Work of Art

22

Luxury yacht round-world cruise, on selling basis many esp new rich pay almost anything to be known as exclusive, like special motors for $20,000. Seven or 8 month cruise cost $100,000 p. person (anyway 60,000). Adv point, you get all luxury (and they really will) of billionaire's yacht that had initial cost fifteen million & fifty to 100,000 yr upkeep for a fraction and meet same kind of society. Social host, a count or earl (real stuff), hostess, princess. All fine suites; family of four with maid, valet, secretary get seven bedrms, 7 baths, huge salon, small sit room servants, private dining rm, balcony desk, own steward and stewardess. Price includes wines & booze, all vintage. Shore excursion not in busses etc. but Rolls-Royces and guides not the usual talking machines you read about but smart natives, young docs, lawyers, college profs, etc. who speak English & introduce passengers into native homes both rich and slum, wh ordinary tourists nev see. Carry big launches for fishing, going up rivers too small for yacht, etc. Yacht at least 12,000 ton or whatever make it biggest in world--social credit just to been on it. Limit to 100--80?--pass. Best chef and grub in world, plus take on native chefs with own supplies--example Hindu chef w curries, Bombay to Bangkok, then in turn Siamese, Chink, Jap, etc. Carry private theat co., dancing instructors, language teachers. Special mail service by aeroplanes. Be fun to plan--spend other people's money--but maybe hell to travel on, with all the fat rich cranks that want their money worth and want the purser to know how much they made.

Now and then, in café confidences, Myron and Ora Weagle had given to their friends curiously similar opinions about the effect of childhood environment upon their characters.

'My father,' said Ora, 'was a sloppy, lazy, booze-hoisting old bum, and my mother didn't know much besides cooking, and she was too busy to give me much attention, and the kids I knew were a bunch of foul-mouthed loafers that used to hang around the hoboes up near the water-tank, and I never had a chance to get any formal schooling, and I got thrown on my own as just a brat. So naturally I've become a sort of vagabond that can't be bored by thinking about his "debts" to a lot of little shop-keeping lice, and I suppose I'm inclined to be lazy, and not too scrupulous about the dames and the liquor. But my early rearing did have one swell result. Brought up so unconventionally, I'll always be an Anti-Puritan. I'll never deny the joys of the flesh and the sanctity of Beauty.'

And, 'My father,' said Myron, 'was pretty easy-going and always did like drinking and swopping stories with the boys, and my mother was hard-driven taking care of us, and I heard a lot of filth from the hoboes up near the water-tank. Maybe just sort of as a reaction I've become almost too much of a crank about paying debts, and fussing over my work, and being scared of liquor and women. But my rearing did have one swell result. Just by way of contrast, it made me a good, sound, old-fashioned New England Puritan.

In 1920, when Myron was forty, and Ora thirty-eight, they had almost exchanged appearances, except that Myron was five inches the taller. He, who had been round-faced and slow, was fine-drawn now, and nervously quick, and his stiffly rearing flaxen hair, as it grew thinner, had become more brown, and lain humbly down under decades of severe brushing. The slim, Shelleyan Ora had grown fat. His face was an orb of complacency, about the dapper moustache of an English police sergeant, and sulky, thickening lips. He was, as ever, darker of tint than Myron, but not in every light evidently so, for after dinner his cheeks were likely to shine greasily.

Myron often looked at you but did not seem to see you. Ora usually saw you but did not seem to look at you.

Myron was incorrigibly and perpetually bewildered by Ora's zig-zag of fortune, and occasionally, for a year at a time, he could not make out at all what Ora was doing and why he should not be even more bankrupt than he was. After Black Slumber; between 1905 and 1920 Ora had five other books published: three novels, one very daring, dealing with a prostitute who was a good girl, one still more daring, dealing with a prostitute who actually was a bad girl, and one comic, with involuntary assistance from Mr. Dooley, Irvin Cobb, George Ade, and P. G. Wodehouse. Then there was his guide to Canada--favourably reviewed by all newspapers not published in Canada--and 'The Scientific Meaning of Dreams: A Handbook that Shows You to Yourself', in which Dr. Freud had been an unconscious collaborator.

Myron was proud at the appearance of each of these, and he earnestly tried to find out what the book-reviews meant. He was excited when he found a publishers' publicity note to the effect that Ora Weagle ('Marcel Lenoir'), author of Slippers, Be Still, reported as one of the twenty-seven best sellers in Augusta, Tallahassee, San José, and Mankato, this past month, was planning a trip around the world on a whaling-vessel. Or had taken a cottage in sight of Bailey's Beach for the summer. Or was learning to fly. He never ceased feeling a little puzzled and unhappy when he learned from Ora that he had no plans whatever for whaling, flying, or viewing Newport.

What Ora did between novels, Myron could not comprehend, and though he admitted that he was not one who could ever understand the ardours and stress of creation, he did timidly wonder if five books in fifteen years was so very much. And the guide-book and dream-book such little thin books, just trickles of mint-flavoured text around large raw hunks of illustration.

