.