Authors generally were inexplicable, felt Myron. He knew that there were differences between individual hotel-keepers, travelling-men, and pot-washers, but it did not occur to him that authors were ever anything save authors. All his life he was to picture Bernard Shaw as Ora Weagle with a beard, and Thoreau as an Ora who drank his whisky and sang 'Frankie and Johnny' in a log cabin instead of in a Fiftieth Street speakeasy.

Whether or no his ponderous and hypocritical brother understood him, Ora was always busy. A fellow had to be, to make a living in a world that rewarded such mutton-heads as hotel-keepers and stockbrokers, but too much feared the mad power of beauty to give decent support to its creative artists. It wouldn't even provide a tiny pension, so that he might be secure, with bare provision for his modest wants--a cot-bed, a chair or two, a little porridge and lobster salad, a quite infrequent jaunt to Europe or China, a few cigarettes and bottles of whisky and champagne, some girls, a refreshing summer in the mountains, a humble little motor car for the gathering of material, just enough of a wardrobe so that the Maestro would not be shamed in the presence of supercilious millionaires, a cocktail now and then, a flat no larger than might be necessary for the entertainment of the combined editors of America, a couple of Monets for inspiration, just a shelf or so of hand-tooled books, with a mere emergency-stock of liqueur brandy, absinthe, Swedish punch, arrack, Burgundy, Chateau Yquem, and perhaps rum--and he was even willing to give up the rum. Yet no one, even among those who pretended to be patrons of genius, was willing to give him such an insignificant pension. And Ora knew. He knew! For he had made it his business to approach every foundation for the cultivation of the arts, every committee in charge of awarding prizes or fellowships, and every publisher rumoured to have gone insane and to have given advances on unwritten books.

Myron did not merely bore him but furiously irritated him by incessant, clumsy, pawing hints about leading what he comically called a 'more regular life'. Yet he had to see Myron often. He had to live! And he really liked Myron's new wife--a kid from their own home town, Effie May Lambkin. She was good fun, for she thought Ora was the wittiest man she had known, and worshipped him instead of trying to get cute, like so many of these women. She was always glad to order up a late supper for him or, when Myron got stuffy, to lend him enough to get through till Monday.

Ora was proud of the fact that, though Effie May was a beauty, in a coarse, hoydenish sort of way, he was so loyal to the family that he had made practically no effort to seduce her. And then Myron thought he was a rounder!

Oh yes, he was busier than his brother could possibly know, and he had to do everything by himself, without any help from a crew of clerks and stenographers such as Myron had, so that Myron could sit on his bottom and never do any real work at all. Say what they liked, Ora knew that he was systematic. He had compiled a list of fifty fellow American authors who were sufficiently well rewarded, i.e., commercial, so that they were worth soliciting, and he spent days in composing a letter confiding to these colleagues his difficulties, which were, it appeared, as follows: he was engaged in the last fatiguing months of finishing a long novel, his wife was ill, his two children were hungry and without enough clothing to go to school, his rent was unpaid, and unless the benefactor could send him three hundred dollars at once, the whole bunch of them would have to commit suicide. This form letter he changed only in the first paragraph, in which he mentioned several books by the author--which was easy, because they were all listed in Who's Who--and the last, where in the simple, grave-eyed manner of a genius willing to face starvation and bend his pride to begging, he explained that though they had not met him personally, through the master's books (give titles) he knew his kindness, justice, and astounding knowledge of human nature.

On the first letter, from fifty prospects he had sixteen answers, with seven refusals, and nine cheques ranging from ten dollars to one hundred and fifty, in total, six hundred and five dollars. None of them sent the full three hundred, but they crawled with apology for not doing so, which was precisely his reason for having put it so high.

On a second letter to the thirty-four hounds who had not answered, he collected eleven more replies, with another hundred and thirty dollars, netting seven hundred and thirty-five dollars for six days' work--two days composing the form and four in typing the letters, and if the swell-head Myron could ever do as well as that, Ora would just like to know! Beaming upon his honestly and arduously earned pile, Ora went on a splendid drunk with Colonel Falkenstein, Wilson Ketch and, from time to time, various girls, most of whom he did not remember having met before. They did, though.

Sober again, and very sick, with only sixteen dollars left of the seven hundred and thirty-five, and three months' rent due for his attic, Ora devoted himself to the twenty-three megalomaniacs who even yet had not been courteous enough to answer. Regarding these snobs, he had an airy wine-born plan. He wrote them a third time, not tenderly but insultingly. They were, he eloquently put it, boors, ingrates, cowards, and reactionaries. While they were making fools of themselves by trying to ape the rich with their Palm Beach villas, Vermont stock farms, and royal suites on liners, he was forced to support himself by stoking furnaces twelve hours a night, that he might devote himself to creating a Real American Art.

This drew, from the twenty-three, twelve more blanks, three cheques, and eight letters of furious reply. It was for the last that he had really been hoping. Here he had eight original and unpublished manuscripts, three of them holograph, in which eight of the most competent writers in America ungrudgingly devoted themselves and their noblest blasphemy to making it clear that they regarded him as a liar, a crook, and a damned nuisance. He read them with shouts of happiness, and bustled out to sell them to an autograph dealer, at from three to sixty dollars apiece.

He made second and third and fourth lists of fifty philanthropists each, extending his sales-appeal from the innocent composers of books to newspaper editorial writers, colyumists, cartoonists, playwrights, and rich women reported as having attended public poetry-readings, and he widened his selling area to take in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany. Each three months he made a spirited campaign of high-pressure-salesmanship, and cannily did not return to any list oftener than once a year.

So on the whole, the Ora who with shy boyishness, with wistfully quivering thick lips, showed to Myron and Effie May the gin-scented attic in which he had to live, had a slightly larger income than Myron's, which thought made him laugh secretly but very much.

Though he gallantly continued with his books and infrequent magazine fiction, and though his four lists demanded so much painful typing, Ora was most occupied by ghosting--the writing of books to be signed by other and more famous persons. He came to have rather a sound reputation for the work, and various publishers sent for him, though they disgusted him by sourly refusing to pay one penny till the work was done--the dirty money-grubbers! Thus, at various times, Ora was an ex-senator who had destroyed the Wall Street millionaires, another ex-senator who had wiped out the Reds, a Russo-Polish-Spanish-Iowa actress who had three kings as lovers, a forger who had done twenty years in the pen, a chess champion, and a Hollywood dog.

Ghosting paid better than the composition of begging letters, but he never gave them up, for no sacrifice was too great for his art. And it was as an artist, as a seer, that he was able, he crowed, to put it all over Myron.

Ora had been thinking about a new realistic novel in which he would crucify a horrible parent named Tim Wiggins, who kept a foul restaurant and was beastly to his sensitive son, and possibly in connection with this enterprise he had run up to Black Thread Centre for a week.

Returned, he charged in on Myron.

'Well, the great innkeeper and psychologist, that can tell a crook before he's signed the register, has certainly pulled one swell boner!' said Ora, winking at Myron's pretty typist.

Myron hastily sent her out, and stormed, 'What the devil do you mean now?'

'I've been up to the Centre, and I saw Dad and Mom, and since you were so kind as to rescue them from working and give them a nice easy old age, in their lovely little bungalow among the roses--well, they're simply going nuts with nothing to do, that's all!'

'Nonsense!'

Myron went to Black Thread next day.

His mother was sitting in a filthy kitchen, before a sink of dirty dishes, crying. She had, she sobbed, so got out of the habit of activity that now she could not stir at all, and old Tom, no longer needing to make an appearance as host, was drinking worse than ever.

'I've tried reading, and I've tried church-work and I've tried knitting and talking to the neighbours, but I guess folks like us, that have worked real hard all our lives, just don't know how to loaf,' she said. 'I'm kind of scared, dear. I've been noticing how many business folks seem to suddenly pop off and die, when they retire and say they're so glad they're out of the harness and now they're going to have a good time.'

He was bewildered. He assured himself that he really had meant well. He told himself that he would not afford to buy off the present lessee of the American House, and that if he did, his parents would let it go dirty and slack. He thought about a farm for them--he tried to consult them, but his mother only wept and looked forlorn. He might have rented a farm, except that at the Lambkins', when he hinted of his problem, Herbert blatted, 'Now you're married into Our Family, you can't go on being selfish and just thinking of yourself, the way you always have! . . . That fellow Monlux, offering a man with my degrees fifteen hundred a year, and you never even called him down! . . . And I want to tell you that I'm not going to have my sister's father-in-law running a miserable little tavern right here in our own town! Why don't you put 'em on a farm?'

That did it. Myron gave his father and mother a wild week in New York--Tom said that the Westward wasted a lot of good coin, dressing up the bell-hops in fool monkey jackets, and as a seasoned executive he disapproved of such incompetence--and he settled them again at the American House, where Edna Weagle, as she toiled twelve hours a day, began again to whistle.

And Ora commented on it all, 'Just as I've always told you, Myron, you lack the artist's sense of people. You're probably more generous than I am, in some ways, but I see inside people and let 'em alone.'

The young woman whom Ora brought up to the suite to meet Effie May and Myron, late in the evening, was a very friendly young woman. Within ten minutes she was calling them 'Teeny the Swede' and 'Snookums', and she was demanding, 'Well, where's the hooch? What's the idea of holding out on the girl friend like this?' And after the whisky, a good deal of it, she offered to take off her clothes and do imitations of Isadora Duncan.

Myron saw that the perplexed Effie May was wondering whether she ought to take her brother-in-law's lady-friend as a model. He lured Ora to the bedroom, and remarked, 'Take that girl away. Chase her out of here.'

'What the devil do you mean?'

'I don't like her, though probably she's merely silly. Out!'

'Then I'll go, too! And I'll stay away!'

'All right. Sorry not to see you again, but this is my house. . .'

'Oh no, it isn't, darling! It's anybody's house that's got the money, no matter what a stinker he may be, and you're just a hired man in it--you and your hick wife!'

Myron raised his fist, dropped it to his side, and muttered, 'Get out.'

He did not see Ora for a year after that.

He felt guilty and considerably relieved. He pictured his poor little brother in that poor little attic of his, and doubtless he would have suffered if it had not been for the fact that, as Ora was unanimously agreed, he lacked imagination.